Played a couple hours of new AUH expansion. It runs fine, but I have a 14900KF and a 4090, so your results may vary. I did notice my GPU got up to nearly 80 degrees at one point, but that was because I had mistakenly cranked up resolution scaling like a retard. Putting it back and 100 percent and capping the framerate at 60 brought temps back down under 50. No crashes druing my first ten years of play in China. No bugs that I noticed, but its a huge game, so I very likely missed or overlooked things. On the whole though, at least for me, performace seems to be more or less stable. Again though, my system is not a typical one.
As for how it plays...its...okay. I started an original character at 18 yrs old and had them take the exams. Then I waited for about three years to get some kind of assignment. I wondered if the game was bugged since I did fairly well on the exam, but yeah...you just wait until the game deigns to give you some kind of governorship. Finally I got a post in the west and was given a county. Im a military governor, which basically means you are stationed in the north and western provinces and you can raise provincial troops using your treasury funds (Very similar to admin). There are no provincial troops in the eastern provinces, so rebellions require the emperor to call troops over to deal with it. Anyway, from there it was pretty standard stuff. You earn merit as a governor by building shit and doing random tasks (again, like admin). The point is to acquire Merit to get better posts. Its kind of an okay system since there is a clear goal to incentivize you, but unless you have a retarded character, I dont see you ever really failing at it as long as you're doing stuff in game.
A couple years went by and I got to join in a conquest war. My character has great military stats, so he ended up being the hero of the campaign and earned quite a bit of Merit for his contributions. Shortly after the war, he was relieved of his county tier post and granted a duchy tier one in the north. This felt nice as it did actually seem like my actions and success drove my promotion forward, but again, I fail to see a path where any halfway skilled player will fail to earn merit without intentionally kneecapping themselves. For a game thats notorious for being too easy, this doesnt help that reputation.
per usual.
