So, I have finished the Japanese campaign (on Normal or whatever the middle difficulty is called) and I guess it's time for some "second glance impressions".
By and large, I am still as fond of the things I pointed out liking in my first impressions, though I gotta say the most positive one is probably supply - it really made for some interesting situations throughout the campaign. Fairly generous supply generation of captured objectives usually means you can forget worrying about it after a while, but there's the occasional situation where you fall out of supply or have to keep your warships anchored to keep the ground troops going. I liked that.
I also stand by my statement about lessened combat lethality, though it falls apart a bit in the late campaign. I found US planes COULD gang up on me and destroy a full strength unit in two attacks.
On the other hand, I had to assault a Superfortress four turns in a row with three Zeros to bring it down. Thankfully it didn't move...
Anyway, infantry remains a viable choice through to the end, and in fact is often a better one than armor, even without an equivalent to PG/PzC's "close terrain" rules.
There are some "mad rushes" for secondary objectives, but by comment about generous turn times also remains true through to the end - the last mission even has 100 turns even though I finished it in less than 50.
But now for some more nitpicking, having seen all Japanese scenarios:
Upgrading units to discounted upgraded versions is generally too expensive. Sometimes FAR too expensive. Why do I have to pay 80 to upgrade to an almost identical unit?
On the other hand, the prices for destroyer upgrades, for example, are very moderate.
There's a major scenario design failure in the Japanese campaign in that there are no or too few airfields in basically all missions. This means any non-carrier based aircraft hardly gets any use.
Too many things in the missions require hindsight. Can I take this place behind the line with paratroopers or a marine landing? Moving to this exact spot will make the entire enemy fleet come at me, but if I stick to this course or that, I can take them on picemeal? Oh, my entire fleet will be removed by event, leaving my carrier aircraft without a place to land.
Moving a aircraft here will trigger a large fighter assault which WILL cost me my plane.
I don't have a perfect solution, as sometimes having those things is probably a neccessity, but the frequency got a bit on my nerves.
There's too much thick jungle in the island-hopping missions. Moving 20 INF one tile at a turn for 50 turns isn't exactly fun. Australia is the other extreme, though - here you can often breeze across the map with light INF.
Naval combat is a bit over the place. I like how it encourages players to have a variety of ships in it, but it's rules are often non-intuitive. Why does this cruiser do up to 4 damage and this other, identical cruiser only 1, at the same range in a similar position? There's also a reliance on "knowing" stuff that'll only happen next turn. You might say it rewards good "planning ahead", but I think it rather feels like the lottery.
I really, REALLY miss the "terrain info" when hovering over any hex from PzC. It's often hard to identify what something is - is that a swamp? Does this tile on the border of a forest already count as forested? Is this bridge destroyed? Not to mention the aforenamed "How is this city called?".
PzC had this down to an art, you just had to look and copy. And there's plenty of room in the UI, too. I saw in the preview screenshots that you're still not going for a proper implementation but are solving the place-names issue by having "name-bubbles" hovering across the map, and it boggles my mind. Just copy PzC and be done with it, FFS!
Too many of the "specialities" you can pick up over the course of the campaign either have a clearly better pick or none that's good at all. I picked Wunderwaffen as the last pick, for example - but you get the Tiger 1, which is totally outdated by that point and there's a Japanese tank available that is clearly better, as it's attack is basically identical, but it trades some defense for much-needed mobility. And you get a Nebelwerfer which looks like the '40 or '41 model as well - again, totally outdated stuff.
The assumptions the campaign makes about the war in europe are a bit ridiculous, with the Nazis beating the UK and the Soviet Union.
There's NO branching and (despite some long term effects of secondarys objectives) thus no choice & consequence in the campaign, which is still rather short. PG had what, 30 missions? IIRC the Japanese campaign has 12 or 13. Sure, you can point to the fact that there's also an allied campaign of equal length - with good reason - but I for one would have preferred a larger, branching Japanese OR US campaign to having pocket-sized campaigns for both. I know you have plans for additional content, and I'm looking forward to it - but it leaves a bit of a sour "nickel and diming" aftertaste in my mouth as well.
I have to repeat my performance comment from the initial impressions, the computer chokes so on resolving the AI turn, if you have a MP3 running in the background it begins to stutter.
The game also crashed or semi-crashed on me a couple of times. The semi-crashes are particularly interesting - the UI apparently broke down, but I could restore it by alt-tabbing out of the game and alt-tabbing back in.
Same about the bugginess - especially the ghost unit bug hit me several times. One circumstance seems especially easy to reproduce - landing paratroopers on an airfield on which there's already an aircraft parked...
But let me end on a positive note, despite all these nitpicks, I enjoyed my time with the campaign and still consider the purchase money well spent. Thanks for making the game, and here's hoping a few of the rough edges will be smoothed in time.
_____
rezaf
Very true! That's why I never got past mission 2 (well, I kinda got distracted by other things as well and do hope to return 
