Profile of squippy

Well OK, if you say so. It did not appear that way to me, because even after pointing out that "it depends", you continued to make absolute statements.

As it happens, I have almost the opposite position to yours; I really wish there was less micro in this game. The idea that my troops will just stand there looking at a grenade rolling around their feet unless I personally intervene annoys me immensely, frex. I wish this game could be played more as a strategist, rather than something akin to a concert pianist. I just don;t go around claiming that these things are detrimental to the game merely because they don't appeal to me.

Ah... the "just like in real life" argument - classic.

If you're presuming that I'm making an argument to "realism" you're very much mistaken; that term, along with "balance", should be struck from every game designers vocabulary. I mention it for 2 reasons: first, because a game thematically focused on WW2 should aesthetically resemble WW2, otherwise its theme is lost; and second, because as a war game, it should similarly incorporate elements of actual warfare, including sudden and catastrophic losses.

The "strategy" part of an RTS is that when you fail to kill enemy units in any engagements, you should be able to kill them outside of engagements? Good strategy - seems legit.

Of course. Not only is that entirely realistic as a depiction of warfare, it's a well established tradition in wargaming. I certainly know off-map abilities were present in post-Vietnam wargaming, but I would assume they appeared earlier.

Civilization, to take the almost polar opposite example, is also a strategy game, albeit turn based, but also one in which actual units are secondary to the infrastructural and economic decisions that preceded them. When you say that the game should be this or that, you really have no leg to stand on; all you are really doing is expressing your preference, to which you are perfectly entitled. But there is no particular reason that this or any game must follow your preferences.

Usually, in particular with games with a dedicated fanbase, you'll see oodles of dev diaries, sneak peaks and even just developers dropping hints in the official forums.

I've seen that happen, yes. But that said, I don't follow every game ever made, so I can't really say how common it is; certaily, they don#t all do it all the time. But there is at least one thing that needs to be split out here.

NDA's and PR are not the same thing. Even where companies do show alpha material, that's under the company's control; the playtesters will still be under NDA's, as will everyone working on it. Some suggestions about things that companies might be worried about have already been mentioned upthread. Other concerns might be, personal disputes among players might lead to someone quitting in a huff and badmouthing the game. Or, maybe they tried something, and we know they try to make each faction work differently, and it turned out to be garbage, and so now they are redesigning. Or maybe they are just waiting for some industry event to make an announcement. Or maybe the design is done, but they are using placeholder art and are waiting for new stuff before they show it off.

NDA's are standard practice and don't indicate anything. And as for the lack of info, you can wonder about that, but you might as well be reading chicken entrails.

To be clear, are we referring to Counterattacks on the scale of Unternehmen Lüttich or smaller, tactical counterattacks, such as quickly counterattacking a hill that has been lost?

I'm primarily referring to the tactical and operational levels; the lag time involved in the movements depicted by big arrows on maps means that the distinction between attack and counter-attack is rather thin.

As for predictability, I recall one author - although I can;t provide the source as it was a library book - remarking that the allies prepared for "the inevitable* German counter-attack", with the asterisked footnote reading, as I remember, "When writing history it is generally unwise to use the word "inevitable", except when referring to German counter-attacks."

Even if they didn't do it 100 percent of the time, they did it often enough that at the top of every allied officer's To Do list was "prepare to receive counter-attack".