User blog comment:Tuckerscreator/Wars Never Ends/@comment-189012-20121004113326/@comment-189012-20121005035123

I've tried the mod on WikiReaper's desktop and I can safely say... the game is insanely difficult and too long! This is because of the 3D environment (and when I meant 3D, I mean fully 3D space from X to the Y to the Z since space has no limits) and the AI consistently moving its homebase around to gather resources. Think I spent three hours in a normal-level skirmish on a weekend. Not the best way to spend the weekend... and try to imagine fighting them on brutal/hard settings. :/

Anyway, it is pretty much on "closing the gaps" (or "cleaning up the mess" as how I see it). As indicated by the recent news on how the development of Halo Wars was done, it's not surprising that there's a lot of questions left unanswered. Since Halo Wars is from the UNSC perspective, the UNSC in the sequel should expand what was explored in the first game. As the Covenant has its own campaign in the sequel, it would not be a problem to play around a bit with the game and canon elements to properly reintroduce the military units and how they behave.

The removal is more to do with "not fitting in canon" than it is to do with gameplay. Flamethrowers are not effective units in open battlefield and it does not make any sense when you put it in the Halo Universe (from my perspective, that is). The only reason why the unit is added to the game is because Ensemble felt it was necessary to make use of the Flamethrower weapon in Halo 3 (evident from the concept arts). Suicide grunts should be an upgradable unit ability for the standard infantry (i.e. go suicide if you're close to the enemy).

"Movement formation" is based on what I've seen on Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars (really great game... hmm... gonna play it after this if I have the time!). The game does have "evasive" movement but it has more to do with retreating (as you said) than advancing forward. How Tiberium Wars tackled this is by introducing superior frontal armour and weaker rear armour for certain vehicles. Essentially, default retreating would mean to expose the rear armour. An evasive retreat or "reverse retreat" as it is called in the game is to... retreat by going in reverse; the vehicle would go in reverse without exposing its rear armour. I guess this could be applied for infantries by having little animations of individual units pulling injured units as they retreat... that would be fun! :O