ORIGINAL: Jeffrey H.
China is fun to play out. The new game I'm playing is not like the first one I played last year. It seems Germany and Russia are not at war and Russia has almost completely turned East to face China. But tech research is painfully slow. Artillery is king of the land battles, very good against the AI which tends to clump up huge forces within cities and has to be pulverized over many turns. Early vehicle techs are really too weak to support their initial development costs, it makes more sense to simply bulk up on grunts and swarm the NME. It makes the really interesting tech tree go a bit unused. I tend to try to reach far into the tech tree when possible but when facing an AI grunt swarm or two it becomes a real stretch.
The tech bleed off is a neat feature, I'm itching to try it out.
One idea I've been tossing around in my head is a distinction between combat engineers and construction crews. The issue for me is the realtively strong combat nature of standard engineers and HQ's in the game, which I think the AI tends to overuse at least in part because they are good bargains. If they had poor or even nil combat force, I wonder if the AI would still fixate on them so much.
Interesting observations. They match mine actually.
BTW forgot to mention that formation costs are now 0 PP and HQs are 3 PP, where they had been 1 and 5 respectively.
A neat feature, not something i intended, but nice nonetheless, is that you can actually keep track of how many countries have researched something, by looking at the cost for each tech. I found with Mexico i was still researching faster than the AI, but, it was not far behind...
And yeah i agree with you on the strategy. Buy infantry (preferably with around 10% MGs protecting them), and use them defensively until you get artillery that is worth using and then its time to smash through the enemy. Vehicles are nice, when you get them, but not essential, as most countries won´t ever get to the techs giving them vehicles worth anything... except possibly Great Britain and USA. With the new tech bleeding it might change...
Maybe if there was a way to force the AI to use more production on PPs, it would be a different story.
When playing i usually give myself the restriction that i *have* to buy the least expensive techs first, and then the more expensive ones later. Gives a nice balance of techs...
Wish that was something i could produce! 
