This game is more about managing risk than it is about tactics. You cannot count on your attacks landing a hit, so you must always ask yourself, "do I have the manpower in reserve to replace this soldier if his attack fails?". You must keep a large gold buffer to replace key soldiers and equipment at a moment's notice. This is the only strategy that works, and once you realize it, the game becomes a boring slog. A tactic that worked one time will fail the next time, for no reason. A tactic that should fail will work. You get punished for fighting uphill and rewarded for attacking downhill, but hits are so random, it really doesn't matter at all. The only thing that matters is if you have soldiers and gold in reserve should things go sideways.

Your company has no leader, it's just a constant cycling of expendable soldiers. Hard to feel attached to anything you do, you don't really build anything. You will wander around the map, enticed by cool sounding encounters, only to talk yourself out from them because you don't have enough manpower in reserve should you lose. You are constantly re-loading from previous saves to re-roll an important battle. Sure, when the hits land and you beat a tough battle, it feels great. But it might just feel great because you spent an hour before that doing boring trade missions where you watch your group move around the screen and do nothing.

Every once in a while I pick this game up again, only to remember why I stopped playing it. With a few critical changes, it could become much more entertaining. Let me revive soldiers, or at least nominate a core group to be revived. It's annoying and unfun to constantly replay the same starting levels over and over for new soldiers. If you're going to let me reload from saves, just build it into the game, let me revive soldiers, stop wasting my time with stupid save-reload cycles. Give me some kind of indicator of the difficulty for encounters so that I don't have to reload if I enter one that turns out to be way beyond my group's abilities. I have no idea if the crypt is going to be a handful of zombies or a crazy necromancer. The whole game just screams at you to do nothing until you can overwhelm a battle, it's just boring.

I can't tell if this game is just communicating very poorly with what I should do or if it's just a bad game.

If you feel like engaging enemies at the correct position or hoping that animals run into your spears over and over is considered tactical then I guess this might be the game for you.

The biggest problem is that a 1 skull mission can be anything from lowly bandits that don't do ♥♥♥♥ to monsters that one shot your band of 12 equipped guys. You can do a three skull mission for 2k gold and not fight at all, while dying to a mission that would give you 300 on completion.

I'm sure you should just play it safe and only take the easy ones, but it's a grind and almost nothing prevents a streak of bad luck taking one of your trained guys down. It's very much like Darkest Dungeon 1 in that way. Very tedious gameplay loop.

Oh man. I was looking for a turn base tactical RPG like FF tactics but ended up buying this one and its worth every penny. For starter. Its like Mount and Blade and Heroes III Might & Magic made something and this is the gem they created. You get to create mercenaries and take contracts and maybe later on join a faction. if you love reading like I do. You get to know their story. I almost scream when one of favorite merc got almost killed by a direwolf luckily he evaded the death blow. This game is got me frustrated in a good way. Where to go to find more contracts, weapons, supply and everything. Keeping my mercs paid and alive while taking out dangerous quest. Im looking forward when the day I fully build, equip and make my mercs famous throughout the kingdom.