Recent reviews by ThreeOracle

A worthy successor to EU4. The scale is great, economy feels like Victoria 3 without the terrible combat and the depth is very engaging. I would argue you don't need to wait for patches and content updates to get onto the games because of how much content there is already, but that's up to you. For the price and playtime you get, is a big recommend.

A big step down for the series, Most of the changes feel like they were done for the sake of change rather then to improve the player experience.

Waste of great potential and a high price point for a unfinished experience

A great game that has been getting better with every update. Having a blast playing it.

Its a solid recommend, it stands apart from the first game yet builds on the theme to deliver a great experience. The main three problems are: 1) They watered down the sense of impact your social and moral choices have. Yes you can do brutal things justified by the sake of survival, but the impact and negative repercussions don't go far enough. If I force people to abandon their children or revoke their rights to universal rations, you would expect a bigger response then a short story about making people sad. It also leans into problem 2) You are not punished enough. In a city full of 20,000+ people, you can go without half you required food income for years and people won't revolt or complain. Not hitting your heat requirement during a storm? no big deal, all your districts work fine and people just less trusting. If it lasts for too long you get a popup telling you people died but that's all. It doesn't help the amount of people that die is a percentage of the population, so it will never be so many you can lose within a few years. Even with the simplified heat system it could have been made so if a district falls bellow a threshold you risk illness, forcing you to priorities which districts get the heat generating buildings and adjacency bonuses. Issue 3) is the story. Its lacks the Gray nuance that a game like this should have. It turns into a "Them and Us" story which leads to the player taking sides, quite literally with the end of chapter choices that limit the story. By the end of the game, I had all my needs solved, tons of resources and all I had to do was wait till events occurred. It ties back into problem 1 and 2, if I was struggling, then making concessions to those who opposed me would have been a interesting choice. But when a group threatens to strike or shut down a district and you could survive for the next 100 years without it, you stop caring.

I point these problems out because they are what is holding back this game from being a good game to a great one.

This is a very lukewarm recommend. The game is fun at its core, working with the production chain system is a nice innovation to the genre, technological ages are interesting and national spirits allow for adapting the way you play in a meaningful way. But there are a lot of things this game gets wrong, which I will rattle off.

Multiplayer not being ready for launch, forcing people to play a broken, port forwarded version to play with their friends is a silly mistake. The first impressions of a game for multiplayer viability are critical for convincing people to buy the game to play it with their friends. It will not matter if the multiplayer is fixed later on, the consensus will remain it that its broken and not worth playing forever. See the Humankind multiplayer for a similar example.

There is a massive lack of quality of life features which add a bunch of tedium. For instance, embarking unit requires you to move to the tile next to the water, then press the embark button and select where you want to embark. Or if you have units with multiple turn movements, you have to manually confirm the movement of each one individually and if the unit spots a 'threat' it will stop and you have to reconfirm the movement.
There is no automatic scout movement and no 'wait until unit is healed' button. This names the more pressing annoyances found when playing the game but you get the picture.

Visually, aside from the ascetics, the biggest issue is the visual clarity in populated areas. the tile improvements, especially in the mid to late game can look indistinguishable. If a person was shown a screenshot and told to state which tile was the paper mill out of all the factories they would struggle. The same thing can be said about the difference between an envoy and a single leader unit.

Chaos and the fact that it become completely irreverent at a certain point in the game once you have enough gold feels like an oversight. This is probably a good thing for the health of the game, since the events you can get range from an incontinence to a instant save reload. The mechanic just become a tax, since you never want to risk getting the event 'Your capital region becomes independent'. The simple solution would be to offer the player to pay experience points or offer a the choice of what bad event happens.

More minor things include selecting one starting bonus and having no meaning to which nation you represent is a missed opportunity. Could have added some interesting flavour or choices. Winning the game was one of the most underwhelming experiences I have had winning a 4X game. The frame rate on lower end systems is poor between turns and during unit movement. If you are behind in tech you can have a game where you cannot decide any of the ages.

To sum this up, if you like similar games of the genre you will get enjoyment out of this. However, view this as a single player only experience that's rough around the edges. Go watch a video to make your own judgement.

Very good

I swear if I hear one more time that he has lost his keys I will go and break into his Brown Sedan myself

Shouldn't have wished to live in more interesting times.

Far too much time wasting to progress and anti-consumer mechanics.