ORIGINAL: Mac Linehan
ORIGINAL: CaptainConflict
I bought it when it first came out. It seemed o.k. at first and in difficult to understand. The part that turned me off however was that very few countries could colonize and Germany was not one of them. Maybe this has changed with updates. If you want to play as Great Britain or France and you can get the hang of all the economy stuff then the colonizing aspect would probably be entertaining.
CaptainConflict -
There is a preference setting that allows the player to disable the historical "Spheres of Influence" (which limits each country to it's historical areas of interest) aspect of the game. I have only played the USA which has access to the full range of colonial actions immediately; Germany may have to wait for reunification before setting out to build an empire.
There is a new beta patch out. Please stick with it; I suspect that Germany is a particularly challenging nation to play.
Mac
Having played Prussia to unification to Germany, I can say that you are right. Once you become Germany, you will have access to pretty much every colonization decision up to creation of a state, if you can get that far in your colony. Unification happened in 1870, after I met the conditions for unification which included a successful campaign in the war with France I started.