[Iron Harvest] - Giant mechs and sappy Eastern European violin music

Cantido

One upon a time in 2016, Stonemaier Games teamed up with artist Jacob Rozalski to bring the latter's art to life in the form of a board game called Scythe. A name which had a double meaning as a weapon for death and a tool for feeding the masses, and this double meaning was the perfect metaphor for the gameplay. It was the ultimate "gateway to fancy-pants board games," combining stylish mech warfare and territory control with European board game mechanics especially popular in Germany.

The universe of Scythe is an alternate post-WW1 Dieselpunk Eastern Europe. Gloom. Hope. Sad violins. A lot of grain. Rust. Giant badass robots that probably run like shit. Alternative names for countries everybody knows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DmU1k8arVg

Its greatest strength was that it was a little bit of everything. Its weakness was that it was a little bit of everything. And that's okay. The war in Scythe was a cold war. The euro mechanics were light. It left fans of Risk or Monopoly craving more of the more of the elegant mechanics they were discovering, so the point was that it provided the gateway to deeper exploration into those mechanics. Players who wanted something more fighty learned about Kemet. Players who craved more economics learned about Concordia or Race/Roll for the Galaxy. Some moved on to those new games, some latched on to Scythe and enjoyed its many expansions.

The point was that it tried to do all these things without falling apart and it succeeded. (There is a game that does absolutely everything at full blast without sacrificing anything, but its called Twilight Imperium and its over eight hours long.)

So publisher Deep Silver and developer King Art Games said "yo, this should be an RTS.

And it is called Iron Harvest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mruZvlOucbc&t=36s

There are many factions in Scythe, but Iron Harvest only focuses on three of them: the goody two-shoes on the backfoot, Poland the Polania Republic, the industrious but politically unstable Germany Saxony Empire, and the assholes, Russia the Rusviet Federation.

(More to come, I need to play it some more.

Corp.Shephard

The game is out in an open beta right now if you go and download the demo from their steam page. You can play around in AI skirmishes, play online, etc.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/826630/Iron_Harvest/

I have only played a handful of games and mostly sort of "in-house" playing with friends. The mech designs are pretty spectacular. There's this strange waddling mech that looks like a Warhammer drop pod with tiny legs that spits out rolling tires that seek out enemies and then explode. It's so absurd and it rules.

The mechs control well for the pace of the game. I've played a lot of company of heroes... even more so company of heroes 2... and the controls for the tanks/vehicles in that were always a struggle. It was a skill you had to learn... the right ways to give commands and guide your tanks correctly. In CoH2 it is pretty easy to make a mistake when controlling multiple tanks. It is much harder for that to happen in this game. The pace is slower and the mechs move and operate at a ponderous rate. If you make a micro mistake you have more time to correct it before something awful happens.

The mechs have been cool but I will say that I've felt a bit underwhelmed by the infantry combat. The arcs for the team weapons such as mortars, MGs, and anti-tank guns are small and narrow. It get it... they have to be weaker than Company of Heroes. The game plays slower. The time to kill is much higher. Flanking relies on surprise and quick action to get things done before the enemy can respond... when the game plays slower flanking gets weaker. That means the weapons that "have to be flanked" have to be weaker too. I just enjoy that game-play a lot though...

The campaign sounds to be pretty good though, I am hopeful:

https://www.ign.com/articles/iron-harvest-preview-bringing-back-the-classic-rts-campaign

I will say that I have not found a way to group up with friends and then auto-match. Does anyone know how to do this? Is playing with friends only for "custom matches"? I would be quite sad if that's true... I've got hundreds of hours of CoH2 playing online in auto-matches with friends.

Handsome Costanza

picked this game up as its premise and art style is right up my alley. I'm really early on but I have to say the tutorial might be the worst video game tutorial I've ever experienced. It's tedious, long, unskippable, and doesn't really tell me much about how to play the game.

Prisca

I am an avid fan of Company of Heroes, and was intrigued that Iron Harvest's gameplay was inspired by it; the setting is interesting also. However I am not very impressed with how clunky the game is, I rather regret supporting its kickstarter.

Fiatil

I really wish I would have tried the open beta for this. It looks kind of awesome, but I need to try it before taking the plunge on a full priced RTS.

Edit: Ahh darn. Reviews make it sound like it's essentially still in early access (not all planned units are in the game), and they kind of arbitrarily pulled the trigger on calling it a finished product. That doesn't seem like a wise decision for an RTS with multiplayer -- it's hard to get a stable community for multiplayer when the release date is squishy like that.