games

8Thats because its cheap to implement and adjust such mechanics. When they are selling a new dlc every other week, they cant follow a simulation aproach. So they put together a script with a bunch of events that give random modifiers.

But even back then when they tried a bit, there were still lots of such modifiers and events. Its just that they were hidden or made sense in world. Now its all just hoarding abstract types of mana and casting the modifiers.

That being said making a simulation is incredibly hard. Back then chris king even build his world around marxist materialist ideas(he gave a presentation on this once) but it produced wierd bugs, liquidity crises, general gluts, etc were very common. The economy would often run out of coal and iron mid 19th century, and so on. Nobody could tell why things that worked worked or viceversa. It was somewhat fixed by balancing the coeficients, adding events and adding infinite dumps of resources and infinite workspace in provinces, so the company does not wamt to get into that mess again. Even then a lot of the game was stacking moddifiers but it was more subtle and somtimes counter intuitive.

At the end of the day you have your equations regulating how the game works, and there are several coeficients that balnce and adjust them, changing those coeficients is the easy way to change the outcomes.