Recent reviews by GreatScots

For folks who are really interested in the American Civil War and enjoy first-person shooters that heavily test teamwork among strangers, this game is for you. The game looks really good most of the time and borderline cinematic at the right angles and distances.

There's usually one populated public server (it maxes at 300 players), which gives the game the appearance of being dead. Unlike other historical FPS, this game's organized community forms the backbone of the player base. If you find you're enjoying pub play and want even more out of War of Rights, ask around and find a good organized group to join. Finding a sizable, proficient, drama-free group will make your WoR experience all that much better.

Depending on your tastes, you may need to avail yourself of the ability to mute people, which is easily done.

The game has improved considerably in the four years since I started playing it, and more work is slated to be done and it all looks to be headed in a positive direction.

If you're good at FPS and that's all you want to do, you can play HLL that way and you will be an asset to your team. For those like me who are poor FPS players but play for the team, HLL gives you plenty to do: armor, artillery, Engineer, MG, Commander, and logistics. If you enjoy both, the squad lead, support, and antitank roles might appeal to you.

TL; WR: Get it; it’s the best game in the genre.

The Brief: If the devs hadn't created this game we would be in the UGCW forum whining they should have created a game with more in depth campaign dynamics. It’s challenging to create a game that is both complex yet doesn’t require a semester of research before playing, but the GTCW folks seem well on their way to doing just that.

Pros:

-The game offers players rich strategic and tactical environments.
-The devs give players the choice of how they want to play campaigns and battles. As long as they continue to allow players to fine tune their experience to their preferences, this title, and any franchise that may follow it, should be very successful. In campaign, you can micromanage (almost) every single detail or you can take a very hands-off approach.
-Lots of replayability with different campaign starts, policy choices, and historical battles.
-A rich ability to structure army OOBs
-Army commanders can be swapped in, out, and around
-A large and growing list of battlefield maps for campaign
-Beautiful "paper" maps
-A good soundtrack that plays at the campaign level
-Battle sound effects (cannons booming, volleys cracking) are quite good
-The sprite quality is no longer underwhelming since the inclusion of 3D sprites. The smoke effects look great on the battlefield and the commanders’ portraits aren’t bad.

Cons:

-Campaigns are easy to win because battles are (usually) easy to win. The AI on the battlefield does not play optimally, although it’s doing a few things better these days. The player has to play less than optimally to make the fights closer. AI on the campaign map is okay, probably because there’s less to get wrong, but is still (usually) not that challenging. That is also true of the AI of lots of other highly rated games, and TW titles come to mind on this point.

-Lacks multiplayer capability, which would eliminate the largest downside–too easy to win– I see in this game.

-Still some buggy actions in battle (i.e. skirms retreat from advancing enemy brigades by moving perpendicular to them) and campaigns (the Union frequently abandons Washington in favor of concentrating in Ohio-Illinois. Furthermore, the complexity of the economy and other background processes can obscure whether something is bugged or working as intended.

-No playable naval battles or fort battles (or navy vs. fort battles). They are all auto resolved. Additionally, navies don’t offer support to land forces in nearby engagements.


-Policies need to be rebalanced to make choices more difficult and consequential. There are some OP/ autotakes and some “never-takes.” Those who have played the game know.


Neutral:

-The game could be made more newcomer-friendly, but there’s a lot already out there.
-The in-game tutorials could be updated and made a bit more thematic for newcomers. This is compensated in large part by all the YT tutorials the community has produced.
-The game’s manual is 259 pages:
https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/654890/manuals/Grand_Tactician_Manual.pdf?t=1632502816 . Now that’s a quick read if you’re coming to this from the pre-Age of Sigmar WHFB, but that’s not most people. On the other hand, the devs opted for completeness, which I prefer.

-The unofficial GTCW discord https://discord.gg/Z4wBjNv7Wq has lots of helpful folks for Q+A.

-It’s unclear how mod-friendly the game will be in its final form. Right now you can mod a lot of the data values in game files, but whether we’ll be able to mod maps, uniforms, etc. is unknown.

-Diplomacy and naval strength seem under-powered to the point they can almost completely be ignored, except for some early diplomacy. The prospect of foreign intervention is difficult to trigger and underwhelming when it occurs. I can vouch for the first and have to take other people’s word for the second, because, despite 350 hours in the game, almost all in campaign, I’ve never seen the intervention go off. I heard it’s not that big of a deal when it does. As many may not care much about diplomacy or the navy, perhaps it’s best left this way.
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Finally: don’t whine about paying $45.00. If you stick with it, the game will give you 100s of hours of entertainment. If price was that important, you had a year to save yourselves $5 by purchasing prior to version 1.0. To compare:

-When Civil War General 2 launched in 1997 at around $50+ tax, it would cost $~85 + tax today, adjusted for inflation. While that was a great game, GTCW is (at least) twice as good and half the price (if purchased pre-1.0 release).

-UG is four years old, still retails for $30, and lacks the campaign-level depth and lots of other extras found in GTCW. In the time some are going to spend arguing it’s really a $30-$40 game, you could have just gone to work and made up the difference.

Shameless Self Promotion Time: I post a lot of GTCW content here, and there's a playlist of tutorials I created for the game: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrFv5p4OJ2oWKn8pbgbxFxg

This is easily my favorite game and a solid 10/10. Full disclosure: I was already a huge fan of WHFB and Total War going back to the first Rome, which was long my favorite game. If they hadn't created this game, I'd be complaining to all one or two of my friends "why doesn't someone create a WHFB video game?" Well, CA did, and they did it better than I thought anyone would. For the most part, I've stuck to the grand campaign against the AI, so I can't provide informed comments about multiplayer battles or campaigns.

Strengths:
1. Lore-friendly and good use of artistic license when there was less lore available (Norsca, for example).
2. Army unit selection is fantastic, and they've done a good job integrating magic, monsters, and flying units into battles.
3. Interesting tech trees for most factions and character development throughout campaigns is great. The quest battles and various magic items that can be acquired are a nice touch. If they weren't there, I (and probably others) would be whining they should be included.
4. The units and their animations look great on the battlefield.
5. Mods can really fill in some of the small gaps in the game. I don't want to overemphasize this point because I don't see that many gaps in the game as it stands. A fair criticism of the vanilla game is that you cannot play with a lot of the minor factions, but there are mods that unlock those for campaign and battles. There are also mods for Tomb Kings and Chaos Dwarves for use in multiplayer battles, and they're quite good. Some of the modded battlefields are fantastic as well.
6. The volume and quality of Free LC.


Shortcomings:
1. It is a nuisance that some races cannot occupy certain settlements (Empire into Dwarves and vice-versa, for example). This can simply be fixed with a mod that allows you to conquer anywhere. While it's a simple fix for the user, it would have been better to just scrap that part of the campaign.
2. No naval battles.
3. The AI does a good enough job on the battlefield to make many battles interesting, but it underwhelms on the campaign map. I've demolished far stronger factions because their armies camp in remote settlements while I take half their holdings, and only then begin to mobilize against me. The AI also seems to overspend on agents when they really could use larger armies.

Other things:
1. My campaigns tend to swing from very dire straits--frequently related to the Chaos invasion-- to positions of unrivalled power where winning the campaign becomes the more boring question of "when" rather than "if." However, I'm not sure what I would recommend to replace this. It sounds as if CA is trying to address this with the vortex in TWW2, but it's not clear why it would be more satisfying to lose the campaign to a dying faction that managed to pull off its last ritual before being vanquished.

2. I have mixed feelings about the pricing of DLCs. I did not buy any DLC for a time, but then I broke down when they released my Wood Elves, and got the Blood and Gore for the full experience. Picked up Beastmen and Chaos when they went on sale, got Norsca for free for preordering TWW2, but I still haven't purchased the two lord packs because they don't appear to offer enough to justify the price. I get more play out of any of the DLC races than I do for most other full games and I have not regretted a single DLC I've purchased yet or felt it was not worth what I paid. It sounds like CA will focus less on mini campaigns for future DLC races and focus more on their effects on the grand campaign, both of which are good news.

Less than 15 months after the initial game was released, we are up to nine playable races in the vanilla grand campaign (Empire, Dwarves, Vampire Counts, Greenskins, Chaos, Beastmen, Bretonnia, Wood Elves, and Norsca), several more with mods, we've received quite a bit of Free LC, and we should be able to plug this campaign map and its factions into TWW2, with Skaven, Lizardmen, High Elves, and Dark Elves. This is a fantastic project, and for what will likely be 1000+ hours of gameplay for less than $175, I'm hard pressed to think of a better deal.