ICBM: Escalation

This game used to be great however after the last major update it causes my PC to crash. After about 1 minute in game it starts stuttering and slowing down so I close the game. After this my keyboard locks up and about 5 minutes later my PC crashes forcing a restart. This only happens with this game and has happened 5 out of 5 times attempting to find the problem. Aside from my PC crashing DRM is an issue, I typically remain offline at all times but for some reason you CAN NOT play this game offline even if your playing single player. DRM usually doesn't make much sense especially when forced into the single player portion of a game. I'd refund if I could at this point as bricking my computer isn't worth playing this game.

Excellent game, Having lots of fun with it since I got it. So much more varied than previous titles because its a full strategic simulator now, but its still arcadey enough to just be fun. Its not extremely sweaty like Paradox games(Which Ive owned almost all and have about 4k hours in across titles).

cool idea. ai and the bots dont work that great when it comes to mission planning. half the time they stop attacking in the middle of a war every start is the same, you spend the first 20-40 min struggling to fight off a land invasion by an opponent who has 10x your tanks somehow. also super fun if you make it though the land invasion and get to the point where you can spend 10 min building an airbase to have it nuked before your first plane gets in the air because the AI-bots have map hack. there is almost zero resources about unit stats and how the mechanics work. ive spent alot of time with it and i find it more frustrating then 'fun'.

thought id try this out, I then looked at the time and it was 4am, i have no idea what's going on but I'm having a great time.

It's a pretty good game. Many problems still need to be worked out. --It crashes often --I dislike how much of the tech tree is dead space which you have to interact with to advance from one era to the next. AFAIK, the best way to progress through tech involves a lot of "there are 5 worthless techs remaining in this era I'll never use. Which 3 can I get most quickly?" --I dislike how it's not clear how much of an effect each tech has. Instead of saying "your land armies do more damage" maybe you could put a number on that? 5% vs. 20% is a huge difference. There's a lot of guessing in the game. --Getting units into and out of army bases for airlifts is buggy as hell --"Sir, we've conquered New York and Philadelphia, but it's pretty much a draw until we conquer some random town 500 miles away." Get used to that a lot. --Game seems to be a roll of the dice where if you click on an event, about 50% of the time, it will bring you to the relevant location. If you roll badly, I hope you know where Bellem is. --It should be a lot easier at a glance to tell cities are in which province. (Almost 100% of the benefits of conquest happen when you have conquered the entire province). --Max speed is painfully slow. It's not actually 4x. I think, late game, it's realistically like 2.5x or 3x. There's a lot of slowdown. --I think the game is excellent for strategic depth in non-nuclear war. The nuclear war element is, ironically, meh. --It is stupid how the game handles an AI trying to grab cities that you are currently occupying. It always seems to resolve with a disputed territory going to an AI. --It is [b]stupid[/b] how underpriced destroyers are compared to pretty much every unit in the game. You have 10 armies costing 6x as much as my 2 destroyers. You can't do anything and will eventually get wiped. Destroyers make planes/carriers look mostly useless and are better at being cruisers than cruisers are, and are also the cheapest all-purpose fighting unit. For most of the game, 2 destroyers will also win against 3 airfields, which cost a combined ~8 destroyers. --I'm trying to make planes work, but they just suck for most of the game. In contrast, winning on the hardest difficulties with builds of all armies/destroyers is fairly trivial with possibly a few Specialized Airbases which are fairly useless until you have late-game tech but very efficient for destroying the world when you have a huge tech advantage and only then. Okay, so on the hardest difficulty, the AIs get a 75% boost to production and research or whatever. But, we both started out with 4000 production points and my destroyers are worth 3x as much as anything they built, so I'm going to win building *nothing* in the first hour and totally abusing how randomly they place their troops at minute 1 of the game. --By default the game gets into nuclear weapons jarringly quickly, at which point armies in general are not very effective at anything except for kamikaze airdrops to destroy key infrastructure. --The AI is very bad at recognizing when they have been destroyer-locked. --Against hard AIs, it is hugely important to NEVER BUILD ANYTHING pretty much. Pick your starting unit set very carefully. Optimize for destroyers holding key defensive points and clearing invasion points, and armies with a few airbases to airlift them into position. Be on 100% Research pretty much all of the time --It is stupid how critically important it is to spend 30-40 clicks at the start of each game offering 9 AIs the same research/production/nuclear agreements. It's like a 30% boost to research and production? Why? What is the point of this mechanic? 40 mindless clicks, GO! --The game IN THEORY has a war plan where you can automate your land troops to invade. I have never gotten it to actually work to get armies to split up and conquer cities on their own. --The game IN THEORY has war plans where you can automate nuclear forces to target cities. However, the game on its own will sometimes choose to autolock like 100% of your nuclear forces on an annihilated city with 0 people. Guys, it's not going anywhere, you can stop nuking it now. Please? Okay, this is pretty stupid.

This game fills a niche in strategy games that I've always craved, a cold war/modern era global conflict that doesn't avoid or reduce the dangers of nuclear weapons. Conventional warfare is still a thing and to some degree required but nukes are a tool to aid in your conflicts that gradually enforces a global escalation that can feel almost too real. the actual gameplay is pretty good, I think there is a healthy amount of depth and a lot of micromanaging as well as tools that make said micromanaging easier. the tech trees are expansive and designed in a way that everyone tends to have in edge and weakness with specific techs depending on what you focus on and what strategies you are trying to employ. Definitely the best cold war/modern day strategy game I've found, would recommend.

Game would be even greater, if devs can fix the annoying UI bugs.

Pretty good,

game is just to difficult to learn and honestly it has potential but in its current state its not great. id pass on this if i knew what i know now

Nuking random countries and mass murder is fun af. Easy to learn as well no confusing things.