Some thougths on engineers (again)

[Cortilein]

In the "Order of Battle" series, engineers opened up interesting tactical choices as they are able to demolish bridges and lay minefields in that game.

I realize that there has already been much discussion on engineers/pioniere units in PzC2 in this forum. In short, the conclusion was that - as of now - they are simply the absolute primary choice for infantry as they provide supreme support in assaulting cities and ignore enemy entrenchment. I really do not intend to fire up that whole argument again - but wouldn't it be feasible to have them split into (powerful) combat engineers vs. (small and weak, yet specialized) construction/demolition teams? Or give those capabilities to the mostly ignored bridge engineer unit? The latter (as well as mobile bridge layer units, mine sweepers and amphibious tanks) would be of pretty darn good value if there was some enemy unit capable of blowing up your valuable river crossing...

At least human players should be capable to come up with rather interesting tactics. Spamming of minefields could be avoided by some kind of ability cooldown or a hard limit of that action (say, twice per map/battle).

[Kerensky]

I don't that level of complexity is healthy for a Panzer Corps game. The idea of units having cooldowns and abilities on top of all their stats and traits... has dangerous potential for feature bloat.

Now that said, I do like the idea of special case minefield and bridge manipulation though. The upcoming DLC do in fact experiment with some of these ideas. It will be very interesting to see the reaction to that when the time comes. I would also prefer to innovate in ways that aren't just copies of things we've seen in other games. Or even in the original Panzer Corps. This is a big reason why the new Axis Operations are steering towards content like Spain that neither OOB nor Panzer Corps have.