Ok, I should probably say something about the brigades, since that idea has grown in my crazy head anyway:
If you click on the brigade techs now, you'll see that they'll add certain boni to your units. E.g. Artillery will give soft attack boni, anti-air-regiment will give air attack boni and so on...
The reason for this is, that we said to ourselves... why don't I profit from research in artillery if I don't build and attach artillery brigades. Does that mean my divisions don't have any artillery? Of course not. Every infantry or tank division has artillery. Those brigades are only additional forces that I can assign to a unit to make it even stronger for a special attack mission or something. But if that is so, then why don't I notice any changes when I research artillery from '18 to '45 level?
A logical question so we changed that.
We reduced the stats of all land divisions. Now the stats are lower than the ones you're used to. If you want your infantry '42 division to have the stats it had before, you must research artillery '42, anti-tank '42 and so on...
If you let your highly trained soldiers run around wit '45 gear and small-arms but give them '18 artillery and '36 anti-air at the same time... well guess what... they won't be as effective as they could be.
It also works the other way around. if you have '36 infantry and your opponent has '39 infantry, that doesn't necessarily mean that he's got the better unit. If you can equip your forces with '45 artillery and '42 tank-hunters, then things will look different.
But don't worry, the boni are not high enough to make brigade techs more important than division techs. But now you need to put your focus on all weapon techs, not just on the divisions, because being behind in artillery technology can really make a difference...
The recon tech now also gives you reconnaissance boni, so if you have better recon units, you have better recon.. makes sense doesn't it?
The motorized brigades make your motorized divisions (and Cavallery) go faster. But ONLY motorized divisions. Infantry is slow all by itself, but tanks are slowed down by non-motorized artillery, so if you research SP-Artillery.. guess what.. they'll be able to advance faster (and use more fuel, but don't worry - the non-motorized units still don't use fuel. The motorized brigades only affect also motorized divisions).
The Vatican was not just entered as a new country for events and stuff but also works as our "Update-Ghost". Once a month the Vatican will make "its twin" independent and immediately annex it again. This is WAD and shouldn't bother you. It is necessary since the boni are not updated by the game engine if you build new units. But an annexation updates all units stats around the world, so we needed this little strange hack to ensure our boni system works. If you follow our recommendation and turn of the "new country" and "country annexed" message boxes, you'll hardly notice anything. And even if you want the boxes in the game, it happens only once a month.
We hope you feel, like we do, that this boni system makes the way the unit-research works a lot more realistic and challenging.
As I said before.. comments and critics are welcome and wanted/needed
