The big disappointment for me is that the map is fixed and static: it can only scroll to the east or west until it hits the edge of the world, and then it stops.
Continuously scrolling maps have been around for decades and many large scale games use them. Being permanently married to an idiosyncratic version of a mercator projection seems like a lazy design decision.
My other problem with the maps is that the land masses often are often clumsy renderings of the geography they represent. The individual hexes are computer generated rather than hand drawn, leading to weird distortions. I'd like to say that this is driven by some game design purpose, but it isn't. And I like Bill and Hubert too much to say what I really think is going on.
When you couple that with no stacking and a naval system that doesn't really make a serious attempt at representing what is going on in the game's time scale, I think I'm going to wait for a while on this one.
I still have a special place in my heart for the nail-biting that goes on in Carriers at War, and this game system doesn't even come close to delivering that. And I stand up and cheer every time I fire up Steam and Iron and see what kind of a projection NWS uses.
