Thankyou man for the review. Sounds like there's no game breaking bugs and the career mode is good/decent from batting point of view that's what I am looking for. The more bowling animations are added bonus. I think I am gonna get it.
There are quite a lot more options for batting than there were in 17 so it might take a bit of messing around to find your sweet spot. There's a bunch of different batting styles with some variation in shots - and different animations have different timing windows so it does make a difference. The old issue with bowling speed being linked to visual speed has been addressed so now there's a slider specifically for visual speed, and that changes the feel of batting quite a lot.
Spinners now bowl a bit quicker by default and have their own speed slider rather than being locked at a very slow speed as per 14/17 (and Ashes? Can't remember when that changed).
The other major change you might notice from 17 is that BA overhauled the bowling AI system for C19 and bowling is now a bit more guided / planned than previously. The old DBC14 system mostly decided what to bowl via emergent number crunching and never quite worked as intended. The old DBC17 issue with deliveries clustering around the set lengths has been addressed and the sets of 6 that you see in the hawkeye summary between overs are generally pretty good.
As I think I said up thread, I would definitely say that the AI seamers in particular bowl better / more realistically at me now than in previous iterations, though that's not to say there aren't some kinks. Occasionally I've had spinners going around the wicket and bowling absolute nonsense down the leg side for an over or so before coming to their senses.
The old DBC exploit of just spamming leg glances at everything can still get you through if all else fails.