I have no idea what they were thinking, but it's beyond awful. Why would they think anyone would want to move small tokens around a map and have "combat" that is so tedious and unbalanced it defies logic.

Some problems that come to mind

- It's unbalanced, the mage generals are far more useful than any other general. That goes for enemy generals who can wreck your army before you even get to engage.

- Units are grossly unbalanced. The complete lack of Zone of Control means archers are just cannon fodder. Assuming your archers survived a mage generals first shot (good luck) then the enemy army will just waltz through your melee characters and hack your archers to pieces.

- Maps are all the same, except maybe the odd rock or tree. It honestly looks ugly as sin, like something from 2001. It also makes any tactics pretty much "take out the weak high damage or ranged stacks".

- Complete lack of any decent tutorial. Like how do you recruit troops? How do you remove useless troops from your army (still don't know this one?)? How do you move generals around? I had to figure most of it out and it doesn't seem at all intuitive.

- But for all of that, the worst crime of all is it's just tedious to the core. That's the worst crime. Worse, you can't even automate it because you miss quests. Who decided that was a good idea? No one wants to be taken out of the excellent main game to be dragged into this crap fest. Please for the love of god at least just add an auto result generator for armies so we don't have to fight manually.

Actually, mage generals are only superior if you get heal early on. I have a martial general that is waaay better than any mage general.

1. You get heal later on anyway even on a martial general. So that's the biggest advantage out the window.

2. Martial generals get demoralizing shout. A spammable ability that AoE stuns

3. Obviously martial generals make the units themselves stronger than a mage general does

And don't be mad you don't get the reward for something if you turn that thing off, lol. That's your choice.

There is actually an auto resolve feature but it's much worse than manually fighting the battles because in most cases you can cheese your way through every fight without losing any troops, but if you use auto resolve it will produce an inordinate amount of casualties.

I don't find crusade mode challenging at all but I do certainly find it tedious. It's very easy to cheese with large stacks of archers and mage generals, but that really just makes it all seem like a waste of time. It was an interesting idea that is very poorly executed in a technical manner, imo.

Originally posted by XartaX:

Actually, mage generals are only superior if you get heal early on. I have a martial general that is waaay better than any mage general.

1. You get heal later on anyway even on a martial general. So that's the biggest advantage out the window.

2. Martial generals get demoralizing shout. A spammable ability that AoE stuns

3. Obviously martial generals make the units themselves stronger than a mage general does

I'd agree if they actually worked that way. I got a martial general as my second. I leveld her up to 5. She started with 0 attackc, 2 defense. And at level 5, she still has 0 attack, 2 defense. She really can't handle much beyond that level without losing a lot of troops, so.... she's now relegated to camping in Drezen.

there is autoresolve

Originally posted by phadin:

Originally posted by XartaX:

Actually, mage generals are only superior if you get heal early on. I have a martial general that is waaay better than any mage general.

1. You get heal later on anyway even on a martial general. So that's the biggest advantage out the window.

2. Martial generals get demoralizing shout. A spammable ability that AoE stuns

3. Obviously martial generals make the units themselves stronger than a mage general does

I'd agree if they actually worked that way. I got a martial general as my second. I leveld her up to 5. She started with 0 attackc, 2 defense. And at level 5, she still has 0 attack, 2 defense. She really can't handle much beyond that level without losing a lot of troops, so.... she's now relegated to camping in Drezen.

They do work that way. A martial gets far more skills during level up that boosts your army. Those don't show up as part of the general stats. I have a martial that can roll literally every single army in the game with zero issues or casualties.

Edit: Actually, offensive training and defensive training does turn up on your general stats, and martial generals are more likely to get those.

Originally posted by GAME OVER:

there is autoresolve

OH yeah?

I guess there is real aspitation to make crpgs as close to tabletop rules as possible. I believe crusade exists only because it exists in tabletop. I hate this. I prefer my crpg being as far from tabletop version as possible. Also why I really despise dnd games but love rpg in general.

Originally posted by GAME OVER:

there is autoresolve

I don't see this option? I see an autoplay mode which is not the same thing. Which menu is it in?

It's not that bad. It's just unbalanced as you've said.

Many end game path specific units don't scale well and don't come in large enough quantities to matter.
You could pass the ritiuals every time they pop. use your ritual to summon them into an army at every moment, and they'll still perform worse than stacking large quantities of snipers, hedgeknights, and gladiators.

It really really really desperately needs an actual balancing pass so those fights are actually fun to do instead of being time consuming (watching your single super army travel across the map) and boring.
New generals should have xp sharing with old generals so you actually use more than a single army.

Losing quests only really affects the secret ending and being swarm. The real crime is you miss a few really good items from relics. In Kingmaker you still dealt with artisans on auto.

I just use the combat relief mod and forget it exists, same with the kingdom management it's not good it's not fun it's just tedious.

Agree with OP. I switched to auto mode in chapter 5 after just giving up on that BS. The RPG part of the game easily finds a spot in my Top 5 favourtie RPGs of the last decade but the crusade stuff...uff

the idea behind the crusade is wonderful, the way it has been balanced however clearly show that the devs didn't bothered checking what they made there.

some units and generals are simply overpowered and some demon army, well either you wreck them like cheese or you are the cheese, but there's no inbetween, and the number beside an army doesn't mean stuff, you could have a 9-9 army and yet get wreck because, oh well, logic.

let's hope they actually rethink the whole system later on because auto resolve is just a button that sacrifice your army's worth for some time, playing them manually is way more cost saving, which is yet again completely pointless, the goal of auto resolve is to gain time, not to lose more in ressource.

If you struggle just get a ravager and boost it with extra summons. That unit breaks the enemy so hard it's not even funny. THey got a petrify attack that permanently petrifies an enemy unit for the entire battle. And they can spam it.

Originally posted by Lywelyn:

the idea behind the crusade is wonderful, the way it has been balanced however clearly show that the devs didn't bothered checking what they made there.

some units and generals are simply overpowered and some demon army, well either you wreck them like cheese or you are the cheese, but there's no inbetween, and the number beside an army doesn't mean stuff, you could have a 9-9 army and yet get wreck because, oh well, logic.

let's hope they actually rethink the whole system later on because auto resolve is just a button that sacrifice your army's worth for some time, playing them manually is way more cost saving, which is yet again completely pointless, the goal of auto resolve is to gain time, not to lose more in ressource.

They ran out of time. The September release date came up and management didn't move back the release date so we got what we got.

Originally posted by Bobs:

Originally posted by GAME OVER:

there is autoresolve

I don't see this option? I see an autoplay mode which is not the same thing. Which menu is it in?

Little cog-wheel top right of map. Not in menu.