There’s a small indie studio call Kremlin Games
Just wanted to add they’re called NostalGames now and they just released Crisis in the Kremlin 2 about a month ago. Def worth checking out all their games if you can get past their clunky UIs
Come on balkanize already
Oh yea rule the waves sounds right up your alley, the whole game loop is just designing ships and then you get to see how they succeed or fail in the battles where you control the ships (with differing difficulties letting you control a main formation, all formations or each individual ship.) I do love me some crunchy wargames. That PTO game seems interesting, reminds me of a game much later called Pacific Storm, very jank and buggy but i did have lots of fun with it as a kid.
but i don’t want to embarrass myself and i am very patient with ongoing projects.
Yea that’s fair, fingers crossed for it!
I have not been following the vic3-hoi4 converter, that stories system actually does sound pretty interesting, hope they succeed too!
Yea I agree the naval needs some work, though I think the latest patch did at least emphasize how important naval control is to a country that trades overseas, naval blockades are crippling!
Do I detect a fellow rule the waves fan? 
That whole era of pre-dreadnoughts to interwar ships is super fascinating because of all the developments and weird shit they tried.
As for hoi4 I could never really get into the naval but I do think it achieves exactly what you point out at the strategic level, I just also like the actually controlling the fleet engagements. I will say I love the designers in HOI4 too, it’s just fun to twiddle around and see what cursed stuff you can make, or just try to replicate historical designs as best as possible. I do hate that the naval designer for battleships the batteries always come in pairs, so you always either have 2-4-6-8 etc batteries. Too abstract for my liking 
Yea it all sounds pretty neat. I agree that Vicky 3 is such a better game for emergent storytelling. Something I’ve noticed watching a lot of paradox grand campaigns (ck to hoi4) is that the narrative just kind of falls apart in hoi4. Its a great war game in the context of WW2, but you really have to work to make it interesting narratively outside of it, since wars are fought to complete annexation and everything is driven by focus trees which are hand created. (Not to say the HOI4 mods aren’t impressive, they are, but clearly its a lot of work)
I’m not sure how one would be able to bolt together the two systems since Vic3 is so macro focused but much of HOI4s interesting combat comes out of the economy micro of choosing how to design your equipment and how your division templates are setup. I think the whole 1836-1936 period is such a difficult one to do military because they changed so much in that time period. I’ve seen before ideally you’d have the EU4 system of Vic2 and then it somehow transitions to HOI4 towards the end.
Yup, Alaskaball already described this process in detail, but the gist of it is you will have an almost all reactionary government at the beginning of the game in almost all countries. As you develop further, the landowners will lose influence as their base of power becomes diluted by industrialists owning more of the means of production. It’s worth checking in on your government every few years to see how the IG power percentages have changed. As you play the game more you’ll get a feeling for how close you are to being ready for enacting the council republic law. Definitely just focus on building up your industry like I mentioned in my first post.
Edit: the religious IG can be made pretty irrelevant if you change the PMs for the cities/universities/government admin buildings.
Collatz_problem is correct on both counts for the armed forces and religious IGs. I just want to add that you can use this general cheese on any ideology capable of taking up the communist ideology (so TUs, AF, I think rurals?), so an easy way to get a communist leader of the TUs is actually to have a communist general that is part of the TUs. Once the leader dies/retires the existing characters have a chance to get that role based on popularity and influence. You can actually see those chances if you click an IG and scroll down to the Leader Ideologies drop down.
There’s a few pre-reqs, first you need socialism in the tech tree, until that you’re really not getting anywhere. Once it’s researched and people are miserable enough (below 10 SOL IIRC) you’ll get a socialist movement and this is your first real springboard. You basically need enough supporters of the trade unions (TUs) to make passing the law feasible (or at least, not lose all your states in a counter revolution.)
Above all else you need to build industry since they give you laborers who mostly align with the TUs, the core of this will be lumber mills, tool workshops, and iron mines in the early game since they all feed each other. Try to avoid building anything agricultural since agricultural workers are far less effective in getting the TUs in power.
To your direct question about the petit-bourgeoisie (PBs) no in most cases will actually impede the socialist revolution, but they’re part of industrialization so you gotta just accept they will be there. The rural folk/agrarian IG is fine, it can get a socialist leader on occasion but I wouldn’t count on it. If you do want to get the rurals on your side, mostly keep them miserable, so this means tenant farmers or commercial farming in the laws, not homesteading. Homesteading will effectively make them wealthy enough to not want socialism.
This is awful, I am a graduate of job corps, before I went into it I was homeless. The program helped me get to a point where I could actually live a decent life, and I don’t think I would’ve been able to otherwise. Of all the people I knew at my time there, many were like me in that they had no place to go back to, or it was abusive. The government is condemning the young folks in these places to misery and death, straight up social murder.
Depends on when but I’m definitely interested
As take mentioned, you can change the theme by hitting escape and clicking the theme button, this is the dawn of wonder theme so pick any one but that. You got got by the automatic theme changer based on country feature they added. If you set it manually it’ll stay that though.