The Great War Preview – p.1

teasers

The First World War was a costly trench warfare in the West for months and years – and that’s exactly what The Great War by Petroglyph depicts, complete with trench systems and barrage.

All screenshots are from GamersGlobal

I can understand if you don’t even want to touch a war strategy game like this these days: The Ex-Command&Conquer-The makers of Petroglyph chose a not-so-appetizing theme with World War I. But if you are interested in this epoch and in particular the western front, there has been little choice so far – especially for RTS fans. into this gap The Great War – Western Frontwith a new approach for real-time strategy.

Speaking of which, the title features both the real-time trench-building tactics and a strategic level that takes place in turns. The playing field is the western front, i.e. the line of trench systems that mostly runs through France and Belgium, nested several times in a row on both sides. The map is divided into hexes, each representing an entire region. Those that have a name, such as Nancy or Paris, are the places that are really fought over.

The campaign mode

I had the opportunity to play The Great War for about three hours, starting with an extensive but necessary tutorial. I was particularly interested in the campaign mode, but not much happened there, at least in terms of the course of the front. Just like in history. Because you don’t just have to win a battle, you also have to accumulate supplies and, above all, troops over many rounds, reconnoiter and then hopefully win the battle at some point – whether diced or played out using real-time tactics. And then you have a maximum of one of the up to 5 stars of a province, and they stand for the loyalty or the control of a territory. The owner only changes when all the stars are gone.

The soldier symbols on typical board game chips are basically nothing more than your troop stocks, which you can use in a battle. In between, there are always objectives on the campaign map that bring you additional troops or resources when they are fulfilled. There is a research tree divided into six categories such as aviation, around 1914, which was still in its infancy. After your move on the strategic map, the computer then moves – and it continues with the next month.

Basically, strategy mode is all about finding a spot where you can finally dare to attack. It was too much clicking through for me, because you have to think a bit before even a “Minor Victory” is predicted. Also, apparently you are not allowed to attack a hex from two or three adjacent regions at the same time, which I believe is nonsense, both historically and mechanically. Due to time constraints, I rolled out most of the battles in my preview season, resulting in troop losses and, depending on the outcome, a plus or minus in national morale. At best, the attacker reduces the province’s control stars by one.

The rather unadorned campaign map is divided into hexes, each representing a province.

Trench construction before real-time battle

Then once you’re in battle mode, there’s the deployment phase, and that’s really unusual. First you build trenches as you like, and the game also remembers them: If several battles take place in a hex field – and this is very often the case – the undestroyed trenches are still there and you can expand and modernize them further . Next we place MG nests, making sure their firing zones overlap. Of course, all of this costs resources. The heavy and light artillery, which plays a crucial role in this game, also wants to be placed.

Battles revolve around above-ground points, denoted by a letter, that we must control. They also allow you to call for reinforcements. There are also various details such as bunkers where troops are safe but not allowed to fire, or the command trench. The trenches usually have two positions, for each squad: they can only fire in one, just looking over the edge of the trench, the squad that may be placed in the second position remains in reserve.

A timer always seems to be running down during the battles, for me it was 20 minutes each time. As an attacker, I have to get out of my trench system for better or worse in order to get an enemy control point. In order to be able to do that, I should first eliminate the trench positions nearby, especially the machine gun nests. For example with concentrated artillery fire.

As in history, it seems nonsensical to chase hundreds of soldiers across the open field towards prepared defenders. The First World War wasted an indescribably large number of human lives in a completely senseless manner – mind you, even in the reference system “war”, which I consider to be senseless in itself – and we are reenacting that here.

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