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Fighting a Cold War gone hot with Eugen Systems' classic PC wargame! Once upon a time, in a world before PCs... Although never a really serious player, back in the days before home PCs, I'd long been interested in wargames with miniatures - not the boardgame variety, as the model-making or collecting aspect was important to me, too. I still have the 1/300 scale metal WW2 AFVs and basic little rulebook I bought back in the 1970s. In the late 1980s I dabbled with the Cold War era and acquired a modest set of 1/300 and 1/285 miniatures from Davco, Heroics & Ross, Scotia and GHQ, basically a Soviet tank battalion with T-72s, a couple of Motor Rifle companies with BMPs, plus US and British tank/infantry company combat teams in sufficient strength to give them a fair fight, with a variety of Abrams, Bradleys, Chieftains and 432s etc. Even tiny 1/300 items like Ferret Scout Cars could look quite well when painted and were much more suitable for decent wargaming than larger models (I don't really see much attraction in skirmishes with quite large models, which seem to be having something of a resurgence of interest in the form of the 'Bolt Action' rules) For my own Cold War forays, I used an adapted version of the Wargame Research Group's 'Rules for All Arms Land Warfare from Platoon to Company Level' (June 1988) for 1925-1950 because they were the first I'd found which really tried to replicate the way armies actually operated, instead of providing (in effect) a chess game with different pieces and rules, usually underlaid with an obsessive attention to armour thickness and penetration and other theoretical weapon characteristics rather than real-world tactics and capabilities. It was like, suddenly, a set of rules had been written by real army officers, rather than by enthusiasts who can only get so much understanding of how armies really work by reading books. As I wanted to play solo, I adapted methods from the same publisher's solo wargames booklet, adding a system of drawing cards from a deck, as my force advanced, to generate realistic enemy units ahead of us. It worked quite while and while I never had enough space - and thus had to use too small a ground scale for my 1/300 units - the results could be quite pleasing, visually, played out on a grass-mat laid out with my home-made modular terrain system. In the pic below, a platoon of US Army M60A3s, sited to fire hull-down from a flank, burns as a Soviet T-72 platoon, backed up by a BMP-1, approaches a village defended now by mechanised infantry in M113 APCs and mortar carriers. In the different scenario below, a company of BMP-2s is closing in on a ridgeline objective, backed up by T-72s. BMP-1s and another pair of T-72s wait in a field in front of the village church. Below is what was likely an earlier pic in the same battle, with a T-72 platoon leading a company of BMP-2s which has yet to shake out from platoon columns into line formation for the assault. Ahead, MiG-27s flash low over smoke screens laid by supporting SO-122 SP guns, whose observation and support vehicles can be seen in the foreground. You'd think that I'd have jumped at the chance to play wargames on the PC. I have tried a few, notably the original Combat Mission and the more recent Theatre of War. But good though they could be in their way, to my mind they suffered from the same failing as some earlier paper wargame rules. They gave you a force equivalent to something like a company but allowed (or worse, effectively compelled) you the player to move around individual tanks, vehicles or soldiers. That's a chess game with different pieces and rules, not the way military operations work. If you're commanding a company-sized force, your 'pieces' are your platoons, be they tanks or infantry, certainly not individual soldiers, guns or vehicles. By and large, you deploy, move around and give your orders, not to individuals or individual vehicles, but to the commanders of each platoon. The latter carry them out, by and large using 'canned' tactics like battle drills and 'Standard Operating Procedures' or SOPs. If you're playing a wargame, in command of a force comprising maybe three or more platoons of one or more different troop types, it may be fun to pick out and send that high-morale, expert-rated fellow with the panzerfaust along that hedge to stalk that pesky Sherman. But while real-life company commanders do sometimes have to organise such things, it's not the approach a proper tactical simulation of platoon, company or battalion-level operations should take by default. Instead, your forces should come pre-organised into platoons. Barring rare exceptions, you should give your orders only to these platoons (in effect, to the platoon leaders). They should carry out your orders using standard tactics, with an absolute mimimum of player micro-management. This is the missing factor which those 1988 WRG WW2-era rules at last implemented. Having found this factor rather lacking in the PC wargames I had so far tried, and having meantime also found that simulations rather than wargames amply satisfied my interest in 'blowing [virtual] stuff up', I left it there. Until last week. On holiday in Spain's Costa del Sol, I wandered into a Game store in Malaga in search of a bargain and came across a copy of Wargame: European Escalation as a 'Super Oferta' for the princely sum of one Euro. Having an interest in both wargames and the Cold War era, I had been vaguely aware of Eugen Systems' sweet-looking 2012 PC wargame (and its 2014 development, Airland Battle), in part from watching videos like this one: For a price that wouldn't have bought me a platoon of 1/300 T-72s 25 years ago, you get hundreds of nicely-crafted AFVs and other units on a range of different maps (with a proper ground scale), set in the same era I had tried to wargame all those years ago. And with visuals aproaching that of a simulation. It was worth giving another PC wargame a try, I decided. That was a week ago. Safely back in the rather less sunny UK, this mission report describes how it worked out and what I've made of it, so far. And The Lord said, let there be pixels... Having decided to have a crack at Cold War wargaming in the computer age, I found that while my copy of W:EE came on a DVD, it was Steam-based. So installation involved downloads from that provider, which happily included some free DLC, in the form of several 'expansion pack' campaigns. The base sim provides four basic campaigns or 'operations' which constitute the main single player element. The nearest thing to a 'quick mission bulder' is a 'Skirmish' mode within single player, which enamles you to set up player -vs- AI battles. Excluding the expansion packs, the 4 campaigns comprise 22 missions, set during the period 1975 to 1985. The bad news is that if like me you thought the unlock system that came with a certain recent WW2 combat flight sim was not a good idea, W:EE will kind of put that into perspective. Yes, you can play as one of 8 different national armies, distributed between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Yes, you get a great selection of nicely-rendered playable units for each, from MBTs to IFVs to APCs and a range of support vehicles and helos. And yes, you get an impressive variety of moderately large and impressively-detailed maps, ranging over several parts of the potential World War Three European battlefield. But no, you can't actually play anything but a tiny segment of all this super content, until you have unlocked it, by playing and accumulating points. With my 1/300 miniatures, I could set up and fight a battle with any of the units I'd bought. But in creating a PC equivalent with vastly greater scope in about every respect conceivable, they decided to let you have access to almost none of this vast potential, a design decision which beggars belief...my belief, anyway. Perhaps it's somehow tied into anti-cheat measures for the W:EE muntiplayer component. But for now, all I can do is grit my teeth, swallow any sense I have of good and proper game design and begin the aptly-described 'grind' to unlock more of the things I really want to play with. Sensibly, it appears that Eugen Systems have dispensed with this concept for the follow-on wargame series - Wargame: Air Land Battle - which, as well as somewhat better graphics and fixed-wing air support, reportedly and thankfully bins the unlocks. If that's so, I would definitely consider investing in it, although the fixed-wing element can reportedly be a bit too lethal, when in a real WW3 the flyboys would on most days either have been grounded by the bad weather or attacking targets beyond the immediate battlefield...until their airfields were nuked, anyway. As for W:EE, I've tried to find some sort of cheat to unlock the content but no dice. Creating a 'private' multiplayer battle just for youself was said to enable you to get at unlocked units, possibly functioning much like a mission editor, but that didn't work for me. That would be some compensation; but at the minimum, what is really needed is for you to be able to begin any of the available SP campaigns from the get-go and to do so with a much less restricted set of available units. The alternative to playing campaigns and unlocking stuff is the aforementioned 'Skirmish' mode. This is ideal to practice, and lets you do so on any of the many maps available, like this one, for instance. These big, beautifully-rendered virtual environments are the sort of thing that would have massively exceeded my wildest dreams (not to mention my available space and my modelling abilities) as a dilletante 1/300 wargamer, back in the day. Maps galore and great warfighting terrain to boot, but as for the actual weaponry, even in this Skirmish mode, you still seem to be restricted to the kit you have unlocked at any point in time. So the darn unlock system is pretty pervasive. Anyhow, if you're now asking 'Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?', well, that's coming next! ...to be continued!