RTS / Grand Strategy in-game time that can be sped up and paused

Something you see in real-time with pause grand strategy games, such as Paradox games, is an in-game clock that ticks at large intervals (hours, days per few seconds) and can be sped up and paused. The logic for updating the various progress bars in the game, such as unit movements and construction, is usually bound to the tick interval of the clock. How do I go about doing this? Time.timeScale definitely isn't the answer because various animations and camera movements would be affected.