Apparently EA recently hosted a C&C summit for the new C&C where they invited community sites to play the game and provide feedback, and then allowed them to write previews based on their experiences.Game Replays put up a notably lengthy, but measured sounding article, so I thought it might be worth sharing a recap.The full article (there's a lot here): http://www.gamereplays.org/generals2/portals.php?show=news&tid=910692 Details:-EA flew 12 community site heads (and presumably paid their full way) out to Los Angeles to play the new C&C game for two days and give feedback to the team about their impressions.-EA usually holds a summit like this for every C&C game, but the difference this time was that instead of presenting a game that was near gold master (and thus relatively unchangeable), making the summit more of a preview event than a real feedback event, this one was much earlier in development so that feedback could actually be addressed.-Almost all the senior staff from the old team is gone, replaced with the team JVC built when after he launched the studio.-The game will be treated as a service in the same sense games like Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, and other high profile f2p titles are, as in it will be expanded with a large number of additions, balancing patches, new modes, etc post launch. The base version will launch with Generals content.-C&C will be a traditional RTS with base building, resource collection, and three unique factions. It also presumably features a very prominent annihilation mode. Basically, think more like StarCraft 2 and less like DoW/CoH.-[Nirolak's Note: "Think more like StarCraft 2" could also probably be a bit of a motto for this game as several of the following points will show.]-The game features a fragile, harassable builder unit, and killing that unit will cause a building to stop constructing. Game Replays feels this will help stop "base crawling Whack-A-Mole". I haven't played enough C&C to experience this, but I assume this was because players could just pop up a building without the enemy having a notably effective to stop it, thus inching their base into the enemy.-Resource nodes now have a maximum optimal number of harvesters, meaning that the rate at which you can collect resources from any given location is gated, which in turn helps promote creating expansion bases. Of course, taking an expansion can be risky as you have to invest in making and defending an output.-There is also new resource that serves the same purpose as vespene gas (as in it's used for higher tech tree units and structures). The vespene gas resource (oil) however is autocollected by building an oil derrick on it as opposed to requiring more workers.-Supply Drops and Black Markets have been removed so that it is actually possible to run out of resources on a map, meaning that you can no longer have indefinite late game income.-The way each faction techs up is unique, and the tech tree variety was compared to Red Alert 3. The authors said it was notably more robust than the first Generals game, but that the specifics of the tech trees are currently NDA'ed and thus they can't share more information on them at the moment.-While the infantry units have the appearance of squads, this is simply an aesthetic, as the squad functions as a single unit (like, when they get killed, all the units will die, and they don't have different weapons or things in the squad like in Dawn of War or Company of Heroes).-Building placement is currently grid based and uses 90 degree rotations, but this is still an in progress.-Game Replays really liked the fundamentals of the game, but noted that inherently only playing for two days is not nearly enough time to analyze all the amount of depth and nuance present in the game and see how it would hold up in the long run. They did note that they like the initial result of the core mechanics changes in that the game now promotes manageably sized armies where the importance of unit control/positioning is much greater than before, as opposed to the more raw numbers focused game of yore.-Their game balance philosophy is that they want to balance the title from both a numeric (damage/unit cost) and usage (strategy) perspective, so they built tools to collect a gigantic amount of data that will help them analyze both on a large scale. A large part of the reason they felt they needed this is that they want the factions to be rather divergent, since they feel having mirror-match-esque factions is rather boring, but that inherently makes balancing much more difficult.-Victory has claimed that they've actually not yet decided how to monetize the game outside of the fact that it will be F2P. They did note though that they believed basically no one would actually want to play the game if it had anything the RTS community would consider pay 2 win or imbalancing, thus causing them to have essentially flushed all the money they spent down the drain. [Nirolak Note: To check on this claim, I went to their job site and noticed they are trying to hire a monetization designer, so it is possible they are being truthful.] Game Replays did note however that even with good intentions, there are definitely ways you could still mess up monetizing a title like this.-While Skirmish is present (and presumably what they played), the game will also feature additional PvP and PvE modes. [Nirolak's Note: A long time ago JVC hinted that the game would have a lot more variety than RTS games generally do in terms of modes. I imagine some of those will be coming post launch however.]-Game Replays ends on a note that the development team seems to understand the fundamentals of what makes a good game, but of course, having only seen a build that was legitimately early for a relatively short period of time, all they can assert is that the game has potential, not if it will actually end up living up to it. There is also an official EA video from the summit , but as a warning, it's kind of stomach churningly informercial-esque. It does feature a bit of new footage however.