I meant to take a quick test of this game, ended up playing almost 2 hours
It is pretty good game, and its main problem currently is that there is lots of confusion.
First two main things to fix. These were two things that most spoilt the game for me.
1. Own countrys logo keeps getting bigger. Otherwise I like it, but it keeps hiding countries under it. It becomes very annoying when you expand your country, and hence the logo gets bigger, but then you havent conquered your neighbor yet.
2. In buying armies page, make an option to make the number back to 0. In my first game I was quite confused how the building happened, and as I kept increasing the number, nothing happened even longer, since I didnt have enough money to buy them. It took me quite long time before I realised that the money was taken right away when buying, and at that point the number was already so high on most of them, that it was very high to reach that amount of money anymore to be able to build them.
These two fixes would imprve the first time experience a lot.
What I still missed was that how much money armies consumed as upkeep. I think tutorial said upkeep costs, but I couldnt quite see this cost. Maybe add it to the buy cost as 35/0.1 USD.
One thing that got me stuck in the game was that as I expanded a bit, then it ended up that all the countries beside me became of same color, meaning I couldnt attack any of them anymore, and my only option was naval.
It is bit annoying that this can happen, and perhaps there should be some way to still make some country weaker with lot of effort. However, I am not sure if games idea was to do more diplomacy, since I pretty much skipped the diplomacy. If that is the point, then no need to change, since might be even better game if part of the thing is to actually figure out how to get diplomacy benefit you.
Regarding random events. Those were bit confusing in that you would see differnt options, and sometimes you see only green options show up on some choice, especially it might show +money. So you pick that up, and then it ends up taking your income down. That was confusing and felt very random, as in, I couldnt have control what to do, since even I chose the option with only good things, and especially with +money, I still ended up losing money (income).
One thing I was wondering is if there is any way to send more troops when attack has begun already? If three isnt, it might not be bad option to be able to send more.
And regarding choosing your country, as, at least I wanted to go pick some specific country, it was annoying that countries were ordered in ranging, instead of alphabetical order. Alphabetical order would be better. Although, favorably you can pick the soring yourself.
But all in all, I enjoyed this game pretty much, and might even return it later again. Would even consider buying it when it is ready, for it quite nicely hit the "Risk" type kind simple world conquer strategy game that is basically quite quicly playable. ALthough this wasnt really quick enough yet to really work for substitue for Risk kind itch.