The best "conquer the world" game where you can play as any country starting in the pre-WW2 era and on,. Very clear, oft concise UI, make it incredibly accessible, comfy graphics, and custom-ability up the whazoo (create own fleets, divisions, however, name them whatever, decide their makeup to be however). I wish there was a bit more of everything but there's a ton as it is. I find it superior to HOI series because HOI overcomplicates way too much where you don't even need it.
The only drawback to this game is territories are fixed, many are just limited, empty, has limited number of cities, and diplomacy is a bit weak. There is a tad bit of micromanagement as you grow, setting what you want each city to build or having to manually set air squadrons to "defend" against air attack (would think that would be set by default and "turning off" would be manual instead). Finally, the economy/resource system is silly. While you can go into "resource debt" and not have everything "disband" like a lot of 4X-style games do, here it incurs penalities, troops are less efficient, and that's fine, but the resource "bleed off" is insane. Essentially, you can never have a really massive armies, despite how AI constantly pushes for them to overwhelm the player, and seems to get away with it. Worse, is the resource production doesn't make sense, like how in some countries should be rich in oil or food, but are lacking instead. Huh? Increasing production just nudges things a few points. Cities can be set to produce only 1 item at a time, which increases the micromanagement. The AI can do this well, because it's an AI, but for the Human player, it's a clickfest and drag, to truly optimize. While cities can be set to focus on producing Goods, Food, Arms, which are resources, there's some it can't focus on which makes no sense. There is a workaround....
But the shining star of this game is the EDITOR allowing you to create your own customer campaigns or scenarios.
It's incredibly versatile, easy to learn/use (for the most part) and allows TONS of custom-ability. You can make your own campaign that doesn't have known events in history occur, and let the game play out until the year 3000AD if you want to.
I created (and posted a guide) on how to allow your cities to focus on amassing ANY RESOURCE. So you can set it to focus on Synthetic Oil, Metal, Coal, whatever. This allows for more fun and grander armies where you have thousands of ships and like 20000 tank groups in epic raging wars across the entire planet. NICE! I love how anything can happen in the game, and how countries can be converted to an ideology if they're conquered and "liberated", like "Communist USA" or "Democratic USSR". And certain territories can be "freed" and given independence akin to their late 20th century versions, like if you take over areas of the USSR where modern-day Ukraine is at and "free them", the game will update to flip into "Ukraine" with it's modern flag and make them an ally, so if you play as Germany and do that, they would become "Fascist Ukraine".
There's also user-made scenarios, mod-like, that are creative and interesting as well.
This game doesn't have the moddability as others in the series-the others have Steam Workshop full of stuff, this one doesn't. However, THIS GAME is the superior game in crisp, colorful graphics, and interface. A+ quality.
When I tried the others, they were bad, very muddy graphics, looked lower-res, and UI was made into a huge mess. You'll find most tend to agree Calm and the Storm is the superior game and I couldn't agree more.
I've played for a bajillion hours and it never gets old. Yeah on the custome scenarios I do, it's a free-for-all, and game turns is set to 9999999 turns so the game can go into the 21st century and on. While there's a "tech cap" since that's based on the base-game, you reach in the base game anyways where you can build ICBMS (those it's handled poorly) and nuke bombers and can nuke cities (which puts them out of commission for the game). The AI I noticed doesn't use nukes. Not sure why. But the Editor you can do whatever you want, with units with stronger or other abilities, it's fun to experiment with.
Easily 11 out of 10 game.
Passes the "If you could take only 5 games to a desert island..." question, it would be one of my picks easily.
It never gets boring or gets old, it can be addicting "one more turn!".
