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Game warfare 19171/7/2024 This is decent, but doesn’t feel precisely right surely commanders learn things like ‘helmets would be a really good idea’ as a result of their own men dying. Killing enemies and winning battles gives you experience, which is gained as a military unit rather than by individual mooks you use it to buy upgrades along the lines of ‘more rum before the attack’ or ‘nastier gas’. (Gas is a much more reliable weapon in the game than in real life.) Sound-effects are generally good: the cry of ‘Gas! Gas! Gas!’ is genuinely chilling if you’re familiar both with its game effect and its historical use. Artillery, in particular, is game-changingly random – and the sound-effects emphasize the unnerving uncertainty of this, with occasional booms and CRUMPs and rattles of gunfire that don’t correspond to any in-game effects. If this wasn’t just a Flash game, you’d want a much more sophisticated morale system with far more wide-ranging effects, but just having it present feels like a big deal in a creep game. Morale recovers slowly, and can be boosted by officers. This is one of the best arguments against tanks: if yours gets destroyed, the effect on morale is devastating. When a lot of units die, it damages morale if morale drops too low you surrender. You don’t know if you should sacrifice a squad of riflemen to deal with a sniper, or if you should wait until you’re ready to launch a full-blown attack and hope he doesn’t pick off your vital machinegunners in the meantime. You can’t always prevent your soldiers from running into your own artillery barrage or gas cloud. Even if you have the basic historical awareness to know that defence is probably going to be a lot stronger than attack, there’s a lot of floundering. Usually you’ll need to manage several of these at once.īut learning these strategies costs lives. To depopulate the trench, you can wait for the enemy to attack first and counterattack against the few survivors pound the trench with artillery and hope you get lucky send in assaulters behind a wave of riflemen, and hope that the former manage to throw enough grenades into the trench before they get mown down send foward a valuable sharpshooter and hope that he doesn’t get killed by artillery/gas/counterattack/mines gas them out or recruit a slow, very expensive tank. The ultimate aim is to overwhelm the trench with numbers, but this is rarely practical on its own. There are various tactics for doing this. Thus, your immediate goal is almost always to take and hold the next trench. Defence is much stronger than attack, but units are forced to attack unless they’re in a trench. A trench can only hold three squads at a time if more troops show up to a full trench, they automatically go over the top, but otherwise – crucially – you get to choose when units leave a trench. Trenches are a key feature of the battlefield: units in a trench are considerably safer from enemy fire and light artillery, and some (machinegunners) also become much more dangerous. Recruitment isn’t based on cashflow, but on time: each unit type has a countdown that has to run out before you can recruit it, and when you recruit anyone all the clocks restart. First, you recruit in squads, which range in size from six riflemen to one sharpshooter, officer or tank. Warfare: 1917 allows you to (vaguely) target artillery and gas. In Steam Brigade you fly a dirigible over the battlefield and fine-tune your battle plan by ferrying troops back and forth. The trick of a creep game is that different units are stronger in different situations, so you have to recruit carefully.īecause creep games feel pretty low-interaction when your only tool is recruitment, there’s usually a further way to tip the scales. Steam Brigade and Bowmaster 2 are recent examples. Which is to say, you recruit units at one end of the screen, your opponent recruits them at the other, and they walk steadily towards the opposite end and fight when they run into each other. Warfare: 1917 doesn’t quite do this, but it does deal with the trenches of the Great War directly, so I can hardly not talk about it. The core of my recurrent gyp is that I want to see a horribly accurate WW1 wargame with a focus on logistics and morale-maintenance, in which your main enemies are despair, High Command and the cowardly bastards in the next regiment down the line. World War One, the war that makes the idea of war difficult to justify, is largely neglected the only games I’ve seen that deal with it in particular (as opposed to an interlude between the Napoleonic era and WW2) are about biplane aces. World War Two is extremely popular, because it forms the essential basis of the how modern America sees its military and because nobody needs to feel qualms about killing Nazis. One of my recurring gyps about computer wargames is focus: they tend to pick out wars that Americans don’t feel conflicted about.
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