The intricate strategy of Grand Tactician: The Civil War comes to Steam this month

Ambitious strategy game project Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865) will release into Early Access on Steam on August 21st. A real-time grand strategy game with tactical battles, Grand Tactician: The Civil War looks to blend the kind of grand strategy of a game like Europa Universalis with the real-time battles of a game from the Total War series.

Players in GT: The Civil War will run one of the two combatants in the game, muster their armies, manage their officers and logistics, and then deploy them to the battlefield. Multi-day battles are a key feature, like historical Gettysburg, where the actions of engineers or arrival of reinforcements between the days of the fight can change the tide.

There's an in-depth command infrastructure, where officers can like or dislike each other, or become rivals, so that their units don't work well together—or fight to be better than the other on the battlefield. There are also optional rules for officers doing things like disobeying orders, or for couriers to carry orders from command to the officers' position.

The developers have also already released their roadmap for post-launch. They'll be first working on mid-battle saving and loading, then giving the campaign AI a pass. Beyond that, they'll add new maps, campaign start dates, tutorials, and the like.

You can find out more about Grand Tactician: The Civil War on its rather nice official website and you can find its pre-release listing on Steam. GT: The Civil War is the second game from developer Oliver Keppelmüller, following his 2015 release of The Seven Years War (1756-1763).

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.