The problem for beginners is they are faced with all these decisions and no information on their effect. The "regional decisions" are a good example. Should you spend you limited resources on building telegraph lines? Who knows? There is absolutely no way to test the results since its effect is lost in the hundreds of other decisions you make. The game is much to long to find out by playing one building telegraph lines all over the place and then another without. This lack of information on the effect of investing resources makes all these extra decisions to be made by the beginner just game clutter and gives the game the appearance of complexity where there really isn't. You can play the game with probably little sacrifice ignoring most of these choices.