TL;DR - High complexity in economics, industry, diplomacy, and government paired with a lack of automation and really poor user interface; Too little complexity in military. Broken/stupid AI. Bugs galore.
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I've been conflicted about this game since I first played it. I see the potential, and I really wanted to like this game, but in the end I just can't leave a good review.
In the gaming industry, World War I is a very under-represented event in world history, despite the massive impact it had on the world. Sure, the later conflict of WWII featured a lot of interesting military strategy and tactics like tanks blitzing through the front lines or epic battles between aircraft carrier fleets in the Pacific, which have been simulated extensively. But it's not like WWI was this uninteresting event not worth simulating. Most people think of slow, grinding, trench warfare when it comes to WWI, but it was not always so on all fronts! And the world political climate wasn't so static either.
So why can't I give this game a good review? Because its attempt at simulating WWI and its events falls flat in pretty much every category. Let's take a closer look:
Province/City Management - This is the most tedious aspect of the game. Every province and every city has large dropdown menus of options for you to choose from to make improvements. The problem is, there's no context given behind any of the options, besides the name of the option. So, in order for you to understand what exactly every option does and what could be the benefit of selecting it, you have to close the dropdown menu and then find the game encyclopedia menu and look up what it does, what's its costs and benefits are, etc. Then repeat for each menu option. Needless to say, it gets tiresome really fast. A much better solution would have been to have a GUI where you can click pictures, buttons, adjust sliders, etc., rather than have to swim through dropdown menus. The other major problem is that, from what I can tell, there is absolutely no automation available to assist you. In order for you to produce or improve anything at all, you have to manually set it. And, there are no queues, so you can't just set a production/improvement list one time and then let it do its thing. With dozens and potentially hundreds of provinces and cities at your command, this can just get absolutely exhausting.
Empire Management - WWI occurred at the pinnacle of the era of European empires. If you play as any major power, you will have some kind of empire to manage. But unfortunately, just like you have to do everything manually for your provinces and cities, you also have to do the same for your subject nations. And if you are playing Britain or France, there are a ton of them to manage. Again, the lack of automation kills the vibe here. If only you could set a policy for your subjects and leave them to it: for example, direct them to improve infrastructure in provinces where there are natural resources, then prospect them, harvest them, and ship them to you. But no, sadly you have to manually do all of this too.
Trade (including intra-empire trade) - No automation here either. I think you get the point.
Diplomacy - This is very underdeveloped, and the game suffers greatly for it. For one, basic things like having military access to your allies' territory is not a given. I'm not kidding. If you are France, and Belgium is your ally, if you attempt to move your units into Belgian territory to help defend them, it will say that you have to declare war on them or ask for permission to move your troops there. And when you ask for that permission - wait for it - you will be rejected! Every time! Why?!? I don't understand at all how you are supposed to make the AI accept something so obvious that it should be trivial. And the game does nothing to explain it to you. Good luck doing any diplomacy that's more complex than that. And then, there's the random declarations of war that happen for no reason. In one of my games as Italy, the Allies refused my entry into their alliance despite the fact that I was at war with the Central Powers. And when our mutual enemy was finally defeated, the very next turn Australia declared war on me and with them the entire Allies...................................................
Units and Combat - This should be the fun part, after all you can't have a conflict without battles. And with all of the detail and options available for infrastructure and industry, the military system should be just as detailed, right? Wrong. Essentially, the level of complexity for units and battles is about the same as you would find in Axis & Allies. And that wouldn't be a bad thing if the game didn't have such high complexity for economics, diplomacy, empire management, etc. It's so bizarre how low complexity military is in this game, while everything else is such high complexity. It should be the other way around. This game has no concept of command and control, generals and other types of officers, supply lines and logistics, or battlefield tactics. Instead, you just form huge stacks of units and push them into enemy provinces, where they will engage in long battles that take several turns to resolve. In most cases, whoever sends more units to the battle wins. That's about the extent of tactics in this game. One of the strangest design decisions in this game, too, is how artillery is implemented. Artillery attacks from neighboring provinces, even though the distance between those provinces in reality is far greater than the range of those guns. This is WWI, remember, not modern times with long range missiles, yet you wouldn't know the difference in this game. And, if you stack enough artillery in one province, and have them all target the same neighboring province, you can automatically win a battle there in one or two turns. That's because the single biggest bug in this game is that artillery is unbalanced and a large stack of artillery can erase entire stacks of enemy units in an instant. You can even attack neighboring provinces without sending any infantry units there, and still destroy entire stacks of units. It's just stupid. Oh, and you can capture artillery and use it for yourself, never mind the fact that in reality every military in WWI had its own standard for sizes and types of ammunition and in no way would have been able to use captured artillery in any extensive way. What about airplanes? They are basically useless. Sorry, no epic dogfights with the Red Baron here. And according to this game, airships were the most powerful type of aircraft and can single handedly destroy entire squadrons of fighter planes.
AI - Let's just get this over with. The AI is dumb; really, really, dumb. In my Britain game, I destroyed over half of the German army at sea. No, that's not a typo. They embarked half of their entire army on transports which I promptly sunk. Enough said.
So as you can see, nothing in this game works well or like it should. As of writing this review, I still have yet to play as the major Central Powers. For the heck of it, I probably will, and then never play this again. If you're looking for an authentic WWI simulation, look elsewhere.
