Land Doctrine Reviews

What a missed opportunity! Lovely little game as it stands but the potential was huge. Real shame it wasnt realised.

I'm not sure this is going to help the dev now or if anyone will ever even read this, but I changed it from the negative review below. Issues are fixed. Here's the story: The Dev abandoned this game, I guess because of inexperience. He moved on to eventually create a similar but better game called Panzer Doctrine. When THAT first got released, a number of people, me included, were like, "WTF, dude? We paid you already for an EA title, then you go and abandon it, do the work to fix it and add some nice new features, and essentially release the completed game as a new title and try and charge for it as an EA game again?!" At first the dev didn't respond well to that, banning people and deleting threads. Then he gave it some thought and said, "You know, you guys are right. Sorry." And he was completly sincere about it. He unbanned people that he'd banned, restored the threads, then came back and fixed this game even knowing that there was going to be pretty much 0 profit in doing so. I give the guy a lot of credit for acknowledging his mistake and going above and beyond like that to fix things. You don't see many sincere apologies backed up by action on the internet. Anyway, now that it is fixed, Land Doctrine is worth the money. It's a RTS game with a more realistic approach than usual to developing tanks, training and equipping infantry, and taking/holding ground. And as I said before, he's got a similar but more advanced game out called Panzer Doctrine if this game works for you. ********************************************************************************************** Land Doctrine is a great concept and looks fantastic for the first couple of hours of so, but then you run into more and more balance issues and little annoying things that add up. In the end I have to say, no... I wouldn't recommend it. For example, infantry are OP. I've got a city that is completely surrounded by massive amounts of enemy troops and tanks. They constantly attack it, and I just as constantly send them packing with huge casualties. There are no supply chain rules in this game, so even in a surrounded city, I can reinforce my stranded battalions with no penalties. And since my new infantry are maxed out in all of the training categories and my units are getting experience from each win, and are insanely dug-in... they're Spartans now. I don't think a nuclear missile would dislodge my infantry at this point. All of my infantry-based units are like this. You can't co-ordinate your attacks. So in the case of my surrounded city, the enemy can attack from 4 different directions and do. But you can't tell units of different speeds to stick together and attack at once - even if they're all attacking from one direction. And co-ordinating attacks from different directions at once is impossible. So attacks with large amounts of material end up being fiascos. Little bugs and lack of cleanup... like some of my units can no longer move. They're still there, they presumably would defend themselves if attacked, but they have a speed of 0. If you've got units that are all in the same place, you often can't select the particular unit that you want to look at. If you design tanks, you can't delete those designs later. And the dev went with buttons to select tank types instead of a drop down menu, so at the end of a game you have buttons all over the place when you want to select a tank. All of this is fixable. But the dev has said he's not going to put much effort into fixing the issues with this game unless he finds a publisher, which seems really cavalier to me. He's an indie dev on an indie dev platform selling to people who tend to go for indie games, but he doesn't actually want to be an indie dev. The point of Steam is that you don't need a publisher anymore. And I paid money for this Steam product just like I'd pay for a title from EA or Sega or anyone else. If issues get updated and patched, I'll change the review. But what I've read regarding impending updates doesn't make me optimistic.

This game has a very very good idea and it's cheap. It could easily be used for officers (even virtual officers), but the game is very buggy & not up-to-the task, even for its price. I'll keep it though, if something good happens, but i've seen too much Unity games getting abandoned, so i wouldn't count on any upgrade any time soon.

The maps are not random. The combat is flawed. So is this game. Its actually more like a 4x space strategy on land. You can't move your armies where you want you gotta do it in a line... Rating 2/10 SAD...

This game could have been fantastic. It's a good idea, and one in the somehow unexplored genre of tank building (if you're a developer, that's a hint: get to work!). Unfortunately, it's unfinished and severely lacking in gameplay. The tank design is basic, and the battles consist of clicking a button and seeing either "victory" or "defeat." There is no sense of an arms race, because there's no way to see what your opponents have; even in battle, your feedback is restricted to a few sentences along the lines of "your tanks have better armour than the enemy."

Land Doctrine provides a simple graphical interface. The documentation is up front and to the point, but doesn't give enough information to really figure out the mechanics of what's happening or give a hint as to the proper combined arms to be successful. The game is stable and fast and offers a blend of real time and the ability to pause. It lends a feel of WWII type weapons, and has an interesting research and vehicle design system that gives options without making it into a laborious exercise. While the visuals beg the most for improvement, especially a tactical re-enactment of the automatically resolved battles, what I really most want is more information about how the game calculates victory.

Land Doctrine is literally a digital board game. The elegant rules create an experience that is epic in scale, intriguing in complexity, and filled with meaningful decisions. There is no tutorial, but the manual is concise and illustrated. By wargame standards it's a brief and easy read, with the various systems all being simple and intuitive. The result is a mix of realism and abstraction that is uniquely compelling. Battles offer a rarely seen level of clarity and decisiveness. Combat in other games often becomes a muddle of +/- modifiers; one blob of units ultimately being just as effective as another. Here each battalion has distinct advantages and disadvantages. Complaints that you can't field a mix of tanks and infantry in each battalion miss the beauty of this system. Limiting each battalion to one type of tank and one infantry loadout doesn't limit you, it defines them. This in turn challenges you to develop and deploy each battalion to its maximum potential. Your enjoyment of the game will be hampered by its sometimes convoluted user interface. Where operation Market Garden went a bridge too far, Land Doctrine's interface often goes a click too deep. And much like those doomed paratroopers, at times you'll be cut off from what you want, just when you need it most. The game is never unplayable, but accessing info can sometimes become tedious. With a few interface enhancements, Land Doctrine is the kind of game Slitherine would publish at quadruple the cost. Especially, if each battalion's 3D model represented the actual tank and infantry type. Keep in mind, this isn't a Civ-style, peacefully build up, and unleash the perfect war machine, kind of game. Instead, you're thrust into the middle of a war, and the odds are stacked against you. Even the Easy difficulty is a tough fight for an inexperienced commander. Starting out, your T1 Rabbit tank is actually an armored car with delusions of grandeur. The frontline is a mishmash of regulars and reserves armed with a motley assortment of misfit toys. To top it off, there is nothing in the R&D pipeline, and your production lines are impersonating the Titanic as they churn straight into disaster. With such an intense challenge, there is a lot of fun to be had here. Every action has far reaching consequences. There is no perfect tank, infantry, battalion, weapon, strategy or tactic that always ensures victory. Truly, everything must be done at its right time, and in its right place. In the end, your choices will become the Land Doctrine that your army lives or dies by.

Free demo? Check Cool Concept? Check Cheap? Check This game is rough around the edges, but really is the direction I want to see indie strategy games go. If anything, I'd like to see a build up phase before the war starts. *edit: And now my one request was added, what a time to be alive

Game is unfinished and abandoned. It's still quite obtuse and unpolished, but the dev stated in a forum post that he wouldn't work on it further unless a publisher picked it up. When that didn't happen, he just bailed. A shame, since there was a lot of potential here.

Rule the Waves stuck you into the role of an early 20th century Naval bureaucrat who helped steer the design and future of your nation. Land Doctrine is this, but with tanks. But how does it compare to the venerable WWI Naval Simulator? Land Doctrine is a game that, for $5, offers a good deal of enjoyment. We’ll break down what it does, and follow that up with what it doesn’t. If you like the thought of managing a land war, and nothing but a land war, and controlling the design philosophy, then this is your game. You are top brass in this game, someone with stars on your shoulders. Watching the fight is beyond you, all you do is see the results. It’s not a bad looking little game. Instead of hexes and turns we have a WEGO map with little armored units. Each is a battalion, of your design, that holds spaces or attacks them. Terrain matters, as does urban attacks. There can be up to four factions (including yourself) on a map that can be quite ponderous. War is immediate. You load up and go with a basic army and some even more basic tanks. You’re greeted with a basic “How-To” once you start playing each game. There isn’t a tutorial or the likes, nor does the game really need it. Research is incremental and lets you choose between armor tech, infantry tech, or industrial tech. Each nation accrues research points as time goes on and then spends that on research. It’s worth note that you also have to wait a period of time. This feels like a redundant mechanic. Give me one or the other. In addition to picking research you can use what you’ve learned on different tank variants. Early in the game you don’t have many choices beyond just up-armoring or swapping a single gun. Later on your can experiment and see the final impacts with a wide range of variables. Production is fairly simple. You pick how many companies you’d like, the type, loadout, and support. This makes some interesting trade-offs, more troops gives a harder hitting army but now you might be light on battalions at the front. ou’ve got three presets to play with for your infantry. Prefer carbines over rifles? Or maybe you’d like more anti-tank components? It does offer some interesting choices. I usually struck the middle road but I can see specialization between army groups for certain situations. The battle system is fairly simple. Advance your own battalions, set a few variables, and then let it go. It’s worth noting that some battalions move faster than others so you’re fragile reserve battalion might arrive before the meatier regulars. The resolution is heavy on the details for each phase. This reads rather like a battle report from a Grigsby game. At each phase-range you get to see how your forces performed and what sort of casualties you incurred. The winner remains in position while the loser retreats. If those loser retreats into another hostile army it is destroyed. If your armies can arrive at the next destination before the shattered army, it’s destroyed. This feels like an unintentional blitzkrieg mechanic. Finally you get a summary from your troops on the ground. In a lot of grog games it’s hard to tell what worked. Even in Rule the Waves you sometimes have no clue if a certain battleship was all that effective. Here at least you get some instant feedback and can use that to gauge the effectiveness of your forces. [h1]The Bummers[/h1] One thing that sets Rule the Waves and Children of a Dead Earth apart is a tactical layer build on top of a research layer. Not only do you get to steer the research, perform the design, but you can also play as the Admiral or star marshall. You get a deep down, visceral, in your face, example of the prowess of your forces. (Or lack thereof). You can try a crazy design of just casemate guns on all of your battleships. Or you can tinker with huge engines and just railguns. In Land Doctrine we get a summary and no visual of what’s going on. I can understand why, but it still makes me yearn for a Rule the Waves type game that let’s me play with crazy designs and watch them get destroyed. Combat feels a bit off. One engagement will seem like a surefire win and ends up being a total rout, and another battle is the total opposite. Though it seems to be very player dependent as I’ve heard some people spend hours and have a really fair match up. My biggest issue is lack of a run up. A year long cold war would allow the player to steer research and get a wildly different game without having to survive the initial onslaught. The AI seems either suicidally aggressive or docile. One game I found myself attacked on all fronts while in another everything seemed chill. The chill game let me play with more designs and it was a more satisfying game. For it’s few flaws it’s a surprisingly solid game. Sure I can complain about it not having a tank-on-tank physics simulator, but it’s not what the game set out to do. For just $5 it’s a damned good deal.