From: Kevin Subject: EU - Great game (long) I'd just like to say that after about 50 hours of playtime, this game is great. I can't stop playing it. I sit down for a night to play it, 9 hours go by and I think I'm getting hungry and tired, then I look back at the screen and play for 4 more hours. Its a complicated game, not easily learned in the 'usual' 15 minute learning curve that most of todays games have. (ala panzer general and HOMM)(these games I think are great btw, gets people into wanting other strategy games (and then eventually leads to a nice great deep stretegy game like EU in being made.) If you have tyhe patients to learn the game you will be rewarded, though do NOT expect to play the game quickly. I played about 6 or 7 hours of starting various countries/campaigns then I settled on playing Russia in the Grand. After trying several others I knew I wasn't ready for sailing ships, colonizing exploring AND handling wars and europian politics all at the same time. Russia actually starts out with very few EU friends (so a lot less political stuff to mess with), no settlers (no no worry about explorgn and settling till a good ways into the game). So it lets you concentrate and learn the interface easier. Anyhow I'd guess I've played it probably 40 hours and I'm in year 1580,, in a 1492-1792(?) length game. My hand while I play is sitting on the pause key. I pritty much pause whenever a window pops up, although sometimes in mid-war I just hit enter a few times becuase I know they are just my troops arriving/fighting msgs's and I'm busy watching the war happen anyhow. (you can of course modify what evens cuase windows to pop up, or wethar they just show on the botoom history bar). I still wish the game had been turn based designed, I think they did a great job of making the game real-time, and although real-time has some advantages (armies take various amounts of time to travel from province to province, real time allowes a greater variation of this)(unless you make each turn a day in turn based but that would be a lot of 'end turn clicking')(So I woudl assume you would have to do maybe 2-week time periods turn-based. (so an everage battle would last 2 turns, small ones 1 and big ones 3)(with the realtime system battles can last anywhere from 1-2 days to 2 month and end within a days notice).(this also allows you more chances to retreat your troops). But all that asside I'm sure they could have allowed things like (order army to retreat at ?% loss's and such, to allow your troops to not have to fight the whole 2 weeks and such). I remember about 10 years ago I did play a turn based strategy game that reminds me a lot of this game, to be honest for the past 4 or 5 years I've spent a lot of hours trying to locate this game, it was a great game, the only game I found that rivalled the koei games as far as having a lot of political 'stuff to do' (and/or stuff to watch out for). BUGS: So far I've noticed if you get use to playing by hitting the pause key a lot (a personal must in my world), if you set a window to popup and pause, it unpauses the game when you click 'ok' to get rid of the message. Well I'm not very partial to playing the game with a big giant window in the way, so its natual for me to click 'ok' but then I have to run and hit the pause key again as it unpauses the #%*(^( game. All that said, its got the most playtime of any game from me easily in the past 2 years or so. (with exeption of games releases over 2 years ago) It's not a 'light' stretegy game. So lots of light gamers will find it frustrating and hard to understand. The interface I truely believe is extremely easy to use and to get to any info that you want. HOWEVER the game itself is designed to not show you certain information and I beleive people are confusing not being able to find info they want (becuase its not thier) with a poor interface. Yes there is a lot of information to display, I love tool-tip style of holding your mouse of anything and getting a better description of something. This saves you from having a 250 button toolbar or pulldown menu. (becuase if it weren't for those you would have to have at least a menu list of 200 items, or 200 icons on your screen.). This method gets you down to basically 9(or so) icons on the screen to hit in order to view all the various information in the game. All the information screens are at the most 2 clicks of a mouse away, this is very easy to access and friendly, I've played some games that you had to go into a sub-menu of a sub-menu in the submenu in order to see the information you wanted, now that's bad design). Anyhow all I can say is if you don't like it that's to bad. But I think any serious strategy gamer should take a look at this for himself, as games this indepth don't come along very often. Now if only the AI knew how to play :}!!!!