
I mean, you research new tech, but a good amount of it feeds back into making the number go up faster. The war and politics parts I bet are more interesting and feel like a bigger part of the game once you get the economy stuff down to a science, but that’ll take a good while of not having fun while you learn what the hell is happening
If you like Stellaris though I bet you’d like Hearts of Iron 4. It’s like 40% war, 40% production (not economy), 20% politics, but it’s more “layered” than stellaris (if you play you’ll understand) and there’s a lot of progression in research and events. There’s also a lot more good mods for Hoi4 than just about any other paradox game.
It is too much if you take everything in at once, but if you just take play the built in tutorial then from there just kinda wing it, looking up stuff when you need to, you can get rolling pretty easy. Most of the stuff that’ll make your head hurt (navy, some aspects of supply and air-force), don’t have as much sway on the game if you’re playing casually so you can just forget about it until later. As for the WW2 part, I’m not a massive fan either, but mods and turning off historical AI helps