Historically accurate for the time period as they were far behind Europe in technology), and nations like Germany and Italy forming. The first one sees industralization, Asian/African nations being either conquered or westernizing (as they start out uncivilized. It covers two, in my opinion, interesting time periods: The Victorian Era, and the Interwar Era.

It is also a lot less 'blobby' in that expanding too quickly is hard and often leads to your nation collapsing or getting ganged up on, a bit like a harsher version of EU4's AE. It models a lot of things from population (the population is modeled better than Stellaris, fight me) to industralization to elections to rebellions. It's, with the HPM mod and both DLCs, the best and probably most realistic one (but it often does get silly: for example in one of my games the USA went fascist then shattered). Victoria 2 is the last game of the 'old generation' of Paradox games that had fewer, larger DLCs, no mana, and more obtuse yet deeper mechanics. I see the last thread on this game that I found is pretty dead.

Victoria 2 new nations mod