This game really does embody the 'Almost, but not quite' description.
I was slightly wary therefore of Superpower 2, the first being such a disappointment, but my desire for this game to be great overcame my doubts and I bought it. By the time I had my copy the 1.4 patch was out, and so I missed some of the earlier glitches, and I have to say the 1.4 version does run fairly smoothly. You do come across the occasional hiccup such as being unable to build infantry every now and then but things which I would class as glitches are few and far between. There are however plenty of outright mistakes.
The promise of diplomacy seems entirely added on. A country allying with you depends on one simple factor, is their diplomatic relations score above 60. You can force it above 60 in any number of unrealistic ways. The promise of influencing other countries and making them puppets simply doesn't happen, it's military force and annexation or nothing.
The economy is a joke. Initially I was careful not to tinker too much, worried of ruining the 'perfect balance'. However with all but the poorest countries you can simply whack taxes to 100%, put all the spending sliders to full, reduce interest to 0.0% and before you know it you're rolling in money. If you really don't care about relations with other countries make contraception an abortion illegal, and polygamy and child labour legal, this upsets western countries but is a serious boost to your economy. This works with just about any country other than the really poor ones who can't stomach the couple of years heavy losses you experience.
The military losses you experience are seemingly irrelevent to your opponent, sometimes with your entire airforce being wiped out by a group of infantry. This isn't a frequent problem, but when it does happen it can be a real pain. Also sometimes the enemy adopt stupid tactics, most notably if you are fighting two nations at once.
The saving grace of all of these things could have been the mod support. Red Alert 2 had it's life extended five times over for me by the mods, and a game like this would surely attract a dedicated modding scene who would put these things right? Well maybe, excpet the Golem Labs forums are down and have been for months, their support is non-existant and I don't know where the Superpower 2 modders are but Google was no help!
Overall the game has little 'feel'. You may hugely improve your country, dragging Gambia to the greatest economic and military power in the world, yet apart from bigger numbers, you might aswell have paused the game for three hours for all the diference you can see. Military conflict is the same, apart from dragging tank icons ontop of each other and watching the numbers go down, there is basicaly not a lot you can do to change the situation. (The little drop down bar doesn't seem to do much)
However despite this, I would have said I enjoyed Superpower 2, all it's flaws seemed to be small fry compared to the enjoyment of gradually expanding your borders, and making your country great. However it was still difficult to ignore that the basic reason for this 'gradual increase' was not the real life world situations you were confronting, or any other form of opposition. It was the in game timer. Waiting to build your army, waiting to annex captured territory, waiting for your economic improvements to take effect, the whole game was basically waiting. Well for anyone reading this, I am going to totally blow Superpower 2 out of the water for you:
"Set_speed x"
Where x is any number (though keep it under 500 ideally!).
Alt+Tab out of a single player custom game and type this into the 'Joshua Console' and it will increase the game speed, so that six months is 2 seconds. Once you do this, the game is basically over. It could have been great, a long drawn out geopolitical slugger, but instead every game ends up farcical (unless you try desperately to 'keep it real') with any action provided by the same people early on (Syria, India, Iraq). Once you get to 2050, the only 'action' comes in the form of 'reactions' to things you do. I have never seen two countries anywhere 'have a dispute'. Basically, whilst I still admit I do kind of like this game for what it tries to be, unless you are willing to overlook some serious flaws and are wowed by a very accurate world map, you'll hate it.