WARPATH Opinions & Rating

[Shahed]

Greetings everyone!

I've been playing a cpl of days of Warpath this weekend. Overall I've enjoyed it. This could be because I haven't played ETW for at least all summer if not much more. I like the overall feel of the campaign. It's a reasonable uphill curve since the euros have all the guns and tech, money etc. It's also very different from the GC. I love the terrain, which seems to be much better than before and I love the hunter feel to playing the Native Americans. Others might call it the zergfeel though.

Some things just don't make too much sense. Such as... Pueblo get muskets first and horse archers last. In order to get the horse archers you have to go almost all the way up the tech tree. People may argue that this was the case, BUT it's still kinda dumb gameplay wise. You get deadly muskets almost off the bat and you have to wait till almost end game to get a basic horse archer. (which btw if you wanna talk history was pretty much any friggin E-Ronimo with a bison skin thong and little red beads around his neck).

Native auxiliaries in Euro armies seem to have better melee stats than your own base troops, if I'm not mistaken. I didn't check that one 100%. Building a pioneer cabin is akin to building a religious building, I had to really LOL BIG on that one, conversion rates for this definitely needs a nerf. There need to be more FLAT lands, from North Dakota to Texas.

The French and Dutch have absolutely NO PURPOSE in declaring war on Pueblo or Plains but they inevitably do. Then they land stacks on Spanish or English territory which seem to get jammed up for a few turns, then move a cpl of turns and jam up again. This could be CAI helping it's allies, sure. Then why not just pump more Spanish troops out of the HUGE military base in Mexico City ? No sense at all. It does present a decent challenge sometimes though when they show up with a few Line Infantry.

Overall it seems Warpath is made "difficult" by numbers i.e stats, conversion, extreme recruitment costs and silly upkeep costs. It's all about balancing but there's really not much logic to it. The BAI & CAI seem to have improved. I've seen some nice moves on both counts. Very few 1 unit raids and reasonably sensible co ordinated attacks and very nice build ups. I like the stacks I've seen, pretty decent. BAI goes into square thinking billions of psycho natives are coming even if it's faced by one or two units of tribesmen. So all you have to do is march cheap tribesmen up to the line infantry, line infantry will go into square (thus zeroing the fire by rank advantage), and then you walk up your bowmen and just pepper them down to dust.

The whole game needs so much more tuning I can't imagine it's already "done". One thing they really should fix is the dammmmmmmmmmeddddd deployment issue when the interface won't even allow you to draw a unit across a little rock or twig.

I do like it very much overall, it's pretty decent and offers a different take on the game. I'd give it a 7.5.

HF!