I've yet to play a game, Glen has already covered about the game being heavily based on 2nd edition/Titan Legions, but a few things that stick out for me (and withholding a true judgement until I have played 3 or 4 games)
- They have heavily modernised the missions/objective system. This is a good step for me, as I found that always the thing that got most tiresome in SM2 - even with some of the expansion material, really you had to house rule extra missions and campaigns, so having things available like that from launch is great.
- They have added a
lot of granular rules and crunch. You could fit an entire army summary of SM2 unit rules on 2 sides of A4, for this game I have seen weapon loadouts for one tank (as its no longer single profile) that fill an entire side of A4! I can kind of see why they have added some granular detail, as this game is effectively 'blue on blue' and might get boring with lots of identical unit profiles, but suspect they may have overtipped the balance - I'm not sure if applying 28mm-scale granularity is appropriate with a game which has traditionally needed to be more abstract, for the sake of our eyesight
Also, I have played enough games over they years to look at some of the special rules (which again take many pages) and think there could have been a cleaner, more efficient way to do it. I always thought one of SM2's strengths (and I think partly why it was so popular) was because it was so quick to learn and play. I think I used to take 10 minutes to get people rolling dice when demoing, perhaps a little longer for Armaggedon - this game looks like it won't have that benefit and will be tougher for cross-system gamer demoing to take place.
- The standard 'way to play' has been set at 3000pts which may be, considering that the points values are lower and the game may take longer to play, is too high. I can understand them wanting to sell as much stuff as possible for a 'standard' game, but there is such a thing as greed and that could potentially un-horse the popularity of the game if too many people insist on that points value and its not playable in an evening (which I think should always be a guiding principle for tabletop wargaming design). I would have thought WHFB 8th edition would have taught GW a lesson there, but perhaps not - it will be interesting to see what format tournament organisers run with, and if they drop that value to try and squeeze three games in a day.
Finally, I know a lot of Epic players are upset Armaggedon wasn't used as the template for this new game. I can understand that as I think it's possibly the best 'wargame' that GW have ever designed. But, I can understand from a commerical perspective why you would want to replicate what was the most successful version of the past in this new game.
But anyway, will play some games, and then sure some more strengths and weaknesses will become apparent.