Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)

Fun, but insanely difficult, even on easy mode. You start off in control of half the country, either the Union or the Confederacy, complete with their own strengths and weaknesses. You are brought up to speed on the condition of the land via cabinet reports and newspaper articles (which will report on your actions and the result of those choices), and you're tasked with maintaining the economy, international relationships, national morale, and military. And it takes you a good while to get the ball rolling, as building something like a simple flour mill costs your country millions, and even millions more to subsidize any aspect of the country. So you have to play this delicate balance between them, as they are not entirely intuitive, and focusing on any one of them (say military) completely destabilizes your economy, screws up your national credit rating, and sends your country into massive debt. And after you're just beginning to stabilize your country, then the Battle of Fort Sumter erupts, and you're suddenly off to the races. You find your 9k troop regiments you struggled to build up are no match for the sudden appearance of 19-20k troop enemies that suddenly appear, and they stampede all throughout your land, ransacking and attacking everything in sight. Your economy tanks, morale drops, and outside countries like Great Britain start siding with the enemy, despite your attempt to dissuade them via policies. And that's on easy mode. I think if there are any tweaks to the game that should be made, I think the economy and timings of the game should be adjusted. I think you should be able to at least get your country mobilized without bankrupting your economy. To tell me I need a flour and iron mill to help the economy, only to turn around and cost me millions of dollars to build one of each and send my country into 30+ million in debt, causing my treasury to have to take out loans via bonds, and watch my national credit rating go straight from A+ to BBB-, shouldn't really be a thing. On the plus side of things, I think the AI of the troops are pretty spot on, more or less. The delay in orders, the necessity of rail lines and telegraph stations, the fog of war, troop fatigue and emotional states, really add to immersion of the gameplay. It does add a bit of intentional frustration when your flank crumbles and falls back because your officers in command of the flank disagree with you and the go rogue, threatening your position on the battlefield. And the need to build and maintain supply lines across the country is also a nice touch, as armies do need guns, gunpowder, cannons, food, and medical supplies, which are a constant need for any regiments, especially when in enemy territories.

The tutorials in this game are outdated not only in the names locations and objectives but you cant even learn the game effectively without looking up every individual component of the game and cross compare to the version you have if its the DLC or not and then you cant deactivate tutorials that i could locate. The idea of this game is amazing but with implementation for a Full time dad and full time nurse this is overly complicated resulting in an unplayable experience due to the complexity and lack of any form of guidance and then you are forced to ply broken tutorials.

Overall... it's much more frustrating than it is fun. I don't recommend it. You will spend A LOT of time screwing around with the controls, wondering why the RTS battle controls that every single other RTS uses, don't apply here. Basic stuff like holding middle mouse to adjust camera angle... nope. The battle order delay seems like a good idea on paper... very frustrating in practice. Again, in other games if you need to readjust where you send a unit, you just quickly tell them. Here, every single click counts. Your unit will go where you originally told them until they "receive" their new orders. You WILL be save-scumming regularly when you screw this up. It's not fun. Oh, you want to click-and-drag your mouse to select multiple infantry units, like in every single other RTS game? Nope. Can't do that either. Instead, you can move all units under your command in formation, by moving your general's "HQ" unit. No, this is not a better system -- the HQ unit is invincible, which is... weird... and sometimes you want to split the units up and move them as separate groups. It's a shame, because the systems that are setup within the game seem like good IDEAS. The order delay system could be fine, just needs work. The "troops are supplied if they're within radius of the HQ" thing, could be good. It's just, throughout the RTS-style battles, you will feel like you just don't have the control that you want... you'll always be wondering why this one guy won't move like you told him to. The most fun I had in the game was, with Whiskey and Lemons, playing as a low-ranked officer of 1 cavalry unit. When all I had to worry about was maneuvering one cav unit, it was fun. The readiness system... most YouTubers even tell you, turn Readiness off entirely before you start a campaign, that it just adds frustration. The expansiveness of the map is great, the general bios are great. But the devs ultimately shot too high with this and didn't see the required fixes through to the end. The complicated systems in-game fall apart under their own weight, and it just... isn't fun.

This is such an incredible game for military commanders. 5.9 hours in a single day i just could not stop playing. Unlike titles such as scourge of war you get the gist of it pretty quick as the UI is extremely intuitive. Graffics wise dont expect miracles but what it lacks in shiny it delivers in detail. I'm not a hardcore strategy player but as i said, the UI is so Intuitive i got the hang of it in 2 hours. Easy to understand hard to master. Now I don't know much about the civil war aside from the movie Gods and Generals and Gettysburg but the beauty is you don't need to, as the game explains every battle you will fight and the chain of command is pretty straightforward. These guys are truly passionate about their history and if every country had people as dedicated to honoring their history and theirs like this the world would be a better place. I want to truly thank the team for this outstanding piece of interactive art. Again, i'm not american at all but this is a very very good introduction to the civil war. Hope the Napoleonic game comes along nicely.

this game is good but I really struggle to commit to a whole campaign its just too slow battle wise spending up to 3 hours on one battle just to lose and have to wait another 1 hour before that army can move again due to the readiness mechanic is just too slow. I appreciate this game the battle system is cool the vibe is unmatched and it can be fun but it requires a very specific mood and technically speaking its super choppy on the campaign map also the ai leaves a lot to be desired. overall from what ive played 6/10 it is fun at times but to be honest its not worth the asking price get it on discount if you are planning on buying it

Seems pretty historically accurate. Very difficult if playing CSA.

if youre an avid ACW geek, its really good. I enjoy it a lot. Buy on sale. the whiskey and lemons DLC is also a great addition

The most realistic and in depth strategy game that has ever been made. - Order Delays ✓ - Fog of War ✓ - Command Hierarchy ✓ - Exact counts of soldiers in a unit ✓ - Combat mechanics that factor in exact troop counts, what weapons a unit has, how much experience a unit has, cover, whether a unit is in combat for the first time, etc. ✓ - A painfully high quality economy system with accurate mechanics for national debt and credit scores ✓

Incredibly detalied, the pacing and command on the battlefield is excellent

So there are a lot of cases where you should listen to the good reviews. The bad reviews are for bad reasons. A lot of times you should listen to the good ones, because they're for good reasons. Listen to both good and bad, because this game is as mixed of a bag as you're gonna get. The orders of battle, roster of historical officers, historical weaponry and procurement of it, and state population/support-based volunteer/draftees makes this one of the deepest strategic games of the American Civil War ever made. It's definitely the deepest I've ever played. From there on out, everything is incredibly janky and kinda busted in too many ways to count. The economics system is wholly unnecessary. You'll only build a few buildings throughout a campaign, and will barely understand how, or even if they help you. You get next to no instruction; I'd say at a beta level, for how any of the dozens of resources do anything. It was clearly a developer's passion project on some level, and is in some way impressive, but it's hard to tell the practical difference from any normal strategy game "take territory, get/take more money." Being able to give division commanders vague orders to hold ground on their own is great. It keeps you from needing to micromanage too much, and also just experience two armies going at it. Ultimate General, for me, sometimes had a unit with high morale get charged and take 0 casualties, on multiple occasion, but in Grand Tactician, it's a real joy to see a couple of armies going at it, trading musket fire. But there's that problem of zero feedback, where sometimes a unit needs a sec to get moving because they have to disengage from fighting or something, or sometimes it just didn't respond at all, so you need to brute force commands until it works. This means the order delay system just kinda makes this a terrible experience. Are my orders en route? Or is the unit not responding? Sometimes the orders arrive and you can't tell if they worked. I have to play with order delays off. I like the game a lot. I think it's got a claim to being the best American Civil War strategy game on the market. But I also think that has a lot to do with there not being a whole lot of American Civil War strategy games coming out on the market.