LAGGY!!!, with pretty much "scripted" history. Limiting in a lot of areas.
First and foremost - waging a war is retarded. You have to decide what the goal of your war is - like conquering one province. That's great, but what if I want to conquer all provinces of the enemy country? I have to send a diplomat and change my wargoal for each province... oh and you have to know which province is where off the top of your head - there is no map to choose what you want to conquer. Anyway, let's say you send your diplomats and wait for them to return and select all available provinces... well all available does not mean all provinces the enemy has apparently. It just so happens that sometimes you can select say 70% of their provinces, then if you want the rest, you have to offer peace, and rafter wait a few months re-start the war for the rest of them.
How about if someone attacks you? After spending a ton of money on military, a ton of time on waging war, you kick the enemy out of your country, and you even occupy ALL their provinces.. well apparently you cannot have a wargoal if you were the defender... so the only thing you can do is accept their peace proposals or propose peace yourself. So you agree on peace.. and what do you get from the exhaustive war? Nothing. That's what. When peace is signed, everyone gets their original territories back and that's that. As if it never happened. Great. Why can't I dictate the terms of the peace? I freaking destroyed them and occupied all their provinces after all? Why can't I just conquer them outright? Retarded.
Did I mention the performance during all this is hooooooooorible. i can't underline this enough. I have an i7 920 overclocked to 3.2GHz with 6GB RAM and ATI 5870 GFX card. This game is a slide show. Even selecting an army that has say 100k soldiers makes it think for 15 secs. Not even talking about selecting multiple armies or trying to scroll through armies. How abotu trying to split a 240k army... since the armies are made of 3k batallions, selecting which batallions will be moved into the newly formed army can take 10-15 secs per click...need to split it 50/50.. well you need 80 clicks for to move the battalions + however many clicks to scroll throught hem.. 10-15 secs per click remember?.. yeaaaah...
Then there are the incessant pop-ups that pop up to the very front even when you are doing something in the game menus or organizing your armies.
Bottom line - very poor game engine choice, very poor game performance... pretty stupid war gameplay options - especially for a war heavy game (don't worry there are plenty of stupid non-combat ideas too - too many to mention, but one spectacular one - if a high level factory closes.. even for a few days.. it loses all its upgrades.. it becomes level 1 factory now.. whaaaat? how does that make ANY sense? R e t a r d e d!)
P.S.
Oh and what is with the determined way things develop. Yes I understand it is somewhat historical game, but come on - give the player a decent possibility to change history in a big way. We play a game because we want to "win" it. That's a whole other problem with the game. I don't even want to go there.
The game could have been good. But it isn't. Really.