Started up a new game and I'm starting to get apprehensive to just playing the game now. Do I go with tactical or auto-resolve combat, a major reason I was ever interested in this game was the tactical combat features of the game, Brad made mention that he knew people loved the tactical aspect of the game while I *think* he wasn't as much of a fan of that. Regardless, it was put in, in a similar fashion as MoM, but it is soooo broken as to be an exercise in frustration it seems to me.

Example:

I have my sovereign and some peasants, I attack another sovereign, the strength totals or whatever you call the numbers, show that my army is stronger than the opposing army. Cool, so I go into tactical combat to putz around and play it out cause I enjoy that sort of thing. The enemy sovereign casts one spell on each of his turns and destroys my sovereign (I don't have any attack spells to cast), so then I move my peasants up and attack the guy in melee combat, but they miss every single time. I get the impression that it's my guys attack vs. opponents defense and if their defense is just too high, it's largely a waste of my time, that is lame. I should still be hitting the guy and doing like 1pt of damage or something, not just blatantly missing like that, he wasn't even that strong. Throw a few misses in there for randomization, but EVERY SINGLE TIME I attacked, it was a 'miss'. So, needless to say, I just gave up and re-loaded (I had saved before starting combat).

This time, I figured, what the hell, lets try auto-resolve, it worked so damn well in the campaign, lets see what happens. So I do auto-resolve, my sovereign destroys the opponent and the results screen shows that I only lost 1 peasant. Normally I'd be thrilled at the outcome, but I'm just more dismayed that tactical combat was completely overlooked, it's more time consuming and FAR less rewarding, there's no tactics to it, it's just, go through the motions and get worse results than letting the computer play the game itself.

The icing on the cake was after auto-resolve combat, after the results screen that showed I lost one peasant, that I come back to the main map screen and lo and behold, I have my sovereign and 1 peasant left (wth, I went into combat with sovereign and 4 peasants, 1 died and now I'm down to 1 peasant, how does that math work out?!?).

So, needless to say, both tactical combat and apparently in some circumstances auto-resolving combat, are both very broken. How did this ever get past play testing and QA? I mean honestly, this game is so broken and I'm trying my best to enjoy it and look past the issues but, they are everywhere I look, it's pathetic, there's no way anyone can tell me that these things weren't seen during in-house testing unless nobody is testing the game. This is very obvious stuff guys, it's not some little-known, obscure bug, this and many others as explained on these forums are very obvious, in your face, completely broken aspects of the game.

This game doesn't deserve over a 3 or 4  out of 10 in my opinion and no I wouldn't recommend it to anyone in its current state, it would be embarrassing for me, to do so.