The general design principle here is “guiding hand” not “divine intervention.” You don’t place citizens in jobs; you encourage them to take up certain tasks. You don’t promote people from one social class to another; you set the conditions that make their rise up the ladder of success possible. There will still be national decisions as modeled in the more recent Paradox games, and the wide range of social and political reforms should give you lots of opportunity for experimentation.

Make no mistake – Victoria II is still a forbidding prospect. Tossing out ideas that didn’t work is one thing, but even the near complete rewrite of the system has maintained many of the elements that made the original game so attractive to min-maxers and off-putting to many armchair presidents.