Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)

I have spent the last few days playing this game and have really enjoyed it. The learning curve is very steep, but once you get to grips with it this is an enjoyable game. The game is flawed, the battles in particular. There's no doubt about that. But, even with the flawed AI and janky controls, the campaign mode is absolutely fantastic. If youre a civil war buff who enjoys in-depth strategy/RTS games, and you are willing to overlook a few flaws, then you will almost certainly enjoy this game. I would definitely recommend it.

Away down South in the land of traitors, rattlesnakes and alligators Right away! Come away! Right away! Right away, come away! Where cotton's king and men are chattels Union boys will win the battles Right away! Come away! Right away, come away! We'll all go down to Dixie, away, away! Each Dixie boy must understand that he must mind his Uncle Sam Away! Away! We'll all go down to Dixie! Away! Away! We'll all go down to Dixie! I wish I was in Baltimore, I'd make secession traitors roar Right away! Come away! Right away! Come away! Right away, come away! We'll put the traitors all to route, I'll bet my boots we'll whip 'em out Right away! Come away! Right away, come away! We'll all go down to Dixie, away, away! Each Dixie boy must understand that he must mind his Uncle Sam Away! Away! We'll all go down to Dixie! Away! Away! We'll all go down to Dixie! Oh may our Stars and Stripes still wave forever roar the free and brave! Right away! Come away! Right away, come away! Come away! And let our motto forever be for Union and for Liberty Right away! Come away! Right away, come away! We'll all go down to Dixie, away, away! Each Dixie boy must understand that he must mind his Uncle Sam Away! Away! We'll all go down to Dixie! Away! Away! We'll all go down to Dixie!

A wonderful and unique ACW game that's sure to get your moneys worth as far as enjoyment/time spent. You take the position of 'president' for either side you choose and manage the finances, trade, and industry of your faction amidst a most terrible brother war. You'll take helm over iconic generals and lead them to battle or untimely death as was my case with Robert E Lee. Leaving Stonewall Jackson in charge of Johnny Rebel to win an early victory in the summer of 1863. There are some glaring problems with the AI in battles to which I will offer some impromptu fixes: Occasionally your unit will 'freeze' and neither fire on the enemy nor leave it's position, sometimes forming a 'blob' that just gets obliterated by any kind of fire - to fix you must spam attack them on several enemy divisions, when they begin to form again you'll be able to have them advance/fall back as normal. With fog of war on this can be very bad as you wont be able to click units across the map and these men will essentially be stuck in position until the battle starts Perhaps the worst AI floundering in the game is when you move a unit into cover on a battlefield. They will typically move up to the stone wall or whatever and present themselves to enfilade fire, turning their flank entirely to the enemy before finally moving back up over the wall. In practice if this is missed (common when you're commanding 100,000 men) that unit will suffer hundreds if not thousands of casualties in mere moments. Which could cause a sudden rout of a previously fine unit. The only solution to this is to advance your units manually up to just before the wall and never actually click to cover on a wall unless enemy units aren't present. This is absolutely terrible for both the base game and the DLC as with the DLC you will just be watching men get massacred without firing back (as they're perpendicular to the enemy) while trying to move into cover, ruining your limited engagements with shattering defeats that may end the game early. Another AI problem is your men getting stuck in marching columns. Simply clicking to attack the enemy will not solve this one. You'll need to 'fall back' anywhere on the battlefield and as soon as your men receive this order and start to move they'll be fixed and capable of forming a line again. These AI problems become much more troublesome in the late game when artillery becomes more advanced. In the case of the 30lb parrot rifle it's canister shot matches or exceeds a standard rifle such as the lorenz or the springfield rifled musket, thus any enfilade exposure will see hundreds of casualties with only a few shots. You'll commonly find yourself losing hundreds of men to a 60 man 1 gun detachment that will take FOREVER to rout, which will simply be replaced by another. I don't feel a single gun should have so much power in the face of 6000 men. In the DLC you will find your men's range adjusted against your will sometimes 20x throughout a battle. Turning off initiative doesn't help and I can only assume that it's your AI superior officer telling your men to only engage at close quarters. If your attention is elsewhere this will lead to your men standing there getting shot for precious minutes while not returning fire. Despite all this the game is really fun and immersive with potential for hundreds of hours of play. I love grand strategy and this amalgamation of total-war style battles and 4x has potential to be something great. The soundtrack is superb and you'll learn to love the fiddle. Edit: If Devs read these things I think this game should focus on rolling out new maps for alternate battlefields that may not have been done historically. You'll get tired of fighting for manassas junction and there isn't much leeway there. In practice I fought the same three maps from Missouri, Kentucky, and northern virginia for the entire duration of the war.

Solange die Deutsche Sprache nicht da ist, kann ich es nicht empfehlen.

REVIEW GRAND TACTICIAN: CIVIL WAR+ WHISKEY & LEMONS DLC General The game did a good job to evoke the time period in the visual design of the game with menu illustrations, button symbols, the zoomed-out maps and UI elements. In addition it does not compromise on historical accuracy in favor of gameplay, which is a mixed bag, but it’s cool to see an RTS which uses historical order-of-battle set-ups for armies. That being said, this game is quite janky and an acquired taste even if you can look past its faults. These include: - It's unstable: it is recommended that you verify your game files in Steam before every load-up - If you made settings-adjustments in the main menu, these do not carry-over between load-ups - This game is extremely RTFM, info from tooltips is helping but is not always complete. - The cut-scene narrator has a really boring cadence that almost sounds like text-to-speech and the cut-scenes are too long. I have turned them off. On another positive note, the music selection for the game is great, a couple of really well-known and fun civil war era songs were picked for this. Main Campaign Game Grand Tactician: Civil War is a game with a lot of grand ambitions. If these ambitions are met is a mixed answer. It purports to give you the full nation-management and army-management deal, to a greater scope than a game like Total War: Empire and with more micro-management/detail on the army level than Victoria III, which is commendable, but a steep desire from what is said to be a small team and they have not quite managed to pull it off. The game gives the player a lot of stuff to tinker with, Armies, Fleets, Forts, Buildings, The Department of Finances, Policies, Projects and Enterprises, but after a few playthroughs the player will find that about only half of these really matter for winning the scenario’s: Armies and Fleets, Policies and Projects. However, the other bits can’t be left completely on auto-manage or it will screw up the player’s resource management. Some jankiness: - Field Armies sometimes retreat THROUGH the enemy army after a lost battle, deeper into enemy territory where they are then stuck on low readiness, immobilized and vulnerable to further losses. - In the fog of war, you sometimes see enemy army symbols on the map from earlier intelligence. When you move your own army to that spot and the enemy isn’t there, the symbol does not disappear. - The map is quite crowded in places and it can be hard to see and select stuff on the map. Especially when corps/armies/forts are in the same place. This is not helped with the developer finding it important to give the tooltip to explain Combat range and command range for armies, which apparently takes precedence over info on settlements and armies. - If corps are stacked in one location the player should be able to select the corps he needs by at least a multi-click system (click one, top unit, click two the 2nd unit in the stack etc.), like when units overlap with HQ’s on the battle maps. Looking past this, I’m still having fun. Like the dispatches and news papers and managing and moving the armies. Not too keen on the naval part of this game, but don’t hate it either, serves its purpose. It’s also nice that you can edit the uniforms of units. Battles What makes Battles good in this game is modelling it on the old Army Staff game “Kriegspiel” (google that) which was actually a thing in use at general staff’s at the time. The battle maps are great, and battle graphics don’t fall short of Ultimate-General: Civil War. The Battle SOUNDS are amazing and can get quite loud. Unfortunately, the great soundtrack drops out in battle, though sometimes you’ll hear regimental bands play these when really zoomed in. What is janky is that HQ symbols block themselves, you can’t make a small positional adjustment if your right-click for that is within the quite large area “covered” by the HQ NATO symbol. Furthermore, if units are close to each other, the unit you LMB on is not always the unit you select? Charging moving enemy units doesn’t quite work, the charging unit will move to the spot where the enemy was when you ordered the charge. This is also a problem when chasing enemies. I guess the game codes attacks to positions, rather than units. This will and does frustrate people. More gripes are for the AI, which is a mixed bag of giving challenges and being walk-overs. This may be a “verify your game files before starting the game” thing, but I’ve seen the AI weirdly blob his brigades or attack piecemeal, or scramble its whole corps to oppose a small flanking movement while your main body is still in front and must be visible to it. This being said, when the AI does its thing and the battle gets intense, it really is a fun game and winning a particular tough battle does give a sense of accomplishment. Overall I like the experience of the game, with the visuals, campaign elements and army management and battles, but a lot of stuff in this game could really have gotten a second thought or second take/look to make it better. In essence there is a bunch of fluff in this game that may look like mould to many, and that is a shame, because the high ambitions and concept deserve shine (or kitten fuzz instead of mould). A game like blue cheese, plenty of flavour, but not to everyone’s taste. WHISKEY AND LEMONS The DLC adds a whole layer of extra flavor but also of the blue cheese variety. It is a nice roleplay variant of the game where you start as a brigade/regiment commander and slowly rise through the ranks. The higher your rank and prestige, the more of the normal campaign game and army management you can influence. I find this fun because I often tried to do similar things by personal restriction in Total War games (army sizes mostly). As your faction is now mostly under AI control, it may be a good idea to set the enemy AI to one level lower than what you would usually pick on the standard game variant as my side has so far always lost the war in the DLC variant. Additionally the Regimental Size campaign has a few more problems than the Brigade level size (examples): - The project Cavalry Reform II has been replaced with the Horse Artillery project, but that does not allow you to recruit horse artillery because it is still mapped to Cavalry Reform II - The campaign objectives are changed but not always tick over to “yes” if they are achieved. - Your side’s battle AI will be frustratingly passive and blob up at rivers and act infinitely worse than the enemy AI would in the standard variant. - The action card "reconcile" actually makes your relations with other officers WORSE, instead of improving them... As for the roleplaying events, these are nice to have and I wish there were more, including some dialog trees like in Crusader Kings. These could be conversations with colleagues, notables from home- and occupied territories your officer is present or even quest-trees for special missions. The events also seem to skew negative, aside from most Companions that join your staff. Whiskey and Lemons adds a level of agency to your army career UG:CW doesn’t have, UG just leads you through the historical battles. Then again, it’s the same price as this DLC… and GT:CW alone is already $50,- so you pay a lot and it is absolutely not worth it for everyone (it was for me so far). Conclusion Both the Standard Game and the DLC have high ambitions to make a historical wargame that truly evokes the portrayed period and in these ambitions the developer has been successful. However, on the technical design and coding of the game and AI there is a lot of room for improvement (an auditorium-sized room, really) to make it a good game. For now, I find it a fun game, can get over the issues it has as is offers some experiences I'm missing in other strategy games.

i've tried this game too many times. strategic portion good, good brigade building system, good perk and evolution, very good system of national support and possible actions. fantastic politic system, very convoluted and difficult to comprehend economics that are ok left on automagement. tactical portion of the game? i started over so many campaigns trying to make it work. brigades are utterly incompetent to react on tactical situations, delayed orders are a mess, the AI will slip 5 brigades behind your lines while your reaction force adjacent to your hq will start to move 5 minutes after the enemy already started to open fire from the positions your reaction force were positioned to prevent. charges on routed enemies are pointed to the ground were the enemy was making charges an infuriating exercise. if this game had the simple mechanics of ultimate general civil war in the tactical portion it would be a wonderful game. But like this?

This is one of those games in which it took time to review and find its shortcomings. It certainly *looks* like it has potential, but the gameplay falls short; it has inexcusable typos (look for "IMOPORT" in the table for building or acquiring a new ship); and apparently there is a raft of unaddressed bugs. Google "Fort Bug" for example. That one alone is a game killer. Forget about this game . . . and GT2 as far as I am concerned.

I really wanted to like this game. It's so messed up I don't know how it's even playable. It has grand ambitions with the strategic map and tactical battles along with an economic system but everything but the tactical battles don't work. Playing as the union the game is constantly adding territory to the CSA around my unit even while I sit in a major city causing supply issues. I have a major victory against multiple CSA armies only to have them sit around for a couple of days and reengage me and then have a complete victory. Anothe issues is my readiness is in the green only to all of sudden drop to red for some reason that I have no idea because there's not enough information to inform me what's going on. The economic system is completely opaque. You can get a sense of why you should build the national level buildings but the economic buildings are a crap shoot as I'm somehow supposed to read the economic screen and understand what's going on. Give me a break. overall, I really wanted to like this game as I love these type of map games and there's a sense of the old total war series vibe here but I can't continue playing this as it's too frustrating. what a shame.