Punk Wars: Prologue

The game, it's setting, and the art (mostly), all look pretty good. The gameplay, however, is too tedious. Building in a space is instantaneous and consumes the builder, and then you have to go through the whole process to create another builder and spend turns moving them someplace useful again. Weapon ranges are illogical. Basic infantry unit with guns only have a range of 1, but flamethrowers have a range of 2??? The tech tree has several either/or choices that limit options because once an option is researched, the other option is permanently blocked. Why? How is supposed to make sense? You had better like browns and grays, because you're going see a LOT of it. I've sunk 5 hours into this game, and that's enough.

Its important to note that the demo does feel rough around the edges. The demo at the moment demands that you quickly block off your ramps and focus on researching ranged support units like snipers and medics to maintain a defensive formation at your base. The AI is also cheating quite badly and will have a strong army at the start and will also repeatedly spam infantry and vehicle units toward your base (thankfully the infantry while powerful, don't synergize well with each other so your snipers and zeppelins will, provided you don't get caught out of position, will eventually reach critical mass and wipe them out). The difficulty has been set to the point that you will have to play to the steampunk factions strengths or you will die horribly. I think that forcing the player to use the steampunk faction's strengths (its higher range on snipers and hit and run capacity on its zeppelins) can be both a good thing and a bad thing. For people just wanting to play casual this demo is going to kill you, as you also on a 75 turn timer and the AI will not hesitate to begin sieging your base structures with stunlock abilities your faction doesn't get. If you don't immediately block the ramps to your base, you will get swarmed and die in 5 turns. I'm not joking. The good news is that having to actually think and use your roster is the point of a game like this. Unfortunately the tutorial does a terrible job teaching you some basic mechanics. For example there is the option of upgrading buildings with your workers. This is generally not worth it on regular buildings. It is however completely worth it on your observatory HQ buildings (as it boosts its border radius by 1 and gives it a gun) and maybe your steam extractors (+1 to steam when there's only 3 deposits that can be reached on your map). It's also important to note that the tutorial doesn't tell you how the economy works. If a tile produces a resource, once the tile is in your borders its yours no question. So it is often times worth much more in terms of resources per turn to build a new HQ building to expand your borders, than it is to spend several turns building new buildings (also note that a worker needs AP to build resource buildings but ZERO AP to build a HQ). Some abilities such as the zeppelin bombardment ability sounds like it only affects buildings but it actually hurts everything in its AOE. Likewise some buildings say it requires another building nearby to function. If you can build a building on a tile than it functions even if it says it needs stuff like a farm, clockwork theatre or steam extractor. My skyports work just fine despite not being near a steam extractor. Last but not least I take a bit of issue with the unit and faction rosters. Steampunk has a lot of units but only zeppelin, sniper, man at arms (early game) and medic are useful. The rest like the locomotive and clockwork mech lack the punch that is needed and are clunky and hard to be effective in a one unit per tile game. Locomotive and clockwork mech are basically better version of the man at arms with the locomotive having weaker attack but a building damage ability and the same man at arms trade steam for atk power ability and the Clockwork mech has a much stronger attack and 1 extra armor but has an ability that lets it move slightly more per turn and attack twice instead of once. The problem is that these units don't have AOE abilities and don't do enough damage to justify using them for anything other than tanking damage for a zeppelin backline. These units can feel like a letdown considering they are late-game in the tech tree. Dieselpunk seems to have it pretty bad too. We can't play them in the demo but based upon what the AI manages to build there isn't much the faction can do beyond some suicidal AOE abilities. Their infantry have at best 2 range and are easily mowed down. Same deal goes for their armored car. Ironically they do have an air unit that fulfills roughly the same role as the zeppelin, a A-10-esque vtol, but the damage it does is lower. Maybe its just because the devs intentionally made the AI stupid to compensate for its empire earth levels of unit spamming cheats but it really does feel like there's nothing the dieselpunk faction can do against a good defensive chokepoint. Overall I would say that this game demo shows promise. Hopefully the full game will be well fleshed out and have better balancing and less typos in building and ability descriptions

Leaving a positive review here.

hey yo kid, remember steampunk is a trash-genre

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nice

Medeniyetimiz düştü. Küllerinden dört yeni güç doğuyor. Buhar, çelik, atom ve dizel-punk şirketlerinin teknolojilerini ve yaşam tarzlarını yaymak için çarpıştığı klasik sıra tabanlı 4X stratejisinde kendinizi savaş ağırlıklı bir döneme kaptırın.