14 DAY TRIAL // Wargame AirLand Battles was a video game that I first thought to be almost inscrutable and, although I was very much attracted by the military theme and the historical scenarios that depicted the start of World War III, I initially thought I would only spend about 10 hours or so with it before moving to more familiar experiences.
I ended up logging more than 150 hours played for the strategy title from Eugen Systems and Focus Home Interactive, with about two thirds of them spent in multiplayer matches, and even if I had more defeats than victories, in the end, the title offered some of the most fun and tense battles I have ever experienced.
Now the same two companies are launching a new Wargame, called Red Dragon, and that means I need to once more learn some of the core concepts and tricks that I drilled into my mind while playing AirLand Battle.
It’s surprisingly hard to return to the series, which is very careful when it comes to actual military strategy and portrays units very realistically.
I forgot how important scouting was in Wargame and how much I needed to make sure that I knew where the enemy was before I launched any kind of attack.
Even the AI-controlled enemies managed to spring a few nasty surprises on me, especially in hilly terrain and using infantry that moved through woods, before I remembered to carefully place squadrons with solid visibility around the perimeter to make sure I did not walk into an ambush.
Combined arms is another concept that is a little nebulous to me and when first playing Red Dragon, I focused too much on armor or on mobile troops, which do have their uses, but need to be carefully mixed with support assets in order to be effective.
When it comes to multiplayer, a very important skill linked to Wargame is the ability to spend hours in the Deck Builder in order to create a very solid line-up of units.
Those need to be then tested on the battlefield against a variety of opponents and defeat is often the best way to see how a deck can be improved, which requires a humility that other strategy titles do not encourage.
Wargame Red Dragon also introduces naval-based gameplay to the series for the first time and those features forced me to learn an entirely new set of skills.