Well, it's good to see that V2 is recognized as part of the franchise continuum and not a just a one off.
- Naval changes, a good improvement as far as it goes. Could have been better still.
- Newspaper. Fluff. Someone should have had the presence of mind to say no, do something useful.
- Colonization, nice but not much of a change from all previous colonization schemes.
- Crisis system. Interesting, looks like some cross pollination from Pride of Nations has been happening. Be more interesting if the player could initiate a crisis.
-------------
Ships live in a hostile environment and you don't need to rust away the whole hull to sink one, you just need a hole in the right place and the sea does the rest. Ships also have critical systems such as guns, fuel, ammunition, supplies, crew, propulsion. As these systems fail the ship, while largely whole, becomes incapable of performing critical tasks. Read about the sinking of the Bismark and it's sister ship and you can appreciate this.
Speaking of rust, ships should rarely sink at sea from rust or wood worms, the crew on board does work to maintain things, that's part of the maintenance cost. They can become more costly to maintain.
The game still magically upgrades ships (and other military units). This has to end. It's necessary to go back to the HoI system with a hull and attached features that can upgrade, at a cost. Upgrades should at least require the ship to be docked and likely at a shipyard.
Ships need to be crewed from the population, and when battles are resolved casualties counted and war weariness affected.
The crew needs to get experience, not the hull. That is, you should be able to move an experience crew to a new ship.
Naval battles should be able to occur on navigable rivers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mobile_Bay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Island_Number_Ten
Ships should be able to engage in coastal land battles (like it was in V1 and HoI), target forts and towns and be targeted by land artillery. And airplanes.
I hope that the maintenance cost featured in the ship description is an estimate of what is paid for resources, not just money that vaporizes.
Building and upgrading ships should require pops who are paid to do this.
It's good that ship building ports have been limited and made appropriately costly. It would have been better if geographic conditions were the limiting factor for port location and size instead of arbitrarily assigning one to a state. The time wasted developing the 'newspaper' could have been devoted to this. Then you have a meaningful reason for ports to be where they are and a rational understanding of why some places do better than others.
It makes the game more meaningful when you use rational means instead of random means.
-------
Instead of the newspaper, it would have been much nicer if someone had gone through the program and removed all of those hateful dialog boxes that demand that we acknowledge such amazingly trivial things such as "moralists have enhance morality" (or something like that), "(state) is electrified" etc. It's like a club beating the game purchaser again and again and again and again. Some pathological narcissist did this to us, please kill it.
--------
The 'new' colonization system seems just a rehash of all the earlier ones. The colonization points are, like their diplomatic point cousins, kind of lame and gamey. It fails also to allow the player to do things that would be reasonable to do because of the gamey nature arbitrary limits are needed to contain it.
As example of the contradiction, the US can't colonize in Africa but it somehow already has a thriving colony there. What, they forgot how as soon as they did it?
What's needed is a better system that gives the player 'economic' choices. That is, the player must manage scarcity of resources to accomplish his goals. If his goal is colonization it comes at the cost of other opportunities.
The best way to do this is to utilize leaders from the leader pool, pops, and resources. Form organizations (like brigades or factories) that are funded and tasked to colonize. They can be funded from investors or the government, or both.
The game needs to develop a wider range of roles for leaders and this is one. If you look at the wikkipedia entry for the Liberia foundation you find leaders. Those leaders also served in other roles such as politicians, military officers and industrialists.
The same guy who went and established the Liberian colony was responsible for finding and promoting the guy who developed the Monitor for the North.
In battle, colonization, diplomacy, and research, leaders are necessary. And having to allocate scarce leaders is a much better scheme to do things that to wait for colony points or diplomatic points.
Further, this would allow players to plan and implement goals (fire and forget) rather than wait for bells to ring to pounce on the pellet lever.
Money should go to leaders and pops to pay for their efforts. Always.
----
Instead of wasting efforts on a 'newspaper' that I have to click to learn things I already knew or don't really care about, why not develop a system to pay pops to construct everything that is built in the game.:
-
From factories to the Panama Canal, the player presently throws money up in the air and it magically transforms into a factory or canal. Why not have staffed services that are paid to perform these tasks. And who recruit or dragoon foreign workers if none are locally available.
Have a system of work related attrition for jobs. Some jobs are as dangerous as battle.
-
Have female pops, and age groups for all pops. Then issues of fertility can be made interesting.
-
Presently factories are randomly located. This is inane. there are geographic and marketing reasons why factories locate. As example most textiles located in the New England area instead of the South because of water power. But Vicky doesn't recognized the existence of these resources.
-
Stop randomly upgrading states with nonsensical upgrades. The player should pay for and build these. When you get mining improvements in a farm RGO and department stores in the desert, the game loses its verisimilitude. You begin to feel that you are wasting your time doing something stupid.
-
Create a logistical system, this also explains why things are where they are and confers a cost on moving your dirt around. Strategic movement should be reinstated and made part of this system, competing with goods movemen t. It can be pretty abstracted, but there needs to be one and it should reflect the cost of different modes of transport.
-
Have separate Naval and Land military tabs. Really. Please. V1 retained some military management from HoI. Meager as it was it was at least something. V2 dispensed with even that minimal functionality in favor of total chaos. In a rare moment of lucidity and mild chagrin we were given 'rally points'. Which, though not solving the problem, at least acknowledged the burden placed upon the player of managing hoards of randomly placed units.
If you have separate naval and land military tabs, you then have the screen real estate for the player to design what his armies/fleets should look like (what kinds of units they should contain) at which point all created or unassigned units could move to (or strategically move to if strategic movement is reinstated) an appropriate army and with minimal stress a player can have all his armies/fleets composed exactly as he wants in a proactive way. You could even filter for the type of leader you want and assign a base of operation.
People work best when they can plan and implement, not when they have to play whack-a-mole or press a lever for a food pellet on command.
-
Restore the linking feature of the ledger. The ledger keeps shrinking and losing functions.
----------
Again, all things that could have been addressed with the resources that were wasted on a feature that tells the player everything he already knew happened last month, for which he must take time out of the game to click and read (or they pile up).
