OT Progress: I've got a big logo for the game, and about six or eight screenshots (no scans; are scans still banned?) of gameplay in the first two or three chapters. Is this enough these days? I know that in the past people went wildly overboard with OTs and were told to scale back. Mine will be pretty pedestrian by those standards.
I'm 12 hours in and it turns out that EVERY skirmish battle so far can be cleared in one turn with scouts and the APC
I just did my first skirmish and that's basically how it was; I was surprised at how easy it was. The first turn of the first mission of the game, in which you sneak up on an enemy soldier from behind and shoot him, is also a little too easy; maybe people playing the first game were turned off by having bullets fly at them from the very start in VC1's intro mission?
But I'm loving everything else about the game -- they even got to finally use a tower with signal numbers, developed a decade ago for the first game; it appears in a mission and the mission works pretty well. I'm enjoying the weather effects like mist and day/night differences. Looking forward to the snow!
Sublimit, the maps are big to begin with and eventually get
huge: remember how the maps are divided with vertical and horizontal lines, with the points labeled 11, 12, 13..., 21, 22, 23... as you go to the right and downward? Now, we get more than ten gridlines in both directions, and we have map points labelled 910 and 108 and even 1211. (The grid lines bisect the numbers, so they aren't confusing on the actual maps.) I actually watched the trailer loop twice when picking the game up at Yodobashi Camera to confirm this.
Huge.
Also,
Johann, very minor nitpick in your excellent review: "Edinburgh" is not England; it is the United Kingdom. "Dokkum" appears to be England/Scotland/Wales and "Delfzijl" is Ireland, and Delfzijn seems not to have gained independence as it has for us. VC1's map of Europa never gave us a name for this "United Kingdom".
I'm really digging the updated map: we finally get to see the equivalent of Scandinavia, and there are two other small countries in a position similar to Gallia (Nemur and Emmen) which I hope we get to interact with.