Where to begin? This game is so full of flaws.
I think the most-annoying problem is the speed of the AI.
This game takes a VERY long time between turns to make decisions. You can literally get up from the computer, go make a sandwhich, come back....and the computer is STILL "thinking".
Come to that, everything in the game is glacially slow. Don't get me wrong. I love turn-based games. I hate frantic button-mashing games, but this is just ridiculous. A scroll unfurls to give you a message......and it's blank! At first, you think, "This must be a bug," but no! Wait about sixteen minutes and the message will finally fill in.
The entire interface isn't just slow, it's clunky. Want to establish a trade route between one of your merchant ships and a port? Great! All you have to do is click on your ship, hold down the button, drag it over any port highlighted in green....and here is where things go wrong. You must hover the mouse pointer EXACTLY, to the micromillimeter, EXACTLY in the precise, tricky, elusive spot, or, when you release, the trade route will NOT be established. Your ship snaps back and you get the wonderful fun of trying again. And again. And again, and again, and again.
Get fed up and want to just quit the game? Surprise! Even this simple function brings you to a "loading" screen that takes 45 minutes to complete!
Various aspects of the game design bite donkey balls, too.
For example, if you enter the technology-tree screen, you MUST select a new technology to research, you aren't allowed to save up the points and do something later. You cannot exit this screen until you make a commitment, which may turn out to be a disaster in one or two turns.
If you enter into an alliance with another nation, the game shuts off your ability to make any further alliances!! Meanwhile, your moron ally is free to make all sorts of crummy alliances, which you are then dragged into as a member!
Want to know what's happening in France? Well, buddy, then you had better be sharing a border with France. Otherwise, a "fog of war" keeps you literally in the dark! You can't see, trade with, fight or otherwise make deals with any nation you aren't sharing a border with. I guess there is a technology advance/building to solve this problem eventually, but it's just asinine, and frustrating, not to mention game-ruinginly-unrealistic. For example, it's a classic historical fact that France and Russia allied to keep Germany bottled up.
The fact that this is the Napoleonic era is irrelevant...I mean, you can't even sail a ship from Russia to France to establish contact.....they're "fog of war" out of touch because you don't share a border with them. This BITES, big time.
The combat system is just as bad as the rest of the game. You can build supposedly-superior units, such as artillery and cavalry, but none of that makes any difference whatsoever. The only thing that matters is NUMBERS, therefore you have the absurd and screamingly-grotesque situation of a mob of milita who don't even have muskets, defeating trained cavalry and field cannons! Yes, remotely possible once in a while, but the computer treats EVERY type of unit as EXACTLY the same in strength. ONLY quantity will win a battle. That's just F....ed up!
