Wargame: European Escalation

[weemadando]

I also love just how horrifically overpowered anti-air units are.

When I send in a pack of gunships and waves of air cav after them, I don't expect a single Shilka to be able to destroy the entire group without ever being spotted (pro tip guys, FOLLOW THE MASSIVE LINE OF TRACER BACK TO THE SOURCE).

[xthetenth]

Too bad the combat is super boring degree-of-divergence stuff, I guess. The SP is the epitome of no-AI spend your $100 of units 'properly' to get the biggest number of low-divergence shots to 'win' against the huge scripted puzzle army in each level. I imagine the MP is hilarious since unit prices don't weigh accuracy (or stabilisation) highly enough.

The mechanics are over abstracted, and I feel their is a surprising lack of more environmental features that could change things up from the 1-2 combos good comboes of units. Such as night, weather, seasons, terrain deformation, etc. It strikes me as somewhat of a prototype game. As if Eugen systems planned on seeing if it caught on and then doing everything properly in a sequel. It definitely needs more randomizing on every level.

I don't think i'm even going to bother with MP since i'm sure it's already degenerated into the standard "1-2 deck builds beat all other builds" nonsense.

What deck builds are you thinking of? Because really the only deck I see working consistently is good combined arms. SP is really bad for showing the best aspects of the game because of the way the limited points and small numbers of available units encourage very safe play, but everything has enough counters that MP really isn't about slamming optimized builds into each other as it is about figuring out where you're going to fight and getting what you need.

[CaptHawkeye]

Well it can be said that the game depicts an era before choppers prominently featured radar and thermal imaging to to locate targets. So point defense guns had a roll to play. Today SPAAGs are being phased out precisely because the advantage has shifted back to the choppers. You're better off with SAMs. That's just trivia though.

I feel the game would be most improved by some means of randomisation. Stark feels the game is too heavily based on puzzles, it is. It would be better if the game had a multi path campaign emphasizing choice in objectives. As for the gameplay being overly focused on some mechanics, adding more details is only going to burden an already pretty heavily burned game by a gigantic table of equipment. (<3) Maybe they should have kept Ruses?

I haven't played multi, but i'm used to games with huge unit lists being broken by 1-2 winning combos. If it's not so i'll have to try it sooner.

[xthetenth]

I've been bouncing between different units in a good few roles in my army list for a while. A surprisingly large number of units are useful in my experience. Combined arms are nearly always the answer, and once the primacy of that is established it's a matter of discussing what units are best in a given role, and that's nearly universally a matter decided by personal taste and army focus since there are some pretty decent tradeoffs to be had. The units in a similar role have tradeoffs against each other that are significant enough that a "better" unit may have some crippling flaw with a given way of doing things. There are a few spam strats that players love. Helicopter rushes and artillery spam are easy to beat with a balanced force setup. The cheap tank rush is easily defeated pretty easily if you know how to stun enemies with artillery, flamers or just get them in a forest with infantry. Nothing in isolation is particularly powerful without serious weaknesses in turn, while there's tons of combinations that work well. Sure there's some stuff that's totally useless, but a huge fraction has its uses.