Recent reviews by Lwantssugar

This is a city builder with a very niche audience, for people who felt like the logistics of other city management games werent in depth enough for you, but one I recommend anyways.

W&R is the kind of game where you think "Oh, ill just do this one thing" And then three hours are gone and you forgot to eat. The learning curve is a vertical cliff, the game does have two different tutorials that are decently thorough, but even those arent enough for everything and there are times where you just have to use trial and error to get forward. This game is best played with you carefully and thoroughly planning out far into the future, making your own five year plans to meet your economic goals. And then initializing this plan, confident you didnt leave anything out.

This of course is just the dream, my own reality is losing hours due to something I overlooked and wondering where I went wrong. Thats just how much depth it has. Compare this to something like Tropico, which has a very rudimentary supply chain in comparison. To do something as basic as building paved roads you must do the following: Either find a source of or import quarried stone, send that to a gravel plant to be crushed. Then you must find or import crude oil, send that to a refinery to be turned into bitumen, and then send bitumen to a plant where its mixed with gravel to make asphalt. Thats just the first half of the equation though, now you need to use trucks and trains and whatever else to move these building supplies to where the construction is actually taking place. And then the actual construction process requires heavy machinery you need to import or assemble yourself, as well as construction workers who need to walk to or be transported to the construction site.

You might be thinking "Why bother with that long of a process?" Two reasons: the first is because if you dont have the infrastructure to be wholly self sufficient you have to import everything which gets very expensive very quickly. The second is that it feels great when you finally do get every last piece into place and the whole thing Just Works without as much of your direct input.

TLDR: I recommend this game but only if youre wanting more depth in city builders, and youre willing to accept hundreds of hours disappearing while you get to grips with it. At time of writing Im not yet brave enough to take off all the training wheels, which are both plentiful, yet also entirely within the players control to how many they want

Empire feels well-polished in comparison, even after many many patches it never addressed the root of many of the problems which is the warscape engine itself: it was tailor-made to simulate Early-modern line infantry warfare, not Roman maniples or Greek phallanxes. As such shields get waved around like theyre made of foam and the combat itself lacks weight, this wasnt a big issue in Empire/Napoleon since there were few dedicated melee units and most bayonet charges were brief exchanges meant to break the enemy with pure shock rather than killing power. The lack of weight is most apparent with cavalry when in Rome 1 charging a cataphract into infrantry sent the front ranks flying and often times immediatly broke said unit.

Yes there are mods that can fix certain things but they cant fix the underlying problems like the engine, you should not buy a game based on the fact that there are mods to fix it; the vanilla game needs to be able to stand up on its own as a satisfactory experience to be worth your money