Well, I played it a bit more, and had significantly more success this time through. Saved/annexed Texas, got a dependable (if low) surplus going, colonized historical U.S. territory...
Occupying provinces takes way too long, from what I can tell. One brigade seems to do it just as fast as ten. On a related note, why does it take so much longer to build railroads, factories, or just research than in Vicky 1 (or, for that matter, even to be able to order a retreat from a battle)? Particularly since they seem to be integral to getting a workable budget.
Overall, I'm pleased with the look of the map. The world actually looks like... the world. However, at anything higher than the lowest resolution, it becomes practically impossible for me to actually see things like state or province borders, and even then I sometimes have problems. I think it was a poor choice to leave the terrain graphics on regardless of what map mode your in. It might not have been so bad if, for instance, country colors were sharper or brighter (like in Vicky1), but they're all so grimy and diluted (except when fully zoomed-out); even at full zoom, I could barely tell how Prussia was doing in its war against Austria, for instance. It's especially distracting at times when you're looking at countries bordering you, because the country color under the fog of war is so radically different than the color when it's not under the fog of war.
Despite running quite smoothly on my comp, loading quickly, etc, the game just felt so clunky. Information that shouldn't be hard to find or wasn't hard to find in Vicky now is; maybe I just couldn't find it, but I have no way of knowing how long it will take my units to get from Point A to Point B, nor could I find any way for the game to notify me of simple things like units arriving at their destinations. It's even difficult to just find your units on the map (this goes for the map's province upgrade graphics, too). As for the rest, being able to find and interpret the walls of numbers the game throws at you seems to be just a matter of getting used to the interface. Though I admit I prefer Vicky's setup more, it's certainly functional.
I know it's customizable, but I thought it was silly that practically no information is pre-set to appear in pop-up menus, whereas IIRC everything was in Vicky. This might actually be a good thing because I was playing at the lowest resolution, in which case the screen would have been absolutely covered with pop-ups. So, it's a trade-off between pausing all the time to clear the screen, or pause every couple of in-game days to check all those identical flags that appear in the bottom right and remove them. Making matters worse, quite a few of the windows just seem excessively large; at the lowest resolution, the army window took up nearly half the screen (compared to, say, Vicky where it doesn't cover the map at all).
So, it seems to me Vicky 2 is one step forward, two steps back from its predecessor.
Edit - that's not to say there weren't other areas this game appears to have improved upon the original. Diplomacy (integral to this period) has thankfully been fleshed out (and you don't have to spend cash on it, either!), including things as simple as information on the governments of other countries, POPs seem to have been largely fragmented and so avoiding the annoying tendency of soldier POPs to be utterly decimated in wars or, especially in the case of the U.S., leave vast stretches of the territory nearly bereft of inhabitants. I think I also prefer the way reinforcements are done in this one, too.
