Toyed with "Cuban Missile Crisis" (that along its standalone expansion is still free to get on indiegala, see the free game list thread for the links) that 60ies based game on some alternate history after things went to hell after the actual cuban missiles crisis.
After completing the tutorial mini campaign that decieve you into thinking this one gameplay may be different than Sudden Strike and Blitzkrieg, i started one of the main campaigns included with the game, the US/UK one as i'm more familiar with their tanks and etc.. naming conventions so i thought it would help getting the hang of the whole things quicker.
And after completing 2 very long grueling battles against enemy groups encounted on the campaign map, the 2nd one had me taking more than 1 hour to attack the last objective , due to insane amount of save/reload because success and failure was linked to "pixel war".
"pixel war" , yeah it's that biggest part of the Sudden Strike/Blitzkrieg gameplay that the tutorial made me forget as it wasn't as heavy on it :
Those pixels i talke about are the distance you need to move your spotting units then stop then activate their spotting ability, the move again a pixel or two, stop, activate their spotting abilities, repeat ... (that's a lot of clicking in the end) until you either spot the units that have been murdering your whole army in your previous attempt, or walk a pixel too much and get in the LOS of said troops that will proceed to murder your spotter and you troops now that you can't see them anymore.
And if you spot said unit , let's hope you can kill them quick (armor penetration being -very- random) before some of the other camping AI tanks rush to the location and with how uncertain battles can be it's extremely easy to lose a lot of very previous units in seconds because they're taking their time to retreat to safety (that damned random armor penetration too, explain also lots of my reloading
)
So far in my campaign i got 2 encounter battles that are played on "random maps", 1st one i initiated as i attacked, but the 2nd one was an enemy group attacking one of mine on the map
But even despite i was the one attacked, the random map was again the same as previously (though with snow instead of grass) about "take the objective protected by all the enemies camping there, oh and don't think about setting ambushes, despite you're the one attacked the AI will NEVER move out of their camping zones to attack you...".
And there's some puzzle aspect to solve too, because in missions the way the enemies are positionned it means you must find from which direction to attack, as other directions may just lead to utter failure, make sure to surround enemies location with spotters to get an idea on how exactly each troops are camping , that should usually help you to figure out which direction is a NO and which one is the must use.
I wonder if out of the manually crafted missions (i hope there are some), those random maps are not in fact all of the same crap like those 2 i just completed, i remember Blitzkrieg and Sudden Strike had a bit more variation, but in the same time there wasn't a campaign map with you and the AI moving troops around, it was missions after missions.
And no idea if it's because i accidentally started to play on Normal difficulty, but tanks burn their fuel super fast, my fuel supply truck had to go back 2 times to the camp at the entrance of the map to get more fuel and come back to help some out of fuel tanks that couldn't move to attack anymore.
Make sure to increase a bit the amount of fuel you'll carry in a mission.
Oh and still no access to air support and bombers, not sure why as the tutorial mini campaign gave me some.