Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865)

This is the best RTS Civil War game I've played. I will say that the game is much smother with the DLC which is unfortunate, and while the game is the best I've played, this could be so much better. Mechanics: Several of the game mechanics are useless in the DLC, which I like, because in the regular game, they come into play out of nowhere, and destroy your entire campaign. Such as the economy, trading, and budgets. Troop movement is very simple, and its said you can move multiple units at once, but I've never found that to be true. There are also many many many times where movement is awful, such as how you have to manual tell each Zouave regiment to sprint, but you cant have them sprint from the commander. They are also several times where a single regiment can take several in game hours to move a short distance. I wish there was a drag and click system similar to what I've seen ultimate general has. As far as European intervention goes, you can see my play time, and I've done about 18-20 play throughs in both modes, and I've never had European intervention, as either Yank or Reb. I personally think that its far to hard to get any chance of Europe intervening. Naval....it sucks. It takes forever to get ironclads, and by the time you do, you probably dont have a large enough home port to construct them. As the Confederacy, once the blockades start, even on the easiest mode, thats the end of any chance of naval victories for you. At times, naval is very unbalanced. I once had a squadron of about 5-8 Ironclads and a few other wood ships (about 3 additional) go up against a blockade squadron with about 20-25ish ships, and I absolutely destroyed them. While I enjoy it as the Confederacy, it does seem a bit unbalanced. Weapon purchasing has never made sense to me, and its really frustrating when your trying to make a sharps brigade, and all you can give them is Springfields, because the sharps rifles "aren't in stock" while about 20k are clearly in stock. Same goes for cannons, and constructing ships. ship construction. I have money, and have enough space, can I build ironclads, I have bought the thing that lets me build them, can I? no. Why? No. Drafting is also one thing that should be controlled by the player but inst, you pass the act and a few thousand men become available or reinforce your already fielded regiments. I have all in entry and exit points to the map in my control, the enemy has to surrender now right? nope, you will capture a large portion of them, but the whole enemy force wont surrender. Major and Minor Victories/Defeats make no sense. I had 70k troops engaged, killed 10k enemy troops, lost 2k of my own but the battle was still a minor victory? I had 10k troops engaged, killed 300 enemy troops, lost 20 and its a major victory??? I believe that system needs a simple rework Sound designs: Beautiful. Visuals: While the visuals look like there from an old COD game, they can still very very easily crash your game. even on the lowest graphics settings, the game still runs pretty slow if you have like 80k + troops, which happens pretty often once you get serious about drafting troops. One of my personal pet peeves is that you cant see the true size of your regiments, the models seem to only have a Large Medium and Small size. Feature that should be added: I would like to see an actual draft system, that allows the player to select how many men out of the countries total population he can draft I.E. the country has a pop of 15 million men, the economy allows for 8 million men to be drafted, the player then selects to draft 3 million men. A drag and click order movement system so troops can converge on an area or move together more easily. I.E. you drag a box around three regiments, which would then select all three, and you order all three to move forward together. If all entry/exit point are in your control, and the enemy losses the battle, the commanding general surrenders his forces. I.E. just like how the player can surrender, but for the AI, this would also allow for more newspapers, and a bigger hit to the enemy nations morale, depending on if it was a major loss or minor loss. this would bring the need of prison camps, and quite frankly give them the use they deserve, as well as bring about actual strategy to trying to get a surrender instead of just killing/wounded as many troops as possible until the enemy unit is absolved. This would also apply to if a unit is completely cut off from escape (I.E. the enemy unit is completely surrounded or enveloped). "Grant Surrenders to Jackson: Union in risk of losing the Shenandoah!" "After the Battle of Gettysburg, Brigadier General Grant of the Union's XXX Corps surrendered his troops to Lieutenant General "Stonewall" Jackson of the Confederate LV Corps. an approximate 10,000 troops have been taken POW with 20,000 being paroled due to no room in prison camps....."