All you need to do in this game is sit there and wait.What a waste of time

I feel your pain, im starting to regret buying this game. I spent whole weekend on restarting and its just slow and boring.... Wished i just bought City Skylines 2 instead of this one.

I have a tenancy to ramble on endlessly about this game sorry...

...I was initially very negative about this game, but honestly it's improved a lot in the last year. The economic, political, and war systems have all improved substantially. I'm honestly a bit surprised by the recent spike in negativity. As I said, my main issue with the game is how trade works. Namely its too expensive, which makes it hard to pursue protectionist policies (by which I mean encouraging exports of key industries your trying to build while discouraging imports) as a small industrializing country, it and doesn't feel very natural / realistic to me. I love that you have the ability to set different tariffs for different goods, but its a bit absurd that the government has direct control of trade.

IMO I think this is more an issue with balancing and the poor trade system, than a fundamental problem, but I get what you mean.

I also think this is much more of an issue starting as an un-industrialized nation, which is always going to a bit tedious. As an industrialized nation you actually do have some options such as in investing in the trade capacity to import the iron or conquering / colonizing / absorbing a market that has more, but as a small industrialized nation you cant afford these options. In some cases you may be able to join another nations market, so I would even argue that there actually is a somewhat interesting choice to be made here.

Don't worry the rest of the game will be sold to you in the next 3-5 years and 200 dlc's. This is Paradox

It's almost like they have the already-built game engine and sprinkle a bs storyline on it.