I've been playing The Great War: Western Front and I really don't think it's a bad game, but I do think it suffers from balancing issues that, since it was abandoned, will never be resolved except possibly by modders.
The thing about it is that it is such a weird style of warfare to wrap your head around that it takes time to just get a sense of how to do things - how the fuck do I win - and in the meanwhile I can't tell what's badly balanced versus just me not understanding it properly.
I think a large chunk of the hate it got came from people going in demanding that it be something that it never claimed to be (Total War). The graphics aren't exactly pretty and they do have a cartoonishness that's accidental, but the UI, the constant use of (very boring) WW1 History Channel style footage, paintings and propaganda posters and quotes everywhere, all shows it as a very sincere labor of love. It failed to deliver a few gimmick features (oh my god all the shell holes stay the same from fight to fight) that don't matter IRL, but mattered to people that bought it thinking that it matters. The mission campaign is too easy and it lacks pizzazz in its presentation, but I found it fun and worth the price of entry on sale; I do think the campaign really needs to have more of the mechanics in it and a smaller-scale introduction to the grand campaign would be helpful.
I think the biggest balancing issue is that support (artillery bombardments, support weapons, anything) is just too fucking expensive. It goes down too damn fast and the ratio of infantry you can put out to a single goddamn machine gun is insane.
My other complaints mostly revolve around:
The shitass star system for taking provinces
The tech tree being boring (not bad, necessarily, just boring, compare it to a Total War game and you see how juvenile and Flash Game like the theming of techs is, it's the difference between a game where you invent "percussion caps" versus "improved muskets," know what I mean?)
Air works mechanically, but I kind of feel like it would have been better just straight up ripping off Steel Division
Lack (understandable for a first game) of underground complexes
The tanks are kind of weird?
The way combat goes, basically, only trenches are persistent and trenches, artillery, support etc. is all placed before battle. This is very important because, while you can reinforce tanks, infantry and call air missions during battles, the gameplay revolves around trenches - you basically can't do shit outside of a trench as infantry, even unentrenched infantry trading blows slaughter each other shockingly fast - and so if you don't plan out adequate trench lines, you will die. You cannot spam your way out of it, you will fucking die (as it should be).
So the whole point of this crap is how to take a trench when taking trenches is basically impossible. You've got, effectively, four "tools" (besides the static machine guns/mortars) with little nuances: infantry (with variations), heavy artillery, light artillery, siege artillery, tanks and aircraft, and all of the latter is there to facilitate getting your infantry into the enemy trench. Heavy artillery basically exists to destroy shit: bombardments and gas attacks that kill men and destroy materiel. Light artillery basically exists to keep your troops alive on the advance, all of it (suppression, smoke and rolling barrages) are just different ways of silencing enemy guns for long enough for you to hop in the trench with them. Siege artillery is heavy artillery on steroids and (very importantly) can be used in pre-bombardment to destroy trenches, which (remember, the trench network can't be expanded when combat starts) is devastating, as is undermining their lines. Then aircraft are doing a pseudo-Steel Division/Wargame thing.
Tanks are accurate, so they're not SUPER fast (although I think still faster than real life) and they come in realistic male, female or hermaphrodite variants. They fall into the realistic category of being super fragile, but keep your distance and infantry can't do shit, so they can run amok in the rear line if you micro them. It turns out that the point of males is to be tank destroyers and bunker busters, they kill shit that artillery just can't deal with. Females are there to be a mobile machine gun. What's weird about it, though, is that they feel much more effective as a defensive weapon, kiting attacking infantry that are out of range of your defensive guns.
This isn't really what tanks were for, though. The problem is partially that tanks go down a little too fast to machine guns, the very thing they were designed to counter, and the game just doesn't really depict early tank tactics. A tank's primary function was not to be a fighting platform itself but to essentially be to trench warfare what a battering ram or siege tower was to castle sieges. It is a giant shell that could both carry a platoon inside (like an armored personnel carrier) and provide a moving shield for men clustered directly behind it. In muddy conditions they'd have a spool of duckboard that they would unwind, making roads that allowed infantry to advance much faster. What the game uses light artillery for (negating the advantage of machine guns) is what tanks were really meant to excel at.
You throw in some other fuckery. Communication trenches were designed to facilitate single runners delivering messages, but were not practical to assault or to deploy troops through; the game (which chooses to depict only the fighting aspect of trenches, field hospitals, living quarters and such are presumably in the rear) presents them as non-fighting roads between your lines, but they're just as much roads for the enemy, and the most important principle of the game is to never let the enemy get in your trench, as doing so completely negates that powerful defensive advantage. Now, it can still make sense; a blockhouse should be directly connected to the trenches it supports, for example. It's just, like the tanks, an odd choice and most players don't really use them.
What pisses in my Coke is that you have to fight the same battle several times to take a province, and it doesn't make sense realistically or in the in-game context. I took a trench, and then did what, fucking left it? I feel like it's an easy fix, too. If the maps were long and vertical, with multiple command trenches and even interesting support areas to take, you could have a single map with potential for back-and-forth and it would capture some of the human side of what made these places interesting. Verdun, for example, has four stars, meaning it takes four separate battles, on the same terrain, to capture it... assuming you win every time. And winning is defined, in game, as a total blowout victory where you took literally everything.
If a map is just extended deeper, stacked, you could still have it be the case that pushing back the enemy pretty much does depend on several rounds of combat, because there simply is not enough time, manpower, materiel or range on your artillery to actually get that far in. Defense in depth. But you could have full persistence and still have the battle take place over different ground as one side advances deeper. Define combat by the border, not the province, likewise to make that clear.
TLDR game's okay, I like it and have fun with it, but you can tell that it's a kind of half-baked first try; because of that, it will never get a sequel like other niche first-try games.
