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Unit-unspecific
I feel like it would be more realistic if stamina was modeled such that units that have done a lot of moving / running can’t recover to full-stamina. As it is, I can order my artillery to sprint across the battlefield and they’ll spend so much time sitting around afterwards that they’ll fully recover their stamina and I can order them to do it again in the other direction. Ditto for infantry. I know from real-world experience that there’s a limit to how much you can do in a day, you don’t just fully recover if you stand around for a few hours.
Infantry
It would be cool to have the sharpshooters capable of targeting and killing enemy officers.
IMO the game should have more-contagious routing like in Shogun: Total War.
Regiments should be smarter about recognizing when they’re in a hopeless situation and retreating early. It looks ridiculous to see a single regiment in a shootout with an entire brigade. And it’s the norm to see clueless behavior like that, so you can’t just pass it off as being some particularly-brave regiment.
The speed with which routing infantry move is ridiculous, especially if the unit is already tired. I don’t understand what the rationale for that was.
I feel like the woods may provide too much of a protection bonus.
I feel like woods should maybe slow down infantry more than it does, at least when in column formation.
I feel like there should be more of a penalty or disincentive to running your regiments up in line formation in the face of great danger like an enemy regiment or cannon firing at them from close range in clear terrain. Like maybe a larger morale penalty when being shot at from close range, or a larger morale penalty if getting shot at from close range while transitioning from column to line. As it is, there’s no reason to have lines of infantry advancing like happened historically. I’m all for games allowing for non-historical tactics if they’re realistic, but I suspect there may have been a good reason they had regiments advancing in line instead of in column.
Officers
Officers seem to be unrealistically protected from being killed. For example, regiments and artillery won’t shoot at them even when the officer is very close to them.
Officers seem to have infinite stamina.
Officers seem to be able to immediately reveal all enemy units within their field of view.
Unlike, for example, Combat Mission, where it can take time for all of the enemy units to be revealed.
Being unrealistically protected from being killed, having infinite stamina, and being able to immediately reveal everything about all the enemy units in their field of view make officers incredibly powerful for scouting. If you use a regiment as a picket to scout, that picket can get attacked, overwhelmed, and mauled or routed. It’s often better to keep the regiment you were going to use as a picket with the rest of your brigade and just use a brigade or artillery commander to scout.
Artillery
IMO the ability of artillery to move through woods relatively easily was a HUGE mistake both for realism and gameplay. It basically removes any need to pay attention to terrain, because you always end up with your artillery right behind your infantry when a fight starts. You can march your entire brigade / division / corps straight through the woods and not worry about it. Who wins a fight comes down to who micromanages their artillery and infantry better to keep the artillery with line-of-sight to enemy infantry regiments less than 200m away.
I think Combat Mission (e.g. CMx1) did it much better with their simulation of how slow it is to move AT guns through woods and how tanks can’t enter woods at all.
I feel like they should move like 10-20x slower or more, or even be barred entirely from entering woods, and double-time should only speed them up like maybe 10% if they’re moving through woods.
I think it could make sense to have different kinds of woods like in Combat Mission. Woods with underbrush (impassable to artillery) vs. woods with no underbrush.
Similarly, the huge disparity between how effective cannister is and how effective solid shot and shrapnel are seems to STRONGLY incentivize just keeping your artillery with your infantry and not having distant batteries.
The speed with which routing artillery units move is ridiculous.
I don't think the game models penetration, because I feel like moving your regiment in column to charge an artillery battery would be a horrible idea specifically because a cannonball could go lengthwise through the formation, hitting like 100 guys. But that doesn’t seem to ever happen in the game. You seem to suffer the same number of casualties per cannister hit whether you’re in line formation or column.
Orders
The “use couriers to give orders” system is extremely cool but also seems extremely incongruent with the ability to immediately take command of any unit and issue orders that get executed immediately. I’m finding that it generally makes more sense to take command of every brigade, at least when operating at the division or corps level. I still don’t understand the difference between issuing a brigade commander a “Hold” stance vs. taking direct command of him and just issuing an order to deploy at a particular location.
I feel like the solution here is Silent-Hunter-style fine-grained realism options.
For example, one option could be that you can only have direct command of a single unit at a time, or a certain limit of units, or maybe unit-specific limits. So, like, you can have direct command of up to 6 artillery batteries, 4 regiments, and 1 brigade commander.
Another cool option would be to have it that even regiments must receive orders by courier if the brigade commander is outside a certain radius (like 20 yards).
Immersion
I feel like this game does a great job of giving you a Total-War-style birds-eye view of how these battles worked, but at the expense of the immersion you’d get from implementing it like an OFP-style experience. And it isn’t possible to give units orders like you could in the real world, so you’re kind of forced to micromanage unless you give yourself a self-imposed constraint and understand you won’t get as-good a result.
It would be extremely cool to have an option to play with realistic terrain sizes, with every soldier shown, realistic battle lengths, with you restricted to a first-person perspective.
I want to be able to look around while the camera is stuck to / following a unit.
Graphics
Allow for an arbitrary number of sprites for each unit type. For example, instead of just having one or two sprites for the infantryman sprite, have 20 stock variations and let modders have as many or as few as they want.
The game mechanics strongly incentivize you to keep the trees turned off at all times while playing to aid your situational awareness. This is very similar to CMx1 where you’re incentivized to turn the trees off and increase the size of the models to an unrealistically-large size. This results in you not really getting to enjoy the full beauty of the game and also hurts immersion.
Sound
Allow for an arbitrary number of clips for every sound. For example, instead of just having one cannon sound, have 20, and let modders have as many or as few as they want.
Have higher-quality sounds that really crack. Post Scriptum set the bar here.
Multiplayer
There’s no multiplayer! That’s pretty crazy for a game like this, it’s a real shame.
Victory conditions / scoring
The way the VPs give points needs to be made more accurate. 10,000 points for a VP in an Open Play battle between two Corps is saying that VP is worth as much as 100,000 men, even though each Corps may have only around 20,000 men. So it’s saying you could hold that position for the designated amount of time, then let the other side kill all your guys without killing any of his, and you’d have won by a huge margin. I feel like for a Corps-level battle, 200 points makes more sense (so you could lose 2,000 men more than the enemy and be considered even for holding that ground). Obviously the appropriate points value depends on the larger strategic picture but a 10,000 point VP sounds like it’s saying the whole war depends on holding that VP.
Scenarios
I feel like the game could benefit from having a small scenario where you command just a single artillery battery in the woods, positioned behind a friendly infantry brigade, where success depends on your ability to micromanage your guns to see in between your friendly infantry regiments. The artillery tutorial is OK but doesn’t force you to learn proper micromanagement and the importance of cannister.
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