With just Balaton and Berlin left to go on my first playthough on the historical path here are a couple of thoughts.
The good parts:
1. Greatly improved customization - interesting heroes, passives applying to medals, commander traits - all of these make it much more feasible to customize the force and have the potential make games feel different.
2. Almost all scenarios are a choice of 2 alternatives - I plan to immediatly jump into the fictional path via Afrika Corps after I finish the inital campaign.
3. Interesting objectives - while at the start these are mostly "capture all victory hexes", things get interesting later. So far Baltic scenario was my favourite.
4. Good map design (again, Baltic shines here) with interesting new features such as high ground, making things more fun than in the original.
5. AT support fire makes combat more interesting and tactical. I grew fond of AT and the StuG was really invaluable in the Eastern front scenarios.
6. Better apporach to overstrength - less of a prestige drain and more of a tactical choice for some veterans.
7. Core slots and the fact better units take up more lead to some interesting decisions. Due to the difficulty curve later on it's still suboptimal not to deploy all Me 262's and Tiger 2's on their respective positions, but earlier on it does present interesting chalenges on what the composition should be. It also makes it much more interesting for a player like me, who likes to keep his composition fairly historical and use a combination of different units.
8. Amazing graphics, this really brings the game to a new level from a easthetic standpoint.
9. Air combat is much more balanced now. Even in early scenarios it's not a case of shooting down the enemy airdorece in the first 2-3 turns, making it more realistic and balanced.
Things to improve:
1. Scrolling speed increses/decreases depending on zoom level. This is surprisingly hard to get used to, and takes a lot of time to set up the optimal scroll speed.
2. The game still uses 5 star 15 strength BS units to increase the difficulty level on some maps. Not a big fan of this solution - looking at you, Bagration scenario.
3. Prototype mechanic is fun, but could be more fleshed out. It does not replace the SE units idea, but gives access to some interesting additions.
4. Capturing equipment is now solely based on surrenders and to filed it , you need 10 points of strength in captured gear. I think I either suck at capturing or newer really focused on it, since after being almost entirely done with the first approach to the game I have not gathered enough units of a single type to field any captured stack. I would love if this was slighlty modified, since for potential DLC that could just maybe involve the Finnish army or any of the other minor forces, this could be a valuable source of better equipment.
5. Music tracks still get repetitive very quickly (but it's better than in the first part for sure).
Different, but not sure if for better or worse:
1. Prestige awards and upgrades - with all units now upgrading for the cost difference it makes upgrades more tied to the supply mechanic than prestige and much cheaper. It makes you less dedicated to keeping for example a Panzer IV on the Panzer IV upgrade path, but at the same time means you do not have to hoard prestige like a madman for later upgrades.
2. Prestige sinks - aircraft are surprisingly cheap to buy, upgraqde and replace, especially early on. It's infantry that will eat up most of the prestige costs, especially early on if you use elite replacements. Regular infantry is terrible - anothing other than Pioneers and Grenadiers can barely fight properly and is just situational. This should proably be blanced a bit better with regular infantry costing less prestige to buy and replace, giving more reasons to use it over the better types.
3. Encirclement mechanic makes for someunexpected situations and allows to fight where it would be impossible otherwise, but it does reduce the impact of fuel and ammo (especially fuel).
I already thought it was great, but the 3D really enhances things.
