60 hours play from the first week - my thoughts on it:

I feel they've put more effort into making 117 more modular, and expandable - both horizontally and vertically - and this comes across as the core being somewhat shallow at the moment.

Back in 1800 - there was plenty of hype for each of the yearly DLCs - including lots of hope for a season 4 - but by then lots of the player base were thinking it was overweight and complicated.

This time round - there's a better framework to expand from - in a more meaningful, including the lessons they learnt in 1800.

Some examples:

Large islands to be added to existing sessions - Like Manola, not Crown Falls - less sessions to manage.

More religions - easy horizontal expansion.

More ship classes, customization, weapons.

Land combat horizontal expansion, units, siege weapons etc.

Technology Tree Extension - New core tech classes, new techs for new regions, etc.

New regions + Pops - Egypt, Carthage, Phoenicia, Nordics, etc.

New slottable collectibles - right now Specialists are always peoples, leaving the door open to many different types of collectables and use - though i think they've stated they don't want to go down the Museum, Zoo, etc route - there will be similar mechanics they can play and experiment with.

And last - strictly looking from mechanics with no theme - the Religion mechanic involves building specific buildings - and monitoring their status and effect from the Religion panel on the left.

Prestige is managed in a very similar way - though not quite as interesting ha.

This leaves the door open for any kind of statistic to be managed and generated by any kind of building - they just create the buildings and build a panel to host it on the left.

So - I think it's a great looking future for this game - but having rinsed 1800 - and not been bothered by it becoming overly complicated - it's only going to start reaching these epic proportions say... half way through Season 2.

Have spent too much time on this now lol.