Wargame Red Dragon: Overview and Performance Testing. Wargame: Red Dragon Review Wargame red dragon how to play company

Now it is rather difficult to imagine, but the beginning of modern tabletop wargames was laid by ordinary chess: even the Prussian army, due to cost savings, officers trained in command with the help of ordinary copper models on the table, simulating the battlefield, then computers appeared and it became even more to play combat simulators simpler. At the same time, random onlookers joined a small group of wargame lovers who decided to try what it was like to be in the role of a real general! The Wargame series has already given us this opportunity for several times and copes with this task perfectly! The main idea of ​​the product from Eugen Systems is the maximum realism of managing your personal army and full immersion in the atmosphere of wartime. As a result, the developers get something so attractive that it could easily be used in army propaganda.

"There is a marshal's baton in the backpack of every soldier."
Napoleon

Of course, Wargame is notable for its significant complexity: for one half of the players this game will be a real challenge, and for the other half it will be an insurmountable frontier. A kind of game in complicated Exel with many parameters, only one study of which will take several hours, or even days! But this is what gives the game its unique character: literally every nuance can cause a deafening victory or an equally crushing defeat. So, for example, the long viewing range of our armored personnel carrier can turn the battle with the enemy into a meat grinder, where you will act as a butcher; the enemy's artillery installation unnoticed in time can just as well turn half of your tanks into a heap of scrap metal! The situation on the battlefield is rapidly changing - at one point you almost won, and after a few seconds some cheeky helicopter flattens your tank wedge to the ground and that's it! At the same time, the classic "rock-paper-scissors" system transforms into some intricate "rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock-Chewbacca". It is difficult to understand this, but in the case of a good understanding of the mechanics, you begin to feel like a real commander!

In Wargame, everything is worked out with meticulous meticulousness to the smallest detail - technical characteristics, the structure of military units ... sometimes because of such details you start to rejoice like a child!

Red Dragon is the second expansion to the original Wargame. From the name it is clear that the field of hostilities was transferred to Asia. Considering that the series itself is more like a theater, Red Dragon is his best production, a kind of oriental performance that has absorbed all the most beautiful scenes of the past and added a local flavor - something new! True, this does not always work out well and "Red Dragon" was no exception. A significant role in the expansion is given to ships and naval battles, at the same time, Eugen Systems did not bother to change the mechanics for their normal implementation. So it turns out that huge cruisers, which for some reason look like dreadnoughts of the early twentieth century, attack each other from the distance of a rifle shot ... it looks strange, completely destroying our faith in the realism of what is happening, and we are here precisely because of this , remember ?!

But the companies are traditionally good, even despite the alternative history, such as the Second Korean War or the hypothetical military conflict between the USSR and China, which took place as conceived by the developers after the Second World War. Each story has only one preface video, briefly explaining what, how and why is happening, but this, oddly enough, is enough! Such a presentation leaves room for imagination and building the game situation into a system of real historical knowledge of the player! You sit for yourself, play, and involuntarily begin to argue: "What was the beginning of the Second Korean War and why China is inactive?" All this allows Wargame not to be distracted by the development of the plot, to correctly place accents on the warhead.

The game with a live opponent is built around the classic deckbuilding - you compose an army from units, and then check the resulting combination on the battlefield. If you wish, you can create an army simultaneously from American tanks and Korean helicopters - from anyone, it all depends on your imagination! Finding an opponent is not difficult, since the game's community, although not too large, is already strong.

Eugen Systems have done good addition to a great highly specialized game! It will certainly be interesting to fans of wargames and is worth seeing by those who are not yet familiar with the genre. Despite the small flaws in naval battles and a rather confusing interface, Red Dragon is a worthy successor to the Wargame business!

The Wargame series is about combining dazzling entertainment with brutal tactical realism, as well as about military equipment more real than an annual subscription to the Army Bulletin. Wargame: Red Dragon follows the evolutionary path established by its predecessor, AirLand Battle, by expanding the army, adding multiple campaigns, and introducing a new tactical environment: ocean. However, they added welcome variety to the old formula and also made Red Dragon the largest, most comprehensive game in the Wargame series. But this evolutionary progress comes with some surprising steps back.

The Wargame series has always been about vulnerability, that each type of device is specifically designed to destroy a different type of device. This means that reconnaissance is our everything: discovering an enemy at the very beginning of the match can gain an advantage that turns the battle into carnage.
This gives Wargame a distinctive feature. This is a game where even your best units can be easily finished off, leaving you without a clue as to what just happened. One missile from the forest belt and one less excellent tank in your army. The Tank Killer team celebrates their victory in a hiding place inside the forest ... and then a couple of planes cover the forest belt with cluster bombs and kill everyone inside. This game is not about reaction, but about premonition and inference.
This is its best and most directional feature, as it can be extremely frustrating when things go against you. Not only does something go wrong, but it can cause an avalanche of setbacks.
On the other hand, this makes Wargame a delightful series of mind games. You are the conductor of the battle band: reconnaissance units identify traps, artillery suppresses enemy positions, tanks and infantry march forward to assault, helicopters and planes provide cover. It is a tremendous pleasure to figure out every position and strategy of an opponent, simply thanks to a few random clues and a sixth sense.

Napalm in the morning.
Red Dragon, more than any predecessor to the Wargame series, relies on entertainment. The game looks and sounds great. Forests catch fire as a result of napalm strikes, rockets fly criss-cross over your troops, and planes engage in intense aerial combat while a tank column disappears into the cloud from helicopter and rocket fire. Seeing this, one can easily begin to sympathize with Robert Duvall, who played Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.
Unfortunately Wargame does not allow you to fully enjoy the show. Most of the time, you will be playing with positions above the battlefield by pushing unit icons across the command map. You have to enjoy the atmosphere of Wargame in small doses, you cannot take your eyes off the big picture for a long time.

On water-only maps, where only warships can participate in combat, it becomes all too obvious that Wargame's design was never intended to handle the long-range scale of modern naval combat. A sight to behold: 20th century guided missile cruisers, drawn in pistol range from each other and going side to side. Surprisingly, very silly and doesn't go well with the intense cat and mouse game that the rest of Wargame does so well! Naval units perform best when they are part of the combat along the coastline. The existence of ships makes a lot more sense when they work as support for the ground forces, and whoever wins the battle at sea gains control of the coast. There are also river units that can provide some assistance in advancing inland.

Alternate History
The new campaigns in Red Dragon are mostly good. In the first company, you play as the South Korea / American side, you start from a defensive position using modern western-style regiments against North Korea using outdated equipment. Looks lopsided due to the number of communists and the time constraints on campaign goals, but it is a good way to give new recruits a manageable task.
Red Dragon has good variety, with an Asian setting. The campaign covers the Chinese surprise attack on the Soviets in 1979, which is very different from the NATO situation in the battle against the Warsaw Pact countries in previous games. The Chinese are still shaking with their Maoist hangover, and their troops are lagging behind the Soviets in some key areas. Learning how to take advantage of China's manpower to crush the Russian defenses before they can be heavily entrenched is great for making you change your playstyles!
Vrazheskiy I.I. a bit disappointing, tending to use repetitive strategies. I.I. also too prone to "fast movement" of units along roads, making it wildly vulnerable to ambushes and airstrikes.
A multiplayer campaign might have been a brilliant solution here, but unfortunately, Red Dragon doesn't even offer the co-op campaign that was in AirLand Battle, much less a 1v1 campaign. A more serious flaw is that Red Dragon has gotten rid of the strategic "cards" you could play in the Airland Battle campaign. (These are ways to channel strategic resources to change the landscape of the campaign: sabotage groups can paralyze enemy formations, a scout antenna can reveal the composition of enemy units in another territory, etc. These were important tools, summoned at the expense of the same game points that you use to call for reinforcements). It has always been a dilemma: more bodies on the front line, or some kind of trump card that can give you an important advantage at the right time? This dilemma is absent in Red Dragon, and the campaign becomes poorer because of it.

The most dangerous games
You can always find a person's opponent. Wargame has a multiplayer community and it's not hard to find a reasonably sized game, although there are plenty of empty 10v10 rooms out there. The multiplayer is intense, fun and stable. However, I have seen a lot of chat players complaining about de-sync in large games. I myself have never encountered this problem, but it seems that something is affecting a significant part of the community.
As in previous games, in multiplayer, you need to set up your own army in advance. This requires a dive into the "deck builder" where you create a menu of units that will be available to you in a multiplayer game. If you want, you can create an army from a little bit of everything. Want American tanks with German paratroopers and Korean attack helicopters? You can do this ... but the more you limit yourself, the more the game will reward you. If you limit yourself to one alliance, for example Korea-Japan, then these units will cost less. If you then add another restriction, for example, only mechanized infantry columns, you get even more bonuses. This is a good system that generates a large number of very diverse armies, and makes team games more interesting.

As a result, Red Dragon reminds of retreaded tires, too much old in it, and removed some of the favorite features from AirLand Battle. This is not a pure modernization. On the other hand, Red Dragon was great at providing us with more material to play in big, spectacular battles.

VERDICT
Good game in excellent game series but it is not without its drawbacks due to weak naval combat and the lack of several clever features available to its predecessors. Solo Wargame players will probably want to stick with AirLand Battle, but newcomers to the series and multiplayer gamers will find Red Dragon the biggest and most comprehensive game to play.

Developer: Eugen Systems

Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

Genre: strategy

Multiplayer: Yes

System requirements (minimum): Windows XP SP3 / Vista / 7/8; Intel Pentium 4 / AMD Athlon XP 2200+ 2 GHz; 4 Gb RAM; Nvidia GEFORCE 7600 GT / ATI Radeon X1800 GTO / INTEL HD 3000 graphics card

About 2 years ago by the studio Eugen Systems the game was released Wargame: European Escalation then the developers did Wargame: AirLand Battle with aviation, and now the time has come in which there were naval battles. Let's see what came of this in this review.

Plot

In the previous two games, Europe was the target of hostilities, the main participants were NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries.

The third part is similar to the previous games, but there are also many differences between them. Now actions are taking place in the Far East and in order to defend their rights, you have to take up arms.

Red dragon presents four story campaigns. The fourth is announced in the DLC. It touches upon the time when the heads of state could not divide the territory, and a real battle for power took place. The game is based on real events, the period from 1979 to 1987 was affected, during this period of time the strategic struggle for new lands was especially zealous. Great Britain and China negotiated with regards to Hong Kong, the USSR and Japan could not divide the Kuril Islands, and South Korea is again at war with the North.

The game is notable for the fact that the player will feel the spirit of that time, as they say, will take a direct part in the battles, even if even on the other side of the monitor.

Due to the fact that the game contains the familiar names of military operations and units, the effect of presence is obtained. The game is highly addictive and exciting.

Gameplay

The player must immediately calculate several moves ahead, develop his own strategy for the game. The player's task is to hold strategic objects, capture nearby territories, defend their own territory from enemy attacks, and the like. You need to think about how best to act in a given situation, because the further development of events will depend on the decisions that you make now. Sectors that are held for a long time bring political bonuses to the player in the form of money. On them, you can purchase additional weapons and order a whole unit of ground, sea forces and the like. It is very important to hold on to the captured airports, seaports and ship repair infrastructure. Such a system of combat operations will help to win more than one military battle.

The war game is a bit like chess game, here you also need to predict the next steps of the enemy, moreover, the military situation is constantly changing, it is difficult to predict who will be the winner here. Even if you succeed, do not relax, events can change rapidly, which ultimately lead to your defeat.

Game tactics: you need to fight in small groups, without attracting much attention from enemies. For the operation to eliminate the enemy forces to be successful, you need to maneuver and strike from different directions. The key to the successful course of the game is reconnaissance sent in time, determining the place of the next battle, vigilance, since there are also air raids. During the game, a global and tactical map will be provided, with the help of these maps, it is easy to navigate the terrain and you can direct the blocks to the desired zones. This is the minimum of what you should pay attention to. But, having foreseen these factors, you can safely begin hostilities.

The special novelty of the third part is the fleet. Red dragon has many different ships, these are river artillery boats, destroyers and much more. The fleet has many tasks, for example, the destruction of enemy ships, opposing enemy aircraft, landing troops, maintaining their ships in proper condition, and much more. In the struggle for territory, the fleet will help one hundred percent, the main thing is to include logical and strategic thinking and boldly rush into the attack. A brave and risky player can capture an airfield, destroy enemy ground troops with the help of destroyers, not forgetting to destroy enemy aircraft. Armored boats, armored personnel carriers and tanks will help the player to cope with the task, the main thing is to rationally use all available equipment and think one step ahead. The troop organization system now looks a little different. A regimental tactical group is a combat unit, and in previous parts ready-made divisions and corps were under command. At the heart of the group is now a regiment. It can be infantry, tank or motorized. The regiment has no artillery, aviation or similar protective barriers. To make your regiment resistant to hostilities, it will need additional battalions and companies.

Red dragon considered one of the very best RTS by the community. The game provides a choice, either you go through the battles alone, or you can compete with other players, up to twenty people can be involved in the game. Undoubtedly Red dragon will take its place among the popular computer games.

Wargame: Red Dragon is a simulation game developed by Eugen Systems for the PC platform. The environment in the game belongs to the stylistics of history, and the following features can be distinguished: strategy, real-time strategy, military action, realism, cold war, for several players, wargame, tactics, real-time tactics, naval battles other. You will have access to such game modes both "single player" and "multiplayer".

Wargame: Red Dragon is distributed worldwide on a one-time purchase basis by the publisher Focus Home Interactive. At the moment, the stage of the game is launched, and the date of its release is 04/17/2014. You cannot download Wargame: Red Dragon for free, including torrenting, since the game is distributed as a one-time purchase. The game supports Russian.

MMO13 has yet to give Wargame: Red Dragon a rating. Metacritic rates this game at 7.8 out of 10. The game is distributed on the Steam store, where users rate this game with their reviews 8.7 out of 10.

The official description of the game reads:

“The new reference in RTS at its best! The Wargame series returns to duty, larger, richer and more spectacular than ever before. In Wargame Red Dragon, you are engaged in a large-scale conflict where Western forces clash against the Communist bloc. 1991: the two blocs confront each other in a new theater of war, Asia, joined by various other countries: Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.You command the military resources of all 17 nations involved, assembling your fighting force from a phenomenal selection of 1,450 units that have been meticulously reproduced from their source! Command tanks, planes, helicopters, new warships and amphibious units in intense battles of unequaled tactical depth. Master the relief of varied, ultra realistic battlefields, dominate the new maritime areas and rewrite history in a conflict that has been directed and designed in stunning detail by development studio Eugen Systems. Wargame Red Dragon is thrilling in single-player mode with its new dynamic campaign system , and also offers an extensive multiplayer mode where up to 20 players can compete against each other simultaneously. "

The add-ons are different. By the will of modern giants gaming industry the word "DLC" is now perceived with distrust. Collecting money for a couple of new suits and new badges has become the order of the day.

In turn, the French from, as befits very good developers, do not stoop to banal deception of their players. Formally - just an addition to the game. In fact - a full-fledged new part.

So all fans of the Cold War aesthetic will once again be satisfied. The French listened to all the comments of the gaming community and added to the game exactly what it was missing.

Cannon ... They load the cannon ... Why? ..

During negotiations on Hong Kong, Old Thatcher decides to show the largest factory in the world that it is too early to write off the main grandmother of the whole of Great Britain. Meanwhile, students and ordinary citizens of South Korea are taking to the streets to overthrow the dictatorial regime of Jong Doo Hwan - comrade Kim Il Sung, tired of the obsessive "Gangnam style", sends troops to arrest the musician who harassed him and reunite the country along the way. Red Bear and Red Dragon in a border incident decided to find out whose tanks burn longer, and the Japanese armed forces begin to "climb Mount Narodnaya." At the center of all this madness are generals, chiefs of staff, army commanders and, of course, you and me.

Traditionally, there is no time to admire the beauty. Troops are commanded from the tactical mode. A short educational program for everyone who missed the previous parts of the series. Wargame is a tactical real-time strategy in which the player is responsible for commanding the troops of a particular country. A characteristic feature of this series is huge maps and a rather high realism of what is happening. So, your tank can explode after the first successful hit, and the skillful leadership of the infantry unit allows you to destroy the superior forces of the enemy. If you want more details, read the reviews of the previous parts (,) of this wonderful game.

So what is it? The game is based on four story campaigns, the events of which, one way or another, unfold in the South Asian theater of operations. The East, as you know, is a delicate matter, so for a start, the developers decided that they would not fix anything that was not broken. Campaigns in the new part of the series look exactly the same as they looked in - a global map on which we rearrange the figures of tanks and planes, trying to recolor as many territories as possible. When our figures find themselves on the same field with the enemy figures, it becomes possible to arrange a merry tank batch on the tactical map, or simply entrust the calculation of the battle to the computer. In addition, we are constantly haunted by plot or random events, and over time, we are entrusted with well-known "special actions", for example, highlighting the enemy's army or depriving us of the opportunity to use the fleet. In general, everything is familiar.

Give back the stern and bow!

The pearl of the novelty is rightfully the emergence of a combat fleet, and, accordingly, huge maps on which it could be applied. Moreover, maps appeared in which both water and land are present, which completely transforms battles and forces the player to completely reconsider their tactics. Warships are huge and well-armed, in addition, they can shell the land with almost impunity, so the general who first received such an advantage ... cannot consider himself a winner. The "containment and counterbalance system" is superbly implemented. Firstly, we have our own destroyer for each enemy ship - the ships have several types of weapons at once, so that sea battles turn into a real puzzle. Rockets can be hit over great distances, anti-aircraft guns shoot down missiles, and the range of the ship's guns forces us to deftly maneuver, getting closer to strike. Secondly, all these huge clumsy ships easily go to the bottom after a banal and boring raid by bomber aircraft. In a word, the developers have added an absolutely amazing fleet, while not turning it into a kind of superweapon and providing players with many opportunities to destroy it.

The developers have listened to all the comments of the gaming community and added to the game everything that it lacked so much.Eugen Systems listened to fans and lowered prices for military equipment... For once, for the amount given to us at the beginning of the battle, you can buy not only four tanks and a refueling truck, but also collect a pretty decent army. Finally there is a feeling of real global war, and the player controls not units, but a real shock corps, with tanks, helicopters and a formidable destroyer in the roadstead, covering all this disgrace from the sea.

And so that the user does not go crazy, commanding all this militant scrap metal, there was a controlled pause. Yes, cry fans, from now on the game can be paused at any time, twist-turn the battlefield, order this to move here, take those over there, and this "what is it all about, it's interesting" to drive to refuel. A controlled pause negates the advantage of the computer's electronic synapses, so that an imminent attack by bombers can be stopped by sending your steel hawks to intercept in time, and artillery spoiling our nerves can be randomly covered with a salvo of ship guns, or a friendly visit from attack helicopters. In general, a real paradise for a strategist.

I'm an ass like you, sir!

Not without flaws. Moreover, all the same - there is simply no time to watch the colorful and juicy battles, even after the appearance of a controlled pause. No, for about twenty minutes you will admire how tanks crawl back and forth, how effectively planes "lay on the wing" before approaching the target, how artillery guns rise, and how important the cruiser changes its course, similar to a gray spindle - when attacking, you can catch the moment, when the hatches on rocket launchers are stylishly folded back - but after half an hour you will unscrew tactical map to the maximum distance and the rest of the game you will spend among the clouds, commanding conventional images denoting certain units.

Maps that feature both water and land are the best in the game. Despite the innovations, the game still does not explain in any way how one tank differs from another, and why we were given three different artillery mounts. Fans-encyclopedists traditionally do not care about this problem, but the average user is likely to be very annoyed when, during the deployment of troops, he confuses an unarmed command vehicle with an assault tank. In addition, despite the appearance of the fleet, there are somehow not enough maps on which tanks and ships can be simultaneously displayed in the field - however, this problem can be easily solved with the help of a small addition.

Another minor bug is that all the settings get lost from time to time, so do not be surprised if, having twisted the picture to the maximum, you notice that everything has become somewhat angular. In addition, for once I want to quarrel with too smart and strong artificial intelligence, who manages to turn the tide of battle in his favor in the most desperate situation. Perhaps the computer has really become very smart, but sometimes it seems that it is cheating, getting additional units from somewhere out of thin air.

With all the desire, there is not much to scold for. The game is a very high-quality tactical strategy "not for everyone", and if you really like this genre, it will bring you a lot of pleasant minutes. Minor flaws, it seems, will remain in the series, so you will have to take them as part of the gameplay. In general, we have a very, very good game that any self-respecting strategist should try.