Published unfinished, bugged, manual unsupported, after many patches is till a troublesome waste of time and money
WW1 is not an original project rather a PC conversion of an old board game (La Grande Guerre 14-18) published in 1999 by Azure Wish, 1999.
AGEod, on it's own enriched the program with a mess of bugs, instability problems under XP and Vista, incompatibility with major antivirus programs. It also decided to go after the publication of the game at alpha level, unfinished in most aspects and scenarios and game manual unsupported.
It's then true AGEod later dedicated resources to go after WW1 major troubles and complete the game and the manual: many patches have been posted.
Anyway the game is far being bug-free, and even stable: fatal crashes till occur as documented at AGEod support forum pages.
Such events can prevent player from completing scenarios they went after for days.
The late editing and publication of the game manual that users will have to download for free from AGEod site is evidencing a new problem: the high complexity of the game. Tons of the original board game rules have been reversed into AGEod WW1, without being filtered by a performing interface and game engine.
That makes the game difficult to master and manage for most users.
AI is a week aspects in all AGEod products. Far from planning a long term strategy, unable to react to player moves, AGEod AI is till unable to take in account basic game rules.
Graphically the game in outdated, the 2D map has a primitive look: it's unnatural orientation make things odd to players.
Sound quality is poor too.
Cinematic media support is missing, but the game intro video.
Both graphic and sound issues have been reported as regard stability with most common GPU and sound processors.
WW1 has largely improved from the time it was released, that in consideration of the terrible state of the program at that time.
That does not mean WW1 will reach a decent level in a future: AGEod is used to publish severely bugged games but it's far from assisting their future fixing and improvements to get a good game. Beat proof is visiting AGEod forum pages: users are till reporting trouble with games published more one year ago: AACW, NCP.