Watching the 1st 5 eps of Ace Troops, I fast forward or skipped a lot. I couldn't really grasp what the drama was trying to do, the background military details or scenes with Seniors etc didn't intrigue me, I was there for the coming of age story of the kids which I thought was the strong point of the show. The shenanigans they got into were realistic, relatable and I loved how it gave a mundane, "Even the soldiers are humans, not killing machines" approach to the show.
Also while I'm not Chinese I think I can safely say the drama doesn't have in-your-face patriotism or propaganda (which seems to be something that puts out lot of viewers unfamiliar with/dislike patriotic themes) , only a reasonable amount that you'd expect to come with any military drama (expecting a military drama to have zero patriotism is pointless).
Anyway that was about the good things I had to say about Ace Troops, and I stuck through mostly for Xiao Zhan or so I thought. And I'm glad I did.
Because I started seeing more and more positive things about it. It started with noticing how "non-glamourous" XZ was here. Usually he stands out with his looks, but here, he's just another normal soldier. A fairly good looking one but that's about it. The drama's goal wasn't to promote or hide under a single character or actor, but to create a collective story where every single person equally contributes.

By extension, the entire drama was grounded and humble, and never glorified military and instead discussed it from multiple viewpoints. It was so nice and such an unexpected, refreshing surprise, I started caring more. I stopped skipping scenes and started paying complete attention.
Absolutely none of the characters were perfect. They had lots of flaws. But this wasn't due to lazy writing or because the scriptwriter thought it was right for the characters to behave in ways they did, because each time a character did or had a questionable opinion/attitude/action, there was always, always another character to counter and question what they were doing. Therefore these flaws were intentionally done, do emphasis how human the characters were and how everyone makes terrible decisions in life.
It made them feel like people you encounter in day to day in real life. I always love myself a non-judgemental, empathetic and nuanced storytelling like this.
Never did I imagine I'd binge a hard-core 40 ep military drama in less than a week, and thoroughly enjoy it. It made me root hard for almost all the characters and made me cry multiple times.

Also I think I have never ever been this impressed with a Cdrama production before. I know I know, there have been lots more big dramas with obvious "big production values" right? So what caught me by surprise here?
I was already impressed from since the initial episodes with how they had full on regiments of extras- all trained and disciplined etc which must be like 100x difficult than handling regular extras for a drama.
And now I see the war scenes and explosions and floods..... like omg???
Did they get footage from real army or did they really recreate all these.... anyway I'm mindblown.

I've been complaining for a while about how C Cinema etc productions from about 20 yrs ago were not afraid to be full on grimy, gritty but rarely we see such content anymore, everyone too focused on glorified, rose-tinted approaches.
And then Ace Troops happened and took it up like 5 notches.

I'm left wondering about how the hell was this drama made? How did they plan it even, to look so believable and real? How much was the budget? How much time did it take?

In conclusion, I'm glad to see the drama took its job seriously. It's glamorizes very little and keeps things realistic at the same time making it a show about people behind the guns which makes it so watchable despite what it looks like on paper, even for people who thought they wouldn't like a show of this theme (like me).
I think it's very important for a country with military history and so much war and pain to depict it in dynamic ways like this (not overtly rose-tinted, not overtly patriotic/propagandaic) so viewers could learn about the sacrifices that were made so they could enjoy peace.
Ace Troops isn't a perfect show, it does have issues here and there (I had quite a bit of issues with last few eps) and I'm sure it also has inaccuracies on military plotlines too which are not visible to a common viewer like me, but I think I can safely say this is comparatively a really well made military drama.