Slitherine

Hello everyone, i wanna start to play the grand campaigns and i am pondering if i should try them on Mainstein difficulty. I mostly play on Rommel and the game's difficulty is OK there for me.

What i like about Rommel difficulty:

-Forces me to not use the best units avaiable due to lack of Prestige, so i have to have a diverse and mixed up army, i also have to take unit upgrade paths into consideration and cannot change army composition willy nilly.

-Allows me to (usually) fully explore the map, get bonus units and always get DV on all maps. It also allows me to completely take over the map and cities.

What makes Mainstein interesting is that, in theory, the bigger health on enemy units probably makes the AI more interesting (more counteattacks and such), My main worry is about Mainstein is that it will be like Guderian, where it feels like your speed running the game with a single focus on the main objective, where at times it feels its not really possible to get a DV at all (or the DV comes at the cost of catastrophic losses for your army) and one has to skip over the optional objectives (like capturing the bonus units) or even entire sections of the map just to get a DV.

My other worry is that the game isnt really balanced at all around Mainstein and some scenarios will simply be broken. My last worry is that Mainstein will just turn into a normal game where i end up with the same "super optimized" army of panthers and tigers as soon as they are avaiable and Prestige is just a non-issue.

My initial test with Mainstein difficulty on the normal German Campaign, the Africa campaign and Soviet Corps seem to be pretty bad (you have the normal number of turns, but the enemy takes so long to destroy that i had to go into "rush" mentality just like Guderian difficulty.

Has anyone experimented more with Mainstein? does it get better later on? do you usually have time to fully complete a mission or its always a rush? Is it just hard at the start and later on it gets better?

Thanks in advance for all help here.

Your army composition and play style may change for Manstein, e.g. a bit more artillery and much more forcing to surrender, etc.

PeteMitchell wrote: ↑Tue Jul 08, 2025 4:36 pm Your army composition and play style may change for Manstein, e.g. a bit more artillery and much more forcing to surrender, etc.

But otherwise, its fine?

The idea of having to do battlefield replacements due to more enemy health and not be neurotic about every single loss seems interesting, cause Rommel difficulty isnt particularly harder than Field Marshall or General, its just that you have to play much more efficiently, its harder because the player themselves cant make mistakes, Manstein seems to be the odd one out of the difficulties, where the enemy actually gets a buff, not the player gets a debuff, as it were.