Hi, I've been testing the game the last few days, and thought I'll share my impressions so far. My testing game is a new start with China, and the game is with medium difficulty settings, very high hot relations, no units start and current year is 1962, so it's still pretty early.
Firstly, a few questions about patch notes. Social expectations and world inflation were mentioned, but where can I see those? It would be really helpful to see what my people are really expecting, like more social services, lower taxes or what?
Then to the game itself. I've had a hard time figuring out how new social services model works. It seems to suck out all the money no matter what I do ( heh, working like in the real world I suppose, but anyways
). Like if I decrease my government budget to make some extra money, in a few days all that money goes to social services, even I made no changes there at all. Same thing with trades. Social services spending jumps up and down making sure that treasury doesn't increase too much. I have deactivated all the ministers, but it seems that they are still doing something in the background. This is not a really big problem, since it just seems to balance the budget, not throwing me in red or anything, but quite annoying anyway.
Diplomatic deals do not seem to work when it's for longer period of time. Instant deals come to treasury correctly, but if it's a deal where other country pays x sum every day, only thing I seem to get is extra production costs. No money at all. At least it's nowhere to be seen in the trade received section in the daily income tab, and normal trade income doesn't increase either. Also there's still lots of negative value diplomatic offers from countries I'm not allied with. Offered 100M, requested 200M and the like. Just because they like me, does not mean I like them. So I still hope you could add some filters to diplomatic offers later. And allies could at least offer close to what it costs to produce the goods now that production costs really matter, and not just ask everything for half price. This is not a critical problem either, and more like annoyance. I can always just ignore diplomatic offers.
Next there's production costs. For example, if oil's market price is 50$ per barrel and my production costs are 45$, and then I bulk sale and market price drops to 45$, my production costs also go down. Is this supposed to happen? This combined with how sales sliders ( min $/U ) work makes this really a nightmare to keep up with. If I first set my sliders that I want to make 10% profit, then in 2 weeks time the sliders might be at -20% if prices have raised...or even worse, I don't sell anything at all, because prices have dropped, but are still profitable because my production costs dropped also. So is it possible to add an option to tie the sales slider to percent value of production costs, not the dollars? IMO that would make trade much easier to handle, because production costs are moving so much now.
Good thing about the new economy model is, that high tech level countries are now able to export too. I checked Canada, and only goods where their production costs are higher than market prices are agrigulture, fresh water, metal ore and military goods ( prices of military goods is really low for everybody, but that's probably because I had a no-units start ). The bad thing is, that most countries have double digits inflation, and production costs are really high for poorer countries. For example, consumer goods production costs for India is 12483$ and 13163$ for Canada. Respective GDP/c and inflation rates are 518$/8.2% and 19095$/15.3%. Tech level difference naturally is quite big. Probably this is as close as we can get, since in the game car is a car, no matter if it's a new Ferrari or old T-Ford. I agree with foothill though, that fresh water formula could be tweaked down a little. In general, the current model still seems to be working ok, and almost every country still has healthy economy ( no big debts or treasury in red etc. ). Apart from fresh water, only thing I can think of is to tone down inflation a bit.
Space race seems to be much tougher now than it used to. I've played dirty and bought everything I could, but still only barely leading. In a fair game one of the superpowers would most likely win. I'm currently researching manned space flight, USA is few months behind me and USSR is right behind them. At this rate both might even get their man on the moon during this decade. Hard to say which one first, because they are almost even. This is a nice improvement.
Military AI seems to calculate it's chances against colonies correctly now. AI USSR did not DOW Gibraltar in a no-units start, and in general wars seem to be much rarer now. With very high world volatility, there has been only very few wars, except the scripted ones. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, I'll leave that to those that are more familiar with the military aspects of the game. Speaking of wars, North Korea actually won without any outside help and still exists. NV also won SV, but then Laos declared war and won, so North Vietnam is no more. I wasn't allied to North Vietnam, so I don't know if NATO helped or not. Also thousands of idle mechant marines are not floating around anymore, so I suppose AI is calling them back correctly now. This is all good stuff.
Now game is also really fast ( like 5 seconds per day ), and in general I think this is a big step forward. Few minor fixes here and there, and this game is golden. Only bigger gripe I still have left, is that the cold war itself does not look so good. USSR sphere is totally fallen apart already, even USSR has not been in any wars and is doing pretty ok. Population and GDP/c are rising, nice army and no debts or anything, but it has much lower DAR than USA ( 21% vs 30% ). Currently it looks like that USSR AI just have zero chances to compete against USA, and supporting sphere leader is almost impossible too. I mean, if I'd support USSR current ruling party now, the price tag is 456M daily. It's actually cheaper to support opposition ( "only" 227M daily in USSR, and 412M against USA ), and I really don't get the logic behind this. I also made a quick test game with USSR myself, and human can probably still compete against USA just fine, but AI could really use some help. It kinda kills the whole cold war idea, if it's over after 10 years of game start. If human plays the USA, then this probably happens even faster.
