- 2020 required too many clicks: trading, unit management, mass salvage, etc. This was a click fest. Thousands of units in the menu? Click click click click click. This has to be made easier in 2030. If it isn't, I won't buy the game, I have things to do.
- Path finding. Path finding was bad. We aren't talking the leningrad thing, units get stuck in siberia, units get stuck in Mexico. Units get stuck in Alaska. Units just go off and auto deploy where supply isn't. That's a huge issue. Do not allow the AI to send units to remote areas, and then send supply trucks to save supply trucks, and have units go out and take over for units that got stuck...This is a never ending source of head aches and the only fix is turning off the AI unit manager and being forced to click a million times.
- AI barracks and garrisons are dumb. The AI goes off of the theater and zone percentage, but it doesn't work well. We need granular controls on specific barracks to dictate what is expected to live there, and controls to tell the barracks what it needs to focus on protecting. Otherwise, the AI likes to auto garrison and keep moving around units, but I never understood the balancing act the AI army manager did, or why it was shuffling units around constantly, wasting precious CPU.
- Better theater management. The theater should not be broken up into generic force sizes. It never worked well, and the only thing that did seem to function was allocating a theater to high and watch my entire military zerg a particular region. Theaters should yield to bases and carriers, then forces that live inside of each. We should be allowed to assign where we want carriers to be, and what units protect the carrier, and which units live on the carrier. Same for the barracks or military installations of our allies or conquered territories. We should have the same deployment and ai management controls to dictate what needs to be kept in the region at those barracks. Not percentages, not AI management, not broken zone control.
- Game slow down because of AI force size management. I heard you guys speaking on youtube about the new unit trading. Well, the AI needs to properly weigh its rivals and the appropriate size of military to counter them. Part of the slow down after a few years was that the AI does not manage the army well, and of course, keeps sending units into wastelands, and then sends more units, builds more units, and keeps expanding military constantly until the game slows to a crawl. The AI needs stricter controls on how it expands the military. Please properly evaluate military sizes and actually keep old units in reserve, or have the AI keep those units on the world market.
- Better supply: The AI should try to build a supply network to a wasteland, for one thing. It builds hordes of trucks and cargo planes, but does not create a node network of supply buildings or properly patrols from supply to units with them. You may have to create an ability for cargo planes and trucks to supply a region, where it connects its highest supply zones in a radius and projects that supply to the entire circle. Thus, the programming is as simple as creating a node network of deployed cargo planes and supply trucks. The planes should use the air base supply, trucks should use whatever is highest in its deployment radius. This would incentivize targeting supply trucks and planes. Thus, supply vehicles no longer supply a tile, but increase supply of a region based on the highest supply in its service area.
- If supply trucks are turned into deployable units like bridge tractors, then the AI should view deployed supply units as if they were base nodes. Cargo planes should draw fighters, both defensive and offensive. Deployed trucks should draw AA and defensive units, and the AI enemy should want to bomb them or hit them with special forces raids or spies.
edit:
I wanted to add that the upgrade feature needs to work. My expectation was that because the unit actually mapped to the next unit in the upgrade tree, and that when upgrade was selected, the unit would goto reserve, change to the next unit, be set to 1 hit point and had to be repaired with military equipment.
