I agree. In the last patch, diplomacy was much better. Still crap overall, but much better than what we have now. That goes for the whole game. In fact, the only problem the game had before this latest patch was that everybody had way too much money. We've gone from one extreme to the other, now nobody has any money at all.

The human player has a hard time financially at the start, but if you can survive the first 10 years and make some half-decent decisions economy wise, you can give your economy a good kickstart, you can even put yourself in a situation where you have too much money and the game becomes boring, but i don't do that because, well, the game becomes boring.

The problem is that the AI just can't get their own economy going. This is less true for purely land based people like Russia, Prussia, Poland and Austria, who make money because they expand all the time and have more provinces to tax, but even they begin to royally struggle toward mid-game, and they slow down completely. For sea and trade based factions like Britain, France, Spain and UP, the game is over right from the start, because they simply don't understand how to use their empires for profit, and the tax is so low due to low populations in colonies that they are bankrupt right from the second turn, unless the human plays them.