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.

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Wargame: European Escalation (henceforth referred to as Wargame because honestly) suffers from an affliction similar to many of its peers; a horrible disease I have dubbed Total War Syndrome. The most telling symptom of TWS is that all the publicity screenshots for the game tend to be close-ups of the action like the one headlining this review. The military hardware and the explosions are all very photogenic if you’re into that sort of thing, but that kind of picture is actually a little bit useless from a marketing point of view because all it tells the person looking at it is that Wargame is a game with nice graphics. Lots of games these days have nice graphics. Nice graphics do not make Wargame stand out from the crowd in any way, and this was particularly telling when somebody asked me the following question as I was talking about the game:

“What is it actually about?”

It was a fair question. The publicity screenshots are spectacularly useless at telling you what Wargame is. Vanity shots like that are good for marketing the game to the wow-graphics crowd, but they also need to be mixed in with screenshots like this, which are what you spend 99% of your time in game actually looking at.

See? That’s got much more information in it. I suspect that just by looking at that screenshot you can make an educated decision about whether or not Wargame is a game for you. Just by looking at it you can see that it lives up to its title: this is a wargame, not an RTS, with a level of mechanical complexity far beyond what you’d typically encounter in the genre. It is a game where you can send in tanks against BMP-1s and have a reasonable expectation of success, but those same tanks will be crushed by BMP-1Ps. Knowing the difference that one letter makes is what separates victory and defeat in Wargame, and that’s going to justifiably turn a lot of people off of the game. There is a lot of information to take in here and you have to invest several hours simply learning about the basic capabilities of the units at your disposal and the weapons they carry. Until you do you are going to lose. A lot. I don’t blame you if that doesn’t sound like your idea of fun, and if it doesn’t you are highly unlikely to enjoy this game.

If it does sound like fun (learning how to identify several dozen different variants of Cold War era NATO and Soviet military tech, not losing repeatedly) or if that’s a burden you’re willing to shoulder in order to get to the meaty centre of the game, then you should know that Wargame is very, very good. Eugen Systems have learned from Ruse, their previous title, which was game that fused together an RTS with some light wargaming elements and ended up being just a little bit too abstract, a little bit too gamey for what it was trying to do. Wargame does the reverse: it fuses a wargame with some light RTS elements, and it’s a marked improvement since the interest and the reward in this kind of strategy game lies in the details.

So, what is Wargame actually about? Wargame is a grand strategy game where dozens of tanks, helicopters, armoured vehicles and even tiny little infantry men slug it out over maps that can measure up to fifty kilometres on a side. Pretty much everything you’d expect to be modelled in a serious wargame is modelled in some way here. All units have separate ammunition supplies for each weapon they possess, and the vehicles have the additional consideration of fuel to deal with. A tank platoon might consist of four tanks but each tank in the platoon will be dealt with as a distinct unit with its own armour and morale values; they are merely grouped together for ease of movement. If a unit gets panicked its performance on the battlefield will suffer badly – weapons will take longer to aim and they’ll be far more inaccurate when they eventually do fire. Panicked units can even rout entirely, retreating to a safe spot until they recover their wits, and this morale mechanic can make it extremely effective to, e.g., soften up an attacking tank unit with some otherwise-harmless rocket barrages that nevertheless spook the crews to the point where they miss all their shots when they finally get in range of your tanks.

This makes the supply of your forces a primary consideration when playing Wargame. Thankfully the actual resupply mechanic is very simple: you simply move a group of supply trucks or helicopters within a certain radius of a unit that needs fuel/ammo/whatever and as long as both sets of vehicles are stationary the unit will automatically be resupplied. Supply vehicles only have a limited amount of supplies, and when they are drained they must head back to a Forward Operating Base to stock back up. FOBs are large supply dumps that can only be placed at the start of a game, and they constitute the closest thing Wargame has to a “base”, but even losing your FOBs won’t knock you out of a game completely. The only thing that will do that is losing all your command vehicles.

Wargame’s maps are divided into sectors which can be taken and held by your forces to get deployment points – the game’s resources – but only if you have a command vehicle present. Command vehicles are very expensive, unarmed, and have little to no armour, so they absolutely have to be screened, concealed and protected by your other forces. Killing an enemy command vehicle means partially crippling their resource income and their control of the map; losing one of yours is a harsh blow that can often take most of a game to recover from, if you manage it at all. Having a command vehicle out in the open is suicidal since an opponent will happily sacrifice a couple of cheap helicopters in order to get at it (and the unarmoured ones can be taken out by a single infantryman), so they have to be sequestered inside forests and hedgerows where they won’t immediately be spotted and destroyed. This brings me neatly on to the third key element of Wargame, which is reconnoitering the terrain.

There are only two real types of terrain in Wargame: open, and dense. Open terrain is what you’d expect; lines of sight are modelled accurately so if there’s a unit over the brow of a hill you won’t be able to see it, but otherwise it’s business as usual. Dense terrain is where it gets interesting. Forests, hedgerows and towns all count as dense terrain. Move a unit into one of them and it becomes hidden. A hidden unit can only be revealed by either moving one of your units right up next to it (this is suicidal) or else sending in a recon vehicle first to check the dense terrain out. Recon vehicles have very good optics that let them spot concealed ambushes before they actually run into them, and so it’s crucial to lead up a probing attack with a recon element to make sure you’re not about to encounter an anti-tank guided missile team hidden in a woodland somewhere.up ahead. Inside forests and towns, therefore, the usual power dynamic between units is reversed; infantry are very good at hiding because of their small size and have powerful short range anti-tank attacks, so any tanks sent into a forest blind will be destroyed in short order. The same goes for LAAD teams and SAM vehicles, which turn unscouted areas around forests into complete no-go areas for helicopters. These are unit which would be chewed up if they were caught on open terrain, but which are all-powerful if they can attack from a position which makes the most of their strengths.

The actual combat in Wargame is rather conventional. Each weapon has a high explosive rating, an anti-tank rating and an accuracy rating. High explosive weapons are good against unarmoured targets and anti-tank weapons are good against (duh) tanks. When a unit is hit by an attack, first the game checks to see if it’s got any armour on the side where it was hit, and then it compares the strength of the weapon to the strength of the armour to see if it does any damage. Side, rear and top armour is far weaker than frontal armour so there’s a certain amount of positioning involved, but in general your units are intelligent enough to angle their fronts towards the enemy, absolving you of any micromanagement duties and letting you leave them to get on with it while you deal with things on the macro scale. What I particularly like about Wargame’s combat is the way the supply mechanic has allowed the developers to balance certain weapons. For example, the ATGM teams I mentioned above – and ATGMs in general – are cheap and pack a fearsome anti-armour wallop, but the supply of missiles each unit gets is very limited and once they run out that weapon is completely useless; if the unit has no other weapons to fall back on that unit will be completely useless. Helicopters are mobile and deadly but exhaust their rockets in a few salvos, and so they periodically have to be pulled back to FOBs to re-arm. Tanks are expensive and bad in dense terrain, but their ample supply of shells gives them a lot of staying power in a fight and their fuel supply allows them to range fairly far ahead before they require the attentions of a supply truck.

This balancing element is something that’s badly needed because there’s something like 200-300 different units in Wargame. Many of them are simple variants, like a BMP-1P is pretty much just a BMP-1 with a Konkurs ATGM stuck to the top, but balancing that lot must still have been a complete nightmare. Somehow Eugen Systems have more or less managed it, though. Unit cost is something which factors into it since your opponents will get the point value of whatever they manage to destroy added onto their score, leading to much screaming when a pair of 200-point Apache helicopters get taken out by a group of three cheap 30-point Chaparrals. The large unit pool is something that actually helps, too; no matter what unit you field, there’ll likely be something somewhere inside the opposing arsenal of 150 units that’ll act as a hard counter. That is, if you added it to your deck before the battle.

Here we come to the one part of Wargame I have a problem with: the decks, and the unit unlock system. The decks are not offensive in and of themselves; there’s absolutely no way you could be given access to all of the units on your side at once and not suffer from information overload, so you have to add specific units to a custom-made deck before the battle begins. This isn’t so bad except for it being completely unexplained, and it takes a couple of games to get a feel for what the decks will and will not let you bring to a battle. No, the real turd in Wargame is the unlock system. Those 300 units I said were in the game? Most of those are locked to begin with. You can’t use them, instead only having access to some really basic infantry, tank and recon units. To unlock new units you have to get some command stars, which are earned both through playing multiplayer games and completing missions in the single-player campaign. This leads to a situation where the difference between a level one player and a level twenty player isn’t one of experience or ability, it’s that the level twenty player will have access to units that are straight up better than what the level one player can field, since they won’t have access to any of the counters. The system is one that is ostensibly supposed to encourage people to play the single player and to stop them from being overwhelmed by so many unit types all at once, but it’s still something I have an inherent philosophical problem with. When I’m playing a multiplayer game I like the playing field to be level, and I have a strong distaste for mechanics which hand concrete advantages to the people who have played the game longest.

It’s a forgivable sin, though. You can get enough command stars through playing the first tutorial campaign (although it’s still harder than the main campaigns of most conventional RTSes) to put together a worthwhile NATO deck, and its smooth sailing from there on in. Wargame is an accomplished, mature strategy game for people who like strategy as opposed to mere micromanagement. The only thing stopping me from unequivocally recommending it is the fact that the multiplayer community for this game doesn’t appear to be that lively – and remember, I’ve been playing in the week following a Steam sale. If you don’t have a group of friends who also own the game you’re going to have to content yourself with the campaign and skirmish modes, and while those are fairly good in their own right they’re probably not something I’d pay £20-30 for. If you do have such a group of friends, and if you relish a meaty strategy challenge of the kind Wargame provides, then get thee to Steam and buy this game next time it goes on sale. I promise you you won’t regret it.

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