Diplomacy is Not an Option

A roguelite-ish rts-ish citybuilder-ish good time. You can pause at any time so it doesn't have the stress and frankly the inflexibility of an RTS
but includes all the important beats of an RTS like huge armies and walls. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was create insane cities in Age
of Empires 2 map builder and I always found it disappointing that I couldn't make a 'real' city. This game splits the difference and lets you
enjoy the building aspect and placement despite most of it really not mattering a ton, while still having objectives which can make some of
those sandbox city building type games feel a little empty and pointless.

Lots of trial and error, but it isn't a huge investment to restart so I never mind that. Sure, maybe the game has an annoying way of pathing
the enemy on certain maps. Sure maybe you'll lose because a random attack happened to fall at an inconvenient location/time. Oops! I didn't
build enough builders to keep up with construction so I can't build in time so my people all starve to death because I wasn't on top of food
while I was focused on army stuff. While these things are all frustrating in the moment, especially if you didn't really explicitly do anything
"wrong", it just fuels your replay where you say "ah, yeah I should probably clear out this part of the map and put a wall here etc".

I do wish there were more upgrades and unit variety but I think the game is going for mass over quality. At later points in the game your
troops really meet their match which brings in another trial and error mechanic: Oops, I guess I should focus on taking the fight to the enemy
more often.

Ultimately the one reason I didn't want to play this game is that I was afraid it would be content bare, and to some extent it kindof is, but the
replayability and level variety is sufficient to just pick it up randomly and play through a map. The game doesn't bait me to continue all night
long which I actually like, but it's definitely one of those games to play when I'm killing time more than wanting to fulfill an objective.

9/10

Could use more unit types, cavalry needs some kind of buff, spearmen could use a lategame upgrade like swordsman have, and I wouldn't
mind more trading options to pad resources up or down more than you already can.

Casual enough to enjoy even if you can't quite get into RTS or this newer genre of infinite city defense but complicated enough to actually
play more than 20 hours.

I've been loving this game and I've only played the endless mode, if the campaign is even half as fun as the endless then i'll be probably getting a bunch more hours on this game!

Love the cartoon animation style. I have always sucked at any RTS and Base builder I have played before, but this game feels relatively approachable. Whenever I have failed it felt very understandable and could see my faults.

Very fun and challenging city builder, tower defense and rts in one

I really like this game. Its not easy, which is great! It has some comedic cut scenes. The perfect balance between city builder and tower defence.

A great RTS that keeps you on your toes. It's mildly funny and highly strategic with city-planning, wall construction, and perhaps most importantly, economy. It has a bit of a learning curve as you'll see some complain about (they have softened those harder early missions), but the basics is: keep all of your citizens busy and keep growing. Identify where you're weak and build that. Keep the enemy at choke points. And

Nice RTS similar to They are billions, that doesn't take itself too serious.
Lots of humor sprinkled in!

Don't be fooled by good artsyle and nice base mechanics - this game is horrible in what matters the most. Level design and tools it gives for the job.

Campaign (Main chunk of content here) relies on YOU assaulting enemy bases (Compared to trailers which show you defending yourself from enemy forces). There are a few defense missions, yes, and they are the best.

For assaults though... Let's give you some simple math as example. Trebuchet, a legendary siege known to most fans of medieval games. Enemy towers in last mission have up to 3000 HP (Range is about between 1200 and 3000). So you think "Well, it is trebuchet time". Only that... Trebuchets deal 45 damage per impact. 45 (!). So, to destroy *a* tower you need around 67 shots from trebuchets. And final level is full of these towers. And enemy will retaliate in the mean time, hell, good chance their own siege engines (With higher damage) will counter your trebuchets.

And it is just an example of missions where you are the attacker. Game has plenty of tools for defensive playstyle, but barely for attacking. And there is planty of attacking to be done.

Okay, you say. Then you still can micro all of these, right? No, you can't. Pathfinding and target finding is this game are worse than in Starcraft 1. Simple example - if you give attack move command, your units will attack empty walls and buildings, even if enemy units are around. Target priority "units > buildings" was solved decades ago for RTS, what is this?

But then you might say "well then, just manually click what you want to attack". Only that units will always choose worst path for attacking, they will stack in each other, blocking attack pathes for on another.

Overall, it is very *frustrating* experience. Games tries to be what it isn't, and thus falls apart. Bleh

Love everything about the game but it's to difficult.
Every level requires multiple takes to figure out the one and only way to beat it.
50 hours in and it's gotten old, it's just not fun anymore, and there's no way to make it easier.

The game is fun for just a few maps, then it becomes too tedious. My main issue with this game is the constant need of grinding resources. All of them run out quickly and you need to constantly move your camps, storage etc, to keep the flow of resources flowing to feed your tech tree, defenses and troops. There is too much going on at the same time. It's important to keep a good level of tension otherwise the game becomes boring but tension all the time is just stress. There are no moments of peace, if you are not dealing with a wave you need to micro your troops to kill the enemies on the map to allow your workers to get more resources that are constantly running out. If you don't mind clicking everywhere hysterically then you may enjoy it. I quick fix I can suggest: wood, crops and fish x5, iron and stone x2, i.e: if a tree gives 100 wood change it to 500.

could be a good game .. but difficulty level jumps way too much even on easy difficulty level once you hit undead levels. Bosses wipe out whole groups of solders in 1 hit have to kite or bring back to base and let towers kill them.

I can not recommend the game in it's current state. It just keeps crashing in big fights even if I set it to lowest settings. So annoying.
Otherwise the game is great and fun, I hope you get more units in future upgrade and but overall solid RTS.

game has some serious flaws that require immediate attention from this dev team. The random enemies appearing in the middle of your city is an absolute joke! Not only that, but if the enemy is behind a building, you CAN"T HIT IT! Resources are so scarce, I have never got to lvl 3 town hall. The only way to get it is through market. HAHAHA! Amazing. Your units can't even hit a target you tell it to hit. Nightmare general is ridiculously OP for this game. Overall, a game that has serious balance problems.

It's not terrible. It's a PvE RTS in the vein of They Are Billions, clearly trying to build on that foundation; and it feels a little like Age of Empires. These are good things in my book, so I kept on playing for a bit.

Unfortunately, there are a million little things that annoy me here, that eventually made playing this frustrating.

The Economy

The Space

The Corpses

The Concept

Conclusion

Great game, love the style and the tower defence genre of gameplay, it's a lot of fun except for one glaring issue.... balance.

The easy difficulty is too easy, as you'd expect, but notch it up by one level and welcome to getting steamrolled in record time by army after army. This was an issue over a year ago and I picked it back up this week to find that the issue, even though it is a regular complaint, has not been fixed. Seems like a really easy thing to fix as well.

Would love to thumbs up this game, everything else is superb, but the balance really ruins it.

A well done variation on a game you probably have played many times. Right off the bat it doesn't offer too much new. The presentation is cute with the low-poly look and it plays smooth. I just couldn't get particularly interested in it.

It's just too damn hard to the point where it's not fun. You play a mission for 3-4 hours and then get mobbed from a direction that you weren't expecting. The map is different every time you play, so there is no way to get a sense of the map.

I've played They are Billions, and beaten it, but it was not NEAR as frustrating as this since you had an AoE attack or some sort.

It pains me to give it a thumbs down, but unless you're a *HARDCORE* player, stay away.

This game is 100% not for filthy casuals such as myself. Maybe if they tone down the difficulty, I'll check it out again.

This game is so challenging i have tried some challenge levels that im not sure how to beat but i keep trying alot of fun Dev's 10/10

Game is far, far too snowball based.
This is unironically a game where minor decision changes can dictate a win or loss HOURS later into the level.

(Yes, some levels, especially the later ones, can take an average of 2-4 hours to complete, and that's considered a good time).

Taking even the most minor of losses early will basically warrant a restart because you'll have to waste time recovering instead of advancing, and when the enemies scale in strength and number exponentially, you have basically no time for such a thing.

I hate to say it but I cannot recammend this game, even though I'd love to as a fan of base builders. The game is just too tedious. It takes forever to gather resources, making base building slow and cumbersome; all the while you're being attacked by stronger and stronger waves. Some mission goals for resources are insanely high as well. Upgrading townhall from level 1-2 takes 150 wood. From 2-3 takes 600, in addition to stone, iron and money.

The timing on cutscenes is also really bad, to the point were I just started skipping all of them, even though there is come good comedy. Imagine you're having a conversation with someone but they only speak one sentence every 4-5 seconds but maintain eye contact with you the whole time.

The game's pacing needs serious work and now that it's 1.0 I doubt it will improve.

If you're a huge fan or wave games or base builders *maybe* give it a try, if it's on sale. If you're on the fence, don't waste your money. Good concept, poor execution.

Pros
+ Massive battles: Experience the thrill of commanding armies with thousands of units clashing on screen. This game truly delivers on the feeling of epic medieval warfare.
+ Challenging gameplay: Diplomacy is Not an Option lives up to its name. Be prepared to face overwhelming odds and adapt your tactics to survive. The difficulty curve provides a rewarding sense of accomplishment when you overcome the challenges.
+ Unique setting: While it's a medieval fantasy world, the game injects humour and satire into the story and characters, making for a refreshing take on the genre.
+ Deep Tech Tree: There's a good amount of depth to the research and upgrades, allowing you to customize your defenses and armies to suit your playstyle.

Cons
- Steep learning curve: The game doesn't hold your hand. Mastering the mechanics and resource management can be overwhelming for new players, especially during the early stages.
- Limited diplomacy (as expected): While the game's title is tongue-in-cheek, the focus is heavily on combat. Don't expect complex diplomatic options or peaceful solutions.
- Repetitive gameplay loop: While the battles are epic, the core gameplay loop of building, gathering resources, and defending can become repetitive after extended playtime.
- Lack of variety in enemy types: While the enemy numbers are impressive, the variety of enemy units could be expanded for more strategic depth.

Good game, however a lot will depend on if you are an avid RTS and tower defense player or not. I think this is a better game for players that are not as experienced with it as me and play it on middle difficulties. The hardest difficulty was fun for the first few maps but was also a bit of a slog, after that it really got a bit too grindy for me. The easier difficulties on the other hand was a bit too easy and made the game not interesting. I'm quitting mid campaign at this point because I'm not having fun anymore but I got my moneys worth out of it for sure.

Too damn difficult even at lower difficulties, fun game, nice attempt devs

It gets kinda repetitive after a while, it just the same loop of build base, fight off enemy wave, repair base, build bigger army, fight off bigger enemy wave, etc, etc. The game is really fun at first but it gets stale.

You would think after 20 hours I would know if I like a game or not, yet I still haven't decided because there are things I like, and things I hate about Diplomacy is Not an Option.

DNO is a They Are Billions style game, for better and worse. It's not any lesser, nor is it a clone, but instead has its own style and quirks that set it apart. However, the entire game is about perfecting a build order, where you clear and build up a map in preparation for waves of attackers. There are two issues with this style of game that make it not for everyone.

The first is that snowballing is incredibly important. Small gains and optimisations snowball into major changes an hour later. Getting an hour or two in and finding that you just can't win, means starting over from the very beginning. Just the time investment in such long playtime is not for everyone, and being forced to do it again can cause a lot of frustration.

The second is that the game is an optimisation problem. Should you be selling wood or food? Building two or three foresters on the first day? None of this is apparent to the average person, and so getting better is often just not possible because the game doesn't provide you that feedback. Instead, getting better is done by looking up spreadsheets and build orders. This is the kind of thing that makes competitive RTS games toxic and unfun, and yet that is the path this singleplayer game has chosen.

Awkward pacing, QOL, and balance.
DNO suffers from a pacing issue, whether it be in the gameplay, or even in the cutscenes. Certain moments feel like a mad scramble of multitasking and chaos, but most of the game is spent waiting around. Sure, you can pause and fast forward, but that is a crutch rather than a solution to sloppy game design. Worse and most blatant are the story cutscenes, filled with long drawn out pauses that make them take 3x longer than they should. The dialog isn't that clever, and nothing is actually happening so they just feel painful to sit through and watch.

QOL features could be vastly improved. The tech tree specifically feels awkward to use, needing to be reopened every time a research item finished. Easy to miss that and go half an hour without remembering to do research. There is no reason why there couldn't be a queue, or even simultaneous researches. Having to save scum to get to different paths in the story is also bizarre.

Game balance is a mess, and I hope the devs actually take this complaint seriously. I'm not alone with finding certain levels to be poorly balanced with massive difficulty spikes, but the responses to these concerns has been, concerning. Pinned responses to this criticism has been effectively 'get gud', with solutions being to look up spreadsheet builds, or even save scum.

Overall DNO is not a bad game, but it's issues make it not for everyone. It was a coin flip to recommend or not, but decided there would be more value highlighting the issues with DNO and the There Are Billions formula that both games share. I recommend buying TAB first as it's more refined, then you can make a more informed decision about DNO.

Cool game, not to my liking though: the difficulty curve is too steep and uneven.
Maybe you'd enjoy "Diplomacy is Not an Option", but if you prefer to focus more on city building and less on army management, try "Kingdoms & Castles".

Very similar to They are Billions but better. Worth a buy great time killer trying to sort your base out before attacks

if there was an 'Its Alright' recommendation button, I would press that. Don't get me wrong I truly enjoy the game but if you play the endless mode, after awhile into the game like wave 12 onward, the game would start to give problems either by giving problems with frames here and there or the game totally just crashes :/ Hope the Dev can improve the game in the future

Overall the game is a solid 7.9/10

The campaign is too hard, even on easy. I'm about 10 missions in, and it's a struggle. You don't get that nice satisfaction of building up an economy and then steamrolling the opponent. It's more of a fight against time, you know that if you take your time building up you'll get taken out. Clearly this works for some people, but, ultimately, with all the reloads / replays, I'm not enjoying it as much.
On top of that, like with most RTSs you have to micro your forces, deal with broken pathfinding, and so on.
Just add an actual easy option to the game, or I don't know, settings or something.

Also, don't make me micro units. If a unit is about to die, it's fine for it to fall back behind its buddies without me having to click everywhere. Maybe add that as an option?

Game balance is just way off. Horribly finite resources make building any sort of capable defenses tedious and a considerable struggle. Level 4 was certainly difficult but the levels thereafter are even worse, even after the update. Honestly, the game just isn't fun and needs to be re-balanced, regardless of what the dev might say.

My suggestions:
- Improve missile AI to better engage targets. Right now, you could have 100 archers shooting at the same enemy and all of the arrows aren't connecting because of the weird positioning. A tower's position along a wall shouldn't lose an entire run because you realized too late all of your arrows will just miss. Is there any real reason for arrow collision other than to frustrate the player?

- Resource nodes could use a significant bump. I understand wanting the player to expand to gain resources, but the amount of resources given means you cannot adequately defend any new positions taken. The gold mechanic required to tech up just exacerbates this issue. At the present, I can see resource nodes being bumped by at least 30% and the game still being very difficult.

- If resource nodes aren't adjusted, then the gold mechanic is too brutal. Introducing a way to generate gold passively either through a new tax building or node could help the situation and give players a chance to get their economy going before getting overwhelmed. At present, a player is required to dump insane amounts of resources into the market just to get to tier 3, then not be able to afford anything tier 3 has to offer before all of the nodes nearby are dry.

- I would say lessening the amount of enemy units should be the last option for balancing, considering the theme of the game. The player should just be given more tools and resources to handle the enemies presented. Buffing player units would be a better solution. Either expand the research upgrades each unit can receive, or perhaps introduce a veterancy system for units to be able to better handle the enemies that they are thrown against, which could buff units based on kills.

The fact you could probably implement all of these suggestions and the game would *still* be difficult is a testament to how difficult the game is in its current state.

I'm not really sure what the thought behind the new content was. Everything feels really annoying, boring, and just not fun to play.

I tried out the Sarranga missions where you're starving and and have to fight the god that spawns and also kill two nightmare generals.

I don't hate the starvation aspect of the bug maps but i'm not sure how you're supposed to raise a big enough army to fight the generals and gods that spawn. My solution was to just cheese it with healers and one melee guy but that's just not fun.

The god has an aoe which kills all your dudes so you rely on healers to heal one melee dude. That's not a terrible situation but it's boring and you basically 3x speed until the day is over.

Fighting the nightmare generals is the exact same fight because they too kill all your melee guys with an aoe so it's another boring fight of kiting one troop around while it gets ranged to death.

It is frustrating to know what fun this game could be, if there were just a few more options for the player! I saw reviews from 2 years ago and there has been little to no improvements since. Why do i need to build houses on half of the map to get a decent amount of citizens? What is the point of having to build so largely, that i am never able to defend my buildings? I want to build compact, but the game forces me to build all over the map. And what annoys me the most: You could just implement player settings with almost no efford but choose not to.

Please make storage capacity communal. The wood in the storage buildings near my lumber camps stays full until I use up all of the wood in my town center, so in order to transfer the wood to my town center so my woodcutters have a closer drop-off, I have to periodically build and refund a bunch of buildings. Why is this even a mechanic?

I have an issue with games that artifically are difficult by just sending more and more stuff. It's artificial and it doesn't require good balancing.

For context I played semi comp Supreme Commander and CoH, so i'm fairly experienced when it comes to RTS micro but also grander scale and have therefore certain expectations to controls and the sort.

All it is at some point is just to build faster and faster and faster (so the economy is done like an ECO Rts like AoE) in hopes to beat the aritficial difficulty. While painfully microing around mistakes that you only discover when the hordes of enemies are at your footstep (Like a low unit RTS like CoH).

But since the enemy doesn't build a base the closest that I can think of is that this is a tower defense. Unfortunately there's not a lot of variety in here after the 3rd time you went through it. It's a game that doesn't know whether it's an RTS, City Builder or a Tower Defense. Not excelling at either of the three.

A good example here is firing vision. You deal with 1000's (!) of enemies (like Supreme commander) at the same time, but your units sometimes shoot into a wall because a unit is obscured by it. Yet the AI is not capable of at least shooting at something else. So you will have sometimes a trebuchet shooting at one guy somewhere else, missing 100 shots (because they crash into a wall or stone) while an invasion is happening right next to it.

Either fix that, or let shots pass through terrain / walls. This added "realism" is not helping anyone.

The archer target distribution is also horrendous. The controlling aspect of the RTS side is just not good enough for a game that has you control THIS many units while fighting that many units.

The tech tree is also not giving you a lot of choice which would have been one option to diversify, but most choices are obvious.

A tower defense in which one mistake can destroy the last hour of progress unnecessarily. The reason why most Tower defenses are on pre set routes is to exactly avoid this and because it's easier to balance the difficulty ramp.

Something feels off about this difficulty ramp method, especially since the game keeps you artifically busy with you having to clear the map constantly while there's offmap waves coming as well all the time. You either resort to cheese or you accept that the game is incredibly opaque with what's happening and what's coming at you.

Also the controls are not good enough to excert the control the game implies in the trailers (with the phalanxes etc.). This also unfortunately includes the ECO side of the game. Instead of being able to define a specific limit that is auto exported we have to manually click and export resources. It does not add to tactical dept but keeps you from playing the game, like many other things unfortunately. Constantly recruiting but no Auto Build. Constantly balancing food and population.

Some maps are for most people only beatable if they know where what is so they can direct and time their resources there. It's an ok game but I'm feeling quite stressed after playing it which is something I really don't want in a game.

I tried loving it. But that's it.

Writing this after taking a first pass through the campaign on the 4th difficulty level (out of 5). I did spend a decent amount of time playing in the early access on the various challenges prior to 1.0.

Summary
This is a really great spiritual successor to They Are Billions. Where as I felt They Are Billions got worse in its early access journey, this game definitely got better and the 1.0 release has released an excellent game that has been worth the time.

Gameplay Loop
The gameplay loop is pretty stable. You start with a main base and slowly expand your population by acquiring resources and expanding your economy. Each session will take you an hour or two to play (depending on how much you rely on pausing). Generally you take time to clear out segments of the map to claim for exploitation and then solidify your gains by figuring out ways to build defenses or station men. Intermittently large waves will attack you from an announced direction.

The campaign does not do overly much to shake this loop up, but the loop is just pretty good on its own.

Campaign
The campaign is an improvement on just proc-gen endless modes, but I'd say with some significant missed opportunities. There are some side objectives that direct your attention or win condition in a slightly different direction, but you are still starting with the same base startup and applying the same gameplay loop with very little variation.

The campaign had some opportunities to shake up your starting conditions some more than it does, but it takes the path of just ramping the difficulty on the player assuming that the player is learning and getting better. This is fine, but it would have been more interesting to shake up the loop a bit.

Story/Writing
I'll also call out that the story/writing in this game wants to be funny, but it landed pretty flat for me. While you can skip the whole dialogue scene, you can't accelerate the individual dialogues requiring you to listen to the whole thing if you are trying to pay attention. Overall, the dialogue overstays its welcome, it provides some loose context for "why" you are doing what you are doing - but it is not very well written.

You also get to take the story down some branching paths, but this is really just gating content to encourage additional campaign playthroughs. I guess it is ok, but I personally would have preferred a more linear form of storytelling.

You probably aren't playing this game for the gripping story though - so it is an acceptable weakness.

Difficulty
This game is delightfully difficult. There are 5 difficulty levels available to make the game more accessible to players. The difficulty is also well designed in that it scales the volume and frequency of enemy assaults but doesn't touch health or damage points. This is a really nice way to do it and I found the 4th difficulty to be a good sweet spot for me to feel like I was being tested, but could push through and move the campaign forward.

Conclusion
Overall - really enjoying my time with this title. Highly recommend it if you enjoyed They Are Billions and are looking for a good reboot of that formula.

The mission get ridiculously difficult even on medium setting. It seems like a lot of this stuff is not play tested at all. In on of the later mission you get huge waves every 4 days, I've had more fun wiping my ass with sandpaper. The game is just pure frustration and micromanagement without good balance at all, do yourself a favor and play something else, this is garbage!

game is way too quick. you dont even have a chance to build and arm a wooden wall before the final wave of enemies arrive due to lack of population, resources, or time. that and having to micromanage a unit to clear the map makes this game very lack luster for the category its in

The game is great and the optimization is awesome.

Note: If you're writting BepInEx mod, you must delete the `Diplomacy is Not an Option/Diplomacy is Not an Option_Data/Plugins/x86_64/lib_burst_generated.dll` file, otherwise the patched code can never be executed.

Very enjoyable game. I like the way the thousands of tiny moving dots scream at me in different accents.

Been waiting for this game to get out of EA for a long time and its finally released out of EA, Great job Devs! The game is reminiscent of Stronghold series, There are Billions, Total War series and Warcraft 3 influences. The graphics are chill and low key but still have a good fidelity to them. If you like RTS, strategy, mass units with epic battles/siege tower defense and some goofy medieval humor... this game has it!

Had this on my wishlist for much of its beta time. Bought it once it launched and was really happy with it, but the ramp up around mission 3 / 4 is ridiculous. I want to like this, and as a fan of They are Billions, I was so sure this would fit the bill.

Alas, not right now. Might change my review if the dev balances the game a bit, but as others have said, it seems the dev is more interested in telling players to "git gud" as opposed to fixing their poor work. Seems kinda counter intuitive to make a game thats unbalanced, which then no ones buys because its unbalanced, but then you dont fix it because for them, its fine?

It's a fun game but, my God, they need to do something about the cutscenes. They're too slow and just seem to be vehicles for (bland) jokes instead of any kind of story or narrative? That's not to say they're not entertaining, but they're like five minutes long and they feel even longer. They're a real blemish on the game.

That said, I'm enjoying the game play a lot, even if it's not perfect. It'd be nice if there were a few QOL things implemented, such as reminding the player that they're not researching anything, and maybe even allowing you to auto-rebuild buildings.

I really, really want to like this game. This game should everything I love in games, but actually playing it is a tedious chore. I'm trying to find excuses for all of the CTD's and lack of QOL features, as well as just plain broken or missing things.

I cannot recommend this game at this time. It needs more time to cook, and it needs a dev who's more open to feedback. Multiple customers have commented that mission 4 has a huge difficulty spike and the dev responded saying get good. Thats extraordinarily offputting to me. A dev should want their customers to have fun and enjoy the game. I'm beyond the refund window so while I can't refund it, I can leave a review of my experiences.



The good:

Its like Stronghold meets They are Billions. This should be great! But its held back by some serious flaws.

The bad:

- Massed archers are useless. They all focus fire the same target which would seem fine, except arrows have travel time and units keep firing at the doomed target while lethal damage is already on route, so they enormously overkill the 1 peasant they attacked with 100+ arrows, and meanwhile there's 4,999 more peasants attacking that your archers ignored. The game needs some sort of spread fire or target random priority so archers don't waste nearly all of their shots uselessly attacking an enemy who's already dead.

- Your unit AI is abysmal, it will prioritize attacking buildings from creep camps over the siege engines defending the creep camps. It will also prioritize tough tanky enemies attacking your walls that don't do much damage instead of hitting the high damage but fragile siege engines throwing boulders at you. In contrast to your unit AI, the enemy unit AI is very good, it prioritizes attacking your squishy healers and archers with its artillery.

- I hope you like tedium! There's no auto-rebuild option which means you're manually rebuilding spike traps, one at a time, by the thousands. The maps are big and enemies come from all sides, so you need a lot of spike traps. Even if you have the economy to pay for replacements you're still manually placing them down. I've given up endless mode games because they're so tedious to constantly manually rebuild after every wave. Auto-rebuild doesn't mean rebuild for free, the player should be required to have the resources to rebuild the destroyed structure, just don't make them click and drag and paint huge swaths of the map after every wave. Its the pointless, tedious clicking for no good reason thats so upsetting.

- You can only build 1 marketplace, so you can only trade 1 resource at a time, even though you may have many resources being produced in surplus for export.

- The game becomes increasingly unstable after early game. There's a lot of enemies on the screen but this seems to crash the game sometimes, which is a problem when its a horde tower defense game in the style of They Are Billions. Yes, I can reload from autosave, but playing knowing the game can crash at any moment is a bad feeling to have. I don't want to constantly have to worry about will my game crash.

At first I thought the people complaining about the difficulty spike in the 4th mission, were just not figuring out the game... But once I hit it, and replayed it three times, each time trying something new, I understand.

While I am sure I'll get it, the park-walk of the first three missions makes the 4th unnecessarily brutal. And rather than ease the player base into things a little slower and retool the difficulty. The devs have pretty much flipped everyone complaining the finger and said, GET GUD NUB.

Seriously. It's such a massive change in tactics and timings that MOST players will struggle enough to get angry... And that's on easy mode.

While that is certainly their prerogative, it is hardly conducive to creating good will, nor encouraging.

So, I am adding my disapproval, in the form of an official complaint/review.

Since the forums won't do it, maybe dropping the review score will.

There is no need to spike the difficulty so insanely, so quickly. None what so ever. Let alone blame the players for not figuring it out quick enough, rather than adjust timings and give helpful advice.

Really nice blend of resource management and micro-conducive RTS. Really hard to find an RTS I enjoy since WC3/SC2 and this one scratches the itch

also mfer I'm barely getting through the campaign on the easiest difficulty. Appreciate the challenge but dang

This is probably one of the better RTS games in my opinion. It reminds me of older ones from the 90s where difficulty is something that you had to overcome rather than it be handed to you. I read reviews like Alitari and those types of negative reviews are obvious of someone who played the first two levels and then came here to leave a snarky review talking about how they didn't like it because of things they never played long enough to find.

People such as Alitari and others are used to games that hand you the answers. This is a game where you learn to get good on each map and learn different ways to get good. I spent the entire day on a singular level until I finally learned the way to handle it. The game gives you enough tools to handle it, you just have to learn how to use it.

Is the game perfect? No but its better than a lot of AAA games that come out.

Give the game a shot and remember that this game is not a friendly "I want to be handed things because I don't want to get good". This game is like "They are Billions" where you find ways to survive and adapt and overcome.

Try it out! But don't listen to people who whine because it is too hard. Those people are the same type who played Dark Souls and cried because it didn't have an easy mode.

Fun and challenging. It's basically AOE turned into tower defense. I guess people are crying about it being too hard because the graphics make it look casual but it can get pretty sweaty (like AOE)

Games half decent, but the dev is openly mocking paying customers on the forums regarding difficulty feedback.

Lots of people reporting issues with difficulty spikes on mission 4.

well mission that require you to build ships 4 of them cant really focus on doing the objective when most of them are lock in a high tier -_- plus continue hordes of enemies ? not a wave but mobs thta just keep attacking giving u no room to either gather resources iits even on easy mode ? its not really consider easy lol plus RNG placement of the townhall please reduce the cost upgrades either way its fun but without magic its basically a husle

i'm a pretty casual RTS tower defense enjoyer
this game is really really sweaty mission 4 is where i'm having my trouble
the scenario is really cool . the gameplay is super solid but the difficulty spike is really unfun
post patch C&C3 campaign unfun

this is the kind of strategy game that placing an extra lumber mill down or placing a wall wrong might cost you a 2 hour run