>>2053372 (OP)Remembered another one. Play Twilight Struggle. It's an excellent cold war board game that effectively functions like a map painting game. One of the finest board games ever made. It's going to use dices and cards so it won't be like a Paradox game, but it works. The turn based formula lends itself to the slower pace of the war too and a lot of the conflicts are represented via dice combat. If you want a good cold war grand strategy game, this will at the very least scratch that itch for you since it has a good mix of politics, influence spreading, coups, special events and light alt history possibilities by historical events going the other way thanks to RNG Jesus. Not EXACTLY what you want just like that Rise of Nations expansion, but still definitely in the ballpark.
Don't get why everyone's so blackpilled about the prospect of making a good cold war /gsg/. Scenarios that involve wars and warfare can be done either in the 40s and 50s where you don't have huge arsenals or lots of ballistic missiles and the timeframe definitely allows for a round of combat like HOI might. If you want something more modern, just have SDI be a thing or have nuclear weapons be governed by treatied/cooler heads so that they don't instantly pop off, allowing for a more conventional game. If you want to focus more on politics, then making it turn based or operate on a faster time scale like EU4 would work, especially if you allowed for some abstractions the way the EU games do. Another way of doing it would be to focus on a single continent and exclude direct superpower conflict, but instead essentially have you play something akin to the US and USSR through their proxies in a region. Think HOI4, but you're commanding an entire alliance of proxies and your support for them, and the thing can either end up in a diplomatic/economic victory somehow or a gigantic war. And if nukes go off, who cares? It's only [continent I dislike]!
tl;dr think positively/outside the box!
