I keep hoping I’m going to click on just the right American guy and hear “ROUNDS WHO’S GOT ROUNDS I DON’T HAVE ROUNDS GIVE ME ROUNDS”
I found the campaigns reasonably fun, moreso than the dynamic campaigns which generally resulted in battles like 4 SAMs vs 50 engineers in a 40 minute slog.
It’s definitely more of an MP game to me though.
Lots of lines from Band of Brothers when playing the Airborne, which is appropriate, I guess. Although hearing the names of the individuals (like Lipton) in the voice barks is maybe going a little too far.
One nice thing I do enjoy about moving to WW2 after Wargame: the battlefield isn’t necessarily “see a unit, kill a unit”. No cases where your Abrams peeks its nose around a corner and gets nailed by some low-point scum of an AT unit. Sure, there’s the cases where your Sherman gets immediately drilled by a StuG or whatever, but the lethality is lower in SD.
Plus: giving all inf units transport, and then making that transport go away after unloading was a brilliant, brilliant move. I for one do not miss having to spend time making my empty transports huddle in a (hopefully) forgotten corner so as not to feed my opponent.
I’m torn about this. I mean you’re right, it’s nice not having to worry about the transports, but at the same time I miss being able to reposition my infantry after their purpose at a certain location has been served. It really feels like this was done to make the dynamic frontline more relevant by slowing down the speed at which the line can really move.
For years now (at least until Red Dragon eliminated negligible-cost transports from the entire game), empty transports have held a value in multiplayer that might not be readily apparent. One can simply cast away a 1 point truck down some seemingly empty path and derive significant recon value from the simple question of whether or not it gets annihilated. If it does get wiped out, simply seeing what did it (an ATGM, a tank shell, an infantry AT launcher, etc) held non-trivial value that could be obtained at trivial cost. If your empty truck somehow made it to the enemy spawn, you knew with reasonable certainty that any other unit you sent along that path would be gifted with a similar fate.
That’s why 1 point trucks ceased to exist after Wargame: Airland Battle. That is also why the forcible elimination of effectively zero-cost transports was likely deemed important enough to be an included feature in this game.
Any impact it has on the frontline mechanics is guaranteed to be a completely unintended side-effect of eliminating the borderline exploitative nature of one-point transports from the game entirely. Any transport with any combat or utility value whatsoever carries a non-trivial cost and effectively wipes this entire issue out at its very source, while still allowing one to purchase infantry units without paying a transport premium (minus the potentially exploitative aspect of the whole equation).
It’s honestly one of the best additions in the entire game, IMHO.
(bump)
So… what happened with this game? Is it recommendable for solo play? It seems it was forgotten faster than previous Wargame games.
It hasn’t seen any deep discounts yet so I think there are still a lot of potential Eugen players who are playing Red Dragon and haven’t taken the plunge to pick this up.
It’s geared for multi-player, but is fantastic single player as well. I haven’t played much of the campaign but I have a great time playing around with the different divisions in skirmish. Playing on slower speeds against a medium AI is pretty much perfect for my poor skill level and you can have lots of interesting little tactical problems that emerge in an organic fashion on the battlefield.
There are a huge number of factors playing into that. An assortment of reasons include:
- Eugen bungled the beta period, failed to get the entire game playtested, and effectively released a beta-level product.
- Eugen took too long to release fixes and critical balance updates, leaving damn near every 1v1 and 2v2 as mirrors of the 101st Airborne versus the 3rd Fallschirmjager for the first two months of the game’s lifespan.
- The game is too different from Wargame in terms of gameplay and game mechanics to retain the hardcore Wargame fanbase, who feel SD is too simple by comparison.
- The game is too different from standard Paradox fare that they couldn’t bring in new fans from their connection to Paradox.
- The campaign is really kinda lame, with any halfway novel missions being almost exact recreations of missions from European Escalation. Skirmish is fine, but the campaign is massively unfulfilling.
- The matchmaking implementation in the game is half-baked, leading to the same kind of stacked lobbies that were commonplace in Airland Battle and Red Dragon and creating a barrier to entry for newcomers to multiplayer.
- There was an extended period of over 48 hours of server downtime recently which singlehandedly halved the remaining multiplayer community (when you stack all of the aforementioned items on top of this, it became the straw that broke the backs of quite a few people).
And a bunch of other stuff, but those are some of the big ones. The first two are the big points for me, honestly.
As it stands, the game is pretty much how it should have been on release. Still in need of balance work, but headway is finally being made there. There’s a roadmap for further development, with a DLC division pack due out shortly adding the US 4th Armored, British 1st Special Service, 9th Panzer and 16th Luftwaffe Field Division. There’s work underway on free features, like some new units, a new game mode, more cosmetic aces and a co-op mission pack.
It remains to be seen if any of that will be enough to recover from stumbling off the starting blocks, though.
Well, this is funny to me. Their problem (from a commercial standpoint) is that they are too hardcore. They are real time strategy games with the complexity of turn based wargames. There is leadership, suppression, cover, concealment, 3d line of sight, veterancy, supply system, area control, and lots of other factors. Their two previous Wargame games were horrible in how new players had to learn. No tutorial whatsoever, and a campaign that supposed you already knew how to play and had knowledge of at least a few dozens units.
From what I’ve see in youtube, this at least have a tutorial, but the campaign throws you again at the deep end, in a super big battle at the start, and from impressions I read, in climbs in difficulty pretty fast. They need a smoother intro for the new players.
I think the game is awesome, not obtuse but veteran players like…me will smoke you quickly, this is not a game where you lasso a bunch of units and send it off, it’s not that kind of rts. However it’s comparative to men of war in some respect, just bigger scale. They however should have done east front, it’s way more interesting.
imo they should have kept to their wargame roots and gone back to europe 1984. I have zero interest in playing SS units, and little in fighting them (again).
I don’t mind the change to WW2, but what I really wish I could do in these games is to set a slower speed in MP, or at least have a “slow time” resource that I can use to slow things down temporarily when needed.
Yes, I know that your attention is intended to be a limited resource, but I don’t find having to simultaneously herd cats across an entire battlefield during a firefight to be enjoyable at all.
At first the speed is a bit daunting, but you get used to it, and the fact that you should really not move units like a rts. Take your time and sends scouts out, the speed isn’t that fast really.
There is definitely a rhythm to Eugen games like Steel Division where your attention moves back and forth between the tactical situation and your reinforcements. Once you get into that rhythm, you find you actually have lots of time to do what you want. It’s when you focus too much on one side that suddenly everything seems like it’s happening at once and leaves you scrambling to manage lots of things simultaneously. (That said, I still like playing on the speed one click slower than normal).
I’ve had people telling me since EE that I’m playing it wrong by not understanding how to play it at full speed. After 10 years of Eugen games, I’m prepared to accept that I’m just not fast enough. :)
Maybe it’s them the ones who are playing it wrong! Slow speed is the true speed!
I have a friend who is slow as heck, at first he was OMG panic and refused to play further, but after a few rounds in MP 10v10 he got better, and since you only need defend a specific section, its all awesome.
I recommend 10v10 as a MUCH better intro to the game than 1v1 or similar, as the latter is micro intensive and the former is more strategic.
Don’t worry about units, just make sure you deploy far enough back, that you have time to put stuff in good places.
The Wargame series is on sale this weekend on Steam. For people not sure about how this plays, I assume that’s a good way to find out if you like it?
in wargame red dragon, slow speed really IS the true speed. Look at the ridiculous speeds vehicles and troops have: 100km/h on road, 50km/h off road. Elite commandos running at 30km/h toting all their gear (such as stingers and AT launchers lol) You can not fire a tank gun accurately going 50km/h off road. The tank will be flying over bumps half of the time at that speed and break down after ten minutes of it. So half speed is far more realistic.
Got this game at Fall sale, and really loving it. I liked the wargame series, but to me SD is far better
- The maps provide a significant tactical challenge
- The scale is smaller, ie single vehicles. I am enjoying that aspect.
- I like the divisions and the phases overall. I do wish there was an option to play without them.
I m a slow player, so playing SP skirmish. I made decks for both sides where I tried to make them effective but avoid the unicorn units. Recently been doing 4 vs 4 so my division is a small part of the battle. Sometimes the AI helps me, but I also have to watch my team in case they need help.
I hope they do the Eastern front, N. Africa/Italy, as well early war vs Poland/France