Now OOB: Pacific judging from the first screenshots I saw looked like Panzer General TRULY modernized, with thoughtful adjustment to solve some of the problems the original game struggled with. And by and large, I feel this mission has been accomplished - well done indeed Aristocrats.
Before nitpicking a bit, let me iterate through the things I really enjoy about this game:
The presentation is great. It all still looks like ye olde hex light-wargame, but slicker and more modern. Little effects from explosions to sinking ships add to the atmosphere. Little touches like bombers with rear gunners actually turning around when facing fighters make it seem like a lot of thought went into such considerations. Cool stuff.
I like that combat is a lot less lethal than in Panzer General. It's still "lighter" than in a full-blown wargame, but it takes some time to destroy a unit. Units can also retreat, even bunny-hopping over adjacent friendly units. Mutual support can be helpful, but doesn't break the game. As a major problem from PG and PzC solved, fielding masses of weaker troops is actually a possibility due to units having different weights, which allows for very welcome alternate strategies.
It's also great that the game actually enforces seperate maximums for naval, ground and air units.
I also like that missions usually have a lot more turns than PG scenarios. Edit: Same about room for maneuvering - it's great there's usually unoccupied ground to make flank assaults.
Support is another welcome addition, implemented in a pleasingly lightweight fashion that means it doesn't get in the way most of the time but can afford additional tactical opportunities. I was a bit taken aback in the beginning of there being no fuel nor ammo limitation, but I guess it makes sense and I certainly didn't miss skipping a turn every now and then just to resupply.
The flexible goals system, with multiple secondary goals to aim for and some of these having effects that can still be felt several missions down the road is very enjoyable and motivational. Sometimes one really needs to take a close look at the map and make some hard decisions on which goals to pursue and by which means - before the mission has even started in earnest.
I also like the specializations for one's army as well as units sometimes having special abilities (such as "launch torpedo").
In the bottom line, the game's very fun to play and compares favorably to the original classic - hardly anything that was tweaked from Panzer General felt like a step back or an unreasonable idea. OOB:Pacific is, to me, the new standard by which future Panzer General "clones" will have to be measured. Once again, excellent job.
Now for a little nitpicking, and I hope none of it comes across as too harsh:
The engine is a little bit too prone to FPS drops. I don't have the most expensive rig, but my PC is powerful enough not to break out in sweat when playing the newest FPS (with reasonable settings), yet the OOB engine has it visibly struggling at times. The Java mission was by far the worst so far, but from what I understand this is a bug due to be fixed. Anyway, unfortunately the game doesn't shine in this area. Thankfully, it's usually bearable.
I find some information is missing from the UI. Most prominently, I miss a way to just hover across any hex to see what terrain type it is and - if it's a city - how the place is called. This adds flavour at almost no cost, so it's an omission I don't really understand.
I also miss a way to click on an enemy unit to see it's full stats - you do get a selection, but not all of them. This is also sometimes an issue even with your own units.
While I like the less lethal combat, I feel this makes some units/unit types lack any kind of punch. For example, a battleship should blow a single destroyer out of the water, yet this is usually not the case - using swarm tactics with destroyers is often a better tactic. I'm not sure I have a good solution here - when you're at the receiving end, it's of course cool that you're not immediately destroyed by a superior shiptype - but it also makes battleships look like a dubious investment.
Same with ground bombardment, heavy ships lack a punch.
It's similar with fighters and bombers, but at least these are fairly cheap.
It's a little silly facing a defenseless, slow naval bomber with a top-notch fighter and getting a combat prediction of 1:0.
Also, submarines are of very very dubious usefulness.
Experience gain is a joke. All heroes I've seen so far are almost useless.
The support implementation is a little harsh, especially when it comes to paratroopers. The less lethal combat makes it a theoretically feasible tactic to make a paradrop behind enemy lines, but the limitation to 1 movement and rapid loss of combat readyness basically destroys all gains immediately.
While it's nice that you sometimes have to plan your approach when it comes to (secondary) objectives, I found that it's too hindsight reliant. For example, one time you have a very very short turn allowance to blow up some fuel tanks. It's only a 5 str structure, and there's no AA around, but you cannot know this beforehand.
The objective can easily be attained, either by a concentrated bomber raid or - better yet - by using a unit of Paratroopers, but you can only know this after the fact.
The briefings would be a ton better with voice acting. The text is rather limited, and the game isn't exactly cheap, so I can't really understand the decision to be a cheapskate here. At the very least, I hope you guys can provide the neccessary hooks so modders could at least theoretically adress this themselves.
Which brings me to what - to me as a seasoned PzC modder - is the elephant in the room: moddability, which is sadly extremely limited so far. But I read you're planning on improving that with patches, which gives me some hope. If at all possible, please consider providing an actual model importer that takes popular 3D file formats as opposed to simply a 3D Studio Max plugin - I know it's a very popular professional tool, but it's also prohibitively expensive, so most modders don't have access to it.
Finally, there's some bugs that still have to be ironed out. A few briefings have spelling/grammar mistakes. Sometimes, the retreat animation fails to trigger, and you end up with ghost units, displayed at one location but ACTUALLY being elsewhere. Reloading usually resolves this.
In one mission I had to capture a fortress, and the player controlled "copy" it created wasn't clickable like usual units - I could only get to it via the "next unit" loop.
When saving and then loading the game, I could no longer control the fort at all.
In the Java sea mission, I could suddenly repair the ships of my southern fleet at sea, as if they were infantry. Oddly, this didn't affect the northern fleet, and the effect arbitarily ended after a couple of turns.
I guess that's all my nitpicks (and praises) for now. But let me add that I hope to see (much) more content - the Pacific was a sound choice for the first game, it only to showcase the naval features, but where's my campaign in China? Where's actual branching out with player decisions (I hope your engine is flexible enough to add this, eventually). I wanna see OOB:Europe. Hopefully, you guys will end up shipping a lot of copies and providing addons/DLC for years to come, like Panzer Corps did.
I, for one, didn't regret my purchase one bit.
Edit: One more complaint: I understand the reasoning, but making captured units impossible to repair also makes them almost completely useless, imo.
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rezaf
