My first impression is that the manual is impenetrable. For someone not as familiar with the engine, supposedly written from scratch independently from WITP, I don't know what I am supposed to want to be doing. The manual falls into the very common wargame manual trap of explaining what things are but not what I want to do or how to go about doing it. I suspect that even with the intended audience, a majority of people will NOT go to forums to view tutorials. Some polishing work would be useful, too. I would be happy to offer change suggestions (btd I can drive down from Cleveland
) from the perspective of someone with "no" prior experience in the area. In no particular order: The interface in-game is crisp and clear but could use several improvements and polishing. Some line borders need to be present to separate components of the view. At maximum 1920x1080 resolution, the differences in fonts, especially with the historical popups, are extremely jarring, and many icons are pixelized at that resolution. An important (IMHO) addition would be to add hotkeys to the tooltips on the icons, instead of having them only in the manual, to facilitate reduction of arthritis buildup. Tooltips should exist for all options and advanced preferences. I'm not sure there is a lack of space; do any of the options and advanced preferences actually need to be abbreviated? Is the entire map including extension of French holdings into the desert and France itself needed at some point? The map looks great otherwise. There I know a lot of the interface is a holdover from WiTP but I refuse to believe that there isn't a more functional way to present the data and options.
My goal is to help improve the game and reach a wider audience to have more opponents to play these falling-out-of-favor types of games, so please take all of this feedback with that intent.
Actual gameplay impressions to follow after reading through the manual tonight.