First off I want to thank Demonaire for a very well written critique, I have just reactivated FP to take a look and to be brutally honest I am not a fan at all at first glance. I am trying not to have a knee jerk reaction of plain hating it but struggling.
It is very hard to tell who is enemy/ally, the red & green colour having been diluted. I can't even easily tell which units are my own, and I agree totally with the problem of not being able to identify easily the exact location of a unit.
I also very much dislike not being able to see exactly what units make up my armies, to have to click on every army to confirm it's make-up will make large games with 100s of armies much harder to play. As will the overall size of the graphics. Often there will be many armies all close to each other I suspect being able to select the one you want is about to become even harder, in the legacy version I would simply toggle to the pin view but this does not appear to be an option any more - instead you can turn the armies off completely - not sure why anyone would want to do that ....
Whilst I will get used to where everything has been moved to I am not sure I will ever enjoy this fussy overly crowded version. I have always been a fan of the very simple interface - there was something fitting about a game based in the early 19th century having a more basic look and feel about it.
The new menus I will get used to but the map view will be harder to grow to like.
I do not have a long term game playing at the moment so will need to play one through for a few weeks or even months to really know the full impact of this interface but I am not sure with what I see right now there will be a favourable reaction to it, others I have spoken to so far think similar to me and find more things annoying about ti than they do an improvement