There are three crucial aspects to any strategy game to get right, economy, maps and tactics, in my opinion. Unit design, buildings, decorations, add to the mood of the game, but really they are just affected by personal taste, there's no real right or wrong when it comes to themes or styles. Scorched Earth isn't meant to be cheesy or campy, at least not to a greater degree than the original game, nor does it have many ridiculous characters/units like a large number of other mods seem to. It is entirely focused on providing the best battle experiences instead.
The economy is often the hardest one to get right, other games like SimCity 4 are complicated, but have a very easy to understand economic structure, that once you master, makes the game impossibly easy. Conversely, Starcraft had an impossibly rigid economy, where build order and mathematical ratios of units would win the game. What I was adamant about is retaining Westwood's delicate balance of being able to recover from near defeat, and to focus on making more variability, with more exceptions, and more tricks to employ.
Though the ideal map in a strategy game also doesn't exist, there's several ways to approach making good maps, and each has their own pitfalls. I feel that similar to economy, maps need to push players to be creative, to take risks, and find novel ways to defend at the same time. Westwood maps tended to have choke points, but often included too many highly defensible areas, with no long-range weapons that were long-range enough to reach. This creates incentive for players to turtle up, play defensive, and by default enter a war of attrition, without a ton of ore to fund it. So to that effect, many of the new Scorched Earth maps force a player into an offensive guard, stationing troops or tank squads outside of a base, in a kind of layering. Others focus a player to grow as fast as possible, to expand into strategic areas to advance economically, where boldness is rewarded.
With the above two points, tactics have to change naturally. Acting militarily to enhance ones economy, or vice versa, is the method of all the greatest empires. Attacking the attacker to limit or redirect the assault on the core of the base can be essential to surviving. Attacking an enemy base from the air, land, and sea simultaneously, can distract enemy forces to create openings that otherwise don't exist. Every unit has strengths, and generally an obviously exploitable weakness. Learn your strengths, and chain them together in clever ways, or watch the clever AI do it to you...
I want players to both curse and laugh, at their successes and failures. If a new player experiences that, I'll know I achieved what I wanted from this mod.
*Update*
Many of the 2018 goals regarding general cleanup and a finalization of the urban terrain expansion have been reached, but as is often the case, progress tends to inspire more ambitious undertakings. Major milestones, such as completion of an Empire State building, the Woolworth's building and other feature buildings have given city maps new life, but the introduction of dead grass and new sporting venue tiles have also added to long neglected areas. Since Scorched Earth will always be primarily focused on urban warfare, additions along that line will always take precedence, even when other aspects are being completed.
The careful focus on new terrain for the urban theater is helping to map out the deficiencies that both Snow and Temperate terrains suffer from. Simple things such as the urban laneways and parking lots are severely lacking for the other threaters, but with the greater number of available tilesets to take advantage of, the goal will be to quickly grow beyond mere imports from one to the other, and add entire replacement tilesets for dirt roads or other tilesets fundamental to making cities, especially where the rural nature of the existing tilesets is inadequate.
Even with intermittent work on the mod, things should progress rather quickly for the rest of the year!
