Wargame: European Escalation- What You Need to Know

A spectre is haunting Europe- the spectre of good game developers that get no press for no explicable reason.  Eugen is one of those studios, and their most recent title- Wargame- is quite possibly the best modern-era RTS game released in the last decade.  However it has received little to no critical acclaim.  The extent of its fame is essentially a few glowing articles over on Rock Paper Shotgun, including a riveting battle report of one of their own games.

I have played Wargame for over 100 hours solid now, and it shows no sign of becoming less interesting.  This weekend, the game releases its second free DLC package, including more maps, a game mode, and balance tweaks.  It is also going on its second massive discount for a limited time- available for 50% off, a scant $20, this weekend.  At that price, it is a must-buy for any gamer who likes strategy games.  And here’s why.

Units (part I)

Traditionally, RTS units are non de-constructible. What I mean is that the actual units themselves, in almost all RTS games I’ve played, live a short ‘0 / 1’ alive/dead existence, with a certain amount of damage points (shown as health-bars) to represent damage in a fairly abstract way. Most RTS games display diminishing health/damage of a given unit with some kind of cute preset animation. For example, in Total Annihilation the units billow an ever greater amount of smoke. Upon actual death they possess a variety of explosion animations to represent their demise, such as breaking apart or full blown explosions with flying debris!

In Supreme Commander we see pretty much the same system but with fancier deaths or damage animations. The experimental units in particular go out with a real bang. I’m going to propose a more modern and importantly, more fun system in terms of actual gameplay mechanics. It is also, I think, a more realistic way of doing things and fits in with my RTS concept.

Gamasutra Article

An article from Jan ’08 by Nathan Toronto over at Gamasutra entitled “The Future Of The Real-Time Strategy Game” made some interesting criticisms about traditional RTS games, particularly micro/macro-management and the difference between tactics and strategy.