First impressions:
- UI is truly bad, busy and difficult to read. Buttons have all shapes and sizes, there are UI elements that look like buttons that aren't buttons, and vice versa. It is insane. Font size varies wildly, everywhere. Not every menu needs a painted background! It would be OK to have Vic2 spreadsheet style UI if that's the best way to convey information. The tech tree, or "advances" tab is exceptionally horrible with so much empty space and big trees with no obvious layout or categories. Some tooltips are just useless, like "Pops with needs" - OK which pops? I need to click around in an entirely different menu to find out. There are also many typos, even in menus.
- I don't think that Goods system had to be so granular… it seems easily trivialized by expanding RGOs to solve shortages, which is quite cheap, but tedious. My Greek peasants need 0.00023 Masonry! Feels like a lot of additional clicking when system could have just been abstracted away to begin with for the same effect. IDK, I suppose it enables different gameplay for building-only polities but it doesn't seem necessary for the traditional gameplay, which is around consolidation of states. The game shows me 10 options but immediately points out which is the most profitable/viable - so why would I ever choose anything else? Even if the optimal choice changes situationally, I will always know what it is!
-Game seems rather easy, which again makes the econ micro seem like busywork. It isn't difficult to snowball or get ahistorical populations early on. Effect stacking curse from other PDS games is present here, too. Event spam is also here, with the same kind of boring +10% this -20 that effects. The events are not anywhere near as bad as CK3, however, so that is forgivable. Religions and cultures seem less sticky than even EU4.
-Situations absolutely do not provide the uniqueness that mission trees (even barebones ones in Imperator) did. That was gaslighting on the part of PDS and paid marketers (youtubers). They took the time to put in mission trees with the HOI4-like national focus window, and right now these are totally unused except for tutorial content. It seems obvious to me that this will be a vehicle for DLCs as well as Situations. Make no mistake, gameplay will be very repetitive between countries, especially econ busywork and clicking to build the same buildings (or slightly different ones) 100 times.
-International organizatio
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