I'm now up to 1852 in my Austria CG. Yes, it's been slow going, due in part to 5-6 turn resolutions (this is down from 10 minute turns, after I unchecked that little box thingy in the settings everyone says to do).
I've also spent a lot of time on the economy (lets face it, not much else you can do with Austria), and I think I can safely say I got it down pat. I have railroads running through nearly all lowland provinces in Austria now, and some of the more important mountainous regions as well. With my current money and goods output, assuming I spent on nothing else, I calculate I can complete single rails throughout all remaining road provinces of Austria in one years time.
Based on that, I figure I can probably build every eligible farm, mine and another dozen factories in 2-3 years time. In other words, I should be able to max out the entire potential Austrian economy and infrastructure by 1856.
(And I haven't neglected my army up to this point, either. I've built about 6 new corps and supporting troops, forming them into two new armies since the game began. All 6 of my current 3-star generals lead a command-maxxed army of about 1200-1300 strength each, and I've even upgraded the forts in Milano and Venice, buying fort troops and guns to match. I probably didn't need to do the latter; two of my 6 armies rather handily overran Sardinia-Piedmont after they rather foolishly forged a CB on me, then declared war in late '51. The F10 screen had them at 12% of my army strength. But this another issue ...)
Anyways, you can see the point here, economic growth in this game is way too easy. It may seem hard, in that it took me several days of real time to play the game thus far, but when you step back and look at the game date ... 1856 is way to early to be maxxing out your economy.
Clearly, things need to be slowed down. One easy solution would be to simply increase the build cost and times of things. But then another solution occured to me: Maybe limit economic planning to once a year, rather than every turn?
In other words, instead to the game running an "economic phase" once every two week turn ... how about just once a year, in January? That would be the only time resources are collected and expended, armies and fleets built, economic structures contructed, trading planned, etc. The resources and costs would be adjusted, based on the fact they'd now only be coming in 1/24th the previous rate.
The rest of the turns of the year would be limited to army and fleet movement (which would of course be minimal during peace time), diplomacy, and colonization efforts. And since the latter requires resources, one would have to leave some amounts after the first turn of the year to meet these projected colonial needs.
There are a couple of huge additional side benefits to this solution: 1) With only one economic phase to micromanage per year, rather than 24, player game play in this 1600+ turn game will considerably speed up; and on a related not 2) I would think not having economic activity to consider would significantly improve turn resolution speed, in those 23 out of 24 turns where they no longer occured. Even after unchecking the box, 5-6 minutes is really close to intolerable for me.
I realize this is probabaly a big design change, beyond what "modding" could accomplish. But I thought I would throw the idea out there; if it's practical for a future patch, great! If not, oh well.