I would love to get a bit more immersion : once the war starts, I tend to lose interest very fast.
I was thinking about this and there's tons of stuff you can do to increase immersion, but then again comes the question of resources paradox has.
One would be cool to increse players situational awarenes by other means than just the event boxes. CK2 and EUIV have chronicles which show what happenend in kingdom during reigns of kings, Vicky has newspaper system which tells player whats going on in the world. One item was making it's way to every household in the '30s: radio.
Would love to hear music fade away during gameplay and presenter start speaking in old radio voice: "We interrupt our regular program for following news: French forces have surrendered to germans, the french goverment has moved to exile and new goverment under lead of Philippe Petain has sworn in... [maybe put in the Churchill's speech regarding to news and so on]
Paradox has never been strong on the audio side of their games, but you never know...
Another way to increase immersion would be to make more unit animations, of course this adds nothing to players who play with counters.
Right now we have infantry soldier and a tank, that moves, attacks, or falls back.
Would love to see more immersion here too, for instance:
infantry digging in and making actual fighting positions when stopped,
artillery firing and receiving infantry covering in fear,
russian tankers litteraly smashing their tanks on the german ones,
stukas divebombing units while flak tries to shoot them down, etc.
One thing I'd add to tactical is better indicators on the main map screen (things besides just a red/yellow/green number). The main reason for this is when you have 10-20 battles going on at once, its not really feasible to open the battle screen for all of them.
For land warfare, it would also be cool if the size of the battle indicator changed based on how many divisions there were in the combat, how many reserves were in there, and how long the battle had gone for. This would let you know at a glance where the major action was taking place, vs where minor skirmishes were happening across the front.
By "battle indicator" I mean the small circle with the number in it that is either red, yellow or green. It would also be neat if major battles appeared before minor ones when you zoomed in, so you could draw up a bird's eye view and see where the major battles were unfolding.
Another nifty feature would be a "casualties mapmode" where parts of the map were coloured based on battle history, so you could see where casualties were currently being inflicted over the recent past (perhaps 6 months). It would be like a heat map, the world would be grey and then areas of casualties would be pinkish colours, through to deep red to indicate extreme casualties.
Now this! This is more technical aspect, but yeah, now it's really hard to spot the important ones from the pile of 10-20 battles, but boy is it important.
About the casualities map mode I doubt it will be saturated pretty quickly. However I think that some form of battle history or some tool to keep track of your operations would be nice, right now combat log just isn't enough. I for one would like to have some AAR tool ingame to analyse my operations and effectivenes of my divisional templates, airforce ground support, etc.
