Fair enough! When I play KR it's more about the story for me.
Well, I shouldn't overstate this; it's more an extension of how sometimes doing what you want to do depends on the AI doing something in particular. For example, in
Equestria at War one of the nations, the River Republic, has a game path, under the Harmonic (base game Democratic but renamed) leader River Swirl, centered around forming the River Federation out of a group of neighboring nations. Her default focuses give buffs to the River Republic particularly focusing on its diplomacy with the other possible members of the River Federation, and the Republic itself sits in the middle of its faction and doesn't have any obvious expansion directions before that (on the Harmonic path).
The trouble is, forming the River Federation takes a
long time--if you start off taking the relevant focuses just as soon as you get through the first couple of focuses on the Republic's political tree, it can take until late 1011 or early 1012 to actually finish the Federation tree, or about five years in game. Once you do it, the reward is supposed to be that you can annex all the nations around you (plus potentially four more nearby) for free, take control of their armies, navies, and equipment stockpiles, and get cores on their land--
but every relevant nation (as many as eleven or so) gets an event asking them whether or not they actually want to be annexed, and a lot of the time the AI will either "activate secession protocols" and charge you a bunch of PP for nothing, or opt against further integration and become your puppet, with no further advantages. So you put in a lot of time and energy in...and you get nothing, or even penalized. And there's some nations that practically speaking never come on board for one reason or another, even if it's theoretically possible. The idea is cool in concept, but it can be frustrating in practice because it depends so heavily on what the AI chooses to do.
That's the kind of thing where I think, "Gee, I'd like some controls so that I could make this or that happen". In this case you actually can't control whether nations will agree to annexation, although I think there are some factors you can use to influence them,
but you can make some of the nations around you fall to fascism and have to fight them instead of just sitting around for five years or so basically playing an observer game. (Or you could play as the socialists and be able to just spend PP and annex the other countries if they refuse, no muss no fuss) In point of fact I mostly use the controls in
Equestria at War to randomize how things turn out, because the actual game by default has particular outcomes happening rather than randomizing them itself and it can get a little tiresome to see the same things happen every time, but in some cases directing outcomes down a particular path does mean more fun.
