I've been playing this for a while, a few skirmish battles and now I just did the first of the "Operations" they recently added. I don't get the appeal though.
This game is just head-on battles, capture the flag stuff. No real maneuvering, no entrenchments, no minefields. The developer excuse themselves with "historical reasons" for this, as in this is the first hours and days of a conventional WW3, no one has time to dig trenches and lay mines. Fair enough, but the gameplay just turns into a "pick the right counter unit". Additionally, terrain is very simplistically represented. Just having LoS and "attack-move" order can't pass as killer features, please.
Also I can't say I'm crazy about the graphics, which are supposed to be a big thing. For the majority of the time you are just looking at the 2d sprites/icons of your units.
I have 16 hours in WARNO and 25 hours in Steel Division 2. Only singleplayer, which I guess someone is going to point at as being "my problem". Well, I don't imagine multiplayer being much more fun given these mechanics. Does the game somehow become much better in multiplayer?
I might shed some light on this. IMO it is very fun in multiplayer. With a disclaimer that I am a big Wargame/WARNO fanboy, got 936h on WG:RD, 286h on WG:ALB and 124h on WW:EE. Almost exclusively multiplayer, almost number one reason why I'm playing catch up with Pathfinder: Kingmaker and other RPGs at the moment.
For the multiplayer Conquest mode in general I would say that the enjoyment comes from a couple of points.
The complex unity dynamics of the cold war which is mainly driven by the use of missiles, rocket artillery, helicopters and jet planes which creates new standoff threats and increases the "skill cap" of making successful attacks with the multitude of units available and threats.
Divisions, which are meant to have more balanced pros and cons than the nation approach of WG. The lethality of weapons, which sort of actually removes counter play on one hand because anything from a militia with an recoiless-rifle, infantry ATGM, Apache Longbow to Plane based ATGM can threaten your heavy tank given good setup, and this goes for all units.
This combined with the deck system makes a lot of the fun, for me at least, to figure out your vision of an effective fighting force and proving it in action. Kinda like Magic: The Gathering deck building. Especially if you have a military historic interest of the period.
With that said I am personally not a big fan of the Conquest gamemode, which I assure you is heresy to say on the reddit or discord. Having magical flags in open field for a WW3 game always felt wrong for me. Wish they developed something better, destruction is considerd a noob mode because people just arty snipe to get to the win limit.
What makes WARNO in particular exciting is two things. Adding new mechanics & QoL and actively removing cheese.
They have added:
Rules Of Engagement which finally transforms your units from dumb 90-era rts units to actual soldiers that react programmable to enemy fire, like the scripting system in Deadfire. Smart Orders like counter battery fire. These two alone addresses your concern of only "attack-move".
Locked in the year 1989 so no 50-era units and stuff like that anymore. Giving orders during deployment. Sell transports after use. Recon and "airmobile" units can deploy further ahead at the start of the game. Infantry carried weapons team. Trait system, like "IFV Infantry" which gets a bonus close to an IFV for infantry and "Security" which upgrades an infantry squads optics after having been stationary for a while, "Leader" increases veterancy of nearby units. Smoke launchers for vehicle that had them IRL. They are allegedly actively working on a real jammer system for SEAD aircrafts instead of just SEAD missiles, actual agile choppers unlike the mobile slow gun turrets of Wargame. High rises in cities and also airstrip maps.
For cheese it's more advanced fine balancing things like: trying in general to actively balance Air&AA (including balance radar and IR AA) interaction to disallow chees strats ( like only helo openers to be effective ) and retain lethality. Removed capture spawn zone so you can't lose the ability to call in troops anymore just because they random bombed a forest in your base. Decreasing tank turret rotation speed to allow infantry to be effective vs them in forest. Increased speed of ATGM and lethality to make them a threat. Fine tune artillery lethality, reload and aim speed, which is very hard because you swing between click and wipe out everything on the map and firing fire crackers and neither is fun gameplay. Reworked suppression.
So in short, WARNO shows great promise specially since they are still actively adding new mechanics to the game. But if you are mainly a SP player I don't know really. The new Operation Mode might be fun? Think I only played Wargame: Air Land Battle in SP which I did enjoy very much, a large part because I'm Swedish so I could play Sweden in Sweden.
