Slitherine

I played the game now for about 150 hours so I like it enough I would say. That is more than I played the Troop or Total Tank Generals or Second Front. But also a lot less than I played Order of Battle or Panzer Corps or Battle Academy. Some points that bothered me a bit that prevents this game being a classic for me yet. I just finished a US campaign this week and in that last battle I killed around 120 (?) enemy units while loosing 4 myself (3 transports and an AA). That is a bit not realistic. In another campaign I was suddenly surrounded by enemy units after taking a victory hex, also not the most charming thing to experience, with my surrounding scouts everywhere in tact.

Multiplayer is more balanced but has it's crazy stuff as well. That is all in more good fate and fun but still a bit strange. I lost the last MP match (congrats to the winner, well played!) while having at least double the amount of kills. I learned that attacking with trucks with regular soldiers saturates the defensive fire, mostly because when trucks are destroyed, the troops just jump out mostly without any moral or physical damage. So when you have mostly 3 reaction fires you hit the truck, shot 2 kills the truck and shot 3 hits the troops a bit. But after that you are just wounded prey yourself. It teached me a bit about having extra covering fire and stuff. But is is still a bit weird that sending 3 trucks with 3 regular infantry (630 points?) can just overrun your prepared defences. On the other hand, if you just accept and abide by the rules, it's still good fun. Although the exploding trucks just dropping fully healthy soldiers feels a bit weird. On the other side just flooding the zone with low level infantry seems a reasonable tactic.

Oh well, I still have fun playing and the MP is a nice challenge for sure. Getting used to the rules and how to administer them is a nice thing, even if it all doesn't feel fully logical or intuitive. Just wanted to share these thoughts.

Think I first complained about "truck abuse" last summer and it is particularly egregious/unrealistic when combined with towed ordnance which can be (un)loaded and fired in the same turn. In PvP this pretty much destroys the value of self-propelled artillery as you can just tow the artillery (or AT gun) to where you want, unload, fire and then even reload if you haven't already that turn which provides significant protection to the gun from enemy fire. Why pay (a lot) more for SPA that is often slower and has no damage protection from the truck nor can hide in forest or high vegetation?

FWIW I have others have posted to Steam and Discord a boatload of fixes to the game play in the past year but most have yet to be acted on (they did finally give smoke rounds to artillery and non-vehicular mortars) I am choosing to believe this is due to limited bandwidth on the part of the designers but is also a function of the (regrettable) decision to put seemingly much effort into improving the AI in Skirmish Mode. For a game this complex I doubt the AI will ever provide a real challenge and thus think PvP is where the emphasis should be. But I suspect most players have no interest in PvP and would rather abuse the AI a la what you described. :-\