The game has great potential. It is very pleasant to discover a ruined world. Personally, I would prefer to choose the opposite nation - I liked the "home made tanks" that the opponents had. Models very well polished. But why I found this game by complete accident when I was googling the internet in search of a 4x strategy ... I will be happy to wait for a larger map. Lovers of civilization or its collapse should be pleased

Its important to note that the demo does feel rough around the edges. The demo at the moment demands that you quickly block off your ramps and focus on researching ranged support units like snipers and medics to maintain a defensive formation at your base. The AI is also cheating quite badly and will have a strong army at the start and will also repeatedly spam infantry and vehicle units toward your base (thankfully the infantry while powerful, don't synergize well with each other so your snipers and zeppelins will, provided you don't get caught out of position, will eventually reach critical mass and wipe them out). The difficulty has been set to the point that you will have to play to the steampunk factions strengths or you will die horribly. I think that forcing the player to use the steampunk faction's strengths (its higher range on snipers and hit and run capacity on its zeppelins) can be both a good thing and a bad thing. For people just wanting to play casual this demo is going to kill you, as you also on a 75 turn timer and the AI will not hesitate to begin sieging your base structures with stunlock abilities your faction doesn't get.

If you don't immediately block the ramps to your base, you will get swarmed and die in 5 turns. I'm not joking. The good news is that having to actually think and use your roster is the point of a game like this. Unfortunately the tutorial does a terrible job teaching you some basic mechanics. For example there is the option of upgrading buildings with your workers. This is generally not worth it on regular buildings. It is however completely worth it on your observatory HQ buildings (as it boosts its border radius by 1 and gives it a gun) and maybe your steam extractors (+1 to steam when there's only 3 deposits that can be reached on your map).

It's also important to note that the tutorial doesn't tell you how the economy works. If a tile produces a resource, once the tile is in your borders its yours no question. So it is often times worth much more in terms of resources per turn to build a new HQ building to expand your borders, than it is to spend several turns building new buildings (also note that a worker needs AP to build resource buildings but ZERO AP to build a HQ). Some abilities such as the zeppelin bombardment ability sounds like it only affects buildings but it actually hurts everything in its AOE. Likewise some buildings say it requires another building nearby to function. If you can build a building on a tile than it functions even if it says it needs stuff like a farm, clockwork theatre or steam extractor. My skyports work just fine despite not being near a steam extractor.

Last but not least I take a bit of issue with the unit and faction rosters. Steampunk has a lot of units but only zeppelin, sniper, man at arms (early game) and medic are useful. The rest like the locomotive and clockwork mech lack the punch that is needed and are clunky and hard to be effective in a one unit per tile game. Locomotive and clockwork mech are basically better version of the man at arms with the locomotive having weaker attack but a building damage ability and the same man at arms trade steam for atk power ability and the Clockwork mech has a much stronger attack and 1 extra armor but has an ability that lets it move slightly more per turn and attack twice instead of once. The problem is that these units don't have AOE abilities and don't do enough damage to justify using them for anything other than tanking damage for a zeppelin backline. These units can feel like a letdown considering they are late-game in the tech tree.

Dieselpunk seems to have it pretty bad too. We can't play them in the demo but based upon what the AI manages to build there isn't much the faction can do beyond some suicidal AOE abilities. Their infantry have at best 2 range and are easily mowed down. Same deal goes for their armored car. Ironically they do have an air unit that fulfills roughly the same role as the zeppelin, a A-10-esque vtol, but the damage it does is lower. Maybe its just because the devs intentionally made the AI stupid to compensate for its empire earth levels of unit spamming cheats but it really does feel like there's nothing the dieselpunk faction can do against a good defensive chokepoint.

Overall I would say that this game demo shows promise. Hopefully the full game will be well fleshed out and have better balancing and less typos in building and ability descriptions

A simplistic steampunk / dieselpunk 4x game somewhat close to Civ 6 or Endless Legends.

Good:
- gfx, especially the UI art, are pretty good
- music is generally good

So-so:
- the combat system isn't like in Civ games: when units attack something, the target won't retaliate. No bonuses from attacking from different sides etc. So it's a rather simple combat system, far simpler than in Civ games, with no defensive bonuses from tiles, no move cost multipliers on tiles etc.

Bad:
- to place new buildings, you need to produce a "Builder" unit first, which you then need to move to the desired location and convert into the building (the builder is consumed). That's too tedious.
- the terrain is all done in shades of brown. It's very hard to tell what objects are on the tiles, so you have to click on each tile to get an info dialog slide from the left - that's too tedious as well. Guess what, steampunk units are brown, too!
- the game is pretty resource intensive. Even on the lowest graphical settings I had very low FPS on my gaming laptop with GTX1050. I never had such lags with Civ 6 for example

If you're a fan of steam- or dieselpunk, you may be willing to tolerate the brown-ish mess this game is. But anyone else, even a Civ fan has nothing to see here.

The game, it's setting, and the art (mostly), all look pretty good. The gameplay, however, is too tedious.

Building in a space is instantaneous and consumes the builder, and then you have to go through the whole process to create another builder and spend turns moving them someplace useful again.

Weapon ranges are illogical. Basic infantry unit with guns only have a range of 1, but flamethrowers have a range of 2???

The tech tree has several either/or choices that limit options because once an option is researched, the other option is permanently blocked. Why? How is supposed to make sense?

You had better like browns and grays, because you're going see a LOT of it.

I've sunk 5 hours into this game, and that's enough.

Once you play the demo you'll find out the game is fairly shallow combat wise, as rather than make the combat dynamic or building unites matter it's mostly just a numbers game. Fighting against an enemy which is unbalanced to make the game more challenging, as well as place on a time limit so the player can't play at their own pace.

Decent 4x game in a well realised post apocalypse setting. Lacks a difficulty setting & not much content, but unless you are ultra good, or a total newb, you should have a few hours fun with this. Can't believe some are rating it -ve, considering it's free.

Not sure if it's convinced me to buy the full version, I'll see how I fee once my Christmas holiday starts. The game is very similar to Gladius, but not as well polished, and lack of quality sound reduces the immersion a little. Has some nice steam punk type events, and you can make your population happy which is one way it's better than Gladius.

Beat the prologue twice, its a great game so far. Ill definitely get the whole game when I get paid. 9/10 at least.

The demo for Punk Wars showed some good promise even if the color pallet for it made it kind of fugly.
If the full release is as solid as the demo, with larger maps and fleshed out factions, then this could be one hell of a fun game.
Try the demo for yourself, its free after all.

Even though i play'd a little bit of it,i can recommend this game. The system is similiar but also different to the Sid Meiers Civs.