For me, Paradox at the moment is the best strategy game making company. To CA: I played Rome I, Medieval II, Empire and Shogun each for hundreds of hours. I own Napoleon and Rome II too, but due to my not-so-up-to-date hardware, it really isn't fun to play these two. Sadly, I can't touch Rome I without mods anymore. I consider it the greatest game of my childhood together with Age of Empires, but even if I try to stay strong, the graphics just hurt. Medieval II with mods otherwise is even today my favourite, and don't ask why, but I like the graphics much more than the one from newers titles (maybe because this runs on high quality on my machine...). And yes, TW is all about the battle graphics.
Then there is Civilization IV and V, another two games where I sank (not wasted

) maybe a thousand hours of my life. I liked Civ4 much more than vanilla Civ5 (no culture or religion, naaaah) but I haven't really played it with its expansions which are said to make the game finally excellent, so I should give it another go.
Paradox games finally let me desperate at the first attempts. So was EU3 and HoI3 and even EU4. After starting these games for the first time, I quit 20 minutes later and didn't touch them for a few weeks. But gladly I forced myself to play until I understood how to play properly, and it was not wrong to do this, because of all great strategy titles and series who are out there, EU4 is my favourite. And the new DDs are more than promising to me, as EU4 2.0 will be hardly comparable to any previous version. A new game, and thats for the cost of a little expansion. Not that Paradox would be better in their DLC pricing than other companies, but I don't just buy Paradox DLCs for the features I paid for (which would mean they are overpriced), I buy them so they keep working on the game. Otherwise we wouldn't see more patches and would likely stick to 1.9.2 forever while Paradox starts going for EU5. But they don't need to hurry, I don't expect that before 2020