Having played MoW and Red Tide it was pretty easy to jump into ToW. In retrospect though it probably wasn't the best idea to start with the Polish campaign on hardest mode, swear it took me a whole day of replaying the last Polish mission before beating it. But it did make every campaign after that seem like a cakewalk
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Have to say I like ToW a lot better than MoW. Although they are quite similar, I found MoW had too many commando style missions whereas I prefer the larger battles of ToW. I thought ToW1 was awesome, but it did make ToW2 somewhat disappointing in that it had fewer campaigns and the game didn't last as long. It took me substantially less time to beat all of ToW2 Africa+Kursk and the expansions Centauro+Caen than to beat ToW1. I am currently working on throwing extra missions into the campaigns to make them longer, my new German Kursk campaign is 25 battles long. But even as a veteran Hearts of Iron II/III, Civ 3/4, and Red Orchestra modder, I am finding it very difficult to decipher how to work the triggers in the mission editor.
I hear that the next ToW is going to be Korea which I am sure is going to be very interesting. But I hope this is not the beginning of a slide towards Vietnam and modern warfare to which a lot of WW2 game franchises have deserted. I really hope that after Korea, ToW returns to WW2 and all the great possibilities yet to explore instead of jumping on the modern warfare bandwagon which leaves classic gamers scratching their heads and uninterested.