As others have pointed out, this looks like a game with amazing potential. I purchased this after I heard it described by some as a "Mount & Blade: Bannerlord" in a modern setting (something I have been interested in for a very long time). The heart is there, and I can see the vision. The comparison was not entirely wrong too, and I even saw similarities to other games I like. For example, the country cards, and even parts of the UI, seem like they're ripped straight out of HOI4.
The biggest complaint I have about this game (heck, the only complaint so far), is with regards to its realism. I like realistic games, but by no stretch do I need any game to be realistic. Still, the campaign leaves a lot to be desired in the realism department, and I mean a lot. Fortunately, this is just a pet peeve of mine, so if you don't mind a lack of realism, this may not even be a reason to stay away. Honestly, the fact that they even have the game in a semi-functional state says that they're already 90% of the way there. The issues I have are almost entirely cosmetic, so if you can move past them, more power to you. I'm still going to sit here and list some of the gripes I had before I wussed out.
To start with, the research tab killed me. This was probably the biggest slap in the face seeing as everything else before that seemed to indicate an at least pseudo-realistic approach. I was, thus, completely caught off guard when I saw a KAR-98 on the same technological tier as a red dot optic. That is to say that there was a rifle from the 1930s in the same category as an optic developed in 1975 (in its earliest form). Moving over to the production tab, I was able to make SUVs from the start. I suppose the concept of an SUV goes quite a bit further back, but the image shown was of a far more modern design.
Keeping with that, the introduction described the country I was playing as like one which was in the process of developing. Automobile industries are not known for being particularly prominent in less developed parts of the world. I don't see how my country could manufacture entire cars while being incapable of producing KAR-98s.
On that note, I don't think there was a single research tab dedicated towards civilian industry. I also was not able to start researching cold war rifles like FALs until a year which has not yet passed in the real world. Even from the perspective of a developing country, that does not make a whole lot of sense. Any government in the world could easily acquire a surplus rifle like that and reverse engineer the thing. The real problem is setting up production lines capable of producing them at scale, and more importantly profitably.
Speaking of profitability, there was an "economics" tab in which there were only charts describing the ratios of profitability to losses for each resource's industry. Profits by definition include both revenue and losses. Total earnings are either positive (a profit), or negative (a loss). Economics is also a far more complicated subject than just profits and losses.
On that note, the resource management and construction sectors did not make a whole lot of sense. It seems like the developers were aiming to add more depth by specifying different kinds of metals and their corresponding ores, but the result was something that was an odd mix of too specific and not complicated enough. To be fair, I have seen plenty of other games fall victim to this. The problem is just that there are far too many materials used in manufacturing to simply be put in a game like this. In this approach, even by accounting only for the largest sectors, there are a lot of crucial industries that fall to the wayside. I would argue that a better approach would be to just say something like "ores" and "metals" as combined resource categories. Other resources like "wheat" and "bread" could just be combined to a word such as "grain." The issue isn't that the resources described aren't used in industry, it's just that they are oddly specific and end up looking like oversimplifications.
Back to the research tab, a similar thing happens when describing specific weapons or vehicles. It's a little odd to specifically mention one type of rifle, and then switch to describing the ammunition only as "hunting" ammo. There is also an issue where if the game needs to research new weapons in the future, you cannot use any existing weapons for future tech. A better approach would probably be to just say a broader category of weapons that became popular at one point in time. For example, it might be better to say "battle rifles" as opposed to "FAL." All FALs were a type of battle-rifle, but not all battle rifles were FALs.
A lot of my complaints just come down to terminology and graphical depictions, but that's an important thing to consider when making a game like this. I would be happy to go more in depth on this, but I think I have already rambled on for too long. Long story short, I had a hard time getting past this stuff. That isn't to say that this is a bad game or anything, only that I (and people like me) might have a hard time getting over stupid details like this.
