My first Impression - tutorial

[lp60068]

This is my first beta.
I am a long time player of panzer general - so I am very familiar with that game.

I jumped into the tutorial first and my first 30 second impression was - this looks familar - which is not a bad thing.

Gameplay was good, as expected. I liked the graphics of the artillery shooting.

Some Impressions:
I had trouble identifying which units were core and which were not core. Was I adding elite reinforcements to a non-core unit? In PG the units were easily identifiable on the game map (I think different color strength or something).

The indicator for when units had moved - had the slash - at first made it hard to see the strength of the unit.

When a unit attacked, but has not moved - I don't think there was an indicator that it could not attack. I think PG used color to indicate unit had attacked or fired.

Sometimes units blend a little too much into the map - maybe add a little more color difference. There is way too much green in this game. I think the rivers are even greenish.

The toggle stats panel and the purchase units screen use icons and a mouseover with a description, like hard attack, etc. You have a lot of screen space available and maybe you could display more information or ordered it differently by sections to make it more readable at a glance. Unit history in PG was always interesting - describing what battles/scenarios the unit was promoted.

After jumping in and then later reading the beta invite I discovered the Alt-click unit info and combat log. Both of these are good ideas and work well.


Performance was excellent - 2.83 Quad Core, 4gb ram, vista32, 9800GT video w/512.

I will play with this more and add more impressions in a day or two.