Nobody talked much about it, but an excellent wargame just landed for Linux a couple of days ago, not too long after its official release on Windows (mid-october 2014). It’s Unity-based, but very well done nonetheless, and takes place during the American Civil War.

The author of the game is DARTH VADER – no, not the one why cries over Padme like a baby – of Total War fame where he was considered a very serious modder in the community. What makes this game stand out more than anything else is its AI.

There are numerous comments among Steam users about this aspect:

⠇∃xCom ⠇βutan: The only strategy game on the market where the multiplayer mode is not vital, because you can play alone against the machine forever without feeling you’re missing something: every battle is unique, because the behaviour of the AI is extremely well done and provide near infinite replayability thanks to an objective-based branching scenarios on the battle of Gettysburg.

cpatricoo68: The AI makes this game. Rather than simply saying “Easy, Normal or Hard” The AI can be set to aggressive, passive, intelligent or bumbling and makes mistakes that feel so human. Defeat feels natural considering the battle enters “phases” of reformation. Playing with differsent styles makes it feel original without just giving the army unfair boons to make it more difficult.

Renegadeboy: In terms of difficulty, you have a great way of selecting the AI as you select your difficulty on a graph chart. You can select an AI that is careful but smart, an aggressive idiot, or some form of combo (you have 9 different choices). There has been many times where the AI has surprised me with it’s tactics and pushed me across the map after I thought I had won.

The game is not perfect in every aspect but it seems like a very solid wargame nonetheless, and very reasonably priced as well (currently about 15 USD on Steam). RTS are still underrepresented on Linux (we did get Planetary Annihilation though, while it’s more of a multiplayer game).

I will probably grab this one sometimes soon and let you know as well how I feel about it.

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