OK, I remain excited, and will definitely be purchasing this, but having had some time to mull it over, my excitement is dampered compared to what it originally was.
I don't care about the map's graphics. At all. I mean, I guess it's nice that it's being made to look nicer. But whatever, who cares?
Now, Japan and China specific stuff, that's definitely cool. But...
What this game really needs, at this point, is not new features (although I'm happy to see new features). It really needs usability.
There are so many things that are absurdly difficult to do, simply because information is not presented to you in good ways. Lots of things that should be trivial to do wind up taking eighty billion mouse clicks.
For example (and, to be clear, I mean this only as an example, I'm not saying it is the most important thing), say I've got four diplomats, and soon to be five. If I don't use one of them, I'm essentially wasting future diplomats. I don't want to declare war on anybody, I don't want to send somebody money, and so forth. So what's a good thing to do? Maybe a royal marriage with some random nation.
So I laboriously click on some province of an essentially random nation, then scroll up or down to "Royal Marriage", see whether it's enabled or not, if it's enabled click on it, and get told "Very Unlikely". Then I go on to the next random nation and do the same thing. Over and over, for dozens of nations. Sometimes I forget that I've already checked, say, Mainz, so I check it twice or more. And I wind up doing this every friggin' month.
Or, more likely, I just give up on doing it, because it's too tedious, and those future diplomats therefore just go to waste. Solely because the game is borderline unusable in this respect.
Why couldn't there just be a screen, for example, which lists all nations, and allows me to filter them and sort them in a wide variety of ways (and a similar screen for provinces)?
I would go to the screen, filter by nations that I don't have a royal marriage with, and then sort by chance of success of a royal marriage.
And when I say "chance of success", I mean the real chance of success - not like the damn trade screen, which tells you you have a 99% chance (or whatever) even if the place is packed full of merchants from your trade league or who you have trade agreements with, meaning that you really have a zero percent chance, not a 99% chance. So, similarly to the above example, you laboriously inspect the province with the CoT, go to its CoT page, hover over individual shields (!), and finally figure out that you do or do not have an actual chance of placing a merchant there. Or, because that's too tedious, you just send the damn merchant and hope for the best.
Again, these are just examples. The whole game is packed full of usability issues for things that should be trivial and are instead labyrinthine, tedious, and time consuming.
I want to reiterate that, despite these objections, I am happy to see the expansion, and will be buying it, no doubt. But obviously there's a limited amount of resources that can go into development, and, given that fact, I really, really wish that Paradox would dedicate at least some of those resources to usability instead of features.
I don't care about the map's graphics. At all. I mean, I guess it's nice that it's being made to look nicer. But whatever, who cares?
Now, Japan and China specific stuff, that's definitely cool. But...
What this game really needs, at this point, is not new features (although I'm happy to see new features). It really needs usability.
There are so many things that are absurdly difficult to do, simply because information is not presented to you in good ways. Lots of things that should be trivial to do wind up taking eighty billion mouse clicks.
For example (and, to be clear, I mean this only as an example, I'm not saying it is the most important thing), say I've got four diplomats, and soon to be five. If I don't use one of them, I'm essentially wasting future diplomats. I don't want to declare war on anybody, I don't want to send somebody money, and so forth. So what's a good thing to do? Maybe a royal marriage with some random nation.
So I laboriously click on some province of an essentially random nation, then scroll up or down to "Royal Marriage", see whether it's enabled or not, if it's enabled click on it, and get told "Very Unlikely". Then I go on to the next random nation and do the same thing. Over and over, for dozens of nations. Sometimes I forget that I've already checked, say, Mainz, so I check it twice or more. And I wind up doing this every friggin' month.
Or, more likely, I just give up on doing it, because it's too tedious, and those future diplomats therefore just go to waste. Solely because the game is borderline unusable in this respect.
Why couldn't there just be a screen, for example, which lists all nations, and allows me to filter them and sort them in a wide variety of ways (and a similar screen for provinces)?
I would go to the screen, filter by nations that I don't have a royal marriage with, and then sort by chance of success of a royal marriage.
And when I say "chance of success", I mean the real chance of success - not like the damn trade screen, which tells you you have a 99% chance (or whatever) even if the place is packed full of merchants from your trade league or who you have trade agreements with, meaning that you really have a zero percent chance, not a 99% chance. So, similarly to the above example, you laboriously inspect the province with the CoT, go to its CoT page, hover over individual shields (!), and finally figure out that you do or do not have an actual chance of placing a merchant there. Or, because that's too tedious, you just send the damn merchant and hope for the best.
Again, these are just examples. The whole game is packed full of usability issues for things that should be trivial and are instead labyrinthine, tedious, and time consuming.
I want to reiterate that, despite these objections, I am happy to see the expansion, and will be buying it, no doubt. But obviously there's a limited amount of resources that can go into development, and, given that fact, I really, really wish that Paradox would dedicate at least some of those resources to usability instead of features.
