Another year, another Wargame. Eugen are releasing these things like clockwork, but while last year’s Airland Battle was a massively polished and improved version of European Escalation that more than justified a cheeky release of something that looked like practically the same game just one year later, the simple fact that it was so good has created some problems for Red Dragon. After Airland Battle already raised the bar to a point pretty close to where I suspect the ceiling is for the Wargame franchise, Red Dragon was going to have to do something pretty damn special in order to warrant filching yet another £23 from my pocket – and unfortunately for Red Dragon, thanks to that ceiling there doesn’t seem to be any more latitude to refine the series any further in terms of the core mechanics. It’s already as good as it can be, and so Red Dragon instead needs to concentrate on framing those core mechanics in new and interesting ways. And it only partially succeeds.

I won’t bore you too much with the nitty-gritty of how Wargame works, since I already went into it in excruciating detail in my reviews of European Escalation and Airland Battle. The conceit of the series is that various Cold War militaries are fighting it out over battlefields measuring several dozen square kilometres, and that the way the game represents this combat strikes a good compromise between grognardy realism and actually being able to finish a game inside of half an hour without your squishy human brain imploding under the sheer weight of all the numbers. Units are modelled on the scale of individual tanks and squads of infantry, and the whole thing is very slow and very micro-light; the outcome of a firefight will rely far more on your units’ positioning and line of sight when you started it than it will your ability to issue orders to those units in the heat of the moment. Because the battlefields are so large it can take several minutes to redeploy forces to face a new threat, and since it’s so hard to react quickly (save with aircraft) you spend nearly all of your time in Wargame zoomed out and considering the big picture. Where are you going to apply pressure next? Can those infantry squads holed up in the town hold out against a potential attack, or will it be a good idea to station some reserves nearby to minimise your reaction time? What’s the best place to put your recon units so that you can see the enemy coming ahead of time? These are the questions that occupy your attention in Wargame, and there’s nothing else quite like it on the market.

Airland Battle’s headline addition to the gameplay first demoed in European Escalation (aside from a drastic overhaul of unit counters that made them far easier to decipher) were a hundred-odd variants of jet aircraft, and their ability to arrive at any location in seconds on a battlefield where everything normally moves so slowly completely changed the flow of a battle. Airland Battle and European Escalation are consequently very different games. Red Dragon’s headline addition to the gameplay of Airland Battle, on the other hand, is boats. Boats which have been just as lovingly modelled as the rest of the units in the game, and which are preposterously powerful when they actually get to shoot at things, but which are, at the end of the day, boats. Which are by their nature restricted to water, an element which has hitherto not featured on Wargame battlefields beyond the odd river or lake. They don’t have anywhere near the impact that planes did. They physically can’t, because unless you’re playing a naval battle (an absurd scenario that fits Wargame about as well as the naval battles fit vanilla Shogun 2) they’re restricted to no more than a third of the map at any one time.

As a result Red Dragon battles play out much the same as the ones in Airland Battle did, and therein lies the rub: while it certainly makes more of an attempt to change things up from the previous incarnation than your average edition of Football Manager, there’s no getting around the fact that if you already own Airland Battle Red Dragon can’t show you much that is genuinely new. Yes, there’s new nations involved in the game now – both Koreas, China and Japan – but there’s already a thousand plus units present and past a point increasing the number of units is just adding digits on to a meaningless number – especially when most of the new units are simply national variants of existing Warsaw Pact/NATO ones. Does it matter that there’s twenty different types of ATGM team in the game now when you’re going to use them the same way regardless of what they are? I don’t think it does, and so while the new nations serve to frame Wargame’s single-player campaigns very well they don’t materially add to the gameplay. In fact I’d argue that they outright detract from it, since even as a veteran of the previous titles I’m having extreme difficulty figuring out the difference between a BMPT-60 and a VTT-223 in the heat of the moment.

So instead of changing things up the way Airland Battle did Red Dragon instead just loads more on top of the existing structure, and it’s starting to show visible signs of strain. So much development time has gone into the boats and the new units I’m starting to think Eugen care far more about smashing their virtual toys into one another than they do iterating on an excellent concept. And that’s kind of a shame, because Red Dragon does make one extremely significant improvement that might be worth picking it up for, if you’ve previously avoided the series: the stillborn dynamic single-player campaign system of Airland Battle has been drastically reworked into something that definitely has the potential to revolutionise Wargame yet again. I’m really impressed with the changes that have been made to it, and I feel if it had received a little more attention it could have been something very special.

These dynamic campaigns consist of a turn-based strategic layer, where you move counters representing your formations around a map depicting whatever the flashpoint de la jour is – Korea, the Russia/China border etc. – and when you encounter the enemy the action switches to the real-time battles the series is known for. This is all very Total War, and the previous attempt at implementing this system in Airland Battle fell rather flat, but Red Dragon has made some changes that I think lend the campaigns some real weight. First, you’re no longer dealing exclusively with regiment- and division- sized formations. Those were far too unwieldy in Airland Battle, not to mention ridiculously lopsided – I remember the Royal Marine division with 80 squads of Marines and no armour or support vehicles worth a damn – and Red Dragon has ditched them in favour of a more granular structure comprised of smaller collections of troops. Regiments are still in the game and function as the core of your armies, but they’re now supported by battalions and companies of more specialised troops allowing you to mix and match as needed to create an effective fighting force without having to rely on the blunt sledgehammer of a division. If you need your infantry regiment to have a little extra punch you send in a tank battalion with it.  An anti-tank and a recon company working together with a squadron of fighter-bombers can blunt any armoured thrust the AI makes.

This organisation of forces is not only more flexible but it also gives your troops a sense of personality and history; the South Korean infantry regiment holding on to Uichang in my Korean War II campaign was nearly annihilated on the first day, but they were propped up during the remaining seven by a company of TOW-equipped jeeps and a flight of obsolete F-86 Sabres that made attack run after attack run on the advancing columns of T-55s.  It is possible to refit damaged formations to replace losses, but this takes a considerable amount of time and all of the campaign scenarios are time-limited; in practice anything that gets destroyed usually stays destroyed, meaning that campaign battles are no longer a matter of simply destroying X point value of enemy units. Now you have to do that while also preserving your forces so that the formation is still combat-effective throughout the campaign, and a victory where you gut your best regiments to seize a sector is no victory at all since it makes the prospect of future victories all but impossible.

Therefore the single-player campaign is all about fighting one battle while making sure the same formation can fight another one two or three turns down the line, and this emphasis on long-term thinking is a real game-changer in the way a typical battle plays out. Even with reinforcements the number of strategic units available to you is extremely limited, and so that company of crappy obsolete tanks is no longer cannon fodder used to waste enemy an ATGM squad’s supply of missiles. Instead you have to figure out how to make the most of its strengths and get it through the battle relatively intact. It’s rare that you’ll have the manpower to absorb serious losses; only in the first campaign does Red Dragon cut you a break and hand you an entire carrier task force worth of Marines to slice across the North Korean bridgehead, and even then this overwhelming force is isolated from the hard-pressed South Korean defenders who are weathering attacks from North Korean armies twice their size day after day after day.  You’re constantly aware that losing too many tanks, too many ATVs or too many aircraft in the real-time battles will have a severe impact on your ability to continue the fight on the strategic map, even if you win. Happily this attrition is just as true for the AI as it is for you, and if you’re smart, leverage all the force multipliers available to you and kill enough units, you can outright destroy enemy formations¹.

Thanks to this shake-up the campaigns have gone from an anaemic secondary priority to a meaty, thoughtful strategic challenge that’ll keep you occupied for hours. There are four of them in the game and they make very good use of the new nations and even of the naval forces available to you; I think every single one of them involves marine battalions making an amphibious landing and this is the one point in the game where the boats actually make a significant difference, covering your amphibious infantry carriers while they make their way to shore. Sadly they’re still a little rough around the edges and – criminally – have practically no sense of payoff, with the six hours of planning and scheming and countless hard-fought battles to achieve victory being acknowledged by nothing more than a one-liner from one of the generic talking heads before you get dumped back to the main menu. Where are my casualty reports and my summary of destroyed enemy formations over the entire campaign? Why do I care if I achieve a total victory over a minor one? This final piece of context is conspicuous by its absence and left me feeling cheated after completing the South Korean and Chinese campaigns. I think that if they’d included a little more narrative impact like that and also tightened up their battle AI (which is still ludicrously psychotic and very easy to bait) the campaigns would have been Red Dragon’s unique selling point, something worth buying the whole game for.

Instead we have a bit of an odd scenario. If you enjoyed European Escalation then buying Airland Battle was a no-brainer since it was one of the best games released last year, but the same is not true of Red Dragon. I think the people most likely to get their money’s worth are those who really like Wargame, and those who are interested in the series but who want a decent single-player component and have been put off the previous titles by the heavy multiplayer focus. If you fall in between those camps — you enjoyed Airland Battle, but aren’t really in the mood for a game that’s just more of the same – then there’s nothing about Red Dragon that particularly screams “Buy me now!” And if you’re not interested in Wargame, period? Red Dragon is unlikely to change your mind.

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First, there was Wargame: European Escalation. Now, almost exactly a year later, there is another one of it. Since I loved the first Wargame I’m more receptive than I might otherwise be to a sequel that’s been turned out in such a short period of time, but if it were another developer and another series I’d probably be inclined to assume that AirLand Battle was a low-effort attempt to cash in on the original game with another made using the same assets. AirLand Battle asks for the full £30 on Steam (although it was 25% off if you already owned the first Wargame and you can pick up a disk copy on Amazon for just £20) and so it was going to have to do more than be a slightly shinier iteration on the Wargame concept in order to justify its asking price. Fortunately – and actually somewhat surprisingly – it delivers in spades.

AirLand Battle does not deviate from the winning formula established in European Escalation; dozens of vehicles and hundreds of men duking it out over a hundred square kilometre battlefield in a Cold War showdown. If you want to get an impression of how AirLand Battle is going to play you could do worse than go back and read my review of EE, especially since I’m not going to waste any time repeating myself here, but at the same time there are a very substantial number of gameplay features that have undergone a drastic overhaul.  Many of these changes are seemingly minor things, like attaching an icon to the nametag of each unit that describes its broad function (artillery, tanks, gun AA, missile AA, radar AA and so on) that allows you to identify them at a glance and obviates the need to obsessively memorise what each  the 800 units in the game do; however, what they’re actually doing is papering over all the accessibility gaps – and let’s face it, there were a lot of them – that existed in European Escalation. The game is much smoother and easier to play now, and the tempo of the thing has also increased from the sedate pace of EE, thanks largely to the game’s signature improvement: aeroplanes.

It was always a bit odd that a game about modern warfare on a grand scale did not feature aeroplanes in any capacity whatsoever. Helicopters were the only aerial combatants of the European Escalation battlefield, and if you wanted to deny the surrounding airspace to your opponent all you had to do was stick a couple of AA launchers into a hedgerow somewhere and wait for them to blunder into it. It ensured that the focus was firmly on the units on the ground, and since ground units crawl across the battlefield at a relatively glacial speed that’s what set the pace of the game. It also meant that players had no real rapid response options to sudden enemy breakthroughs; even helicopters would take a minute or two to reposition themselves usefully to head off an advancing tank column. This meant that European Escalation, for all of its grognardy historical verisimilitude, ended up being rather more gamey than I suspect the developers wanted since players were denied a key tool – possibly the key tool – of modern warfare.

AirLand Battle changes all that by implementing the best aircraft I have seen in any RTS game ever. When you buy some fighters or fighter-bombers they won’t immediately appear on the map. Instead they’ll appear in the aircraft panel in the lower left hand corner of the screen, where they can be selected and given orders just like any other unit. Once you’ve given them an attack order they’ll fly in from off-map through your air corridor – every map has one or more air corridors per side, usually in their starting sectors – move to wherever their unfortunate target is, and then fire an assortment of hideously pretty ordnance at it. They can loiter on map for a limited amount of time until their fuel or weapons run out before evacuating into the sky and back to your aircraft panel, where they’ll be unavailable for a brief period until they’re refuelled and rearmed. Then you can call them in again.

This both gives jet aircraft a reasonable degree of realism and ensures that they’re not too powerful; while their weapons are amongst the strongest in the game if employed correctly they only have enough fuel and ammo to make one or two attack passes before they have to retreat off-map to recharge. Aircraft are therefore used for temporary advantage to blunt advancing armoured columns, weed out annoying support units like artillery and to clear the skies of enemy aircraft. Even if there are no enemy planes in the area, though, calling in a fighter-bomber can still be a high-risk strategy — especially if it’s a pricey one – due to the expanded role ground-based anti-air units have in AirLand Battle. It’s worth going over the aircraft/AA interaction in a little more detail, because it’s the perfect example of how AirLand Battle focuses on broad strategy over micromanagement.

There are three main types of AA in the game, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. First there’s the gun AA, which consist of heavy skyward-pointing autocannon/gatling guns mounted on a vehicle chassis of some kind. Gun AA is cheap, plentiful and can also be used against soft ground targets like infantry and transports to great effect. However it’s also short-ranged and staggeringly inaccurate, and unless a plane sticks around for a while right above the AA platforms you’re not going to score a kill unless you have a lot of them; the plane will simply drop its bombs/missiles and then evacuate off-map, and all you’ll have done is delay its next call-in time by a small period while the damage inflicted is repaired back at the airfield. Gun AA has its niche – it’s devastating against helicopters and is a cheap way of getting an opponent to think twice about sending in airstrikes because just watching it open fire from your lofty god-like perspective above the battlefield is terrifying – but it’s not going to solve any plane problems you might have on its own.

No, if you want to score kills you need to rely on missile AA, which comes in two varieties. Infrared missiles can be both vehicle-mounted and man-portable, but they have a relatively short range and inferior accuracy. Radar-guided missiles are much better, able to hit an incoming bomber before it drops its payload and packing enough punch to destroy it in that one hit, but all radar AA has to watch out for the dreaded SEAD planes. SEAD stands for Suppression of Enemy Air Defence, and SEAD planes come equipped with long-range radar-seeking weapons that can see and kill a radar AA battery long before it ever manages to lock on to the SEAD plane. If your opponent has SEAD available you need to be very careful with your radar AA assets because they tend to be rather expensive and you don’t have many of them available, so if they make enough successful SEAD runs eventually you won’t have any AA umbrella left.

Setting up an effective AA net is no longer a matter of simply sticking a pair of Rolands in a bush somewhere near your attacking force and leaving them to get on with it, then. You need multiple AA vehicles of both types – radar and infrared – dispersed over a wide area so that no one airstrike can take out the lot, but with overlapping ranges so that if the worst does happen and you lose an AA battery the others will have a good chance of killing the offending plane and you won’t have any suddenly gaping holes in your AA coverage.  The AA-aircraft dynamic demands that you focus on force composition and clever positioning over actually telling the things to fire (they’ll do that automatically anyway) and to a large degree the battle for air superiority is going to be won or lost on your ability to correctly deploy the AA assets at your disposal. There’s no soft or hard counters here – any AA can take out any aircraft if used properly (I once killed a very expensive Nighthawk stealth fighter through the simple expedient of having my recon spot it visually on the way in so that the 12 unguided ZSU-Afghanskii guns they didn’t know I had just behind my lines could open up on it, stun it and eventually bring it down through sheer weight of shells)  and the reverse is equally true — simply an ongoing mindgame between you and your opponent which I think always produces the best kind of strategy experience.

The force composition thing is aided by a dramatically overhauled deck system; you still assemble a force out of decks of unit cards before taking it into a game and trying it out against your opponent’s deck, but it’s far more nuanced this time around. Rather than having a flat five picks per unit category, with each pick giving you access to all sub-variants of that unit and all veterancy levels for an increased cost, you instead have greater flexibility in how many units you can stuff into a category but need to think carefully about what exactly you’re going to bring because each pick is exactly that: one pick. When you start a new deck you’ll have a certain number of activation points available, and the deck will be split into the normal categories – logistics, recon, support, infantry and so on. Picking the first three infantry units for your deck will cost one activation point each. Picking infantry units four and five will cost two points each. Six and seven will cost three points, eight costs four points, and suddenly you don’t have any activation points left to spend on tanks or artillery. If you want to go all-in on one type of unit you can do it, but at the cost of having a very lop-sided army. There’s also the question of availability to consider: for example, for one pick of infantry you’ll be able to get 22 Rookie Motostrelki, but depending on your deck bonuses you might also have the option to take just 8 Elite Motostrelki instead, who could potentially be a lot more effective if you use them correctly¹.

Ah yes, the deck bonuses. Here we come to the one significant question mark that’s hanging over all of the improvements AirLand Battle has made, and to be fair I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, just one that’s not particularly well-balanced at the moment. When you create a deck you’ll have the option to take certain restrictions on what exactly you can put into it, with the payoff being a bonus like increased veterancy or availability for a certain unit category. The most basic restriction will be limiting yourself to the units of one specific nation, followed by a particular type of army specialisation – air assault, mechanised and so on – and then finally a time period specialisation. This last one actually works pretty well thanks to AirLand Battle’s phenomenal attempt to at least broadly balance the 800 different units in the game; a deck made out of 1975-era Soviet equipment will be of decidedly inferior quality to a 1985-era NATO deck, but it’ll be cheap and you’ll have twice as much of it. The other restrictions seem half-baked at best: there might be four new nations in the game but they’ve all got severe deficiencies in one or more categories of their national unit choices. For example, Sweden has next to no AA that can hit planes worth a damn, making playing a Swedish deck against an opponent who knows how to exploit this an absolutely miserable experience unless you have a teammate with units that can plug the gap. The army specialisations also hobble you in areas that are usually quite critical; it might seem logical for an air assault army to have crap armour choices, but it means they have next to no staying power or offensive capability on the battlefield.

So most of the specialisations end up being gimmicky at best and useless at worst, but I don’t think it’s a massive problem – you don’t have to use them if you don’t want to, and there’s more than enough flexibility in the system as is to spend hours poring through the unit database wondering whether it’s better to spend those last two activation points on some vehicle ATGMs or another card of mortar carriers. It also helps that the command star system by which you unlocked units in the original, which I utterly loathed, has been completely stripped out of AirLand Battle². All units are unlocked from the start and everyone is on a level playing field from the off, and it’s absolutely fantastic.

I’ve spent all this time talking about multiplayer mechanics and how you would implement a strategy against a human opponent without once mentioning the new dynamic single-player campaign system. There’s a very good reason for this: it doesn’t strike me as being particularly finished yet. It’s functional and the dynamic campaign map is very nice, and if you get stuck in a multi-day battle over a particular territory it can produce some very memorable encounters as opposing battlegroups are slowly ground down by attrition. Unfortunately it’s hamstrung by two things: the schizophrenic campaign AI — which is worse than the excellently psychotic skirmish AI³ due to its inability to cope with the specific goals of campaign battles – and the relative unimportance of seizing and holding sectors on the battlefield. Each sector you gain will get you just one point of income per tick, and so unless you’re engaged in attritional warfare you end up just ignoring sector control in favour of hunting down and destroying the enemy forces – and since the campaign AI has no imperative to take and hold sectors itself battles can become very passive and very defensive.  AirLand Battle is a game of strategy and maneuver, and I think that having a campaign that sabotages both of these key elements is a spectacular own goal that’s going to drive away anyone who isn’t particularly interested in multiplayer. It wouldn’t surprise me if the campaign didn’t undergo some significant changes in the near future, and what is there certainly has some promise, but for now if you’re looking for a fulfilling single-player experience I think there are other games which do a much better job of it.

The final change I should mention is the complete graphical overhaul the AirLand Battle engine has undergone in the year since its predecessor’s release. It’s an odd thing to say since you spend nearly all your time looking down on things from the stratosphere, but AirLand Battle is a ridiculously pretty game.  It never dawned on me just how flat and ugly the terrain looked in European Escalation until I went back to have a look at my review, but the difference between the two is like night and day. There’s mountains covered in forest, detailed towns to be fought over by individually-rendered infantrymen, a hell of a lot more colour other than various shades of dull green,  and the planes. Oh dear god, the planes. You know when I said AirLand Battle’s planes were the best aircraft in RTSes today? This is due in large part to the way they look and sound and move. Watching a fighter-bomber coming in for an attack run is a sickeningly beautiful thing. Watching the napalm bombs it drops incinerate whole squads of infantry is even better. But the best thing is when an aircraft opens up on an armoured column with its cannon; the A-10 is best for this as it’ll get several vehicles in one pass, with the roar of the cannon and the tracers and the pyrotechnic explosions as the shells find their mark. Look, just go and watch this video because they really aren’t kidding when they say it’s all ingame footage; that is precisely what AirLand Battle looks like when you zoom down to ground level.  It’s stunning to watch, and there’s a replay feature which automatically records every skirmish/multiplayer game you play so that you can go back and wallow in just how amazing the battles are without actually having to fight the things.

As ever, there’s a whole bunch of stuff I haven’t mentioned – balance tweaking, point income increases, improved infantry garrisoning in cities – that makes playing the game faster and less fiddly. Because there’s more points to go around in terms of resources and score multiplayer battles are both more spectacular and rarely last for more than twenty minutes. While it looks like the same game, and while the list of big improvements isn’t quite as long as what I’d normally expect from a sequel, literally every single aspect of the game has undergone some level of change which ensures AirLand Battle is a whole new experience that easily justifies its asking price if you liked the original. I have had more fun with it than any other game this year, and I suspect that might not change any time soon – which is really saying something considering there are some very strong candidates pencilled in for the latter six months of 2013. As excellent as European Escalation was, AirLand Battle leaves it choking in the dust.

The post Thoughts: AirLand Battle. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I was a little puzzled by Ruse (or R.U.S.E, as most people never call it) to begin with. Specifically, I was puzzled by its UI. Whoever designed the visual elements deserves a medal; the menus all use bright, vibrant primary colours and abstract geometric symbols to produce a wonderfully warm, stylish interface. It’s the style Civilization V wishes it had, basically. On the other hand there was something slightly off about data presentation and unit selection. The game is controlled almost entirely via left-clicking, box-selecting units is a little over-generous and ends up selecting units which are just outside the box, and the text is bloody enormous. Which seemed like somewhat baffling design decisions until I realised that Ruse was developed for consoles. The text is designed to be read on a TV screen from across the room and the game is supposed to be played with an imprecise controller, hence the overcompensation from the UI.

All this is a fairly roundabout way of saying that Ruse doesn’t feel like a console game, and it’s a testament to its complexity that it took me a fairly long time to twig that it was despite the tell-tale evidence in the design. Usually when a developer makes an RTS for a console, they make it like C&C Tiberium Wars – i.e., they assume they’re designing for people with attention spans no longer than fifteen minutes (your average CoD player, in other words) and make everything fast-paced and shit. Ruse goes in the other direction, blending light wargaming elements into an RTS that has serious Advance Wars vibes to it. The basic structure is the usual rock-paper-scissors counter trope, with tanks and artillery being good against infantry and buildings, tank destroyers and fighter-bombers being the weapons of choice against tanks and armoured units, while fighters and anti-aircraft guns are (duh) used against aircraft.

Then Ruse deviates significantly from the formula with its implementation of infantry. On open ground, infantry are cannon fodder. They move at a snail’s pace, have the shortest range of any unit in the game and the only units that can’t shoot at them are tank destroyers. However, if you manage to get your infantry into a forest or a city then the tables turn. Infantry (and anti-tank guns) in forests become hidden. Most other units can’t follow them in, and unless they have a recon unit to spot for them they can’t even shoot either. And if an armoured unit – even a  heavy one – blunders too close to a group of hidden infantry then that armoured unit is in for a world of hurt; all infantry carry bazookas and the first attack from a hidden position is three times as powerful as a regular attack. This is enough to one-shot most light and medium vehicles.

The strategy, then, lies in intelligent positioning of units and reconnaissance to maximise their striking power rather than a strict series of hard and soft counters. Playing the campaign on Hard often found me relying not on tanks or artillery or heavy airpower, but on a line of cheap anti-tank guns hidden in a forest screened by cheaper infantry and supported by a wing of fighter-bombers to take out recon units and any tanks that slipped past the killing zones.

Ironically – given the game’s emphasis on intelligence over firepower – the eponymous Ruses allowing you to manipulate the flow of information or otherwise power up your units aren’t that useful. The way Ruse works is that you can always see an opponent’s unit locations and whether the units are Light (infantry, towed units) or Heavy (tanks, tracked vehicles), but you won’t get to see the actual unit type until you make visual contact. Most units need a visual contact in order to target something; the only units that don’t are the ones that saturate an area with indiscriminate fire like artillery and bombers. The Ruses in theory allow you to futz with the vague unit information given to an opponent when they’re out of visual contact, but in actuality I found myself only using two or three of the nine or so types. Perhaps this was because I wasn’t playing against an actual person. I can see the others having more utility if you’re playing against a squishy, fallible human being who might more easily be led astray, but there’s something distinctly artless about, say, swapping around Light and Heavy unit tags when you’re playing the AI since it’s hardcoded to target Light units with anti-infantry ordnance and Heavy units with anti-tank. It doesn’t have a choice, and anyway if it can see your units it’ll know what they are anyway, so I found myself sticking to Radio Silence (hides all units out of visual contact so they can’t be targeted by artillery) and Blitz (speeds units up, which is very important since they normally crawl across the map at an agonisingly slow pace), with occasional use of Spy (reveal all units in a sector) when I found myself short on recon units.

Sadly, if you’re not playing multiplayer Ruse isn’t going to present much of a challenge. It’s somewhat predictable since it’s difficult enough to code a convincing AI for games with set counters and hardcoded rules, let alone the more amorphous variant that Ruse is, but I beat the Hard skirmish AI on my second game ever. It attacks aggressively but its counter to hidden units is artillery, which is completely stymied by Radio Silence allowing the player to cut it to pieces with ambush after ambush.  The campaign is more difficult since the AI not only has overwhelming numbers but its units are also tougher than yours, and the game purposely restricts the types of units available to you. At first this makes for an interesting strategy puzzle – how do you break that defensive strongpoint with no air support within the fifteen minute time limit – and it helps that the missions are quite well put together from a technical point of view, but eventually the restrictions the game saddles you with become too blatantly artificial to be any fun.

A shame, really. Doubly so since – judging from my total and utter inability to get a game via the matchmaking system despite waiting ten minutes – there is no multiplayer community for Ruse. It doesn’t seem to have sold very well, or left any kind of lasting impression on the market – which says more about the current state of the market than it does about Ruse. It’s a game with a lot of good ideas that doesn’t really deserve to be ignored the way it has.

Note from glorious space-year 2013: Eugen Systems have gone on to release the excellent Wargame which contains many of the same ideas in a more serious package, so Ruse’s spirit lives on.

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