If you don't want to read further, at least read this: Much of the game is gated behind a combination of paywalls, rng, and significant grinds. It has a wide variety of seemingly incomplete or underexplored mechanics coupled with balancing so bad it makes every other game look better by comparison.
I've mostly played this game on mobile, not on steam, because it is a mobile game. I've also been holding my tongue for a while because the devs will, supposedly, fix things; however, recent updates have made me realize releasing the game in its current state only makes sense as a cash grab and highlights many of the game's flaws, many of which are seemingly unlikely to change.
I'll talk about the RNG first, considering it's the most egregious, given that this is supposed to be a strategy game (more on that later.)
-Training many units, a lot of which are better than similarly leveled counterparts, some of which are functionally or actually mandatory for content, unless you pay of course, requires resources with an often low drop rate, typically around 10%, meaning you'll get maybe 1 per day unless you spend an unreasonable amount of time playing the game and waiting for the fights to respawn, because yes, these resources are both largely random and time gated...
-Crits: different units have different crit chances, sometimes against specific types of units, which is... fine, but the crits are 1.85x damage so it matters a lot whether or not a unit lands a crit or if yours get hit by one. (Which can end up costing you some of the random, limited resources mentioned earlier.)
-Damage Ranges: everything has a damage range, some small, most enough to matter against some enemies, especially bosses and tankier ones, and some which function as a second crit chance or have an even wider gap than the crit chance.
-Random Attacks: The bot will always have a random unit use one of it's attacks, again at random, targeting a random unit of yours. The attacks are often weighted, but not enough to be reliably predictable.
-Random Targeting: Some attacks, including some from bosses, will hit random spaces in a predetermined area, which gives a large variance to the damage dealt by these attacks, occasionally resulting in unblockable (more on that later as well) turn one or otherwise shots of your units.
-Status Effects: Often have a random chance to be applied, which makes sense, but this, when combined with everything else, can create unwinnable situations with no player involvement at all. An example of this would be against a boss (re-)released in the 13.0 patch, which has a high chance to stun (55%) and hits the entire board. It deals enough damage to every available unit, that poor rng can result in a loss every 5 turns. (Yes the fight will last long enough this can happen 4+ times in a successful run.) This is not the only boss that can do that, as 2 other bosses, one of which is pretty much always 5 turns away from beating you if attacks a certain way, and the other has a chance to delete a unit, this becomes plural as the fight goes on. (Though it does become less impactful in this instance with unit levels.)
The "strategy"
-Balancing is very linear with little room for niches, as the game progresses, so do all the numbers and abilities of units. Niches like tank and indirect (unblockable) dps start to blur as does every sort of dps. In other words, nearly everything good is the same, tanky, indirect damage, big damage numbers, armor piercing. There are exceptions, but all of those exceptions are mostly only useful in niche circumstances or for grinding units (more on that later.)
-While there are some hints of fights being strategic, the best and most reliable strategy is bigger number = win, provided nothing rng and completely out of the players control happens that is (like what can happen with 3/4 bosses in the game).
-Indirect (unblockable) Attacks: Early on these attacks are fewer and far-er between and have some combination of lower damage, longer reload times, and fewer targets. As the game progresses, this aspect goes away entirely, and the unblockable attacks have larger ranges, more damage, and often times, comparable reload times, which means the game starts to demand everything be tanky. This is especially true of bosses, as 2 of them have unblockable one shot ability (one of which is a chance to defeat multiple) as well as a boss with an unblockable 55% board-wide stun chance... There is no strategy here because there isn't really anything that can be done about these attacks, especially when paired with high damage from the boss elsewhere and resistance to status effects (often all of them,) making the bosses unreliable, but still big number = win.
The boss I've been talking about most this time, the one with a 55% stun chance, it requires about a 26 USD investment in premium currency just to beat with reasonable odds, and functionally requires a 9 USD investment in premium currency just to realistically even have a chance beat. Neither guarantee victory, nor do massive amounts of grinding or further spending. You are at the mercy of rng and hyper-inflated numbers intended to force payment the entire time.
The Grind
-Every 5-10 levels introduces new and stronger enemies, and with it units the player is expected to swap to in order to beat them... Units that often need higher ranks to be good at doing what they are supposed to and will be replaced in a handful of levels.
-Later ranks are often no where near worth the time investment. While they still provide enough of a benefit to make a difference, the later ranks typically give the same or almost the same stats as the other ranks for just as much, if not more time investment than all the previous ranks combined, and you now lose much of the main reward from encounters and raids (Skill Points, the unit XP) as it still gathers the limited SP without doing anything with it. (all ready to promote units do this as well)
-Gold: Gold costs are high and passive gold income is incredibly low, often a whole days worth from any source being less than what you'd get from a single fight even from paid and high level sources. The gold cost of most things is also many encounters worth of gold, meaning if you aren't constantly grinding large amount of encounters, you are missing out on a significant part of the game.
-As the levels increase, so does the Skill Points needed for units... except the best average SP gain possible doesn't increase and, in certain parts of the game, the SP reward increase is almost negligible despite it's necessity due to everything scaling with you in that part of the game (naval).
I am writing this review despite not liking the game because Battle Nations really does have a lot of good ideas and hints of being great, and clearly has a lot of potential, but it always falls short... very short, and lacks close to a good enough execution to do those ideas justice.
It really is a shame to see a game with such a high volume of wasted potential.
If I were to describe this game in one word, it would be Disappointing.
