Good at first, but quickly gets old.
- NO land action at all, no battles, no land-locked colonies, no overland transport, nothing. Natives only play a role by delivering resources every month and occasionally raiding a colony (but only in text).
- You can only build colonies on predefined places (randomly selected on every new campaign, but never more than about 35 on the whole map)
- Tedious and partially unintuitive interface, finding the right fleet in a long campaign is difficult. When a dozen squads are in the same port the mechanism to find the right one is clumsy.
- You should be able to bring goods with fast coastal ships to a central market hub, then from there transport them with ocean going ships to Europe, right? That worked before (v1.3?) but now (v1.31) it doesn't anymore, goods are not selectable anymore if they're not produced in the hub colony. Unfortunately the boxed version I bought is married to Steam so it was autopatched (didn't think of turning that off as usually patches IMPROVE the games) :(
- If you change an auto-trade route and have some products now removed from the route still on board you can only manually unload them, the menus don't let you select anything that's not loaded within the route plan.
- You can build fleets by combining 1-3 squadrons, but the combined cargo holds of the squadrons can only be used in automated trade, if you manually go shopping you have to fill the holds of each squad separately.
- In a long campaign you'll reach the point where goods stack up in your home base (or warehouses on the way) because they'll not sell anymore... saturated market? Anyway, no fun.
Also the goods from home run out (England is out of Tools???) making it impossible to fulfill the colonies requests.
- Trade stations and warehouses are separated, moving stuff from one to the other is a manual task. Full holds of of one will not overflow to the other.
- As you probably guessed from the above, longer campaigns end in a micro-management nightmare where you'll spend most of the time paused adjusting this or that.
- Mission are still buggy like "Get gems", the moment I conquer a colony with gemstones - well within the time limit - the mission fails (!)
The only strong (but for me not important, I usually skip them) feature is the sea battles which are really good looking... but even they're botched, it's wrong if an enemy frigate sinks after only three broadsides from two of your frigates.
If you played for example the old Colonization (or Pat2, or PR2) and liked it stay clear of COTA as it will only disappoint you. Maybe many of the points above will be addressed with future patches, but if that's the case just wait until it's in the bargain bins in December :)
Oh, last not least if you didn't pre-order it you don't get several ship types and resources ... they sell you a (slightly) reduced package for the full price. Charming, isn't it?