So what if the water effects are bad, the damage model is glib, and the scale is nothing at all like actual naval warfare. You get a sense that Eugen wants to take this naval stuff seriously, with long-range Harpoon missiles and offshore shelling and the glorious fart-like braaaaaap sound of defensive guns shooting down incoming ordnance. If you’re an aficionado of the classic Harpoon games and their love of naval hardware, Red Dragon’s diagrams of firing arcs will get your heart racing. And now that Wargame: Red Dragon is out, I can still think of only two games that did a good job of integrating ships into the overall game. In fact, I can think of only two games that did a good job of integrating ships into the overall game: Rise of Nations and Age of Empires III both had a really smart approach to what happens when an RTS goes to sea. Naval combat tends to compromise an RTS, so don’t even think about hosting the game on a water map.

Like the aliens in Signs, RTSs rarely survive contact with water. The ships did that standard RTS thing where they swiveled and banged into each other and jostled each other like a mob instead of a fleet, generally making a mess of a finely tuned game. The engine couldn’t quite handle the expanse of sea alongside the intimacy of a land-based tactical RTS. When Eugen added ships with an expansion, things got loosey-goosey all over again. It was one of the many ways Act of War was better than Command & Conquer for tuning Westwood’s trademark loosey-goosey gameplay. Rather than including airplanes on the map, taking off from the airports you build and then flitting a few screens over to bomb something, Eugen modeled airpower as an offmap asset controlled on a separate panel. Their debut RTS, Act of War, was Command & Conquer with a new take on airpower. You just have to play Wargame: Red Dragon.ĭeveloper Eugen has gone this route from land to air to sea before. If Wargame: European Escalation can do such an awesome job adding planes (read the review of Wargame: Airland Battle here), imagine what they can do with ships.

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