Done a game as Imperial Guards. Thoughts.
<Big Problems
>Only 4 factions (Guard, Smurfs, Orks, Necrons)
>No diplomacy even in cases where it makes sense such as the Guard and Space Marines.
>Not enough units. Guard only has the Standard Guardsman, Ogryns, Techmarine, 3 Heroes, Heavy Weps Squad with Rockets, Sentinel, Hydra, Base Leman Russ, Baneblade and Two Planes. That's only 13 Types when we should get at least as many types as Armageddon had, or even better Ultimate Apocalypse.
>There is these shards you capture on the map. They give empire wide bonuses of either boost to your resources, health regen for troops, movement, max health or vision. This leads to very bad snowballing. These stack, so if you capture 3 movement shards, all your units move 3 extra tiles.
>If you can't keep up on the capturing, you've lost, lack of superweapons such as nukes means game gets decided by mid-game.
>Units get upgrades as in extra abilities but there is no upgrading types, eg, changing the heavy weapons squad to have a lascannon or a heavy bolter.
>Not enough structures, while the focus is on combat, the cities are bare bones. There is only 1 structure for each resource but they worthless because I only got bottlenecked by ore anyway
>There should be utility structures. Eg, ability to upgrade you city with walls so that enemy units in them take damage, and FUCKING ROADS. The huge map is too tedious because units travel too slowly.
>No naval units
>No units calling spacecraft
>No Chaos, Nids, Elves or Tau
>This may be my retardation, but I think that units use a 2-action system as xcom, eg, shoot or move and shoot or just move. When some units moved, even if they only moved 1/4 tiles, they still couldn't move after. Again, this could be my retardation
>No Infinite queue.
<Minor Problems
>I don't think the balance is good. Space Marines I think won't be good because they only get 1 city, whereas guard can spam them and by 30 turns I had 5 cities producing units. It felt like production capacity was more important than resources.
>No unlock all map tech
>Tech tree is shit, it's just 5-6 techs in a column and you need two of those before you can research the next column. It's not a tech tree, it's is just move left to right
>Very little buildings to be built out of base, Guard only get citadels built by Techpriests. Guardsman should be able to build trenches, tank barricades, mines, turrets etc etc.
>Abilities feel more like spammy abilities rather than waiting to use it, They might as well have been passives since I always used it when I could
>Units level up but I don't know what higher level does. I think it's just extra health since they level 5 does the same amount of damage as lower level units. I don't know what the max level is.
<Good Things
>Constant combat. In the Future, there is only war.
>Even when you can't find enemies, there is craptons of wildlife.
>Rally points from cities exist
>Abilities from heroes are powerful, but again, they may as as well just be always on, whenever I got a chance to use it I did.
>Quest system is good. Quests aren't stupid bs like in Endless Legend with travel across the map and are completeable within 5-10 turns.
>Cities are well made on the military aspect. When you build a barracks and a manufacturum, both of those buidlings can produce units simultaneously leading to Imperial Guard still being able to build standard guardsman as you produce Baneblades. Unfortunately, building two barracks just ups your production speed, not being able to build two infantry at once, likewise for vehicles.
>Armies can be big. At the end I think I had around 200 troops, but turns still move quickly.
>I reccomend playing on the fastest setting. This allows you get more troops and along the tech tree to get the cooler units faster. The game still takes more or less the same amount of time, just with numbers of troops increased.
<Other things
>Smurf bias. Guardsman say "Praise The Emperor and Guilliman."
>Not enough unit names after the level up. You can change the unit name though.
>AI is alright. Better than civ but nothing special, game is more focused than civ though so that's to be expected.