Gen’l,

For some time now, an eerie silence has surrounded the Grand Engineer Corps camp. The troops are wondering, what is happening inside the fog of war? What does this mean to the Grand Tacticians, present and future? Major changes have taken place in the background, with the Engineer Corps going through a reorganization. As the pieces are falling in place, it’s a good time to share some Engineering intel from behind the scenes.

The Greenhorn Volunteers.

Grand Tactician’s story began in 2016, with Oliver (a finance banker turned coder from Austria) and Ilja (a wargame enthusiast in the Finnish Army) deciding to develop a strategy game independently. The idea was to create something unique in the genre, the game taking place in the American Civil War – a conflict of great interest to us. Soon after Peter (a chemical industry worker and mod artist from Germany) joined the team as an artist, and since then our team of three worked hard to make our dream a reality. We started from zero, new game engine, new coding language, and a lot to learn…

The Civil War (1861-1865) has been a true independent “garage project”, being developed outside the working hours as a second job. It started as a very interesting (yet ambitious) hobby project, with no commercial expectations. The development didn’t have a fixed schedule, we worked as much on the game as we could, learning as we went. We have been blessed with many helpful and talented people with enthusiasm toward our project and the will to help, and this helped shape the game into what it is today – not perfect by any means, but something we’re proud of. We managed to create a unique game among its peers. 2000 reviews with > 70% score is high praise!

What we never expected was that so many players would find the game and enjoy it, providing us ideas and constructive criticism from the Early Access of late 2020 continuing all the way to this day. This of course caused immense pressure to deliver. The post-release development has been even more hectic than the time before. At times, there was exhaustion among the ranks, as all the work was still done after returning home from a day (or night) job, work trip or even military exercise. The COVID years and increased tempo at work for some left a mark in the development as well. This was especially true during development of the Whiskey & Lemons DLC. In these circumstances, while frustrating at times, it has been very flattering that our humble game has been compared to titles created by much larger developers with much larger resources at hand.

At the same time we knew we could not continue like this in the future. Demands at work, with family and with the game were taking an increasing toll. We’re not young guys anymore.

The Long Road Ahead.

We always wanted to make Grand Tactician a game series to portray multiple wars of the gunpowder and linear warfare era (17th to 19th Centuries). If for now we disregard the personal issues we had with resources to invest in game development, we also had reached a point in the Grand Tactician -engine where small fixing here and there no longer was achieving sufficient results. Like said, we know the game is far from perfect, and there are the shortfalls here and there we want to improve. These are mostly the ones the community knows very well and have been providing us feedback about (there are also some technical ones, that are not apparent to players). “Clunkiness”, performance, AI, battle balance, player onboarding, information…

Military minded people remember the approach to putting new wine into old bottles… In order to really improve the battle AI, as an example, working on the AI itself alone no longer helps – work is required in other areas as well, like the whole unit system, pathfinding, order of battle, parts of the combat systems. Tinkering with all these systems individually to help the battle AI a bit will cause issues in other areas, that in turn need to be reworked, and the butterfly effect continues. And still we would have the old unit system, pathfinding, etc. that we want to improve anyways, and that are affecting other areas (clunkiness, performance…) So, in some cases we need a new bottle for the new wine.

During the eight years we of course learned a lot, but also the tools available have constantly developed. Especially the battle layer we developed first during 2017 is showing age and no longer facilitates much improvement without a rehaul. So, we decided that in order to move forward we need to rewrite big blocks of the game engine. This of course takes a lot of time – it’s “revolution vs. evolution”, like game developers like to call it. At the same time it allows further changes like increasing modding opportunities and adding localization.

But, back to reality and the resources… If the volunteers are worn out from years of battle, to rally the Corps, veteran regulars are needed.

The Regulars.

Recently, the Grand Engineer Corps has gone through a major reorganization. As things were still in motion and results were foggy, we kept quiet about this, while already re-working hard the first elements of the game engine. At the same time we released multiple patches to fix the remaining major issues reported by players.

Now we’re very happy to be able to say that things have turned around for us in a major way. We have teamed up with a like minded publisher, the right one for us and for our project – a Grand Tactician -series. With this move we have been able to transform from exhausted garage-developers into professionals – volunteers into regulars – resigning our earlier jobs and now working as full-time game developers! To put it mildly, life is now very different and so are our development opportunities.

What exactly we are working on will be disclosed at a much, much later date. What can be said this early on, is that we’re working on taking Grand Tactician forward in a way that earlier was not possible for us. While not much more can be said at this point, we’re planning on sharing a developer log regularly, approximately every 2-3 months, to give you a small glimpse into our upcoming game. While our vision for the next game is already set – and this takes into account the feedback we’ve received –, we do want to give you an opportunity to provide feedback, during development, at a more detailed level. We’ll start with some more technical matters, and – in full transparency – intend to hold back the major details, until there is a better opportunity to share them. We hope you share our ambition of making Grand Tactician into something greater, and that to do that we need to let the marketing machine have something to run on, when the time is right!

While our work continues, players of The Civil War 1861-1865 will be supported by the development team like before. The best way is to drop an e-mail to our message box info(at)grandtactician(dot)com, as we are deep “in the matrix” – there are only so many pairs of hands. We’ll do our best to help you with issues and questions you have. What is also fair to say at this point is that no new features or downloadable content are to be expected for The Civil War. We hope this is understandable, as large parts of the game’s engine are already cut open on our field surgeon’s table.

Having shared this piece of intel, we continue our long march toward what we hope and believe will be a bright future for Grand Tactician. Touch the elbow!

Very respectfully, your obedient servants
Oliver, Ilja, Peter
The Grand Engineer Corps.

Gen’l,

There were many legendary generals in the American Civil War, like “Stonewall” Jackson, “Old Pete” Longstreet, “Grumble” Jones, “Bull Head” Sumner… each with their own unique stories. In the Grand Tactician DLC, it’s your story.

The Way to the Top – or Not.

Whiskey & Lemons will introduce a new career mode. You will start by creating your character, determining your Civil War personality via a questionnaire, and taking command of a regiment.

As a regimental commander, you are but a small gear in the huge military steam engine. You will have very limited influence over the war, and you will receive orders from your AI commanders. According to your actions and performance, you will generate prestige and get promoted to higher places, where your actions will matter more.

As the DLC campaign will be regiment level, on a zoomed in campaign map, divisions will be the smallest units moving on the campaign map. Single brigades can also be used as garrisons to protect important terrain.

Once commanding a division, you will be able to control the unit on the campaign map. With increased prestige you will be able to influence politics or projects, but this is very limited before rising to the top, commanding the armies of the Union or the Confederacy – provided that you will ever make it that far. Or want to – you can play the whole campaign without accepting any promotions, if you so wish.

Your Story.

There are many things that can get in the way. Your previously mentioned personality could be one of them. Personality is determined on six axes: Loyalty, Piety, Social Life, Heroism, Stress Control and Political Views. These may provide positive and/or negative traits to your career.

You may also attract companions that will be part of your staff. For example, if you are known for lack of loyalty, you may be followed by a Committee Investigator, reporting to the military brass, who may end up limiting your freedom of action by giving political guidance you cannot ignore.

There are also other new features. You will be able to choose to buy your own equipment, recruit your own staff and carry out actions that all will influence your, and your nation’s Civil War journey. You may also get injured in combat, with some of your injuries becoming permanent disabilities.

When you start to gain fame, you may end up with a grudge with some of your fellow officers. This may have a serious impact on your performance in the battle-field, like what happened between Bragg and his lieutenants. And getting rid of them may prove difficult, as it will require further prestige to overrule choices made by the President.

It will be very different, if you become known as “Old Tippler” due to your drinking habits, keep falling off the horse during battles and get into drunken fights with your fellow officers, or as “Skedaddle Joe” due to lack of courage and losing the respect of your men.

Everything you do and experience during the campaign, will be recorded into a Biography. When the campaign ends, you may read your whole story, and see how you compared with historical civil war commanders.

The Other Things.

We’re looking to release Whiskey & Lemons during Q2 of 2023. The plan and development has suffered some real-life related delays, mainly caused by a war in Europe, where the development team is from.

But, while on some fronts there have been delays, on others extra progress has been made. We’re constantly working on the game engine even if the DLC content has not proceeded as earlier planned.

Also the band is recording new music to the game. Along with the DLC release, we will also release the new music as a Soundtrack, the same way we did with the game’s original music – meaning buying the soundtrack is not mandatory to hear the music in the game. The Soundtrack II (working title) allows listening to the tunes outside of the game, and the revenues will go to support our great band, Wasel and the Weasels.

With the DLC release, we’ll also release the next major patch, which is focused on fixing reported issues, implementing some player wishes (like different color fire arcs on paper map), and some performance improvements.

Most Respy,
The Grand Tactician -Team.

Gen’l,

Weapon production and procurement system has seen some changes during the development of Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865), most recently in the 1.08 patch. Let’s take a quick look at how the system works now, vs. previously.

The ability to equip and re-equip units with different weapon types has been one of the unit customization features in the game since the beginning. Originally, since the game’s Early Access release in fall of 2020, the weapon production system was quite heavily abstracted, which many players found unsatisfying, as they had no real direct control over the production.

The Old System.

In short, it used to work like this:
- Industrialization & Diplomacy policies made certain weapon types available, with the better weapon types requiring higher level policy to “unlock”.
- Once the weapon was available, production/import started automatically. Depending on fixed “standardization years” and “equipment modifiers”, the weapons were added to player’s “pool”.
- Standardization year: each weapon had a year, from where onward the weapon type was available. During approximately 2 years the standardization would increase following a curve. Example: weapon standardization year is 1861. In 1861, more weapons of this type became available very slowly, and in around 1863 the production would reach the highest level, as per equipment modifier.
- Equipment modifier: using this value, the different weapon types were balanced according to historical data. Example: Springfield Rifle-Musket, with historical production numbers of more than 1 million units, had a very high modifier, meaning much faster production than say Richmond Rifle, that had historical production of just a bit over 30,000 units.
- Weapons were not tracked as individual pieces, but rather per units to equip.
- Weapon costs were realized at the moment units were equipped, and the costs were depending on number of Weapons & Artillery goods types in markets, which tied the system to economy.
- If a weapon type was commonly used by units, it’s production would speed up a bit.

As said, the system was quite abstract, and limited player’s options. For example, if the player would have wanted to focus the industry to produce repeating rifles, this was not possible, as these weapon types became available very slowly. For this reason in patch 1.06, which focused on economy in general, we changed the system. But there were some bugs, plus a few remnants from the old system, so we wanted to revamp it further in version 1.08 of the game.

Fayetteville Rifle has low standardization, as only 7509 examples of this weapon type have been produced so far.

The New System.

The new system works quite differently if compared to the old one:
- New weapon types are made available via Projects, instead of policies. This adds the possibility to more directly influence which weapon to procure. If the player wants to focus on repeating rifles early on, it is possible, but it requires much higher subsidies than more simple weapon types.
- Using the new Weapons -panel, player can place orders for available weapon types. These can be either produced domestically, or imported from Europe.
- Weapons are tracked by actual number of pieces per weapon type. This also allows tracking of weapons captured in battles, including them in the stock.
- Each weapon is ranked per Production Complexity. The more simple the weapon, the cheaper and faster it is to produce.
- Equipment Factor is used only to balance production times between weapon types, or availability of imported weapons in Europe. For example, it’s used to make a difference between 10-, 20-, and 30-pounder Parrott Rifles, making the larger ones a bit slower to produce, or making sure more commonly available Enfields are faster to import than, say, Dreyses (which historically were not imported).
- Standardization, which affects only domestic production, plays a big role. This value represents the readiness of the nation’s arms industry to produce said weapon type, which in turn depends on the number of weapons of said type in use. If a weapon type is common, it means weapon industry has the required machinery ready to produce further pieces, and also has the means to quickly produce required ammunition and other accessories. When standardization is low, the industry needs to set up the required infrastructure and machinery…
- …which means weapons with high standardization are much quicker and cheaper to produce.
- Weapon costs are realized when an order is placed. The player can place one order per weapon type at a time. Once the weapons are delivered, they can be used to equip units. At this point the costs will cover the required logistics.
- Shortages of needed materials will make production slower and more expensive.
- Weapon imports are affected by blockades. If blockade efficiency is high, less goods get through, meaning orders will take much longer time to be delivered.
- In the Weapons -panel, effects of these mechanics are explained in the offered tooltips.

Example, purchasing 1000 rifles. Left: Union order of Springfield Rifles with standardization of 100 costs $201k and takes 14 days. Middle: CSA order of Richmond Rifles with standardization of 6 costs $293k and takes 62 days. Right: CSA order of Enfield Rifles from Europe costs $344k and takes 17 days. Conclusion: highly standardized, domestically produced weapons are cheaper and quicker to get, but ramping up the industry takes time.

With this new system, weapon production and import (= procurement by the government) are more controllable by the player, and also better balanced. If the player wants to get a lot of weapons quickly, importing is a better option, as long as trade routes are open, but the costs are higher due to the required logistics. If player wants to domestically produce weapons, it’s not possible to start mass production right away, as the industry is not ready immediately. It’s better to place smaller orders first, to increase standardization – later production will be much faster and cheaper than importing, but it takes some time. It also means it’s possible to balance between fast mass production of simple weapon types, such as muzzle-loading rifle-muskets, or more complex types like repeating rifles. And the link to economy is also more apparent: if production facilities suffer shortages on materials, or trade routes are not open, weapon procurement will be directly affected, in the short term as well as in the long term.

I hope this short study explains how weapon production works in the 1.08 version of the game!

Most Respy,

Gen’l. Ilja Varha,
Chief Designer, &c.,
The Grand Tactician -Team

Gen’l,

Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865) was released on Sep 24, 2021, after a year in Early Access. Even before the full release, we had a post-release road-map, describing the development steps we were committed to take to further improve the game, for free. These were ideas and concepts that were not part of the original game design, but what we nevertheless wanted to add to our game. Let’s take a look at the progress, and the next steps.

Currently, we have released six (6) major patches to the game, each one bringing new features, in addition to the obvious bug fixes. All of the added topics in these patches were not part of the post-release road-map, but for example highly requested features from the players:

*Patch 1.01 was mainly for bug fixing, but it also added campaign and battle tutorials and commander promotions.
*Patch 1.02 added a battle information panel for autoresolved battles, rebalanced the battles, and included a list of improvements for the battle AI.
*Patch 1.03, the first major patch, changed the game’s 2D unit sprites into 3D models, with other visual improvements. At the same time the game’s saving & loading system was updated to allow management of the whole save library, instead of scenario specific management, and two new historical battles (Stones River, Champion Hill) were added.
*Patch 1.04 introduced a long list of AI improvements, main focus being on the campaign AI, including naval invasions.
*Patch 1.05 was another mainly AI focused patch, but also introduced a number of new military management options, like prioritizing reinforcements and unit replenishment or detaching a new independent corps from an existing army.
*Patch 1.06, the biggest patch so far, overhauled the game’s economy completely, from the way how subsidies work, to introducing new projects-system, weapon production system, and new building options.
*During the patching process, a few new random maps have been added, and further ones will be added along the way.

Like you can see in the map image above, the development did not follow the operational plan step by step. After the release, we quickly re-prioritized the steps according to players’ requests and feedback. Now, here are how the next development steps look like, and how the post-release road-map will be finalized:

Patch 1.07.

The next patch is again heavily focused on the battle AI. The campaign AI works quite well most of the time, even though it’s of course far from perfect, but this is undermined a bit by the battle AI. If the AI loses most of the battles against a human opponent, this of course has a huge impact on the campaign as well.

While version 1.06 added the projects-feature, reworked weapon production and added four (4) new rare weapon types, in this patch we will also add three more weapons, finalizing the rare weapons -step. The new weapons are the Gatling gun, the Coffee Mill (or Agar) gun for the Union, and the 1-pounder Williams gun for the CSA. These new, rapid-fire weapons come with their own projects. The Union “machineguns” will not tip the balance on the battlefields, even if they can be quite useful in certain situations. The Williams gun is small and cheap to produce, but not that lethal. There is a reason the said weapon types did not see wider use during the war.

A few more projects will also be added, focusing on the early war organization reforms. Both artillery and cavalry units will be available only in smaller unit size, until organization reforms, that will introduce the more effective artillery battalions and cavalry brigades. Further cavalry reform will unlock the ability to recruit horse-artillery. The organization reform -project, introducing corps organization, will now also make logistics more efficient in general, reducing the number of needed military supplies in the newly organized armies.

Version 1.07 will also include a modding tool (Excel format), that allows editing and creating some of the game’s data files.

Avatar.

One of the highly requested features has been the ability create a custom commander in the game. Version 1.08 will introduce tools to do just that. The player may create a custom (army) commander, that is added to the list of commanders in the game. After that, the commander is handled just like any other officer. Will the avatar die in the first battle, leading a brigade in a desperate charge? Or will the avatar one day become the commanding general of the armies?

While finalizing the above features, we are also looking forward to future content in the game. But more about this later!

Most Respy,

Gen’l. Ilja Varha,
Chief Designer, &c.,
The Grand Tactician -Team

Gen’l,

With patch 1.06, Grand Tactician’s economy will see a big overhaul, not only increasing its importance, but also allowing player further control over it.

From the beginning, Grand Tactician had an elaborate economic system built into it. When designing the game, we wanted to minimize micromanagement required from the player, while also having the economy play its role in our model of the Civil War. While this did work quite well, we were not completely happy with the end result, as quite a lot was abstracted a bit too far, and the effects of the economy were quite difficult to observe. For these reasons we decided to redesign parts of the economy.

Sinews of War.

The first noticeable change is in the Finances-panel, and how subsidies work. In the above image, you can see that the subsidy controls have received some improvements. There are now six (6) subsidy types. Politics subsidy type is the only one not connected directly to policies, while the other types are. Enacting Industrialization policies, for example, will unlock further available industry subsidies per annum. Small amount of subsidies are now available even without enacted policies.

Earlier, pre 1.06, subsidies included direct effects. While it worked in principle just fine, it remained rather invisible for the player. We wanted to make the subsidies and the effects easier to see and understand. So, the paid subsidies are now shown under each type as coins of different color. These indicate how much government money has been invested. This money can then be spent by the player.

NOTE: The screenshot still contains some placeholder assets.

Projects.

In the new Projects-panel, player can use the subsidies to finance different kinds of government projects, each requiring certain subsidy type. The projects are divided into civil and military projects, and some are one time, others repeating. For example, with military subsidies one can appoint new weapon types to be produced by the nation’s industry, or with diplomacy subsidies one can make weapon import deals.

These are one time projects. In the above screenshot, you can see one of the repeating projects. Each level of these repeating projects will increase the effects, but will also cost gradually more. Infrastructure Reform, the example shown, requires industry subsidies, and will increase transport capacity of all the nation’s IIPs (Important Infrastructure Points, that move goods around the campaign map). Once appointed, the next level will further increase the effects, but at a slightly higher cost.

The project effects will influence the nation’s war effort, and are powerful tools, but also expensive. It’s up to the player to figure out which projects to focus on, as subsidies are collected over time, and not everything can be done at any one time.

Weapon Production.

Changing the way weapon production works in the game has been one of the main requests from the community since the beginning. We did not want to make big changes so far, as it required stronger link between the economy and weapon production. With the overhauled economy model, it was finally time to change this as well.

In the above image you see a new Weapons-panel, which can be accessed via military management. Here, you can see all available weapons per type, including the actual numbers. There are weapons that are found currently in the nation’s depots, including those captured from the battle fields. Even if certain weapons are available, it does not mean they can be produced or imported — the projects are used for this.

Once a weapon type is available for the industry to produce, or an import deal is made, said weapons can be ordered. Player chooses the number of weapons to be produced, and places the order. Depending on the weapon type’s complexity, standardization, condition of industry (produced weapons), or available trade routes and relations (imported weapons), completion of the order will require certain amount of time and money. Once the order has been completed, the weapons become available, and can be handed over to recruited units.

So, from unlocking the weapon types directly via policies, and receiving new weapons to equip the units quite abstractly, the new system makes weapon production way more flexible and controlled. Players can, for example, try to unlock the best repeating rifles first. But the delays and costs need to be weighed carefully, as the economy now plays more important role in general.

Construction Options.

Another big change is the ability to construct buildings on the campaign map. When no army or fleet is selected, you can see new construction buttons in the bottom of the screen. There are three (3) types of construction options: government building, industries, railroads. Constructing railroads has not changed much from earlier versions of the game, except the location for the controls, and that subsidies can be used to cover the costs.

Government buildings are paid for using the nation’s treasury directly. Government buildings, such as national banks, POW camps, military hospitals and military academies, all have their effects in the war effort. For example, when capturing enemy soldiers in battle, if no POW camps are built, the field commanders will parole the prisoners, and many may return to their units to fight again. If POW camps with sufficient capacity exist, the prisoners can be moved there, and will be effectively out of the fight. But there are upkeep costs…

Industries, like railroads, can be funded with subsidies. When subsidies are available, construction is cheaper, as private investors and businessmen can be attracted more easily. If insufficient subsidies are available, these construction projects can still be ordered, but it will cost much more, and the funds are taken from the treasury directly. Similar payments (subsidies, or direct) can be used now to upgrade any of the existing industries throughout the campaign map.

As the new construction options require further information, we have also added a number of new map filters to show information, that can be helpful when considering whether new buildings are needed, and where they would be most effective.

While all these changes increase the control player can have over the economy, all the mentioned functions can be placed under the AI Cabinet’s control (automanagement), in which case no further commands from the player are needed.

Most Respy,

Gen’l. Ilja Varha,
Chief Designer, &c.,
The Grand Tactician -Team