Still my fav game!

I spent almost all of 2025 in this game! 5/5

Strictly speaking, this is not a review per se, just some random, more or less organized thoughts about the Gold incarnation of Panzer Corps, a glorified yet mindless Panzer General and Panzer General II clone. PROS - excellently designed UI; - highly addictive game, perfectly recaptures the playability, if not the spirit, of SSI's 5-Star General series, while combining the best features of PG (remaking history on an operational/tactical level) and PG II (moving and firing are independent actions, units get heroes/leaders); - lots of units, including purpose-switching ones (AA to AT) and Wunderwaffen; - core army gets experience and in the Grand Campaigns can be saved and transfered from one campaign to another; - except for the Pacific and Japan, all theater of wars are visited and all major WWII sides involved can be played with their own campaigns; - huge content with high replayability value; - huge modding/customizable potential with official editor included in the vanilla game. - solid vanilla campaign, with lots of twists and turns and time-limit (which is absent in all the DLCs). - Grand Campaign made a lot more interesting with the additions of historical figures as heroes, whose aparently over-the-top stats actually balance quite nicely the overall grinding. CONS - non-existent AI (hence the mindless in the first line), substituted by heavy scripting that imposes how one should play the game; - wild inconsistency in the unit/map scale (in the same campaign, a city frequently goes from a one-hex size to a full map size); - odd unit management: upgrading within the same class to a newer equipment (say, from a Panzer III to a IV) means paying full price AND losing in the process all ovestrength points; - frustrating prestige management: it's called soft prestige cap, it's a feature not a bug and it basically punishes the player for performing above and beyond duty (the better army you develop, the less prestige you'll earn)*; - somewhat bizzare campaigns, marred by linearity (except the vanilla one and, to a lesser degree, Sealion), repetitiveness, elephantiasis (worst culprit is the Grand Campaign, where "Bigger is better" seems to have been the designers' motto) and historical oddities (like, for instance, Allied Corps, where half of the British campaign is spent fighting the... Italians, while the US enters the fray only in the middle of it); - experience cap in the Grand Campaign (which also features in its East Branch the most lame finale ever, Epilogue) and the US Grand Campaign, meaning that your units won't get any any experience beyond a limit which is set for every campaign in the GCs; - lack of historical identities/particularities in the DLCs and add-ons, one campaign feeling pretty much like any other one (definitely a problem for the Soviet Corps) and all of them feeling like hurdle races with predetermined endings. I'm not much into multiplayer, but from what I've seen so far it's functional and divided in two. One part features terribly non-descript and generic maps, perfectly balanced both in terms of units and terrains, with no historical realism whatsoever. The second part, much more interesting, features the vanila campaign scenarios, where somewhat more realistic conditions apply, thus turning a battle against a human opponent into a vastly different and challenging gameplay, with almost no relation to what goes on in the campaign. *To be fair, prestige cap can be avoided by choosing to play with another rule set, but this also disables some useful later patch additions. Experience cap, on the other hand, can't be avoided.