Man, now I even feel a bit bad for them. C:S2 needed that CPU issue fixed, else people would’ve never been happy, it was the biggest issue of the first game and they were right on prioritizing that.
Now with these issues, they simply should’ve got more time and fix them before release, because most consumer probably don’t care how much devs struggled. Their team isn’t that big, so it’s totally understandable that they didn’t switch engine.
A lot of features that would have helped, from say the recent Unreal Engine feature list, are also very new, people shouldn’t forgot that game development starts many years earlier. And you also don’t know if another engine could’ve handled the CPU issue side any better and then C:S2 would’ve been dead from the start.
At least now I’m looking forward to them fixing the LOD issues and this would show them they gambled correctly, although released too early.