It is true that the 40K games have a much better system than Regalia and Storm Guard, but Mechanicus suffers from requiring you to fiddle with all the difficulty settings if you don't want an effortless, or almost impossible challenge.
I just jammed the game to Ironman. Default difficulty is very doable on a blind ironman run, and ironman is quite suited to games with low chance of death, as you don't actually want to die often, you just need a constant pervasive threat of death.
Sanctus Reach is indeed much better, but I had no attachment to my units with their weird system and lack of roster, and it is pretty important to me.
Having point buy army building before every mission and a perk based level up system that carries over between missions alleviated much of that for me. I sure felt enough attachment to my units, especially to my three land speeders in the space marine campaign. I always took all three, since a fragile glass cannon unit with ultra high mobility is OP against AI. One I specced into an infantry shredder with aoe damage and infantry armor penetration. One I specced into an anti caster assassin with no range penalty and heavy armor, allowing him to dive enemy lines, kill the weirdboy, and usually survive. The third I tried to build into a tank shredder, but got bad perks and the units ended up being kinda shit.
The unit building and roster management felt on par with Warbanners, not good and certainly not a draw of the game, but not bad enough to lower the enjoyment of the game either.
In Panzer General type war games it is common for core units to have the ability to gain experience and come with you from map to map. Sometimes they can be upgraded. They can also die permanently.
A lot of fans of that genre demand this feature. I can see pros and cons to this feature, but it's kind of a risk for a developer to leave it out, as it helps keep the campaign from feeling like a disconnected series of skirmish maps.
Yeah Sanctus Reach got quite a lot of flak from Panzer General fans for not having Ironman modes and no unit progression. Both were patched in eventually. It leaves the game in a bit of an awkward state with the early campaigns however. On max difficulty but no ironman they are quite easy, as upgrading your units until level 4 gives your army a ton of more firepower and tactical options. The AI gets torn to shreds by tangle grenades and smokes you get from perks. On Ironman the campaigns can be insanely cruel however. Sanctus Reach could have been the best modern tacticool if it was developed as a Panzer General clone from day one, being made closer to Panzer General later made it better, but also introduced other issues.
Still, quite excited for an eventual Sanctus Reach 2.
Also some more tictacs:
Games published by Chucklefish are very pretty, but lack meat on the bones when it comes to the depth. I enjoyed this one enough, but that was mostly attachment to the setting being basically Indiana Jones tactics. If the setting does nothing to you this is a safe skip.
This one is a good bit better, imo the best game published by Chucklefish. It is an Advance Wars clone, and a competent one at that. The only problem I see here is that while the factions have amazing visual identities they are almost completely identical in gameplay. Wether you have a Oak Giant or a Metal Golem makes no difference, both use the same statblock.
Still there is not much competition when it comes to Advance Wars esque games right now, and if you want a taste of that gameplay before the remasters are released this one is a nice deal..
