Ulasan

• gamedeal user

  Dec 9, 2021

  I have been playing American Civil War games since I was 12 (I'm now almost 40). I've always longed for a game that allowed me to control one side throughout the civil war - plan my strategy, move my armies and fight on the battlefield, and whilst there's been some good games in the genre, there was nothing that gave that amount of control. UNTIL NOW. This game is superb. I can set my economic and foreign policy direction (without loads of micro), organise my armies (down to individual brigades, from their uniform, to their weapons to their leader), assign leaders, reward excellence, punish failure (or blame my failure on an unlucky general) and execute battles as commander in chief. The game is easy to understand after a few hours and once you get your head around the generals have their own styles derived from various traits it answers questions such as 'why isn't that general moving to attack that hill like I bloody ordered him to? Oh he's a cautious inexperienced general - that makes sense'. Battles can take place over a number of days which is very engaging and I cannot stress enough how well this represents actual civil war battles. On day one it might be a mad scramble to take objectives or wrestle control of a hill from the enemy. Over night both sides prepare their defences and plan their strategy for the next day. Perhaps I can shell the enemy defences (a la a successful Picketts Charge) and overwhelm the position before they receive reinforcements marching in from the East. Or maybe I can hold onto the high ground long enough to wear the enemy down and pluck a tactical victory from the jaws of impending defeat. This is also the first civil war game where the casualty rates feel 'right'. In addition morale just makes sense and allows me to think more like a general of the time. Crossing open fields under cannon and volley fire is deadly and will rattle the men so maybe I need to send in waves of attack (like they did in real battles and made their tactics make more sense to me). Of course I could try to flank through those forests and streams to the West, but my units become disorganised and the men tired and I won't be able to bring up my artillery quickly and who knows if they can get in position with much daylight left - by which point the enemy may have altered or reinforced their position. Simply put the game makes you think like a civil war general. The game can be played from the map during battles or on the 3D terrain which is great and feels very immersive. In addition the game was recently updated to include 3D sprites which are superb. On the topic of updates, the Dev has demonstrated to be very responsive to not only squashing bugs (within a day often) but in the short time since it has been out the game has been significantly improved and added to. I look forward to seeing what more they do with it. If you like playing games about the American Civil War and want a holistic and immersive experience, I literally cannot recommend any other Civil War game more than this one. For me it's the type of game I've been waiting decades for and I was very prepared to be supremely let down. But I am pleased to report the game has lived up to its claims and aims (one of the few that do) and it is superb. If you're reading this, stop, just buy the game already.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 26, 2022

  This is the first review I've written for a game. This game has a lot of potential, and is a lot better then it was in early access when I originally bought it. However, its current flaws stop me from being able to enjoy it. There are 3 main flaws with this game. 1: Armies and units in those armies retreat stupidly. If you are a union force that loses a battle in Virginia, prepare for your army to run to Richmond in retreat.... somehow. 2: its impossible to pin an army down. That army you just had run into Virginia? If the Confederate AI sends an army after it, it might retreat into North Carolina, then through Tennessee, then into Kentucky. It will do all of this over the span of a couple weeks, without supplies for the most part. There is no chance of the confederates to pin your army down to destroy it, nor is there anyway for you to tell you army what to do. 3: The way an army disengages from another does not make any sense. If I am Robert E Lee at Antietam i would have simply clicked the withdraw button. This button gives you a timer, based on size and shape of your army, that after is up you "withdraw" from the battlefield with any unit that has not surrendered. If your entire army is surrounded 3 to 1, but the magical withdraw timer runs out? all of your remaining men will teleport out of the encirclement and live to fight another day..... or forever with point 2 these 3 flaws are game breaking, because there is no way to actually achieve victory without exploiting the really buggy AI Some good things: There are still pretty regular updates, and the devs listen to the players sometimes. The actual fighting and immersion is generally pretty good. The policy system is fine, and it allows for some alt history which is needed for any good grand strategy game. However the game is too buggy for me to continue to play it without massive updates
• gamedeal user

  May 24, 2022

  This but set during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars would be legendary. I can't wait for Grand Tactician: Napoleon!
• gamedeal user

  Jul 15, 2022

  great game getting better with every patch. its a perfect fusion between grand strategy, economic management and fantastic real time battles. everything that the total war games once promised to become. i really love the way you build armies. would highly recommend. (if any of the developers read this then please do a Napoleonic game next)
• gamedeal user

  Sep 13, 2022

  You know. I was enjoying this game. A lot. Really digging it. Complicated, but I played Crusader Kings 1, and play Crusader Kings 2 (haven't gotten 3 yet). I like learning complicated games with multiple in-depth, interesting systems. Anyway, I'm chugging along, I get into a battle, I have my infantry unit melee an artillery unit (that never gets a single shot off on my men, I timed my rush to go specifically as they were reloading). 2,900-ish-strong infantry unit (which was in reserve, had full morale, and hadn't been in any fighting at all in that battle) shatters and breaks like glass a rock has been chucked into. Against 35 men in an artillery unit. 35. I apparently ran into the 300 Spartans, reborn in the form of 35 artillerymen. I don't get it. My guys could've picked them up and crowdsurfed them into the ocean. They could've stepped on them, all the way to the next engagement. 35 guys who never got a single shot off against any of my 2,900 seasoned infantry, and they gave like a wet paper bag. It destroyed my immersion and my desire to play the game any further. If you like a game that's really complicated but rewarding, this is the game for you. But that level of... Janky weirdness with the AI right there that I just described totally shot my desire to play it any further, personally. I hope you have better luck, General. o7
• gamedeal user

  Dec 26, 2022

  A great game... held back by the fact that the AI is absolutely wack. Without fail on every difficulty setting, the CSA will always pull a massive 100k man army out of nowhere... and go attack Wheeling for some reason, letting you march into Richmond unopposed and sack 90% of their industrial capacity. This is one of those games that has order delays and sub-commander AI that does it's own thing, unlike most other games though the implementation is horrible. Units will sit on their hands and watch the enemy march right in front of them without doing a thing or walk right into them without stopping because their old orders told them to. Winning battles in this game comes down to simply moving a bit ahead of where the AI thinks you're going to be and digging in there. Doesn't matter if it's some dweeb or Robert E Lee they'll walk right into you and charge their entire army right into firing range before they can even get into formation. I've been telling myself for 2 years that these issues have already greatly diminished or are going to be fixed, but looking back I realize they still remain, unaffected.
• gamedeal user

  May 18, 2023

  Man, I love this game -- or at least I want to love it -- so much. If you're into Civil War era war games, you don't exactly have a lot to choose from right now, so this is a no brainer, and I hope people will buy this so that it gets the support and patches it desperately needs. The thing is, going in, you need to be ready to deal with so, so much jank. Some of it comes down to baffling design decisions, and some of it just reeks of under-developed elements. Be warned -- I've played two campaigns now, probably 8 months apart, and as far as I can see none of the issues I have were fixed in that space. I'm going to brain dump a tonne of major and minor issues I have with this game. If you're okay with this list, give this a buy. But you do need to be prepared to deal with a lot of jank. 1. Attack and defence work in a truly bizarre way. Best illustrated with an example: I captured Richmond from the rebels. The rebels want it back. They initiate an attack on my army currently occupying Richmond. For some weird reason, the objective on the battle map is that I have to capture some totally random victory points. This I have lost the defensive benefit of, you know, being the defender, and have to leave my entrenchments to attack a numerically superior enemy. If I fail in this attack, my army retreats from Richmond for no reason. Some people seem to like this because they think it simulates your commanders making bad decisions, but I find it super arbitrary and incredibly frustrating, not getting to choose when to attack and when to defend for myself. 2. The UI is an ungodly mess. As wargamers we're pretty used to this, but it really is bad. On the battle maps, icons get lost behind each other. On the strategy map, armies can also get lost behind each other, so you get into a fight and find out that actually it's two armies instead of one and you're fighting twice as many units as you thought. Icons for units on the battle map disappear depending on zoom level, making it annoying to read the map and hard to find smaller units like skirmishers who might be a long way from the main body of your force. 3. Giving orders to units is so incredibly janky. Sometimes they'll take idiotic paths that lead them straight into the enemy lines. You'll try to recall them but the order delay stops you because apparently your units won't avoid suicide unless expressly ordered to do so by a Major General. This pairs up with the broken UI to make organising a large army infuriating. Sometimes the UI will show that your unit is set to line formation, when actually they're moving in marching columns. To fix this you have to change to a different formation, deselect the unit, reselect it, then swap it back to the formation you actually want. Similarly units will seemingly forget the move commands you gave them, or reset from quick march to normal speed for no apparent reason. 4. The save system is somewhat broken. When you load an old save, there's a good chance that key details of your game will have been changed. Sometimes enemy armies seem to change size (this might be that your intelligence on them has changed). If you have units set to execute orders on a particular date on the strategy map, and you reload your save, they'll execute the order immediately instead of waiting to the correct date. If you re-load a mid-battle save, states of your troops will be different. E.g. they might reset from 'engage at long range' to 'engage at medium range'. If you saved during an engagement, it means they might now be refusing to fire at the enemies in front of them. Fixing this incurs an order delay which may then cost you casualties. 5. Artillery is almost pointless. Trying to put them somewhere with line of sight is almost impossible. The game gives you almost no tools for reading elevation on the map, or for seeing line of sight from a given location, so you just have to plonk your guns somewhere and hope they manage to shoot at something. 6. Game performance is horrible. It's not a twitchy game so it's not the end of the world but it runs horribly on an RTX 3060 and Ryzen 5800X with 32GB of RAM. 7. Enemy AI can go either way. Sometimes they seem to execute quite a smart attack. Other times they'll abandon their entrenchments, go and stand in a big blob somewhere else and wait for you to encircle them and wipe out the whole army. All of the above is a shame, and it says a lot that, given all the above, given many times when I've quit the game in disgust and vowed that I'm done with it, I keep coming back. When the huge battles get going, there's nothing else like it. I just wish some of the above would be addressed. There's apparently paid DLC on the way. Talk of this with so many glaring issues still in place worries me, but maybe it'll bring enough of a cash injection to start tackling these things. When you properly get a battle going, they're great. They can be really dynamic
• gamedeal user

  Jun 20, 2023

  If I had a nickel for every time I defeated a Confederate army that then retreated north through all of Ohio through two more of my armies, before completely reinforcing in the middle of Lake Erie and then coming back to invade Cleveland, I'd have two whole nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it's happened twice. The building system is useless, you will watch the AI teleport across entire states and ford rivers straight through an entire squadron of your gunboats, you will watch 3,000 men starve to death in the middle of Philadelphia because the supply system is hot garbage, and the AI will manage to tie down 80,000 of your soldiers in a battle for six months using less than a tenth of that. The game has so many great features, but it's like one step forward, two steps back because every good feature goes hand in hand with something just mindbogglingly stupid or hopelessly broken. In my latest game, the Confederacy was two billion in debt with no credit, before proceeding to glitch their army morale, raise 400,000 men, and then drown me in angry bulletproof rednecks. The naval system is decent, but also completely useless. Blockading every single AI port has no tangible effect nor will it stop them from zerg-rushing a squadron of ironclads with several dozen tender boats with a cannon duct taped to the bow (and winning). Controlling the rivers and coast doesn't do anything, nor will it stop the AI from sailing right through your entire navy to randomly invade New York with 50,000 dudes while you're preoccupied with burning Richmond to the ground. I really want to like this game, because it's very ambitious about portraying the Civil War to a level of detail that no other game has, but it's simply too busted to like right now. The less said about optimization, UI, and performance, the better.
• tt

  Aug 22, 2023

  This is, quite simply, the most enjoyable grand strategy game I've ever played. Is it perfect? No. Bug free, No. But enjoyable? it rocks.
• badluckbryan

  Aug 28, 2023

  Unfortunately, the game is still not in an acceptable state even after 3 years post EA. As I can only speak from my experience, I feel the game took a few steps back and we're back in EA phase years prior. The previous release of the latest release of the DLC "Whiskey & Lemons" just exacerbated the glaring issues that still remain: - Clunky UI - The AI performing subpar to just plain broken - Random bugs that still plague the game years later However, that's not to say I didn't have fun playing this game. I absolutely did at times, and I know that there is a gem here for Civil War buffs to enjoy. But in its current state I can't recommend the game at this time.