Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)

If I had a nickel for every time I defeated a Confederate army that then retreated north through all of Ohio through two more of my armies, before completely reinforcing in the middle of Lake Erie and then coming back to invade Cleveland, I'd have two whole nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it's happened twice. The building system is useless, you will watch the AI teleport across entire states and ford rivers straight through an entire squadron of your gunboats, you will watch 3,000 men starve to death in the middle of Philadelphia because the supply system is hot garbage, and the AI will manage to tie down 80,000 of your soldiers in a battle for six months using less than a tenth of that. The game has so many great features, but it's like one step forward, two steps back because every good feature goes hand in hand with something just mindbogglingly stupid or hopelessly broken. In my latest game, the Confederacy was two billion in debt with no credit, before proceeding to glitch their army morale, raise 400,000 men, and then drown me in angry bulletproof rednecks. The naval system is decent, but also completely useless. Blockading every single AI port has no tangible effect nor will it stop them from zerg-rushing a squadron of ironclads with several dozen tender boats with a cannon duct taped to the bow (and winning). Controlling the rivers and coast doesn't do anything, nor will it stop the AI from sailing right through your entire navy to randomly invade New York with 50,000 dudes while you're preoccupied with burning Richmond to the ground. I really want to like this game, because it's very ambitious about portraying the Civil War to a level of detail that no other game has, but it's simply too busted to like right now. The less said about optimization, UI, and performance, the better.

Unfortunately, the game is still not in an acceptable state even after 3 years post EA. As I can only speak from my experience, I feel the game took a few steps back and we're back in EA phase years prior. The previous release of the latest release of the DLC "Whiskey & Lemons" just exacerbated the glaring issues that still remain: - Clunky UI - The AI performing subpar to just plain broken - Random bugs that still plague the game years later However, that's not to say I didn't have fun playing this game. I absolutely did at times, and I know that there is a gem here for Civil War buffs to enjoy. But in its current state I can't recommend the game at this time.

Man, I love this game -- or at least I want to love it -- so much. If you're into Civil War era war games, you don't exactly have a lot to choose from right now, so this is a no brainer, and I hope people will buy this so that it gets the support and patches it desperately needs. The thing is, going in, you need to be ready to deal with so, so much jank. Some of it comes down to baffling design decisions, and some of it just reeks of under-developed elements. Be warned -- I've played two campaigns now, probably 8 months apart, and as far as I can see none of the issues I have were fixed in that space. I'm going to brain dump a tonne of major and minor issues I have with this game. If you're okay with this list, give this a buy. But you do need to be prepared to deal with a lot of jank. 1. Attack and defence work in a truly bizarre way. Best illustrated with an example: I captured Richmond from the rebels. The rebels want it back. They initiate an attack on my army currently occupying Richmond. For some weird reason, the objective on the battle map is that I have to capture some totally random victory points. This I have lost the defensive benefit of, you know, being the defender, and have to leave my entrenchments to attack a numerically superior enemy. If I fail in this attack, my army retreats from Richmond for no reason. Some people seem to like this because they think it simulates your commanders making bad decisions, but I find it super arbitrary and incredibly frustrating, not getting to choose when to attack and when to defend for myself. 2. The UI is an ungodly mess. As wargamers we're pretty used to this, but it really is bad. On the battle maps, icons get lost behind each other. On the strategy map, armies can also get lost behind each other, so you get into a fight and find out that actually it's two armies instead of one and you're fighting twice as many units as you thought. Icons for units on the battle map disappear depending on zoom level, making it annoying to read the map and hard to find smaller units like skirmishers who might be a long way from the main body of your force. 3. Giving orders to units is so incredibly janky. Sometimes they'll take idiotic paths that lead them straight into the enemy lines. You'll try to recall them but the order delay stops you because apparently your units won't avoid suicide unless expressly ordered to do so by a Major General. This pairs up with the broken UI to make organising a large army infuriating. Sometimes the UI will show that your unit is set to line formation, when actually they're moving in marching columns. To fix this you have to change to a different formation, deselect the unit, reselect it, then swap it back to the formation you actually want. Similarly units will seemingly forget the move commands you gave them, or reset from quick march to normal speed for no apparent reason. 4. The save system is somewhat broken. When you load an old save, there's a good chance that key details of your game will have been changed. Sometimes enemy armies seem to change size (this might be that your intelligence on them has changed). If you have units set to execute orders on a particular date on the strategy map, and you reload your save, they'll execute the order immediately instead of waiting to the correct date. If you re-load a mid-battle save, states of your troops will be different. E.g. they might reset from 'engage at long range' to 'engage at medium range'. If you saved during an engagement, it means they might now be refusing to fire at the enemies in front of them. Fixing this incurs an order delay which may then cost you casualties. 5. Artillery is almost pointless. Trying to put them somewhere with line of sight is almost impossible. The game gives you almost no tools for reading elevation on the map, or for seeing line of sight from a given location, so you just have to plonk your guns somewhere and hope they manage to shoot at something. 6. Game performance is horrible. It's not a twitchy game so it's not the end of the world but it runs horribly on an RTX 3060 and Ryzen 5800X with 32GB of RAM. 7. Enemy AI can go either way. Sometimes they seem to execute quite a smart attack. Other times they'll abandon their entrenchments, go and stand in a big blob somewhere else and wait for you to encircle them and wipe out the whole army. All of the above is a shame, and it says a lot that, given all the above, given many times when I've quit the game in disgust and vowed that I'm done with it, I keep coming back. When the huge battles get going, there's nothing else like it. I just wish some of the above would be addressed. There's apparently paid DLC on the way. Talk of this with so many glaring issues still in place worries me, but maybe it'll bring enough of a cash injection to start tackling these things. When you properly get a battle going, they're great. They can be really dynamic

This game is ambitious, and I like that. I also like that it is a more in depth Civil War game than Ultimate General. I like how there is an economy, a policy, a good military tab, and a chance to deal with Europeans, and various other little things. I've been holding off on a review to get to know the game better and at this point I think I can speak on it a bit. Now on to what I don't like, and my biggest gripe about this would be the way battles work. Casualties and morale make 0 sense in this. I charge a unit that is demoralized and retreating, inflict 0 casualties, and my unit then begins to run away, what? Use cavalry to charge an artillery battery, they inflict 0-50 casualties, run away, OK?. Use my infantry to fire at retreating units, wait they don't fire? They are engaged and standing there watching them retreat? Most battles I cant pursue a fleeing enemy because I can't catch them and when I do, I hardly deal any casualties. There are rare occasions when if Cav can catch up to infantry, they do a bit of damage. Movement in this is clunky specifically when ordering infantry to charge retreating units, who then walk into them and past them without inflicting casualties. I just had a battle where I shot at a 2000 strong dismounted cavalry brigade that was red to denote them retreating, yet they actually weren't and routed my 1500 strong infantry brigade I sent charging at them, inflicting 0 casualties and sustaining 300, then proceeding to charge and rout my artillery battery positioned close by in support. Playing the battle further revealed this to be a bug as all of the brigades shooting at them did 0 casualties. They are essentially an unbreakable unit that can still damage my morale, so I had to play around them. Another bug was a detachment of 0 men and 60 casualties running around like a ping pong ball as it retreated against my surrounding units. Wish casualties could be calculated in a different way akin to Ultimate General. On numerous times I've ordered brigade in a line behind the front to reposition, they start moving, and then stop to face an enemy that the front line is shooting at, but... they can't fire because they are in the second line, so I have to micro the ♥♥♥♥ out of a few brigades taking my attention off of other places in the battle. And before you ask, Initiative was off. Casualties are not racked up in a way that is like Total War or Ultimate General. You shoot at a unit for a minute, it will display 0 casualties, and then update to show 50 or 100 and so on. You charge a unit, you won't know how many casualties are inflicted or sustained because it updates incrementally. So if that increment isn't updated by the time the battle ends, you could have engaged them as much as you liked and taken casualties in turn but the damage you do doesn't register by battles end. Other AI issues aside, this game feels very clunky and janky at times, and is as frustrating as it is fun to play. Just wanted to focus on the battle side compared to some other reviews. If I could give this game a neutral review I would but as it stands battles are just an annoyance to play and I wish it could be tweaked a bit. For those of ya'll more experienced than I am Feel feel to leave a comment and add in or try to help me out.

Awesome game. Just finished - and won - my first Campaign. Played as the South on mediocre difficulty and aggression. Yea, sometimes it's clunky and a little janky but the few negative reviews that initially held me back from purchasing were definitely overstated. If this is your type game, i'd say you're likely going to be satisfied after surmounting the learning curve - buy in and help keep the developers paid and working!

The "finished" state is so buggy and unpolished, and now that they have announced a new game meaning this on is going to be left abandoned like this. You WILL have a major bug every single battle, and it will probably cause you to quit the battle and start again to hope that RNG gives you one that is less horrible. Battle AI is horrible, doubly so when moving anything more than a single regiment at a time. Brigades will just switch places with one another randomly when giving movement commands, so when you try to advance a whole division up forward to close the distance to the enemy while under fire your whole line will turn 90 degrees and allow the enemy to shoot the flanks and cause horrible casualties instead of just staying in line and advancing forwards. Unit rotation facings will constantly bug out and be locked to a certain facing. Units will get stuck in place and refuse to move, both on the battle map and strategic map. Only about 50% of the time when you move a unit into cover will they actually get the cover bonus or even actually move into cover. Even if feuds and AI control are off, the AI will just randomly move on the battle map without you doing anything. LOS is janky and not reliable. You can place the unit in the same spot 10 times and it will give you 10 different LOS results, making artillery even more of a pain to use. And again, these bugs are not a once in a while thing, they are EVERY SINGLE BATTLE that you play.

As a quick note: I like this game. But unfortunately the devs discovered some new engine that has them all starry-eyed, so they abandoned this game to work on a "sequel." Just wait for that game at this point.

Eine Schande, das ein deutscher Entwickler nicht die eigene Sprache im Spiel implementiert. Und solange dieser Zustand bleibt, gibt es Dislikes 👎

Garbage dev team. Release game in semi-finished state to avoid accusations of rug pulling, then utterly abandon the game. Brilliant!