Yeah, they dropped the ball with the navy content. You can have naval and land decks, but land decks can have ships too. The problem is that some of the ships don't fit into the scale of combat. You have frigates and destroyers as your largest ship, and these are too big and powerful to be balanced with the smaller coastal boats. The larger ships could have been for the navy maps while the smaller coastal boats and riverine craft could have been for land maps. However due to their size, it's like putting a full sized battleship into swimming pool.
The other problem is that in the mixed maps is that naval combat is out of sync with the land combat, which means that ships are only good for fighting other ships. Fewer few of them can actually support a land battle.
Naval Combat can basically be described as getting a blob of ships and send them off on their merry way. Ships fire missiles at each other while anti air and cwis gun down all incoming missiles. Hardly any strategy to it. Balance is pretty too considering that PACT/REDFOR ships were pretty powerful. However in the land battle the PACT/REDFOR forces are pretty gimped compared to NATO/BLUFOR forces. NATO units are well priced and perform their jobs well, while PACT ones are over priced and under perform.
For 10 Points you can get this ultramodern NATO APC which has a nice long ranged M2 browning, perfect armor, and perfect speed.
For 10 Points you can get this really slow old armored car with terrible armor and a short ranged machine gun that can kill anything.
Map design is pretty bad, a lot of the maps have choke points ever where. You can attack the enemy, but the moment your forces will soon see oceans of anti tank missiles, aircraft, and artillery coming down on you. Tanks and tracked apcs have been made useless because of this map design. It is pretty boring. The current meta is basically to rush to all the towns with spec ops riding in helicopters and to dump them into a town and camp all day while you fire artillery and drop bombs on the enemy. It's like Eugen developed Maginot line syndrome and decided that every map must be hard to attack on so that every battle turns into 1914. Some of the maps from the BETA looked promising, and very few maps are actually good. Most of them involve throwing you men into the unstoppable grinder while jets and artillery come down and rape your ground forces. It is also frustrating that the enemy can sneak a squad of Fallschrimjaegar around the edge of the map and get through your defenses and hide to spot targets for artillery in your base.
As for ERA based combat, Eugen came out to so that Cat-C decks and Cat-B decks were basically for category lobbies. Which means that if you want to fight with Vietnam era weaponry, you have to go find a game where people fight with Vietnam era technology as well. The problem is that the game is stilled trying to be balanced for mixed play. You have can have 60 old tanks and only 5 modern ones. They should have followed Flames of War model and break down the game into three different time periods.
As you can see in this diagram here, unit pricing and availability has be tweaked to fit the time period. By the 1990s the M60A3, Base M1, M1LP, and M1A1 would have been the common tanks. Stuff like the T-34, Su-76, and Su-100 would have been turned into 1 card reservists in the 90s part of the game, but they would be really common in the Cat-C battle. I don't see why eugen could follow that set up instead of trying to balance old with new.
There are a lot of flaws, but I believe the game can still be saved through rebalancing, redoing concepts, and mod support. It's just that it seems Eugen has lost interest in the Wargame series.
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