I found games where the results of previous battles have an impact on the next one to sometimes make a total mess of things. Having been a big Warhammer fan back in the day I bought “Shadow of the Horned Rat” when it was released and found that the developers were trying to recreate a Warhammer campaign whereby your troops that remain at the end of the battle are carried over to the next (plus some reinforcements) and gain experience. A nice idea in some respects since it makes you care for your troops more and forces you to think carefully about when you will use your elite troops since when they are gone, they’re gone. In reality I discovered that if you have a bad battle then you are basically screwed for the remainder of the game since you don’t have enough troops to survive the coming battles. The problem was that you often didn’t know exactly what a “bad battle” actually was and only discover that you don’t have enough troops until much later and then have to replay substantial portions of the game again. I gave up pretty quickly, mostly because I really suck at strategy games.

Personally, I like turtling. I’m a patient player and enjoy slowly building up my army and hate to be rushed. My most hated strategy game scenarios are those that place a time limit on you and I’m presently stumpted on such a scenario in Dawn of War.

Playing FreeSpace 2, (not a strategy game I know) I’ve begun to really appreciate how integrating the storyline into each mission really makes things more interesting. You don’t just start out each mission the same, and how well you do in a previous mission may dictate how the next one goes. You can’t always choose what weapons or ships you can use - you use what is available. It tends to be that the more crucial moments in the game are ones where you just have to go in with what you’ve got left.

That’s something I’d like to see in strategy games. No turtling.

You’re right, it doesn’t make any sense for field officers to be building bases in World War II. It’d be interesting to find out how many field bases were actually built in Europe vs. the number of operations performed. It’s academic of course, but it would illustrate the point of how absurd it is to be doing these kinds of things in-game.

Actually, it’s be pretty cool if you built one or two field bases that supported the other missions in the game. It would add a strategic element to the game that would be a better fit for the time period.

The one thing I want to know is: what’s the resource you collect?