A quick feedback on version 1.3 after playing about 70% of a campaign at skill level hard:
Nades. Awesome! Now i want a bazooka, too! Nades offer new tactical options when an enemy is camping or attacking with too many soldiers in one area. The attacking range and the damage inflicted in relation to the APs required to throw nades are in good balance, i think. Things that could be improved:
- the timer could be much shorter. When enemies and allies throw nades it slows down the game because i always have to wait for the nades to explode although they are fighting in remote areas where they can do no damage to me.
- a turn can be over altough the nade has not exploded yet (due to the nade's timer still counting). When you are lucky you can still move away from the nade before it explodes. In a turn based game all attacks should be executed before the next player's turn starts.
- when enemies or allies throw nades in remote places i still can see the smoke. I think this should be hidden by the fog of war. Spotting the smoke makes it pretty easy to locate enemies and allies.
- sometimes the nade path indicates green light but anyway my soldiers manage to throw the nade against a wall etc. and it will bounce back to them. Is this meant to be this way? (is the nade path indicator meant to be inaccurate to some extent? In that case there should be a waiver of liability :)
AI improvement: very well done. Especially allies don't behave like lemmings anymore. When they see that there is little possibility to attack they take cover and wait for the enemy. Some ideas:
- i have the feeling that allied AI has improved much more than the enemies AI. Maybe it depends on who is attacking and who is defending or how many soldiers are on the map. But enemies still tend to make massive attacks without any cover when my soldiers are well hidden and covered. Often they rush out of their cover when i send a single soldier to attract their attention (or even better: let my allies draw their attention). Then i move this soldier back to cover and the enemy will keep attacking without any cover. Usually AI tries to escape when it is too late, when only one or two soldiers are left.
On the other hand i found the enemy AI chose a defensive strategy on one map, hiding the soldiers in buildings all the time, which made it very hard to attack.
In short: I think the enemy AI should try to take more cover and hide in buildings etc when they are overpowered.
- enemies and allies often throw nades with a low path when the opponent is covered behind an object. AI should try to get closer and throw with a high path.
- when the AI tries to throw a nade and it comes back bouncing off an object, it shouldn't try to make the exact same throw from the same position again.
Strategic Map:
Allies are overpowering in last quarter of the game and keep attacking enemy cities with waves of soldiers (each wave with a strength of about 200 or more). This results in battles of 25 or more (very poorly armed) allies - this makes these battles almost unplayable: i have to wait more than 3 minutes until the AI finally completes its turn (including the above mentioned delay caused by nades). Maybe there could be an option to speed up / skip the animation of the AI's turn or only show those actions that happen next to my own soldiers or could have an effect on them.
Issues:
-I am testing on Ubuntu 20.04: when moving objects or dragging the walking path for soldiers, the bars showing AP, health etc start to flicker in different colours. When i release the mouse button, the flickering stops.
- when picking up an object from the ground it replaces the currently held object, which is fine. But the replaced object appears to be on the ground now although it is stored in the backpack.
Keep up this excellent work, Ed!