An excellent, but niche game. Many compare it to A Legionary's Life, sometimes unfairly. This game is not trying to be a sequel, but instead stand on its own legs.

I do agree that it relies excessively on RNG to the point of frustration. I had one legionary named Gaius Critonius (a randomly generated name), who partway through my campaign I gave the nickname Gaius Critical-Failus for his frankly horrific luck. He once rolled a 2 on a d50 four times in a row. While this is the nature of RNG and some will defend it as such, the issue is just how many opportunities the game has to do this to the player due to its reliance on RNG. When it happens once, its pretty funny. When it happens several times because there are easily over a hundred dice rolls per formation combat, it is not fun, and fun being inconsistent is a problem. If you are easily frustrated by RNG or are unwilling to savescum (which I did a lot), this game is not for you.

In spite of all this, the game is a niche gem offering complex systems, exciting gameplay, fascinating lore and realworld history, and a large amount of content. It can absolutely be overwhelming at first, but it is worth learning and gives you solid tools to do so. There is a lot of text that you need to be willing to read, but it is very rewarding when you do take it all in. That same RNG I just complained so much about creates tense and highly exciting moments. I've had the absolute reverse happen where through incredible luck I obliterate an enemy.

The current early access version of the campaign probably takes a regular player 10-15 hours to complete (I took like 30, but I took it slow), and given the real world timescales of the current story and promised content, that number may end up doubling by the 1.0 release.

This game is great, the writing immerses you in the lifestyle incredibly well and makes it hard to put down, I always find myself wanting to finish just one more turn. The combat system is like nothing I've seen before and very interesting, when it goes your way it feels great. Although it can be a little tedious if you get bad luck, that's the nature of turn based RNG.

Speaking of this, almost all of the negative reviews are just people frustrated at the nature of RNG and it's embarrassing. Imagine putting in all of this time and effort to create a game and people give you negative reviews, potentially affecting your reach and sales just because they got some bad rolls or the combat isn't for them. Bunch of clowns.

If your idea of fun is watching two green numbers pop up on a screen a few thousand times, this is the game for you.

Whatever game is here is buried under mountains of tutorial text, obtuse and overcomplicated mechanics, and RNG that robs you of any agency.