I only recently got into VicII when I heard a new expansion was coming out.
VicI still has its charm, but VicII (and the expansion already out) improves it in many ways.
Good points:
1. Politics are much more nuanced. You can enact a wide variety of reforms and it's very clear what they do and how they shape your government.
2. VicI is very dependent on events to keep things semi-historical. In VicII, there are no scripted events, instead there are 'decisions' that can be enacted at certain times to approximate history and what-ifs, making the game feel a lot more natural and that it evolves organically.
3. Raising armies is more accurate, you can no longer just randomly change a POP to a soldier and get a ton of manpower.
4. Diplomacy has been changed around a bit. As a Great Power, you can influence other countries into your 'sphere of influence,' forcing them into alliances. Also it improves the experience of, say, Prussia. You no longer have to wait for an event to fire or go to war with all of the German minor states at once, you can just add them to your sphere of influence and form Germany that way. (Same with Italy.)
5. You can influence what your capitalists build (sorta) with the National Focus system, if you don't play with State Capitalism or Planned Economy.
I recommend it. It's close enough to VicI to have that same feel, but most all of the changes feel like improvements.
The only one real complaint I can make is that the world market is vastly different. In VicI, it was better not to put the trade on automate, and you could easily stockpile commodities you needed. (Especially the stuff for building armies, POP promotion, etc.) In VicII, the default for all of this is automated, and it's best to leave it that way because micromanaging it is very hard... It's impossible to stockpile anything because your POPs will buy it first, or something.
