You know what pisses me off?
In HOI4, it conflates casualties and deaths (and doesn't reflect civilians deaths by strategic bombing, of course), and because of this your casualties will be tiny and then suddenly jump massively if a unit gets encircled. From a purely informative point of view I might be interested in seeing a measure of where my resources are being bled, but from an enjoying-the-story-I'm-creating standpoint that's useless.
But, add on to that, it has no way of telling you when and where those casualties were inflicted, like to say about a specific battle.
I have no idea what it would take to make something like this work, but I want a system where you can break down casualties by state and month, by battleplanner offensive, dynamically identify "battles" by some AI criteria, or go back into a timelapse of what happened and select the range and provinces to include so you can use your judgment to determine what to you is a battle. With the last two, the issue there is that in frontline warfare, there's a difference between an event that has some coherent story to it, like D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge or the Battle of Stalingrad, but not one that an AI would necessarily be able to appreciate.
People used to write cool AARs and Let's Plays - back when Let's Plays were a written, not visual, medium - of games where they basically novelized the game. There was a masterful one of San Andreas on Something Awful. Paradox had some decent ones. This kind of functionality would be useful for stuff like that, but I don't know as people even care about that stuff anymore. Seems to me like 99% of Paradox YouTube is Isorrowproductions being unfunny while doing le epic meme runs.
