Games have a gotten a reputation as mindless violence. Run, shoot, die. Don't you yearn for something more?
How about wargames? Violence for the thinking man! Tell your hapless troops to run, shoot, and die; all from the comfort of your armchair and drinks cabinet. Let's discuss and possibly play some war games.
Boutique wargames, those that are very niche, are usually characterized by great gameplay and shoddy graphics. That's not as big a handicap as it sounds like. They are primarily a platform for two, or more, people to match wits. These studios are usually very small groups of enthusiasts, without the staff or budget for the AAA graphics we expect from bigger games. So the price can be a little higher, and the graphics can be a little worse, but we're still getting a high quality product from independent developers. If you're asking yourself, "Why a screenshot-heavy OP, then?" I figured it would be more interesting than me rambling on about old battles like a crazy grandpa. There's plenty of time for that later.
To lead off, how about the fantastic Combat Mission series? The first three are in WWII, but don't hold that against them. They're tactical-level games that are played out in discrete scenarios. I'm sure anyone who's played it has stories of hard-fought battles that could hinge on a single squad getting in position at the right moment. These games are very in-depth, and some of the best strategy to be had on the PC.
Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord
This gem did a great job of bringing 2d gaming tactics to a 3d field. Units use true line of sight, and complicated calculations determine fire and movement. Set in the standard WWII France, this game simulates warfare in incredible depth. It's a tactical level game, so you command at most a battalion. Each battle needs to be carefully coordinated, especially against a clever opponent.
Combat Mission: Barbarossa to Berlin
CM:BB takes the series to the Eastern Front. A streamlined interface and lots of the seldom-seen areas of the war make this very interesting. Have you ever commanded a company of Finns in a desperate defense against the Red Army? No? Now's your chance!
Combat Mission: Afrika Korps
Tanks! Italians! Sand! Fight in the rarely seen Italian and African campaigns in this edition of Combat Mission.
Combat Mission: Shock Force
Well, there's this one, too, I guess. It's the US invading Syria in the near future. Real ripped-from-the-headlines stuff. The graphics leaped up a notch, but the game kind of went in the shitter. They're releasing expansions that might fix stuff. Stick to the first three.
Western Civilization Software has a pair of great strategic/operational games out there, covering the wars of Napoleon, and the American Civil War. Crown of Glory and Forge of Freedom, respectively.
Forge treaties, fight battles, and govern your nation in Crown of Glory. It's like the Total War series in that your performance as a ruler relies on more than winning battles. If your economy is in the tank, or you have no allies, you'll be at a big disadvantage. Plus, you get to weep and pray that the invincible French don't crush your puny armies. How many games let you do that?
Also like the Total War series, you can fight your battles personally. Except instead of pretty graphics, you get chits and tons of statistics to remember. The battles are great fun, and full of tough decisions. Your line is about to break; do you commit your reserves to the center to try to hold, or do you send them to try to turn the enemy flank? Or just fall back to fight another day? In this picture, it looks like the French have already taken the town, so it's all over but the croissant party.
Forge of Freedom is the sequel, and they improved on a lot of things. The new setting poses a lot of interesting problems, too. You've got to keep governors happy, and try to keep morale up while thousands of men get butchered. There aren't any good screenshots of it out there, though. Imagine Crown of Glory with little US and CS flags.
How about my favorite for the moment, AGEod's World War One. That's right, a game about WWI! How weird is that? It is so absurdly detailed that you will be qualified to teach Ph.D. level history courses after playing it for an hour. Balance your budget, massage public opinion, keep an eye out for dissidents, dictate foreign policy, and deal with this little war that's going on. If you've ever wanted to play a good game about the Great War, look no further. It can take a bit to get into, but it's worth every second.
So, share your favorite wargames!
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Holy shit that looks complicated.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
The vanilla game is uh... very vanilla and not realistic at all, encase you dident realize WW2 history is colored by a distinct anti russian flavor left over from the cold war and its pretty amazing if you've been exposed to both sides. A good example is in vanilla the russians are total push overs and your tanks slaughter them to no end, but when you DL the realism patch your friggin stopped cold and your german war machine is getting mauled badly fighting the russians quickly turns into a battle of horrible attrition and desperation. I was angered when i ran into an over strengthen russsian infantry unit and my panzerIVD was repulsed with massive losses when before it would overrun infantry constantly, i then went online and studied the crap out of WW2 to learn that american history colors the germans as the best during WW2 and the russians as this 'ok' army that just had alot of men and tanks. I was fucking amazed to learn that the russians had the first biplane in the world, they were the first ones to come up with the blizkrieg tactics the germans shamelessly copied the russian deep strike tactics, russians also invented the first rocket powered plane.
If you play panzer general 2 with the realism patch you literally get to relive WW2 because i honestly dont know how the germans did what they did and you get the bonus of realizing that russian could have taken over the world and they've always had superior tech then the west from day 1 and still do today 0_0. * Forgot to mention theres also a smaller allied campaign along with another german campaign 'defending the reich' and a russian campaign that has excellent music*
You can buy it and download it from their site, here. They'll ship you a physical copy if you want, too, which is pretty handy. There's also a demo up on the site.
Yorker, feel free to put up some Hearts of Iron screenshots and stuff. I haven't played it much, so you'd probably do a better job than I would.
Getting to colonize the Americas and playing as Japan during it's modernization is made of win.
That's interesting, it seems like I always knew the Russians were awesome.
The Russians invented all of these nice technologies and doctrines, and then Stalin purged the officer corps that nurtured these developments after the Germans learned from them. So while the Russians originated the tactics, they rapidly unlearned them.
Its really a shame that the eastern front gets so neglected during WW2 because that whole theatre was inhuman and some of the storys are amazing, the western front was minor and mostly fought against green and happy troops compared to the eastern front were a russian soldier sat in his fox hole while the germans ran over it 4 times advancing and retreating, he used 6 different rifles and scavenged ammo from the dead shooting and bayonetting anything that came within reach.
I think I'm more in love with the idea of wargames rather than in love with playing them, because I suck at all of them and usually give up from the complexity, yet I keep buying them.
I think I have some kind of disease.
Hey guaeuys! D@n7 U K0W Dat CHIN353 INV3Nt3D...
You know what, forget it. This shit isn't worth debating about. You show your sources he'll show his and everyone will eat their own cocks rather than admit they were wrong when in the end no one is right or has the full story.
So instead of shitting yourselves over a crap debate lets go back to the original topic.
Terrific strategy games not mentioned:
Hearts of Iron 1, 2, and Doomsday real time WWII strategy where you can play the entire war and any country you want. Want to play Cuba? Sure. Don't think you'll get very far...
Doomsday took the game to 57' so you could what if Russia vs. Allies. Assuming you had defeated the Germans by then.
Hearts of Iron III is due out in 2009. These are basically the same game play style of Europe Universales if I'm even spelling that right.
Now the game I really like to talk about is one not many know about. You can think of it as the great grand daddy of the Total War series.
Just like Total War you build armies, move on a strategic map, and fight in real time.
Differences are where the game gets delicious though.
The map is the full U.S. and territories on a topographic scale. The game draws a battleground based on the exact part of the map the fight occurs in using both topographic and historical maps. It'll random for an area that it doesn't have a map for but it's amazing what you can do in the engine. You can actually have a decent Battle of Chattanooga (fighting up a mountain). I hear you saying that you can do that in Rome Total War but where that battleground is extrapolated and muddy Civil War pulled off realscale. Which for a DOS 5.0 game is saying a hell of a lot.
Most every unit is represented with full army lists in an easy to use flow chart system. Army leaders with personalities are present and you can demote or promote as you see fit as long as the leader could have reasonably held the rank. (You can't make a Captain who never rose above that rank a three star general)
Turns are brilliantly done, using a mix of real time and turn based on the strategic level. This occurs in two phases a day and a night phase. (The game played every day of the war But don't worry, it's awesome.)
At NIGHT you gave orders to armies, made build orders, and all strategic decisions. Depending on the leader of what ever unit you were assigning orders too, they could ignore them.
Then you hit done and the DAY phase began. You could wind the clock down to real time and play sunrise to sunset if you wanted but the sane people just hit FF and watched as their armies crawled across the map.
Because both sides were moving simultaneously Armies met in in fluid motion. If both armies are moving then when the game switches to the battlemap both armies will be in long lines, something you never see in the total war series due to it's one side moves, then the other mode of play. If one army isn't moving when the engagement happens then that army would start in a defensive position. The game calculates pickets and scouts which are sweeping across the map, and you can start with calvary skirmishes while the armeis are slowly filing onto the field. I've never seen a closer to history battle play out in methods used like the ones on this game. Good commanders can win the fight before half of either army is on the field and send the enemy into retreat.
Since you were playing the entire theatre, hundreds of small skirmishes (rare) could happen every day, the game skipped these and just gave you results and this is the games big weak point. The A.I. is terrible and the calculations for skipped battles can give strange results. You can also skip the major fights but this is often unwise unless you are talking about General Lee.
Naval Units are present and any game that progresses past 6 months will have armed steam boats patrolling rivers, ironclads (both ocean and river) being built and blockade runners in full swing. The U.S. can choke out the South given enough time to build naval units so the Confederate can't ignore the water.
One of the more interesting aspects I thought was while Grant and Lee were slugging it out in Virginia, you also had those strange little wars fought over in Texas and Louisiana. I sent many a steamboat and troops up north round Montana to cause havoc in the territories as the Confederates.
This game had other treats as well, including an encyclopedia of units and history built in with 3d models and many examples of Civil War music (albeit in crappy midi format).
I've made more than one post to the Total War forums appealing for simul time movement of the strategic level.
If you do dig this game up and can get it to run, make sure you get the patch, many good improvments occured including an art overhaul.
This is my all time fav for strategy. Nothing will beat building a 150 thousand man army and taking on the enemy general.
caffron said: "and cat pee is not a laughing matter"
I'm partial to the Japanese Zero Fighters.
Total War isn't simultaneous?
Not on the strategic level. You move all of your armies, then end your turn. Then the enemy moves.
I'm starting to think I should go back to Hearts of Iron. I got that and Crusader Kings in a two pack, and they both confused the hell out of me. I especially want to like Crusader Kings, since it seems to pay a lot of attention to lineage and family, which I yearn for in a medieval game.
Crusader Kings is actually the least complicated of the bunch. If you can get the hang of out, you can build up a good economy and take out a few kingdoms. Don't play as France! At least not to start off with. Try a smaller kingdom that isn't hated by everybody. I forgot the one that I always played as.
The one thing I didn't like is the taxation meter on the knights, church, and peasant thingy. You move one and they all go wacko and you can never get them back into their original position. Next thing you know they're all yelling at you and you're losing money and you can't fix it.
It has a bent towards combat, and that's where most of its detail lies, but it also allows you to modify your country policies (not without penalty), manage trade and convoy routes manually, and set how you allocate your industrial capacity. All of this is only to facilitate your eventual war though, and make no mistake you will be involved in it. It has a pretty complex system for combat, and reading up on the strategies and maneuvers of the time period will actually help you greatly.
To me, the fact that you can play as any country is the biggest and best feature for me. Just playing as the Philippines, my native country, and trying to hold out as long as possible against the Japanese onslaught is one of the best experiences ever.
I taught my niece how to play Hearts of Iron 2 this Christmas and she is so into it especially because they're studying WW2 in their history class. I'm so proud.
But the smaller ones could be pretty fun.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Yeah, you should start playing as a small but somewhat militarily capable nation first, like Poland. It teaches you some important lessons about encirclement, salients, re-entrants, pockets, supply lines, and how important support brigades are. After learning about strategy basics, you should try playing as Japan to get an idea how much foreign policy can shape how you wage war (remember democracies definitely need cassus belli and congress approval to wage war), and how much doctrines can shape your long term war capability. Japan also teaches you about complicated supply trains, transported through waters. Playing Germany is going to teach you about careful production and industrial allocation.
It can seem daunting at first but if you tackle each discipline separately you should come to understand it better. Also, remember to read the manual, because it is really helpful, with the exact equations for industrial and transport capacity, as well as being transparent about how combat really works.
Not that I know of, sorry. But maybe you can get some more info on the Paradox Games website. Not really sure on this.
When I get home maybe. Still stuck at my folks' place. I am having a doozy of a time teaching my 13-year old niece to play it, though, and she understands it. If you, with your great love of WWII, don't understand the game, then consider yourself beaten by a 13-year old
Wow. Most awesome 13 year old girl ever!
I consider myself beaten.
One of the awesomer things done by anybody, ever.
*thumbs up*
I SHALL OVERCOME THIS CHALLENGE
Gamer's Gate has it.
http://www.gamersgate.com/
Notice that you can probably get hardcopy cheaper.
My only problem with wargames these days is no one to play with. I would send hours with my brother doing hotseat games while we did homework (wargames usually took 5 minutes or so a turn, and as long as we finished the stuff my mom was happy.) Too me, playing AI's just doesn't give that much excitement since wargames are all about learning your enemy and his/her personality, cpu's can't really change that over the course of games, they don't learn your tricks and sucker punch you when you try them again and such.
One of my favorite battles from the first one was played on a tourny scenario. It turned into a massive blood bath. For a while I hammered a forest position with artillery, every once in a while a squad would break here or there, but before I could make a move, he would rally them and send them back to the front. Finally I had to bring in a reserve platoon with a flamethrower team attached and come in on his flank. Once I got them in the forest, his forces were routed very quickly, and half the forest was set on fire. I then rushed in the rest of the company I had tasked to taking that position.
Then his naval artillery came down. Out of a mostly full company plus a machine gun team or two and the flamethrower team, only one single soldier survived, completely broken and huddling in a ditch just beyond the trees.
Elsewhere in the map, I had three tanks playing a game of cat and mouse with one single AT team. All three of my tanks were knocked out, so I leveled the town with the biggest artillery I had, and that fucking team still survived to take out a tank I sent around his flank.
But the main thing I wanted to say was that Shock Force has finally been patched up to something near the quality of the old games. 1.10 was the last one, and I played a pbem game with the same friend and aside from an unfortunate bug which cost me the game, we had an absolute blast. Now that the next patch is out which fixed the one last issue I had, I imagine we'll be playing more of that again.
That's what they're working on now, the first of the WW2 games with the new engine, first western front, then sometime later a return to the eastern front.
Or something where I can be a cruel feudal lord?
Anyway, here's the main reason why war games are awesome.
I am used to Medieval Total War 2, where if you face your opponent with a slightly larger more trained army with a superior general, you can crush him with some clever tactics and his army will be pretty much gone.
If you do that in Europa Universalis 2, if you do the same thing you will kill 2000 of his soldiers and then the remaining 10k soldiers will run into one of your provinces. Then he will start to siege you, and you will have to break up the siege you just started to chase after him. Then you will have to spend between several in-game months to several in-game years depending on his force's size following him to actually destroy the army.
And if you at any time stop chasing him to take over one of his provinces his forces will get reinforced again, ruining months of work.
On the rebellion part, last campaign I had I played as one of the Indian factions planning to unify all of India. What turned out to be a problem was that all my provinces hated me, and after I took over 8 super-Islamic persian provinces I suddenly realised that they had a 20% rebellion chance per month, each time spawning an army of between 6 and 12 thousand men. Realistically speaking it would take many decades for this intense hatred to start dying down, meaning I could go to war again in maybe 10 real life hours spent playing whack a mole with rebel armies.