Land Doctrine

Rule the Waves stuck you into the role of an early 20th century Naval bureaucrat who helped steer the design and future of your nation. Land Doctrine is this, but with tanks. But how does it compare to the venerable WWI Naval Simulator? Land Doctrine is a game that, for $5, offers a good deal of enjoyment. We’ll break down what it does, and follow that up with what it doesn’t. If you like the thought of managing a land war, and nothing but a land war, and controlling the design philosophy, then this is your game. You are top brass in this game, someone with stars on your shoulders. Watching the fight is beyond you, all you do is see the results. It’s not a bad looking little game. Instead of hexes and turns we have a WEGO map with little armored units. Each is a battalion, of your design, that holds spaces or attacks them. Terrain matters, as does urban attacks. There can be up to four factions (including yourself) on a map that can be quite ponderous. War is immediate. You loa...

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.

Free demo? Check Cool Concept? Check Cheap? Check This game is rough around the edges, but really is the direction I want to see indie strategy games go. If anything, I'd like to see a build up phase before the war starts. *edit: And now my one request was added, what a time to be alive

Land Doctrine is literally a digital board game. The elegant rules create an experience that is epic in scale, intriguing in complexity, and filled with meaningful decisions. There is no tutorial, but the manual is concise and illustrated. By wargame standards it's a brief and easy read, with the various systems all being simple and intuitive. The result is a mix of realism and abstraction that is uniquely compelling. Battles offer a rarely seen level of clarity and decisiveness. Combat in other games often becomes a muddle of +/- modifiers; one blob of units ultimately being just as effective as another. Here each battalion has distinct advantages and disadvantages. Complaints that you can't field a mix of tanks and infantry in each battalion miss the beauty of this system. Limiting each battalion to one type of tank and one infantry loadout doesn't limit you, it defines them. This in turn challenges you to develop and deploy each battalion to its maximum potential. Your enjoy...

I'm not sure this is going to help the dev now or if anyone will ever even read this, but I changed it from the negative review below. Issues are fixed. Here's the story: The Dev abandoned this game, I guess because of inexperience. He moved on to eventually create a similar but better game called Panzer Doctrine. When THAT first got released, a number of people, me included, were like, "WTF, dude? We paid you already for an EA title, then you go and abandon it, do the work to fix it and add some nice new features, and essentially release the completed game as a new title and try and charge for it as an EA game again?!" At first the dev didn't respond well to that, banning people and deleting threads. Then he gave it some thought and said, "You know, you guys are right. Sorry." And he was completly sincere about it. He unbanned people that he'd banned, restored the threads, then came back and fixed this game even knowing that there was going to be pretty much 0 profit in doing so...

5/10 Ok, it is a low budget, one man project, but it lack some of the most basic (and useful) aspects of a strategy game. - Battle reports do not show where the battle took place. You have to scroll arounf the map to understand. - The battle report is cumbersome and to understand what happened you have to scroll down a lot. - Battle dynamics are explained in the brief manual available, but it is hard to relate it in practical terms. I'm really sorry, but to me it is a no-go.

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.

Land Doctrine provides a simple graphical interface. The documentation is up front and to the point, but doesn't give enough information to really figure out the mechanics of what's happening or give a hint as to the proper combined arms to be successful. The game is stable and fast and offers a blend of real time and the ability to pause. It lends a feel of WWII type weapons, and has an interesting research and vehicle design system that gives options without making it into a laborious exercise. While the visuals beg the most for improvement, especially a tactical re-enactment of the automatically resolved battles, what I really most want is more information about how the game calculates victory.

Realized he has abandon it.

At one point during play a gamebreaking bug happens in the design screen. It states that I need to add the engine gun and suspension and yet have all three, still the game won't let new designs get built for this arbitrary stupidity, dear dev, I have no idea where exactly the code is wrong for this but please fix because it's easily the best 5ish bucks I've spent