There are some graphical enhancements in Panzer General III Scorched Earth, such as the representation of inclement weather like rain or snow. These are useful indicators in helping a commander easily identify the weather driven preclusion of air strikes, but can also sometimes reduce visibility on the screen. It's one thing to let the player know there's fog on the battlefield, it's another to make the screen fuzzier, though this usually didn't cause problems.
Two other new features are negligible. The auto-deploy feature will automatically place the player's starting units for them, but this is useful for novices at best, since most players would prefer to place their own. The game also has some new victory conditions. Instead of just taking a particular location, players may have to destroy a defined set of units. This new feature seems ridiculous in implementation, however, as it implies an assassination motive, and the Eastern Front wasn't about selective killing as it was sweeping changes in territory control. For example, a German campaign mission has the player hunting down Russian tanks and troops of an elite guard, supposedly in efforts to prevent their reinforcement and future use. Is this any different, however, from winning an engagement of attrition, more realistically defined by specifying that a certain percentage of enemy forces be destroyed, rather than a specific few?
If the improvements failed to make the game necessarily any better, the things unchanged suffer the same problems from Panzer General 3D. It's bad enough that selecting and moving units is sometimes difficult because it's easy to mis-click stacked or bunched units, but the amount of clicking is kept needlessly high because little information is available at first glance. There's substantial information available within the confines of the Panzer General combat engine, but except for generic damage levels visually indicated by smoke emanating from the unit, the bulk of it hides behind a secondary mouse button click. It's nice that a colored flag rises to alert the player to a unit's low ammunition status, but why couldn't similar uses of the graphics illustrate special unit and leader skills? Or why couldn't there be an easy way to compare an opposing unit's offensive and defensive rating against your unit's? There is some of this displayed in kill/loss probabilities in the cursor when mousing over a target, but to get a detailed picture, you have to dig.
The units themselves look great, with good likeness to their real-life counterparts, and details such as moving turrets or animated firing sequences. More could have been done; it would have been nice if you could tell a glance, for example, if a tank was hull down or if its leader was capable of special attacks.