Right, just had a play about with it so here are my initial thoughts.
Took me a good 30 minutes to install this beast, after making room on my Raptor games hard drive for the 15Gb required.
Then we have the splash screen, took nearly as long to load from that as the demo. Next to the options to change the graphics settings, thankfully this is a lot quicker than the demo, 20 seconds tops with a progress bar.
At this point I thought '**** RtoI, I've played Shogun, Rome and Med2, I'll start with Grand Campaign'. GC has 4 types now: Short (50 yr, hold 5 certain provinces), Long (100yr, hold a lot more certain provinces), Prestige (100yr, hold certain provinces, finish with highest prestige of all existing nations) and World Domination (100yr, hold 50 provinces). I went for long and started up.
First impressions, wow. New campaign map looks amazing and is possibly more of a system hog than the actual battles. there's so much to look at I cant really describe it. End turn takes an age as there are so many nations to get through. My next thought is 'Where do I start?', I honestly had no idea, the basics of moving are still the same and construction is similar but the rest, I hadn't a clue, 'Back to RtoI I think'.
Before starting, I had a look at the historical battles. There's only 3 which is a bit disappointing. Lagos and Brandywine from the demo and another GB vs. France naval engagement.
RtoI drops you right into a battle to begin with and after you winning takes you to a 3 province world map, I won't go into much detail so you can explore it for yourself but basically you have 1 enemy and some of the world map menus unavailable. Despite being quite basic it's still enjoyable (I think) for a total war veteran.
General Info:
-Loading times are better, but still longer the Med2.
-I've only fought the Indians in RtoI so far but the AI seems all right, they've tried to flank me a couple of times and haven't done anything stupid yet.
-Performance is good, I'm running it completely maxed out w/Phenom 9950, 4Gb Ram, GTX 260 & Win XP and large battles run smoothly though the GC campaign map stutters a bit.
-Seems a lot more stable than the demo, I've had no problems at all so far whilst with the demo I had occaisional CTDs.
-No more hang up at the end of battles
-Battles are a lot noisier now, sounds of marching, shouting, screaming etc.