Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865) News

Patch 1.05: Community Requests

Gen'l,

A new patch is out! Version 1.05 is focused on community requests and all-around improvements to enhance game play:

Battle AI improvements, including deployment, defensive behavior.
Army and fleet management improvements, including shipyard capacity, quick construction of ships, reinforcement options for units and armies, detaching a corps from an army, creation of an independent corps after Military II policy, ability to change uniform & colors after recruitment.
Fixed fame system, including redeeming lost fame ("defamed") through time or battle honors, and positive morale effects from famous commanders.
Supply depots can be abandoned by player and the AI.
Commander and unit histories are updated during the campaign.
Further game option to decrease/increase the number of 3D models shown per unit, and optional VSync.
Locking map rotation only affects mouse controls, not hotkeys.
Bug fixes & balance improvements.

Read the full patch notes here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/654890/discussions/0/3185737967876412344/

Cheers,
The Grand Tactician Team

American Civil War game Grand Tactician gets an AI upgrade

The latest patch for historic strategy game Grand Tactician: The Civil War gives the AI a brain boost, both in the way it handles tactical battlefield command and its approach to the grand campaign. It's a "wagonload of AI," as the developers have described it, and it should make for more challenging, interesting campaigns going forward.

As strategy editor Joe Robinson noted in his impressions on Grand Tactician, the AI can feel a bit befuddled at times, both on the battlefield and in the war planning department. Version 1.04, which is out now, addresses some of these issues with more intelligent AI recruiting and troop assignments. The enemy general will now send reinforcements to areas under threat a bit more aggressively, and it'll do more fleet construction too - so keep a close eye on your coasts, because the enemy will be watching for areas that are poorly guarded.

During battles, expect to see more initial artillery bombardment while the AI waits for its reinforcements to arrive and form up. It will order troops to advance more often, and do a better job of waiting for everyone to get into position before actually committing to an attack. It should also do a better job of keeping its commander units a safe distance from engagements and enemy units in general.

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Patch 1.04: A Wagonload of AI

The new Grand Tactician update focuses heavily on improving the game's AI opponent, both in campaign and battle layers.

The campaign AI now recruits more intelligently, and transfers units to threatened theaters actively. It is more active in construction and management of its fleets, and will also consider naval invasions against poorly protected shores. Capital city defense behavior, defensive operations, weapons production and distribution among the troops, replacing commanders with better ones, and organizing early armies into grand armies with corps organization are also among the upgrades.

The battle AI handles its troops better. In attack, it will bombard enemy positions with its artillery while waiting for more troops to arrive, before moving in to close combat, if required. It is more active in defensive battles to counter player's flanking and encirclement movements with timely withdrawals, while also considering keeping a reserve to counter player's maneuvers. All in all, there will be less confusion in the AI's ranks during battles.

Along comes also a long list of bug fixes, balancing, UI and other improvements, including orderly withdrawal from campaign battles if the losing army is not broken.

While continuing to improve the game with the usual bug fixes and other minor improvements, the next patch 1.05 will have its focus in campaign economy, and player's controls in influencing it.

Most Respy,
The Grand Tactician Team

Find the full patch notes here:
Patch Notes 1.04

American Civil War strategy game Grand Tactician is a flawed gem

Grand Tactician: The Civil War is a highly ambitious American Civil War game that's just left Steam Early Access. Its scope and ambition is right there on the table. This is a grand strategy game dedicated to America's notorious civil war, encompassing almost the entire North American continent, with logistics, economics, and strategy sitting on top of a real-time combat layer in which armies fight it out over large 3D maps.

Developed by a small team led by Oliver Keppelmüller, this is one of those indie projects that simultaneously blows you away, but also leaves a bittersweet aftertaste as you discover all of the rough edges waiting to be ironed out, even after 13 months in beta.

The vision of this game is incredible; it sets out to offer a Hearts of Iron-style experience dedicated to this one conflict. You can choose to fight the entire war, starting just before fighting breaks out in 1861, or you can choose start dates in later years up to 1864, with each offering a different strategic set piece to engage with. But for all the praise I could and will heap on it, and much though I may feel like an asshole for pointing out flaws in indie passion projects like this, it does have quite a few of them, and it's worth being honest about that.

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Massive Civil War game Grand Tactician now has 3D soldiers

Reinforcements have arrived in Civil War strategy game Grand Tactician in the form of 3D soldier models. While the development team had always intended to use 3D models for troops in Grand Tactician, early attempts to use them were unsuccessful - the models had too big an impact on performance in the initial builds, and were thus replaced with less memory-hungry 2D sprites. After some post-launch experimentation, the Grand Tactician team has successfully worked out a way to use 3D models as originally planned, and they look pretty great.

"The sprites did have many limitations," chief designer Ilja Varha explains in a Steam post. "As we kept the number of different animations quite high, the number of frames per animation was limited. Also, customization options were limited, as each large sprite sheet reserved a chunk of VRAM."

The new 3D model system looks much better, as there is no longer the need for abrupt transitions from one sprite to another as players move the camera around the battlefield. But there are other advantages: the new 3D troops allow for variations in uniform within the same unit, for example, and soldiers cast realistic shadows on the ground now.

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