Land Doctrine

Game is unfinished and abandoned. It's still quite obtuse and unpolished, but the dev stated in a forum post that he wouldn't work on it further unless a publisher picked it up. When that didn't happen, he just bailed. A shame, since there was a lot of potential here.

Free demo? Check Cool Concept? Check Cheap? Check This game is rough around the edges, but really is the direction I want to see indie strategy games go. If anything, I'd like to see a build up phase before the war starts. *edit: And now my one request was added, what a time to be alive

Land Doctrine is literally a digital board game. The elegant rules create an experience that is epic in scale, intriguing in complexity, and filled with meaningful decisions. There is no tutorial, but the manual is concise and illustrated. By wargame standards it's a brief and easy read, with the various systems all being simple and intuitive. The result is a mix of realism and abstraction that is uniquely compelling. Battles offer a rarely seen level of clarity and decisiveness. Combat in other games often becomes a muddle of +/- modifiers; one blob of units ultimately being just as effective as another. Here each battalion has distinct advantages and disadvantages. Complaints that you can't field a mix of tanks and infantry in each battalion miss the beauty of this system. Limiting each battalion to one type of tank and one infantry loadout doesn't limit you, it defines them. This in turn challenges you to develop and deploy each battalion to its maximum potential. Your enjoyment of the game will be hampered by its sometimes convoluted user interface. Where operation Market Garden went a bridge too far, Land Doctrine's interface often goes a click too deep. And much like those doomed paratroopers, at times you'll be cut off from what you want, just when you need it most. The game is never unplayable, but accessing info can sometimes become tedious. With a few interface enhancements, Land Doctrine is the kind of game Slitherine would publish at quadruple the cost. Especially, if each battalion's 3D model represented the actual tank and infantry type. Keep in mind, this isn't a Civ-style, peacefully build up, and unleash the perfect war machine, kind of game. Instead, you're thrust into the middle of a war, and the odds are stacked against you. Even the Easy difficulty is a tough fight for an inexperienced commander. Starting out, your T1 Rabbit tank is actually an armored car with delusions of grandeur. The frontline is a mishmash of regulars and reserves armed with a motley assortment of misfit toys. To top it off, there is nothing in the R&D pipeline, and your production lines are impersonating the Titanic as they churn straight into disaster. With such an intense challenge, there is a lot of fun to be had here. Every action has far reaching consequences. There is no perfect tank, infantry, battalion, weapon, strategy or tactic that always ensures victory. Truly, everything must be done at its right time, and in its right place. In the end, your choices will become the Land Doctrine that your army lives or dies by.

I'm not sure this is going to help the dev now or if anyone will ever even read this, but I changed it from the negative review below. Issues are fixed. Here's the story: The Dev abandoned this game, I guess because of inexperience. He moved on to eventually create a similar but better game called Panzer Doctrine. When THAT first got released, a number of people, me included, were like, "WTF, dude? We paid you already for an EA title, then you go and abandon it, do the work to fix it and add some nice new features, and essentially release the completed game as a new title and try and charge for it as an EA game again?!" At first the dev didn't respond well to that, banning people and deleting threads. Then he gave it some thought and said, "You know, you guys are right. Sorry." And he was completly sincere about it. He unbanned people that he'd banned, restored the threads, then came back and fixed this game even knowing that there was going to be pretty much 0 profit in doing so. I give the guy a lot of credit for acknowledging his mistake and going above and beyond like that to fix things. You don't see many sincere apologies backed up by action on the internet. Anyway, now that it is fixed, Land Doctrine is worth the money. It's a RTS game with a more realistic approach than usual to developing tanks, training and equipping infantry, and taking/holding ground. And as I said before, he's got a similar but more advanced game out called Panzer Doctrine if this game works for you. ********************************************************************************************** Land Doctrine is a great concept and looks fantastic for the first couple of hours of so, but then you run into more and more balance issues and little annoying things that add up. In the end I have to say, no... I wouldn't recommend it. For example, infantry are OP. I've got a city that is completely surrounded by massive amounts of enemy troops and tanks. They constantly attack it, and I just as constantly send them packing with huge casualties. There are no supply chain rules in this game, so even in a surrounded city, I can reinforce my stranded battalions with no penalties. And since my new infantry are maxed out in all of the training categories and my units are getting experience from each win, and are insanely dug-in... they're Spartans now. I don't think a nuclear missile would dislodge my infantry at this point. All of my infantry-based units are like this. You can't co-ordinate your attacks. So in the case of my surrounded city, the enemy can attack from 4 different directions and do. But you can't tell units of different speeds to stick together and attack at once - even if they're all attacking from one direction. And co-ordinating attacks from different directions at once is impossible. So attacks with large amounts of material end up being fiascos. Little bugs and lack of cleanup... like some of my units can no longer move. They're still there, they presumably would defend themselves if attacked, but they have a speed of 0. If you've got units that are all in the same place, you often can't select the particular unit that you want to look at. If you design tanks, you can't delete those designs later. And the dev went with buttons to select tank types instead of a drop down menu, so at the end of a game you have buttons all over the place when you want to select a tank. All of this is fixable. But the dev has said he's not going to put much effort into fixing the issues with this game unless he finds a publisher, which seems really cavalier to me. He's an indie dev on an indie dev platform selling to people who tend to go for indie games, but he doesn't actually want to be an indie dev. The point of Steam is that you don't need a publisher anymore. And I paid money for this Steam product just like I'd pay for a title from EA or Sega or anyone else. If issues get updated and patched, I'll change the review. But what I've read regarding impending updates doesn't make me optimistic.

5/10 Ok, it is a low budget, one man project, but it lack some of the most basic (and useful) aspects of a strategy game. - Battle reports do not show where the battle took place. You have to scroll arounf the map to understand. - The battle report is cumbersome and to understand what happened you have to scroll down a lot. - Battle dynamics are explained in the brief manual available, but it is hard to relate it in practical terms. I'm really sorry, but to me it is a no-go.

This game has a very very good idea and it's cheap. It could easily be used for officers (even virtual officers), but the game is very buggy & not up-to-the task, even for its price. I'll keep it though, if something good happens, but i've seen too much Unity games getting abandoned, so i wouldn't count on any upgrade any time soon.

UPDATED AS APRIL 8,2017 So I was going to make an entirely new review, abeit hopefully it be good, now it's even worse then before. So I played this for almost another six hours after putting my old review up and came across these bugs -battalions sometimes don't deployed/aren't build, -CeaseFire doesn't work at all! I have my enemies keep attacking me though they not supposed to, -battalions get stuck moving to one location or don't move at all at times, -battalions that get routed run back and forth between spots even if there friendly and if there controlled by the AI, I've seen them go past the AI's spot and take positions somewhere not occupied nearby, -Battalions only move one tile per order, I can't order them to attack a city or tile five tiles away, only the closest one near them until they get there and when a battalion tries to goto a full tile with three battalions, it's gets stuck inbetween. Apprently I was the only person to came across these bugs and when I posted this on the forums where the developer wanted people to post their bugs, I got banned and this was his response - Ban Reason: Too much lies and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥t. - FIRST REVIEW!.....and maybe the only one? First most I want to say this game has ALOT of potenial to be something great, especially for people who like RTS games and for peolple who like me like to design there own machines to use in battle however I have to wonder wiether this game is a quick cashgrab or If the devloper doesn't have any experience with making games in this genre? I will give my honest opionon and I want people to understand am not going to praise or bash it for not reason. Onto the review, on the surface this game looks really interesting with it's concept of armored vechicle designing and indeed it is a good concept but it poorly done but I will get to that in a bit. The game uses a Risk like map however do not be fooled, this game is NOT RISK in any real way besides moving units to an area or city and capturing it. The board to me is more like Civilization without any of the diplomacy. The purpose of this game is to design the best vehicle for the job along with putting that unit in a battalion that will have it work well with. Battalions are easy to create and in a way are similar to Hearts of Iron III but is far worse :/. you Automatically ALWAYS have one unit of Tanks and Infantry in a battalion so you can't have an all infantry or tank battalion which is a bit akyward. You can choose what tanks you want in the battalion BUT you can only have one TYPE of Tank in the battalion so you can't have medium tanks you designed in a battalion with Heavy tanks you designed which is surprising. For infantry you can put in a infantry unit with a present you can make so you can make an entire Infantry unit comprised of riflemen, machinegunmen, anti-armor(RPG's) etc and can do what you want which is nice but is useless, I will explain shortly. The most fun part of this game is the designing part and it is FUN!....well to a certain extent until you realize that it's pointless unforuntely. When designing a tank, you pick the engine, suspension, the main gun and it's armor in the front, side and behind essentially. One gripe I have is that you can't actually choose how it looks and is randomly generated on the parts you picked which estically goes from Pre-WWI looking wheeled armored behicles to whacky WWI Tank models something you see in Warhammer 40,000K but is far less cook and kinda corny looking. There isn't any interperiod or WWII looking designs in the game, want to make a Tiger II with a 100mm cannon? your ♥♥♥♥ out of luck my friend lol To unlock better equipment, you need to research these components which take time usually from 2 months to 6 months ingame. This is probably the only part of the game that is perfectly fine for the most part beacuse Research in general in this game is almost completely pointless. Besides researching equipment for Tanks, you also can research Infantry weapons as well but since Infantry are literally powerless agianst Tanks and the AI only uses Tanks, there's no point at all. Besides that you can also research how fast research is done with upgrading equipment or waiting for your new sweet protoype tank to be done, You can also research how fast infantry are trained but is pointless since the AI only uses Tanks, you can also research the flexiability of Production which means how fast your factories can change it's line from making thing to another which is quite handy if your getting beaten to haw well your design is made on the line and production in general. Now the last two are pointless as well beacuse no matter how much you invest in increasing the efficiency of production, you always produce the same amount of vehicles no matter what every month and improving how well your tanks or armored cars are made in your factories are so minor that it doesn't mattter. Now for the most crappy part of the game.....urrgghh! Warefare is just broken in this game, you start out on the board automatically at war with other nations and there's dipomacy whatsover so no peace treaties, no trading of tech or alliances, hell you can't start the game as a team deathmatch, It's YOU agianst the world and let me tell you, all the AI's will team up on your and steam roll...why you ask? Well Tank warefare is broken all to hell in everyway possible, no matter what design you make and IF you are able to deploy them in decent numbers, you will 9 times out of 10 get steam rollled by the enemy AI. At the beginning of the game, they automatically have better armored vehicles then you and usually even if you research enough to make a true sequal from the T-1 Rabbit, the AI will either have a far better vechicle then you already or if you managed to hold your own somehow, the AI will constantly send Tank at your front until you can't replace the tanks and infantry you lost since you NEVER make enough tanks for mass production per month and the more cities you lose, your production capabilities will diminish greatly to the point you won't be able to produce anything really at all, hell even the starter unit can't be produced in great number and if you wan't, it's worthless, sure you can throw on a slightly better gun but it won't help. No matter what you make and deploy, it will get destroyed, I had an ENTIRE battalion(100) of Maus tanks essentially in my last game solely for defense and somehow the Ai was able to use one battalion with only tanks to take it out so either they have the same quality tanks or something far better since there is no Air power or support power. There's also no rea recon so you never know what the AI has deployed so you can't prepare. Am sure Am forgetting something on here but in this state, I can't recommend this game at all honestly until it's improved. There's a great foundation for a fun ♥♥♥ game but that's all it is and it's too shallow and cheap, hell there's not even a torturial to teach how to play :/

Got my ♥♥♥♥ wrecked on the easiest difficulty by an enemy pincer offensive. gg

Land Doctrine provides a simple graphical interface. The documentation is up front and to the point, but doesn't give enough information to really figure out the mechanics of what's happening or give a hint as to the proper combined arms to be successful. The game is stable and fast and offers a blend of real time and the ability to pause. It lends a feel of WWII type weapons, and has an interesting research and vehicle design system that gives options without making it into a laborious exercise. While the visuals beg the most for improvement, especially a tactical re-enactment of the automatically resolved battles, what I really most want is more information about how the game calculates victory.