As of writing this I have 60 hours of gameplay under my belt. As far as play time, its not very much. But I have managed to win the game as each faction once, taken Kreuznach, and paris, and driven the AI national will down to zero.
And at this point I am growing somewhat bored of the trench layout of the AI. They can be difficult to attack at times, I've lost half my deployable units on poorly planned and poorly coordinated attacks so they sometimes work.
But when I look at my trench lines with Kinks and V's and kill zones, and overlapping fields of fire. Where barbed wire spreads across the front in multiple layers so that when you get past the first bit of barbed wire and into the first trench your reward is more barbed wire with more trenches and a bunch of riflemen just waiting for you to pop your head.
It just feels shallow to me.
SO
I'm really hoping that at some point the developers make a sort of "build your own trench template" system so that the AI has a larger pool of trench layouts to use when they set up their trench lines both on the defensive and on the offensive.
Speaking of offensives, it might be worth adding a sort of "toggle" for trenches to mark them as "jumping off points"
I say this because I will sometimes want my soldiers to get up and start running at a trench but the pathfinding will (falsly) think there is a communication trench connecting the start point and the end point.
This causes the soldiers to "conga line" and is good for getting them into trench lines without being shot at.
Unless, of course, the pathfinding realises there is no communication trenches connecting the start and end trench. In which case the soldiers circle back, form up in skirmish formation, and spend 5 seconds getting shot at by rifles.
This 5 seconds of "forming up" after already starting the push can be the difference between making it into a suppressed trench, and rushing into a very active and not at all suppressed trench.
My second idea is to build in an anchor point about halfway on the back of a firing trench (Just the back, leave the front as non connectable) I say this because it will give a tiny bit more flexibility in the design of trench layouts for the player and make gaps for the AI to try to exploit on the offensive a bit smaller without being OP as suppression barrages are 50% bigger than their radius indicates which will easily fall on directly connected trench lines such as suggested above.
If you add this and the custom template Idea it will make gaps for the Player to exploit smaller as well
And at this point I am growing somewhat bored of the trench layout of the AI. They can be difficult to attack at times, I've lost half my deployable units on poorly planned and poorly coordinated attacks so they sometimes work.
But when I look at my trench lines with Kinks and V's and kill zones, and overlapping fields of fire. Where barbed wire spreads across the front in multiple layers so that when you get past the first bit of barbed wire and into the first trench your reward is more barbed wire with more trenches and a bunch of riflemen just waiting for you to pop your head.
It just feels shallow to me.
SO
I'm really hoping that at some point the developers make a sort of "build your own trench template" system so that the AI has a larger pool of trench layouts to use when they set up their trench lines both on the defensive and on the offensive.
Speaking of offensives, it might be worth adding a sort of "toggle" for trenches to mark them as "jumping off points"
I say this because I will sometimes want my soldiers to get up and start running at a trench but the pathfinding will (falsly) think there is a communication trench connecting the start point and the end point.
This causes the soldiers to "conga line" and is good for getting them into trench lines without being shot at.
Unless, of course, the pathfinding realises there is no communication trenches connecting the start and end trench. In which case the soldiers circle back, form up in skirmish formation, and spend 5 seconds getting shot at by rifles.
This 5 seconds of "forming up" after already starting the push can be the difference between making it into a suppressed trench, and rushing into a very active and not at all suppressed trench.
My second idea is to build in an anchor point about halfway on the back of a firing trench (Just the back, leave the front as non connectable) I say this because it will give a tiny bit more flexibility in the design of trench layouts for the player and make gaps for the AI to try to exploit on the offensive a bit smaller without being OP as suppression barrages are 50% bigger than their radius indicates which will easily fall on directly connected trench lines such as suggested above.
If you add this and the custom template Idea it will make gaps for the Player to exploit smaller as well