Title: Land Doctrine
Genre: Indie, Strategy
Developer:
Z9K Games
Publisher:
Slitherine Ltd.
Release Date: 13 Mar, 2017

English

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.. 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.. UPDATED AS APRIL 8,2017

So I was going to make an entirely new review, abeit hopefully it be good, now it's even worse then before. So I played this for almost another six hours after putting my old review up and came across these bugs

-battalions sometimes don't deployed\/aren't build,
-CeaseFire doesn't work at all! I have my enemies keep attacking me though they not supposed to,
-battalions get stuck moving to one location or don't move at all at times,
-battalions that get routed run back and forth between spots even if there friendly and if there controlled by the AI, I've seen them go past the AI's spot and take positions somewhere not occupied nearby,
-Battalions only move one tile per order, I can't order them to attack a city or tile five tiles away, only the closest one near them until they get there and when a battalion tries to goto a full tile with three battalions, it's gets stuck inbetween.

Apprently I was the only person to came across these bugs and when I posted this on the forums where the developer wanted people to post their bugs, I got banned and this was his response

- Ban Reason: Too much lies and \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665t. -


FIRST REVIEW!.....and maybe the only one?

First most I want to say this game has ALOT of potenial to be something great, especially for people who like RTS games and for peolple who like me like to design there own machines to use in battle however I have to wonder wiether this game is a quick cashgrab or If the devloper doesn't have any experience with making games in this genre? I will give my honest opionon and I want people to understand am not going to praise or bash it for not reason.

Onto the review, on the surface this game looks really interesting with it's concept of armored vechicle designing and indeed it is a good concept but it poorly done but I will get to that in a bit. The game uses a Risk like map however do not be fooled, this game is NOT RISK in any real way besides moving units to an area or city and capturing it. The board to me is more like Civilization without any of the diplomacy. The purpose of this game is to design the best vehicle for the job along with putting that unit in a battalion that will have it work well with. Battalions are easy to create and in a way are similar to Hearts of Iron III but is far worse :\/. you Automatically ALWAYS have one unit of Tanks and Infantry in a battalion so you can't have an all infantry or tank battalion which is a bit akyward. You can choose what tanks you want in the battalion BUT you can only have one TYPE of Tank in the battalion so you can't have medium tanks you designed in a battalion with Heavy tanks you designed which is surprising. For infantry you can put in a infantry unit with a present you can make so you can make an entire Infantry unit comprised of riflemen, machinegunmen, anti-armor(RPG's) etc and can do what you want which is nice but is useless, I will explain shortly.

The most fun part of this game is the designing part and it is FUN!....well to a certain extent until you realize that it's pointless unforuntely. When designing a tank, you pick the engine, suspension, the main gun and it's armor in the front, side and behind essentially. One gripe I have is that you can't actually choose how it looks and is randomly generated on the parts you picked which estically goes from Pre-WWI looking wheeled armored behicles to whacky WWI Tank models something you see in Warhammer 40,000K but is far less cook and kinda corny looking. There isn't any interperiod or WWII looking designs in the game, want to make a Tiger II with a 100mm cannon? your \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665 out of luck my friend lol
To unlock better equipment, you need to research these components which take time usually from 2 months to 6 months ingame. This is probably the only part of the game that is perfectly fine for the most part beacuse Research in general in this game is almost completely pointless. Besides researching equipment for Tanks, you also can research Infantry weapons as well but since Infantry are literally powerless agianst Tanks and the AI only uses Tanks, there's no point at all. Besides that you can also research how fast research is done with upgrading equipment or waiting for your new sweet protoype tank to be done, You can also research how fast infantry are trained but is pointless since the AI only uses Tanks, you can also research the flexiability of Production which means how fast your factories can change it's line from making thing to another which is quite handy if your getting beaten to haw well your design is made on the line and production in general. Now the last two are pointless as well beacuse no matter how much you invest in increasing the efficiency of production, you always produce the same amount of vehicles no matter what every month and improving how well your tanks or armored cars are made in your factories are so minor that it doesn't mattter.

Now for the most crappy part of the game.....urrgghh! Warefare is just broken in this game, you start out on the board automatically at war with other nations and there's dipomacy whatsover so no peace treaties, no trading of tech or alliances, hell you can't start the game as a team deathmatch, It's YOU agianst the world and let me tell you, all the AI's will team up on your and steam roll...why you ask? Well Tank warefare is broken all to hell in everyway possible, no matter what design you make and IF you are able to deploy them in decent numbers, you will 9 times out of 10 get steam rollled by the enemy AI. At the beginning of the game, they automatically have better armored vehicles then you and usually even if you research enough to make a true sequal from the T-1 Rabbit, the AI will either have a far better vechicle then you already or if you managed to hold your own somehow, the AI will constantly send Tank at your front until you can't replace the tanks and infantry you lost since you NEVER make enough tanks for mass production per month and the more cities you lose, your production capabilities will diminish greatly to the point you won't be able to produce anything really at all, hell even the starter unit can't be produced in great number and if you wan't, it's worthless, sure you can throw on a slightly better gun but it won't help. No matter what you make and deploy, it will get destroyed, I had an ENTIRE battalion(100) of Maus tanks essentially in my last game solely for defense and somehow the Ai was able to use one battalion with only tanks to take it out so either they have the same quality tanks or something far better since there is no Air power or support power. There's also no rea recon so you never know what the AI has deployed so you can't prepare.

Am sure Am forgetting something on here but in this state, I can't recommend this game at all honestly until it's improved. There's a great foundation for a fun \u2665\u2665\u2665 game but that's all it is and it's too shallow and cheap, hell there's not even a torturial to teach how to play :\/. Realized he has abandon it.. Fun but pretty tedious, needs some quality of life stuff

New Update available!:
New Update available! Change some Artwork and fixed a bug in gameplay..