I played about 40 minutes of the campaign so far. The menus seem alright to me. They're certainly radically different from past games, but I wasn't having any trouble. Basically you get a menu at the bottom that has what so far appears to be the cities in the local "area" usually about 4-5. You can hover over icons in the areas under each of the city names and build new sections of the city, then you can build a particular building in that slot. As population increases, more slots open up, more buildings can be built. Then when you build armies, there's kind of a neat new system where you raise a general, THEN you raise armies directly on him, no more unit building in cities. Only got to skim the bare surface here but honestly I wasn't put off like Bayr seems to be by the UI changes. They seemed fairly intuitive to me.
The economic side of things seemed to be much better balanced, but it could just be because I was playing Rome proper, other nations may have a lower income at the start of the game. Combat works well, the AI still seems on the dumb side, which is always disappointing.
I definitely didn't feel, on cursory glance, that the bugs and unplayability of Empire are repeated here. Its definitely not as visually impressive as Rome 1 was at the time it released, and I agree it should be, but I do think, after maybe a little over an hour total with it, that its not exactly the trainwreck bayr's posts are making it seem to be. Everyone's opinions will differ, and a lot of wonkiness with Total War games comes out after you've played awhile so we'll see.
