Here are some things that came to mind in my first playthrough:
- Some animations feel like they take a little bit too long to play. When hovering over a circle, there’s a small delay between putting your mouse on it and it then showing its connections to other circles. Although it’s only small, when playing at ‘high speeds’, it feels a little annoying having to wait a second for it to show you what it’s connected to, and so I’d suggest lowering that delay unless there’s a good technical reason for it.
1b. Less annoying but still on the same note is the graphs: in D4 they pan across from the left, showing you their progress over time. That’s nice and all, but as an impatient Gen-Z’er I want that information NOW, not after the 1-2 seconds it takes for the graph to display in full 
Fundamentally the useful bit of the graph is the most recent bit: “I just changed a thing, how did that affect the graph” - so having that be the slowest part to display is a bit inconvenient (though a very minor complaint).
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I think the parts carried over from ‘Clones and Drones’ should be optional. When playing D3, sometimes I had C&D enabled to enjoy a futuristic, end-times-y political simulation, having to deal with all sorts of apocalyptic crises. That’s fun and all, but almost all of my time playing the game (226 hours, D3 and D3A combined!) was spent with C&D disabled, because I wanted a political simulator that dealt with the established economic and social events, not speculative things that although WILL be big problems in the future, aren’t quite yet! As such, I think a toggle for that ‘category’ of events, policies, and problems would be a great idea.
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I like the new second option for prison policy (rehabilitation vs punishment), but the old policy that now seems to solely want to represent prison funding still has its top options talking about rehabilitation. I’d separate these fully, with the old policy being solely about how much you spend on them and associated effects on crime, and the new one being the bit where you decide how nice and cuddly your prisons are.
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Winning elections is still far too easy. After round about 20-ish election cycles in D4, I have yet to have won anything under 95% of the vote. You can put this down partially to playing the game well and making good decisions but crucially - these numbers NEVER happen in a democracy, not ever! Getting above 50% should be a rare achievement that takes a huge amount of skill and strategy in building your political support, and the norm should be less than this. I really think this would be a good thing to overhaul; D3 Electioneering added a lot of fun to elections but it’s simply far too hard to lose an election in this game, and once you’ve won once you’re essentially guaranteed 100% of the vote forevermore.
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The cabinet reshuffle interface after an election is confusing. It’s not obvious whether you’re supposed to click the ones you want to change, or to click the ones you want to keep! I’d suggest making this more clear, as I’ve messed it up a couple of times.
Loving the game already, many thanks to the developers!
