Panzer Corps Grand Campaign '43 DLC

Fun

Grand Campaing 43... Finally you get to play with some really, I mean REALLY strong tanks of your own. You finally get to purchase your own railway cannon, your own Tigers and Panthers, Elephants... The Russians as always throw themselves onto you and as soon as you kill one unit another one takes its place, you're used to that by now but finally you can start to REALLY beat the shit out of them again as if we were back in 1941. +Finally a way to beat back the Russian horde! Thought your Stugs and Panzer 4s were not doing enough damage to the enemy tanks? Well here you go have a Ferdinand, have a Tiger, have a Panther! Thought the Sturmpanzer artillery you were using ever since 39, with their huge cannons mounted on panzer 1/panzer 2 hulls, was starting to be outdated? Well here you go some modern artillery! Mounted on a 38(t) chassis! So modern indeed! Your Stukas were starting to have issues with armored units, which the Russians have a shit ton of? Here have some Ducks with their 75mm cannons! BF 110s? No more! Say hello to the 410! Upgraded infantry, upgraded tanks, artillery, planes what more do you need? +Kharkov, Kursk, Prokhorovka, Kiev at the end... Its kind of funny cuz like in the past when you'd say the name of these places I'd imagine German tanks and planes fighting against their Soviet enemies, old but powerful machines of war fighting... But now I look at these places and in the back of my mind I'm always like "Oh I've seen this place recently... Dnieper River, Kiev, Kharkov..." I know this has nothing to do with the DLC and its cool that in the DLC you get to fight in these historical places, in these battles but the War in Ukraine kinda gives it a new perspective for me you know? +Some missions are a combination of defense and offense like you'll try to hold some bridges against enemy attacks while at the same time attacking in some other part of the map to achieve your objectives, in the last mission for example in Kiev you're fighting against both Russian paratroopers, trying to clear them out of the South of the map while on the East you're trying to make sure Russian units don't cross some bridges over the Dnieper River and this combination of defense and offense is very fun. -Sometimes, randomly Soviet planes, bombers and attackers will spawn on the edge of the map and make their way to you. This isn't necessarily new, I'm pretty sure I've seen it happen in Grand campaing 42 while fighting the Soviets the only difference here is it happens a lot more often. So often in fact that it gets a bit annoying. Not only that but the Soviet ground forces always seem to have better spotting then you do. Their tanks, their infantry all of them seem to be able to see further away then your soldiers. In the previous missions, previous Grand Campaings I suspected that something fishy was going on but it wasn't happening often enough for me to say "yeah something isn't right" but in here I could literally see enemy planes spawning out of thin air when I have every single airfield captured on the map. They cannot be resuplied, they were not here the previous turn, they are here on a suicide mission. If you place your fighters just right you can kill them as soon as they spawn before they even get a turn to move around on the map. Its kind of silly. -By this point in the Grand Campaing maps have gotten very big and there are tons of units on both sides, the Russians always having more then you for obvious reasons. The issue is that the AI is really focused on getting kills. The AI will do everything in its power to attack and keep attacking your weak units just to kill them. This was always the case, even in the older missions AI was always after kills but back then especially in the first Grand Campaing missions the maps were much smaller, there were way less units so it never ended up being like "oh they're all attacking that one unit thats low on health and out of ammo" cuz they'd attack him with like 2-3 maybe 4 units which was all they had so you'd think like ok fair enough chasing down a weak unit to kill it sure but in here when you see 8 different T-34s rushing out of their places just to chase down a single infantry unit you start to REALLY realize that the AI is only after kills. Like you always knew it. Even if you didn't admit it to yourself in the back of your mind you always knew the AI was doing its best to get kills but in the past it seemed ok, it seemed realistic enough that he'd sent several units to kill one of your units the maps weren't too big, the units weren't this many so it didn't seem too silly, too out of place. But now in these huge maps, with tons of units seeing so many Russian tanks jumping out of the fog of war just to hunt down one single weak unit it starts to look really silly. Worst of all thanks to how big maps are and how far some units can move you can start to abuse the AI by simply sending one of the weak, useless units somewhere away so all the enemy tanks go after him which gives you like 1 extra turn to do whatever the hell you wanted to do or takes some pressure off of your defensive lines. Just like all the past Grand Campaing missions this one is very fun too especially with the new, big tanks you get to use. Some issues that were always here start to become REALLY obvious though. Things that in the past seemed ok are starting to get silly now because they start to happen much more often. Still fun DLC, I enjoyed it.

This campaign has issues and boy they are plenty! First of there is the prestige soft cap. Now what is this you're gonnna ask, well after a certain point early on in the campaign you receive a prestige penalty if you have many last tech and exprerienced units. This is disastrous for your core and if you're like me and you've been building your core since GC39 you'll end up seeing your beloved core either gutted or have it's exp diluted to the point where all combat effectiveness is lost. And as if it's not enough that is the AI is in effect in many cases cheating since it has overstrenght way above its exp level (Kursk senarios I'm looking straight at you). If that's not enough some of these senarios have very unreasonable objectives even for a Marginal Victory and you're much better off trying to go for that than for a Decisive Victory because by the end of each senario you'll be either with very low prestige(not that you're given any to begin with) or with butchered units that can't keep facing the seemingly neverending soviet hordes. Now I have to admit that the desperate situation for Germany at that time and the vast numerical superiority of the Soviets have to be simulated somehow but the devs in their effort to achieve that forget that this is a game and games are supposed to be fun and not end up being a masochistic joy ride, because let's face it nobody wants to be on the receiving end. Even if you're playing on colonel(medium difficulty) you get your ass handed to you which I think is absurd! And before you think that I'm ranting because I had a bad performance in this game be informed that this is coming from someone who has been playing strategy games for many years(since Rome1 TW and HOI2) and has even finished the vanilla campaign on Field Marshal. To sum up, difficult campaign even on normal difficulty which is going to make you rage hard because of the ridiculousness of the unfair advantages the AI gets that end up breaking the game. Do not buy if you want to keep your sanity and your blood preasure low. If you're loking for a very difficult chalenge then this might be the thing for you I guess...