Part of the reason for the negative reviews was because the game is Ironman on all the time, but more importantly they were strong-armed into implementing an anti Alt-F4 mechanism. They implemented it before the autosave feature. If you crashed for what ever reason, or Alt-F4ed, you'd lost your entire warband.
-Maps are pretty much the same. They get rearranged, but for the most part it's the same buildings over and over.
-No difficulty setting, ironman mode on all the time. This may turn some people off, but the devs took the concept of HARDCORE to heart.
That includes losing equipment when a warband member is knocked out of action (some of you may like that). This more recently got remedied by rune recipes being made permanent to your warband.
-Can take 20+ hours to get a warband member to level 6+ or higher, only to lose them to a bad forced deployment.
-Forced split deployment, often times within range of an AI Impressive or Demon that will kill a warband member in one turn (for example, getting your leader deployed within reach of a skaven rat ogre that passes their stupidity).
-Anything you know about the tabletop throw it out, the game has its own system with vibes similar to Xcom.
-It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the forced ambush deployment, disengage bugs (whereby you get "no room to disengage"), or demons that make a beeline for your warband bypassing the AI. Although they claim to have remedied it by having the demons attack the closest.
There are still numerous other bugs that were never addressed and when combined with no Alt-F4ing can lead to utter frustration.
We played the game pretty hardcore until we had all our members to level 7 with full purple gear (my friend and I). That's when I realized that it became very repetitive since the only viable tactic was to lure the AI into narrow passages and then pile into a single enemy while abusing the engagement zone. Either you built skaven to alpha ambush/crit swarm, or Mercs as ranged with a couple melee parry builds to tie AI up. When dealing with Impressives, since the map components are limited and you'll eventually memorize them, we learned to jam them into buildings/overhangs and then swarm them.
Because the AI is simply HP and damage buffed when doing Brutal/Deadly your tactical choices are severely limited. After your first warband, you'll learn what abilities are absolutely broken (200% dodge builds with sidestep) and which ones are a waste of time (parry builds can be bypassed). Rarely, even on normal will you be able to have 1v1, and in anything but normal, you'll probably reach the max of 4 on one so you can maximize damage output and/or abuse All Alone routing. The best warband builds are maximized teams of 4. Only reason to run with more than 4, is if you want to roleplay or are doing the limited amount of story missions (5 since the last time I played).
Overall it wouldn't have been a bad game. At first it can be quite addicting, but unfortunately you'll soon either grow frustrated with it (magic being severely punishing for what it brings to the table), or grow bored. It does not have a meta-game like Xcom which could change things up a bit. Part of the problem for me is that things can be great for hours, then all of a sudden you lose a warband member to something completely out of your control (such as not being able to disengage them even though there is plenty of space to do so).
To you guys, I'd recommend the game, however if any of the above that I mentioned frustrates you and you don't like the idea of forced ironman mode, then it'd be best to skip it.
Also i don't understand how bad i miss; isn't the % chance actually hit chance? I've had so many 80%+ misses, so annoying. I restarted once i realized how much more exp you get from doing secondary objectivies etc. Much smoother play through so far, definitely a fun game.
Soon as you start a game and it's your first warband members turn, hit Left ALT and Left Control followed by L, only hit them once. That should bring up the effects window, the chance to hit/cast window, and the battle log. Eventhough the window might not show, it will show once you engage an enemy, so just hit those keys once.