Another piece of micro-managing hell that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, making yourself wonder why you payed 39$.
You sellect a country, load up the map. So lets say you start as Two Sicilies. The basic stragety is always go Nationalist(Because they can build goverment owned factories.) And to raise the taxes to accumulate wealth to build some factories(This is the hard part.) Adter you get some factories running, you subsidize them hoping you don't go bankrupt. Or you could choose not to, allowing your economies to fail next time a war breaks out in your area and prevents you from buying something as worthless as coal. If I have trees in a region, why can't I make my own? Probably because my regions can only make one input, ever, unless an event switches them to rare metals.
If you get your industry up and running.... Then you have a vast option of choices in front of you, you can go invade other countries and gain more territory, sit around and wait for someone to declare war on you, or uninstall the game from your harddrive and go do something productive.
Also their is a horibbal rebel bug that the PI dev's are trying to fix. And by trying I mean, it may not get fixed, and their is not estimated date of release.
If you need anymore info on how Paradox Interactive has turned into a fail developer, simply google the words "Hearts of Iron III" and "Epic Fail" some thread posts are sure to turn up.
I would suggjest the later of those options. As for what you should do thats productive; you could learn an instrument, buy another game, post boring youtube videos, troll forums, become a script kiddy(Or even better, go for programming school, get a job, move out, stop crashing Gmod servers, ect...) spam IRC chats, jack off, pick up a drug habit(Expensive or otherwise.) start binge drinking(Or make fake ID's if under 21.) commit robberies, buy a notebook and learn to drawn then go graffitti stuff, play CS:S again, try to hack the facepunch forums and take them down so Garry finally has a reason to leave moms house, go talk to girls(It's easier then you think!) and finally stand outside the local convienance store peddling weed like Jay and Silent Bob.
^All of these would furfill any need or want you currently have in your life. More so, then they would playing this boring, stale, recycled, micromanaging. There isn't even anything for me to micro manage, but I do have some really cool bars to slide around. Maybe if I slide them around long enough my clergymen will finaly convert to officers(Sounds engaging, doesn't it?)
Honestly, I'm going to take my first piece of advice, learn an instrument while going to programming school so that hopefully I can make video games one day and show 95% of the companies that used to be good, how to make a good game again.