Damn this game is slow

Played for 4 hours, most of that on 5 speed on one of the better CPUs money can buy, and I'm not even 50 years into the campaign. How the hell do they expect anyone to play a significant fraction of the 500 advertised years? I'm losing my mind here with how slowly things progress. Do they think I don't have a job?

In eu4 I would have been well into the 1500s by now, and ready to wrap the campaign up after one, maybe two more session/s. With this though, God knows how long it'll take...