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http://store.steampowered.com/app/251060/
Looks like so much win. I have a copy, waiting for the beta now

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.

An online friend got my 'air land battle' and I never really played 'European escalation' though I did buy that one.

I'm quite excited to see the new factions in action. Hopefully there will be new maps and battlefields.

Pact so far need more nations on their side as Nato has a lot more.

Oh and please god give us the spectre gunship for americans. It's huge, circles around targets and rains down loads of shots. Some say it'd be OP but I just can't help thinking of one or two of those being available for americans even with a jacked up price. It probably gets owned by aircraft though.

The naval units should be pretty nice to see.

In reality, just like all aircraft (which I think the game portrays well) ground attack aircraft die really easily even against a small amount of Anti Air.

But I have played AirLand battle and thought it was great. Is red dragon a sequel?

I was hoping you would get to control a red dragon.
I have been disappointed.

 Swastakowey wrote:
In reality, just like all aircraft (which I think the game portrays well) ground attack aircraft die really easily even against a small amount of Anti Air.

The A-10 doesn't die easily, but that's because it's the melon-fething A-10.

 Swastakowey wrote:
But I have played AirLand battle and thought it was great. Is red dragon a sequel?

Yes.

 purplefood wrote:
I was hoping you would get to control a red dragon.
I have been disappointed.

You can control this little bit of hilarity (god the NK army is great), does that count?

Mother of God... YES....

 purplefood wrote:
I was hoping you would get to control a red dragon.
I have been disappointed.

You can control this little bit of hilarity (god the NK army is great), does that count?

I'm no aeronautical engineer (only half-true), but that doesn't look like it should be able to generate enough lift to fly...

chaos0xomega wrote:
Mother of God... YES....

 purplefood wrote:
I was hoping you would get to control a red dragon.
I have been disappointed.

You can control this little bit of hilarity (god the NK army is great), does that count?

I'm no aeronautical engineer (only half-true), but that doesn't look like it should be able to generate enough lift to fly...

There's also a Hind that has eight of those rocket pods!

Okay now i am interested.

I'm pretty hyped! The only thing that's putting me off is Airland Battle didn't do very well for me out of the gate. I haven't really (ever?) played the adversarial multiplayer, just cooperated against the robots. Airland Battle had some serious problems with its campaign initially, including advertising coop when it didn't have it. They did patch coop in later, so that was good, but the initial experience has me a bit worried.

They said the aircraft will launch flares and stuff now, which sounds pretty cool.

Unfortunately it looks like Red Dragon won't have a coop campaign at all, though the new AI features could make the skirmishes more fun and it sounds like they want to make the single player much better than Airland Battle's.

Oh dear....Well I know what my spare time will be going to when this comes out. But NK? Lord knows i will be expecting some shirt an funny looking head of state making an apperance

Anybody notice on the site that they seem to have taken out Denmark as a playable sub-faction for Nato? I'm not sure if they took them out of the actual game or just left it out by accident. It's not like I'm super bummed about that but somehow I feel like Danes will be p*ssed.

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
I'm pretty hyped! The only thing that's putting me off is Airland Battle didn't do very well for me out of the gate. I haven't really (ever?) played the adversarial multiplayer, just cooperated against the robots. Airland Battle had some serious problems with its campaign initially, including advertising coop when it didn't have it. They did patch coop in later, so that was good, but the initial experience has me a bit worried.

They said the aircraft will launch flares and stuff now, which sounds pretty cool.

Unfortunately it looks like Red Dragon won't have a coop campaign at all, though the new AI features could make the skirmishes more fun and it sounds like they want to make the single player much better than Airland Battle's.

From what I've seen personally and heard about ALB's AI, it cheats a lot. For example, they just know where all of your stuff is, all the time, so they don't have to buy or use recon properly.

 Brunius wrote:

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
I'm pretty hyped! The only thing that's putting me off is Airland Battle didn't do very well for me out of the gate. I haven't really (ever?) played the adversarial multiplayer, just cooperated against the robots. Airland Battle had some serious problems with its campaign initially, including advertising coop when it didn't have it. They did patch coop in later, so that was good, but the initial experience has me a bit worried.

They said the aircraft will launch flares and stuff now, which sounds pretty cool.

Unfortunately it looks like Red Dragon won't have a coop campaign at all, though the new AI features could make the skirmishes more fun and it sounds like they want to make the single player much better than Airland Battle's.

From what I've seen personally and heard about ALB's AI, it cheats a lot. For example, they just know where all of your stuff is, all the time, so they don't have to buy or use recon properly.

Sounds like a lot of AI in a lot of games.

Airland Battle's AI takes cheating to an incredible degree. It will do things like carefully and precisely maneuver just around the maximum ranges of units that it can't see, and do that to slip through defensive lines to kill your command vehicles, which have to sit around immobile in zones potentially far from the fighting.

It stands out especially because reconnaissance features very heavily in Wargame, and the computer not only has perfect intel 100% of the time but exploits it pretty effectively.

However, one of the dev blogs for Red Dragon says that the AI will not have the omniscient intel and will have to use recon units just like players do. If they can make it work well then that will be a fantastic change and should improve the experience a lot from Airland Battle.

 HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
Airland Battle's AI takes cheating to an incredible degree. It will do things like carefully and precisely maneuver just around the maximum ranges of units that it can't see, and do that to slip through defensive lines to kill your command vehicles, which have to sit around immobile in zones potentially far from the fighting.

It stands out especially because reconnaissance features very heavily in Wargame, and the computer not only has perfect intel 100% of the time but exploits it pretty effectively.

However, one of the dev blogs for Red Dragon says that the AI will not have the omniscient intel and will have to use recon units just like players do. If they can make it work well then that will be a fantastic change and should improve the experience a lot from Airland Battle.

I dunno. From what I've seen with A.I. they tend to either do really stupid crap or cheat like crazy. The harder computers also usually have a resource advantage or cheaper units. This has been true with almost every rts I ever have played since the beginning.

I noticed yesterday that this game is out now! I gave one of the single player campaigns a try last night and it seemed improved from Airland Battle.

In Airland Battle, you had a map of the warzone for the campaign to take place over and you'd get a large grouping of soldiers (like a company or something) and they would have a fixed set of units in them that was often quite odd and could not be customised. You could often choose what battlegroups to put on the map, but you couldn't adjust what was in them. In Red Dragon the tokens usually have fewer troops in them and they tend to be focused on a specific purpose. As an example, I had a heavy tank regiment that featured one command vehicle and a dozen or so strong tanks (and then maybe four logistics trucks). Here, instead of moving the large units around and then them fighting one at a time, you move groups of these smaller units around and they fight together, so I might deploy the tank company, a logistics regiment and the air reserve and they can all fight together. You can still run into some really weird combos - for some reason in one battle the tank company didn't join the fight and the next turn it fought on its own against a large enemy group (and won by about 12 points, good job tank company!).

The AI is more interesting in my experience. It does appear that it doesn't cheat anymore (though I'm not sure if it cheats on higher difficulties or, if it does, how). I saw it do things like stumble around in a forest looking for my hidden command vehicle and not finding it for quite a while, which would never have happened in the old games. I'm unsure how stupid it will turn out to be. I did have one map where I had some tanks in a commanding position hidden on the edge of a forest on the crest of a hill. Enemy tanks would advance onto the bridge, come into sight, one or two would get popped and the rest would retreat back out of sight over the bridge. They repeated this dance for a while at intervals before bringing half a dozen tanks around by another route and then crossing the bridge again with the others. This allowed them to overwhelm most of my defense, but I flanked them with a couple of tanks and was able to destroy them right as they dropped bombs on my last heroic, elite-level defender.

The aircraft seem a bit different now. Air defense seems a bit less binary. Things like air to ground missiles are really scary, but the planes don't really seem capable of spotting anything on their own and their armament is limited. AA so far seems less likely to just kill the planes outright unless they hang around, though that could be a mistaken impression.

I did a naval landing and it was kinda neat. You can get ships and patrol boats, amphibious IFVs, landing craft for tanks. I'm not sure how you're meant to fight the ships and boats - I think the game has aircraft built specifically for it. Watching a little boat zip up a river and then blast away with all its cannons is pretty neat.

So from my limited experience it is fun so far.

Sounds good. How's the micro-managing? I've got both of the previous games in the series, but my brief experiments with Escalation found me getting frustrated with micro-managing during the starting single-player campaign (yes, I really suck at it).

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
Pact so far need more nations on their side as Nato has a lot more.

The problem is that adding more Pact nations means just sticking a flag on what is basically the same military repeated over and over again. While all of the NATO nations had their own equipment created by their own defense industries, the Pact was forced to use Soviet equipment (it made them reliant on the Soviets for their defense). Some of the Pact nations had a unique vehicle or two of their own, but everything else was built by the Soviets. So adding more Pact nations would essentially be adding more flags with at most a very minor change to the Pact nation template.

The controls are pretty much the same in all three games. You can tell a unit to go directly to a place by right clicking, to move to a place but stop and fire at any enemies it encounters, or to travel along the road network instead of directly. The new one has added the ability to order units to hold fire (I'm not sure if that was in the older games?).

You're right that it can be a bit... attention-intensive? I don't know if micro is quite the word, but I do have some difficulty keeping track of the battles on larger maps with multiple fronts.

European Escalation's campaign was quite weird though (and some of the missions I thought were pretty tricky, like that one where you are rushing up the map to try and get to the friendly military base or whatever it was) so the skirmish mode might be a bit more representative of the later games. The campaign UI is very much like Airland Battle's, where you can deploy the regiments and stuff like that, except it seems to actually be fun. I think it's because they give you a better baseline - the starting deployment points level seems to be 1000 per side and then you can get bonuses to that from your units being combat-ready, so you don't have the miserable fights Airland Battle had where you had almost no points and couldn't deploy anything and the point income is terrible.

I don't know if any of that made any sense but I hope some of it did.

US Marine decks got a little love compared to ALB. I'm happy.

Still no air superiority Hornet, though. :(

Red Dragon is on sale on Steam for 33% off. The sale will only last for another 36 hours or so (until 10am PST, on 5/21).

You guys have convinced me that I need to get this.

It sounds like what I wanted C&C: Generals to be.

I'm just unhappy that they didn't have the spectre gunship. You know that ac-130 gunship or whatever it was called. Limit it to like one plane and make it expensive. Those things are awesome.

I've been playing the game a lot with a friend. I think I want to change the name of my American deck to 'Team America'. A friend has the name 'Euro bros' for his western Europe deck.

It's a fun game but the enemy A.I. cheats pretty badly I think. If nothing else they get a definite resource boost with which to buy units. It's crazy the size of the army they can amass. They also know exactly where all your crap is like those people that screen-cheat back in the 90's.

The reason they don't have the AC-130 is purely mechanics-based I think. Planes in this game generally don't work that way.

Also it'd just get shot down anyway-- even the Warthog has to be careful lest it get shot down, and it is BY FAR the most durable plane (able to survive multiple missile impacts).

I like the way they've done air. It feels far more balanced now than it did back in ALB, at least.

I'm still just getting used to the switch from ALB to RD because I'm not used to having navies in air land battle.

I also noticed some interesting new things. For instance the French and I think at least western german forces seem to have good stealth helicopters about equivalent to apaches. It definitely caught my interest. I'm pretty sure they're 90's prototype units though. It definitely has me interested though.

Normally I start off my games by goes with lots of infantry in helicopters and then backing them up with anti-air helicopters to provide AA for their approach (pretty much the only things fast enough to catch up with them early game. It seems to be working pretty well. Also some armies in the nato group seem to have tanks without missiles and with poor optics they tend to get sniped by anti-tank infantry or anti-tank vehicles in forests.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
I'm still just getting used to the switch from ALB to RD because I'm not used to having navies in air land battle.

I also noticed some interesting new things. For instance the French and I think at least western german forces seem to have good stealth helicopters about equivalent to apaches. It definitely caught my interest. I'm pretty sure they're 90's prototype units though. It definitely has me interested though.

Normally I start off my games by goes with lots of infantry in helicopters and then backing them up with anti-air helicopters to provide AA for their approach (pretty much the only things fast enough to catch up with them early game. It seems to be working pretty well. Also some armies in the nato group seem to have tanks without missiles and with poor optics they tend to get sniped by anti-tank infantry or anti-tank vehicles in forests.

Yep! NATO armor is typically slightly better with the main gun (in either range, AP, or both), but is outranged by PACT ATGMs. For this reason, I barely bother with NATO tanks - when I do use them, it's usually the American Sheridan, because of the shillelagh it carries.

I usually open with some infantry to garrison a town (because once they're in, you're probably not easily getting them out), an IHAWK/BUK or factional equivalent, plus some TOW vehicles (like the ASLAV TOW). I've typically got an ASF bought, too, to deal with pesky heli rushers

Funny, I find that NATO armor is usually better than PACT armor, myself. The ATGMs used by PACT forces tend to suck anyway.

I'm still adapting from ALB when soviets had some of the best armor. The themes for soviets tends to be load every unit with guns and armor and don't specialize. However the nato groups tend to specialize, have more accurate weapons and seem to have some better guidance systems (then again I play America often these days so whatever).

If I remember west Germany and the UK had some nice tanks. Not sure how they compare to the soviet tanks. I used to remember in ALB there'd be like 25 t-80's of different types (or at least seemingly) in many of the soviet decks that computers used.

Also yeah so far it's mostly just my friends and myself facing and destroying A.I. A.I. still cheats pretty bad in Red Dragon. If anything I find that it cheats much worse. A couple of my friends lists in A.I. hands featured a least a good amount of aircraft all spammed and going for my helicopters that they shouldn't even know about.

SickSix wrote:You guys have convinced me that I need to get this.

Same here. Damn you, dakka.


If anyone wants a good deal on this, gamersgate.co.uk has it for 30 Euros (compared to Steam's 40). Buy key, enter in Steam, download and enjoy.

Funny thing is I have a serious love for Cold War themed games. It's nearly of the same era as us but I have nostalgia to it since it's often placed in the 80's to 90's. Not only that but there's something fun about the soviets or fighting Russians in general. The idea of nukes and at least fairly modern warfare with an opponent that gave the U.S. a serious run for it's money interested me greatly.

@Lynata: Hit me up on steam if you ever want to play a game.

My steam name is:

FKM

in case you want to play a game some time. I play with some of my online friends.

It's a lot of fun. It's got a lot of units in comparison to most other RTS games. Each one has different gear too. You'll get the hang of some. Some are fairly upgraded versions of units from previous times and some just have slightly different weapons loadouts, better accuracy, more ammo or various other stats. Some things might not seem too great at first like small missile spam but then you find out they're fantastic against light vehicles and infantry. A-10's also seem slow but then you realize they have armor, shoot very fast for 30mm guns and have plenty of missiles strong enough to waste tanks. The guns themselves are strong enough to kill both vehicles and lots of infantry.

French tanks for instance as one friend noted seem crappy at first till you realize they're all pretty fast and are good hit and run heavy armor. In fact French helicopters also have some good stealth capabilities for the later versions so it's entirely possible the French are better at hit and run with tanks at least and possibly their helicopters during the 90's. They are basically apache equivalents except stealthier and probably more lightly armed.

I'm not sure if they improved the strength of the Nordic armies yet as the ones in air land battle felt weak in my opinion (esp. Denmark which seems to have been eliminated completely as a sub faction in red dragon). Both german factions were pretty potent, france felt a little weak but seemed to hit and run pretty well, Canada had a couple really nice units in air land battle (some tank killing vehicle with seriously heavy armor and then one prototype missile unit that seemed to be good against vehicles, helicopters, tanks and aircraft) but lacked any sort of long ranged anti-tank infantry to my knowledge and seemed kind of weak in everything in general.