What I liked (don’t change it)
- How the order queue is updated automatically (old orders are stricken through, a green bar shows how long a barrage will still last etc). Amazing!
- Love the popup video that shows what the assemble order does
- graphics style is great, the colours etc
- music is nice
- army constructor is very innovative
- photos of real enemy locations and connection to google maps
1.
grammar
1.1
Title screen:
- Falaise Pocket mission description: "cut off" should be written separately
- Operation Cobra mission description: a "with" is missing.
1.2
Battle of Cherbourg briefing:
- “(…) the capture of Cherbourg will ALLOW (…)”
Battle of Cherbourg in mission:
- When I click on the photo icon that shows real enemy positions on the Cotentin Peninsula, the date says 1947
2.
User experience
2.1
ESC
- It would be nice to have the possibility to close windows with ESC. Right now I can only close them when I click the X.
- in the tutorial it works, but on the title screen it didn't
- I think ESC should first close all small windows (like the “draw order” window), before it calls in the options window. This is sth I hate in the game Battle Acedemy 2. ESC always loads the options screen and doesn’t do anything else. It would be much more useful if ESC always takes you one step back from whatever window you have open.
2.2
CAMERA
- I think the delay when pressing WASD until the map starts moving is a bit too long, and when I stop pressing the key the delay until the camera stops moving is also a bit too long. Everything feels a bit heavy when moving the camera
2.3
TEXT SPEED
- The tutorial text in the small window could appear a little faster. It’s very slow now.
2.4
TUTORIAL CONFUSION
- In the tutorial it’s nice how this "select friendly unit first" text appears when you try to press the draw order with an enemy unit selected. But at the beginning I had difficulty figuring out which units are friendly. Maybe the camera could move to the blue units when you tell them to select a friendly unit
2.5
DESELECTING
- Would be nice to be able to deselect units by clicking somewhere on the map. I hate sticky selection
2.6
SELECTING + ZOOM
- when I click on my units, the camera always zooms in. That’s a cool feature the first time it happens, but I think when people play the game a lot, it will rather become annoying. What if you want to keep the camera zoom level where you had it and want to give several orders to more units in quick succession?
2.7
CONTINUOUS VS WAYPOINT ORDER OPTIONS
- In the selection between “continuous” vs “waypoint” drawing orders, I think the option that you mouse over should be white, and the other option should be red. White is clearer to see on the red background
2.8
MERGING AND SEPARATING UNITS
- In the tutorial I have combined my new mechanized unit with my first infantry unit. But it would be nice to have the option to separate them again?
2.9
SUPPLY DEPOT
When you click on a supply depot, a bin icon shows. But there is no tool tip explaining what it does. As a completely new player I’m afraid to click on it in the fear that it will instantly delete it or something like that, but I’m also curious to know what it does.
2.10
SPACE
I would prefer space to be for pause/play. I would much rather pause the game and then give orders in peace with the mouse.
Right now space is for drawing orders, but you still need to click on “new plan” before you can draw orders, which does not have any hotkey, so it doesn’t realty speed up things.
2.11
ARMY CONSTRUCTOR
- Very interesting idea. Love how you can drag and drop everything and it stays in the place you put it in.
- But I would use the middle mouse button wheel to zoom out. The board is very big and I feel like I would like to have an overview over everything to be able to navigate to my division of choice faster.
- And I would just assign the left mouse button or right mouse button for dragging (like in Order of Battle for example). Using the middle mouse button feels more tiresome after some time, and you will be dragging a lot when using the army constructor.
- I tried to move things around a bit, but to be honest I still had trouble understanding how it exactly works. Would be nice to have a nice popup video here too, like you have for the different attack orders.
2.12
AUTO PLACE UNITS
- At the start of mission 2 (Cherbourg) I was able to use the auto place button, but I was not able to place units manually through dragging. It’s only possible by using the assemble command, right?
2.13
PHOTO ICON
Mission 2: The photos of real enemy positions on the Cotentin Peninsula are very nice.
- The photo icon could be much bigger or change its size together with the zoom level, because I just discovered it by coincidence; it’s very small
3.
Bugs
3.1
Graphical, minor
3.1.1
Draw Order
When you click on draw order, sometimes the order types (assemble, seize ground etc), i.e. their black text box appears not in its place, but a little higher (at the same height as the red box “select units to command”), and then jumps to its proper place after a second. So far this has happened twice: during the first mission, when the order “seize ground”, and the order “artillery barrage” appeared for the first time.
3.1.2
Red dot
When I click on a queued order to edit it, there is a small red dot on the spot where I clicked
4.
Don’t forget
4.1
- Options/load doesn’t work yet
4.2
TOOLTIPS
- Quick save and save have the wrong tool tip
- quit to desktop has the wrong tool tip
4.3
- draw order / chain of command screen : Unit icons are indistinguishable from each other. The tool tip only says “type name”
