(12-09-2014, 09:16 PM)ComradeP Wrote: Everyone has his own preference, so it's nice that both the new and old terrain will be included.

Personally, I think the new terrain (the actual tiles, without anything on them) is less defined, not more: less use of colour to differentiate height levels, making them less easy to identify (height levels are usually some sort of green). That's particularly clear in the second terrain screenshot, where in the new terrain you might with certain terrain configurations think there are just two important height levels, instead of three, as two of them are green. That's why I'm a big fan of using colours for that purpose.

Villages are more defined in the sense that the buildings are more clear, true, but in the new version they use similar graphics to the current Town terrain graphics. Without the clearly visible patch of soil around the buildings, you can no longer see at a glance what is what. Scattered or Building terrain also no longer stands out for the same reason: without the Village hexes having something that identifies them, the patch of soil, it's less easy to identify them. The new Village terrain graphics have a green patch, but that blends in with the terrain tiles.

The colours used for the roofs also look too European/North American in my opinion, they'd look great in Civil War Generals 2 for example. Soviet stone buildings would have mostly brown-ish/dark red-ish roofs or some dark shade of brown or black-ish, not a variety of colours. Buildings in villages might just be wooden huts. With the new terrain graphics, it's unclear why the one terrain type offers less defensive benefits, whilst in the old you can more or less see: these are wooden huts/simple buildings, and these are not.

The new Swamps contrast too much with the surrounding terrain, they're a bit too "in your face" in my opinion.

Using multiple variations for the same terrain type, like with the fields, can also be problematic, particularly if some of them can be confused with Grass. Currently, all fields are identical. I've never really understood why adjacent fields need to look different in some wargames, considering that it's unlikely that they produce different agricultural products, particularly in a collective farm.

(12-15-2014, 10:10 PM)ComradeP Wrote: Talking about smoke, I've been meaning to ask why there's more smoke in the smaller scenarios compared to the corps-sized ones. Is it to limit the advantage that could be gained? For example, the availability of smoke in Yakovlevo is identical to that in the full July 6th scenario.