It's really hard to make decison to recommend or not this game. Please read to make you decision.

This game has a honeymoon period when you study mechanics and having fun. Building draft system and trade was awesome in previous game and even better now. But after investing 100+ hours you will find 3 main issues:

1. Micromanagement hell of big nations. Too much time spent to set building each turn if you want to play optimal.
2. AI weakness, so you need to increase difficulty to just make it somehow interesting (That's not something new for turn based strategies)
3. And third most awful in my eyes is the authority system. If you try to play small nations and especcially on high difficulties, you will find that authority system decides for you what to first 100 turns and you as player don't have real instruments to affect it.

So if you plan to play less than 100 hours it's easy buy, otherwise you could find that you invested your time and don't really have option of replayability, because all nations will have these isssues.

It's a pretty good game, taking a particular approach to strategy games with many of their mechanics, including the interesting and quite complex building and goods systems. Has good potential, many different short campaigns, and a good selection of contries with unique characteristics on the main campaign, so you can play many games which are different. Only thing missing maybe would be something that would represent an progress outside of the units reform and unit roaster updates, something more related to science and technology, and more events outside to those related to vassals.

Very addicting.
If you're on the fence about buying this game like I was read the manual that pretty much describes all the mechanics in game.

NOT compatible with Win10 or Win11. You get a 'ambigious main text error text0' follow by an 'unhandled fatal error' which immediately dumps you back to the desktop. No fix available.

The game has so much to like, but it is so slow. Its takes a full minute minimum to process a turn even when you are playing a small country.

Great addition to any fun of strategy games (4x or others).

Game is lovely, there is only one thorn in the side. Previous game had culture to decadence ratio creating golden and dark ages for nations, greatest mechanic I've ever seen only grand strategy mechanically representing ups and downs instead of paradox linear progression.

In this version however we got authority not representing anything real.

For example take the caliph of Baghdad who is a crumbling empire whose authority was realistically 0 - he could influence nothing and his potential for conquest was non existent and stability really weak. In a game tho due to its past imperial government it's authority will always be maxed out. This arbitrary authority mechanic only based on your government tier and actual demesne size is so downgraded compared to previous game that it hurts me physically.

Still vote up, just dreaming about this gets redone to make game less linear and static.

fun game. I like to play the battles out in FOGM, but you can also battle within the game. DLC adds more land and more nations so is a great new experience.