The victory conditions lead to games ending with a whimper rather than a bang. I'm not exactly sure what the answer is, improving the AI should help but you hit a tipping point as soon as you control more than 60-70% of the map at which point victory becomes an inevitability. Maybe it would help if there was a maximum amount of support you could have on any one tile at a time, so that one way or another you would become vulnerable to attacks on your capital. That limit would have to account for entrenchment bonuses of course but it would lead to games ending with a decisive attack on the capital more often.
I'm not sure there's any good way to avoid tipping points, unless you greatly amp up the enemy's power the weaker they get (which makes no sense). It's just something that you have to accept as part of the mechanics of strategy games.
Act 3's layout is much weaker. It's not just because land inexplicably appears, but because that inexplicable new land provides a straight-line drive to reach the enemy capital. The AI is weak on land, and there's no alternate paths.
Some people keep talking about how the original concept looked better to them. I disagree, I was not a fan of the original all-air combat. It was two-dimensional and looked really shallow. I definitely didn't like the flea-sized fighters.
To you people who think the game is too easy by massing units and sending them in, have you not considered changing the difficulty?
