I would rate it 6/10 for the following reasons :
-Varied amount of countries offer a lot of choices, but not so much in playstyle as the only difference is which countries to attack at the start of the game. I suspect this will start to wear thin after you play a few games taking place in Europe, Asia and the Americas. I did not find much difference between playing Brazil and Argentina for example, other than Argentina had a weaker start.
-Insufficient events to add flavour to the game. There are almost no historical gameplay effects at all, which personally i find a bit dissapointing.
-The combat system is heavily flawed. I frequently have artillery units ending up on the front line, and even after modding artillery techs to give +4 attack instead of +2, zerg rushing with infantry will beat out a infantry + artillery combined arms force. Artillery units frequently end up on the front line and will not "move back" to open a space for infantry, and infantry units in the back line will not move off the battlefield to make room for artillery reinforcements that have just arrived. Cavalry flanking only ever comes into play against a smaller force, and the units are not varied enough(nearly no difference between cavalry, curassiers, dragoons and hussars).
Things like Recon and Military tatics are not explained properly(no tooltips either...) and seem to have a neglible impact on battle, and exp clearly does nothing(Tested with 2 100% exp hussars vs 2 green infantry, infantry outdamaged them, all techs researched and no modifiers).
For the record, 10 guards + 10 artillery defending a woods province with a level 6 fort and river vs a full infantry stack only results in a 3:1 kill ratio for the defender, once all techs are researched(with artillery modded for +4 to attack per tech level). Highly dissapointing and inaccurate, and this means that it is perfectly viable to spam infantry rather than any attempt at a combined arms force, and combined with instant mobilization of fully trained and equipped infantry means that a large standing army is pointless.
Soldier pop is out of control, France can easily have 3 million+ soldiers by the time of the Franco Prussian war and can mobilize ALL of them, WITHOUT any small arms, canned food or any other goods, within a week. Prolonged usage of reserves does not affect the economy at all since they still pay taxes, and casaulties suffered in battle do not reduce a country's population at all. Lose 3 million men in battle? Mobilize all of them again, one week later! Or, just demobilize and mobilize them again, all the dead soldiers will spring back to life, even in enemy occupied territories! The only way to reduce a country's military score is to seize their land, thereby reducing their population and max number of brigades.
Forts are cheap, spammable and have no upkeep, which results in extremely long drawn out wars as it takes a full army 1 year to take over an empty fort. Somehow.
-Economy acts really oddly, such as "perceived demand" being shown in the trade screen rather than "actual demand". There is also no benefit to maintaining a positive cash inflow as you can simply take infinite loans, every AI seems to be millions in debt by 1900 and it does not affect their economy or prestige at all.
-SOI system needs a lot of work, since currently now it just acts as a way to gain access to a country's domestic market. If another country keeps fooling with your SOI, you cant get a casus belli. If a country declares war on a country in your SOI, you dont get a casus belli either! And the AI just loves to spam expel advisors/ban embassy with no way for you to stop it(other than beating them out of GP status...). There is no way to turn a SOI into a satellite, although that would be the logical next step, and infact, there is no way to defeat a country in war and have them become your satellite(makes you wonder how all those satellites at the start of the game were created then...).
-Diplomacy wise, relation seems to do next to nothing(oh look +200 relation, WAR OF CONTAINMENT WITH NO WARNING MWAHAHAHHAA), and most countries, excluding GPs, seem to auto refuse you for military access or alliances unless they are in your SOI. AI tends to spam random requests for military access as well....France spams Austria for military access requests to Germany for example, when they have a common border. They even spam access requests when you just finished a war with them and have a relation of -200!
Also allies keep sueing for white peace in a war, which basically makes them useless.
The war goal, prestige and infamy system could have been much better. As it is, a small country defeating a large country in a war has the same prestige gain as the UK smacking around Tibet, which makes no sense. The aggressor gets the exact same infamy for war goals as the defender....despite it being common place and accepted for the defender to ask for reparations of some sort if they win.
AI doesnt know when its beaten and will refuse to give up if your war goals exceed 100 points or the only thing left is a silly island with no military left.
-AI is also quite dissapointing, in war the AI spends most of the time spending red ORG units behind your lines with no regard to actually fighting you(unless they have a 10:1 numerical superiority). Infact they seem to make every effort possible to run around in circles and not fight you...
Tech wise you have oddities like land locked countries mass researching naval techs and Austria not having tier 2 rifles by 1875 despite fighting numerous war swith Prussia, and there is no script for uncivilized countries to aim for westernization. They just research random culture techs and do nothing.
-Lots of minor annoyances like having to build railrways/forts/naval bases one by one instead of state by state or some "list" form where you can clearly see which provinces in a state are missing railways, etc. Also when viewing the provinces in a state there is no way to click on the province and "jump" to it on the map...you have to exit the population screen and do a search for the name, which is counter intuitive.
-Game is extremely laggy at around 1900. Not sure what causes this...probably the AI moving single brigade stacks around instead of combining them. Everytime the UK mobilizes, it takes like 5-10 seconsd for one day to pass by on the highest speed setting.
-Naval warfare is outright silly, as neither France or UK with 600+ ship navies would engage my fleet of 20 cruisers by 1920, they would all simply hide in their ports. For that matter i dont see why we cant attack ships in a port...they are sitting targets!
All in all a lot of solid gameplay hours but too many issues to make it anywhere near 10/10. Replayability is probably a problem as well once you play a few countries in each of the major regions as gameplay style has largely been the same so far....
-Tech plurality techs and then army techs
-Grab land from the weakest, nearest country
-Eventually fight repeated massive wars with a GP depending on your geographical location.
In particular infinite soldier pop means the AI can mobilize massive armies within a week, have them all killed and mobilize them a week after...which makes lategame warfare extremely boring.
