10000/10

Great game. Great company. Mostly Free DLC. If it came with boobs it would be complete.

Exceptional multiplayer especially with friends to play it with.

Horribly bad singleplayer

- Every map has the same buildings, the same feeling
- Buildings cant be used like in world in conflict or command & conquer where you can send your units into them
- There are over 1000 units, but unique units are far less. You have over 1000 units because more than half of them are retextures. Same with the DLC. Ofcourse the amount there is nice compared to other RTS games, but still it should be mentioned that most of them are the same units just new textures and then counted as new unit.
- No drones, no submarines, no aircraft carriers in MP, no ABC weapons, no cargoplanes
- The worstest of all: no proper modsupport. Games without modsupport getting boring sooner or later and they die out fast. We can retexture stuff and do some config changes like changing weapon stats but thats it. We cant add new units, we cant add new models or replace models, we cant create new maps, we cant create new buildings.

ofcourse there are PRO things like nice graphics, but the CON stuff exceed the PRO stuff, especially that there is no mod support.

I have never played a Wargame game before. I was expecting a tutorial mission to advise how to play the game. No such thing. The "Tutorial" is text based, explains units and tactics but not how to actually use the interface. I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out what to do before searching the internet for help.
I found a 200 page tutorial document. Reading just hte first coupld dozen pages made me realise I don't want to play this game. TO be any good you need ot know every unit in your army, what units counter them and what units they counter. With over 1000 unit types I really can't be bothered. If I need to study and research for hours just to play the game then I am out.
I sort of figured out how to create units in a skirmish but by the time I had a few units to start seaching, the enemy sent a massive force against me and wiped them out at every turn. I had 2 units run into 8 enemies. I had about 10 total units and theirs were split into 3 groups of 6 to 10 each. This was the first battle on easy.
If you want a complicated game that takes a 200 page fan made manual to even play then go right ahead. I'm moving onto a game that is actually fun from the moment you start playing.

Do you know what will Help you win a battle in this game?

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Your Brain!

I decided to play Wargame: Red Dragon last week for the first time in awhile.

The first thing I did was check the credits for a pseudonym I used while doing what pretty much amounted to unpaid, outside consulting & testing for Eugen. I noticed it was removed.

At first I was, understandably, fairly upset by this. I realize that some of the people who Eugen gave their special thanks to ended up coming around to bite them, but really, I'd done no such thing. I had had my disagreements with their choices on several occasions, but their choices were their choices. If it ruined the game I enjoyed, so be it.

And then, I actually sat down and played a few real matches. The best way to describe the way the matches felt was helplessness. I was doing absolutely nothing wrong in terms of my strategy or tactics, but I was unable to successfully grab any ground or maintain a foothold, yet fundamentally, in my experience, I knew I was doing very little wrong, and indeed, because of that, though I had no real front, I was often able to withstand more than I reasonably should have despite being at a significant disadvantage.

It was at this point that I no longer felt like I had been slighted by Eugen for removing the evidence of my involvement, because I accepted that even since the last time I played this game, nothing had truly been fixed. All they have done is play with numbers, but nothing has been done to fix the core problem of what Wargame is. In many ways, things were in a signifcantly worse place than where I left them, balance-wise, and the simple fixes which could have been done years ago, literally a game ago, still have not been taken, and indeed, many weird choices abound - I remember arguing with the developer that interacted with us on the matter of the Chieftan Mk. 5's "late model" 120mm and the M1 Abram's "early model" 105mm gun, to which I'll let you assume who was calling which gun what (spoiler: I'm not an idiot).

USSR, and many (very little) NATO countries have better air-to-air power than the US. Okay?
US has superior surface to air missiles than the USSR. Okay?
China has the best ATGM in the game, Noth Korea has access to one of the best tanks. Okay?
Planes ripple firing some of the most expensive air to air missiles on one target. Okay?
One specific tank getting buffed patch, after patch, after patch, after patch, until most recently they finally decided they'd done to much and increased its point cost by the minimum increment possible. Okay?

These are the sorts of things that best allow one to understand the state of the game - if they understand Wargame. Which is to say that the way Red Dragon is set up is pretty awful in comparison to other games in the series.

However, while I feel other games in the series are less flawed, all of the games are fundamentally flawed at their core due to the implementation of infantry. You see, back when Wargame European Escalation came out, infantry could be killed a little too easily. From what I understand, it was all too easy for the area of effect associated with HE (high explosive) which the mechanic used to damage infantry to overlap with more than the amount that were intended to be damaged. For example, if you had a gun which dealt HE 3 damage, it should only deal that 3 damage. Instead, however, when the hitboxes overlapped as they tended to, it was very easy for that to kill more than the intended amount.

Now flash forward to AirLand Battle. With a mixture of the cover system which effectively spread infantry out in a wider area while still letting them operate in larger groups (a necessity for infantry combat) and a significantly more subtle change to the stealth characteristics of infantry to "deal" with the problem. That is to say, that the problem was never dealt with, it was simply worked around. Instead coming up with some system to ensure that when infantry were dealt HE damage from a single source that it could only deal that much damage in a single shot, they sidestepped the issue completely. This created a new phenonema: the best reconnaissance units were now infantry, which inherently had only second-best-at-best optics before could now move very close to enemy locations and spot things before they were spotted. Keep in mind, that in addition to this, these infantry units are inherently in the cheaper range of the unit prices available in Wargame.

And again, now we move into the (near) present with Wargame Red Dragon. A game which has continued to exhibit the inherent flaw of infantry still being hyper-vulnerable, and now, hyper-stealthy. With a larger amount of units, Red Dragon features far more infantry suitable to the task of "infiltration" and also features a large amount of artillery - with few mechanical/design choices allowing for effective counter battery. If all those words scare and confuse you, what I mean to say is, the developers additionally populated the categories of indirect fire units (artillery) and these super stealthy infantry units, while making it harder to deal with the indirect fire options directly with your own indirect fire units specifically tasked to destroying theirs. This means that it's even harder to attack, and extremely hard to defend, without populating as much of the map as you can with infantry which cannot be spotted until the enemy is right on top of them.

And I do mean right on top of them. The extremes of the current situations are as follows:

The best reconnaissance vehicles cannot spot a regular group of infantry equipped with a missile launcher before that missile launcher can target and destroy them
The best reconnaissance helicopters cannot spot a regular group of anti-air infantry equipped with a missile launcher before that launcher can target and destroy them

Compare this to the significantly more dynamic and visceral nature of the vehicular combat in Wargame and the issue becomes extremely apparent. Infantry are roadblocks, except they're not just roadblocks, they're roadblocks the size of the Great Wall of China. They stagnate the game, and leave it practically frozen, with either side unable to accomplish anything beyond attrition via indirect fire.

I don't know, I guess I just think it would be cool if this game played out a little bit more maneuver warfare than WW1 because of a developers choice to balance around a game flaw.

The best modern RTS on the market bar none.

Well, here it is.

Wargame: Red Dragon is a fun RTS/Tactical kind of game. I'm going to jump right into Pros/Cons.

Pros:
Deck Creating - Red Dragon really lets you go to town on making your army, your way. You can choose from not only countries, but coalations of countries to expand the amount of units you have available.
Multiplayer - Multiplayer can be really awesome a lot of the time, a 10v10 battle can be really intense. Also, chopper rushes.
Graphics - The graphics are really good for an RTS game, theres a lot of detail put into the game, and you can really tell the time they put into making the units.

Cons:
Scale - While the battles can be pretty big, the amount of units that are deployed on the battlefield are kind of small. Infantry squads generally only have a vehicle and 5-6 soldiers. Each vehicle is it's own unit. Unlike the Total War games, which have upwards of 2000 soldiers on the battlefield, Red Dragon only sees 500 or 600 soldiers at a time.
Maps - Now, the maps aren't that bad. They're big. But that's the problem. See, as I sad above, the scale of battles is somewhat small, and the maps are HUGE. It feels kind of a waste.

Well, overall, this is a good modern strategy game. I would rate it 7/10.

Best RTS I have ever played.

THE Modern War Stategy Franchise.

Wargame is a no holds barred representation of the realities of a cold war era skirmish, presented in a format that while simple to learn, takes noteworthy strategic skill and rationality, and no small amout of practice, to master. Eugene has served up for us three generous offerings of Cold War gone hot goodness. Pick a flavour out of European Escalation classic; AirLand Battle extra sweet; or Red Dragon extra spicy. Then get ready to build up your deck of an insane selection of military hardware, and lead it across the decimated landscape of the Old World. Then rejoice or despair as appropriate as your brave army pulls off incredible victories, or gets shocked into submission by the opposing force. Not a game for the faint of heart, or the thin of patience, but I would absolutely recommend it to anyone else!