Absolutism claimed undivided sovereignty; what it actually built was a machine for turning taxes into soldiers. Move the five dials a seventeenth-century monarch really controlled and watch the treasury, the nobility and the countryside answer. Then try the one setting every absolute king wanted and none could have: a large army, a quiet realm and a balanced book.
Your realm
Drag any dial to depart from the preset. The realm’s wealth is fixed; only who pays, and how much reaches you, can change.
lighttaille + gabelle + capitation
clergy & nobles payfully exempt
a guardEurope’s largest
a soldier’s campVersailles
local men ruleroyal commissioners override
Absolute is not totalitarian. No dial here abolishes venal office, conscripts at will or confiscates church land. Those were the limits Louis XIV actually lived inside.