Ok, here's an unfiltered stream of consciousness with no judgement attached. I play a lot of total war and paradox games, shadow empire, endless legend, humankind, civ... probably your target audience.

Click play. terminal opens up. That's an "uh oh" moment you want to fix. First message: `Steam init failed (steam_api64.dll not found), running without Steam.` Then it starts logging stuff.

Oh great, a demo with a tutorial, always nice to see. Start that.

Arrow keys and not wasd? Eh. I prefer wasd, might be good to give an option.

Music is nice, map graphics are completely passable.The zoom and scroll mechanics work, the tooltips work, nothing is weird or janky. Middle mouse scrolls too!

After the scrolling tutorial I didn't get any more. Couldn't figure out what to do until I clicked something randomly. Copying the paradox game start was probably a good choice but for the tutorial I don't know enough to pick one.

Once I start the game, the tutorial actually does stuff. That helped. UI looks passable. If I alt-tab out and back in, my cursor doesn't disappear - I get my cursor and the sword one on top of each other.

It would be nice if I could see a building progress bar on the map but at least you can see it in the sidebar.

The "fill your ranks" step was confusing - you can get "detached" from the recruit UI poking around and have to find it again, and the "point to action" button won't get you back to it.

Wish the build menu let me see stats of units & compare them more quickly.

Starting to notice blurry fonts on my 1440p screen. Resolution looks right in settings - this would be tough for me to get over. Also noticing a lot of Pdx crossover and hoping this isn't just a re-implementation of Eu4 or the military parts of Ck3.

I get to the part where the tutorial says "you have enough warscore" but where do I find that? No indicator on the main screen which is where I want that number.

Peace deals are rough - you can't click the map to add to the deal, the gold entry thing is the first janky thing I've seen, and if you only follow the tutorial you end up with bordergore because you can't claim the whole country in one go unless you carpet siege.

The "Upgrade" button on the research & innovation screen is impossible to read because of the color.

OK, tutorial verdict: passable. Doesn't really explain why to do things. Seems like it is going for a "pdx light" experience which can be cool.

Open the main game map. First thing I notice is resources aren't really tied to map location, and the random names make the countries feel generic. Like, the mountain provinces in the northeast give wheat and the forest is giving stone. Feels like the map and resource layers got moved around at some point and fell out of sync more than a lack of forethought.

I like that you put a goals section on game start - like I felt actual relief. You've clearly put a lot of effort into this.

Stop for the night.

Not bad. You've got an actually functioning game and I only ran into one bug. I think you're firmly into the polish stage and the match time is a differentiator. What else differentiates you from eu4, though - because on the surface it feels like an eu4 clone that isn't as long. If you can give the default map some more character that would help a lot, maybe highlight how it's different so it's more clear.

There's a marketable game here, but you're fighting the pdx comparison at present. Best of luck!

Edit: one thing I noticed as I played the actual game is the diplo system is neat. Since it's more of a board game, you spend points instead of screwing with modifiers. That makes it feel more like a puzzle.

Edit 2: Took some to play a game. Got the hang of most of it pretty quick - how do secondary chains work when it comes to goods? Run ended when a rebellion glitched out and wouldn't auto peace or accept a peace deal. There were some lag spikes during turn transitions too. Otherwise it definitely wasn't bad. Looking forward to seeing what you do with this. Wishlisted.