Wargame: Red Dragon

so much replayablity!

I genuinely believe that Eugen should be legally responsible for fixing a product that they knowingly sold in an almost unplayable state (at least if you're not playing it in multi-player). Hear me out. I don't expect the AI in *Wargame: Red Dragon* to be strategically brilliant. I fully recognize that building an AI capable of competently handling the game's enormous number of units, terrain interactions, reconnaissance, logistics, combined-arms tactics, and operational decisions would be an extremely difficult problem. My criticism is much more basic than that. The game's AI frequently appears incapable of handling even elementary, single-unit tactical decisions. It often ignores the most fundamental characteristics and intended roles of the units it controls, producing behavior that is not merely suboptimal, but downright nonsensical. For example, the AI will sometimes repeatedly send individual air-defense vehicles toward an enemy position even after every friendly unit that could conceivably need their protection in that area has been destroyed - sometimes many minutes earlier. At that point, the AA vehicles are not making a questionable strategic decision; they are simply driving toward the enemy and getting killed for no apparent purpose. Similarly, vehicles whose weapons fundamentally require them to stop before firing can behave as though that limitation doesn't exist. Swedish Strv 103s, for example, may continue driving directly toward a group of BTR-90s, passing through their effective range and getting destroyed without stopping to make use of their own weapons. The AI seems unable to recognize the most elementary relationship between a unit's movement and its ability to employ its weapon effectively. Another recurring example is the behavior of lightly armed APCs. An APC may encounter an enemy at close range and spend minutes firing its essentially useless 7.62 mm machine gun at it while refusing to dismount the infantry it is carrying - even when those infantry could destroy the opposing unit almost immediately. The transport vehicle is effectively sacrificing itself while its actual combat element sits inside it unused. Transport helicopters can exhibit essentially the same problem. A helicopter carrying infantry may encounter an enemy and choose to engage it with its weak onboard machine guns rather than unload the troops it is carrying. Again, this isn't a failure to formulate a sophisticated battlefield plan. It is a failure to recognize the basic purpose of the unit and the capabilities of its passengers. These examples are important because they demonstrate that the problem is not simply that the AI makes poor strategic choices. The AI frequently fails at decisions that could reasonably be handled by very simple rules: * A vehicle should recognize when its primary weapon cannot be used effectively while moving. * A unit should avoid engaging an enemy it cannot meaningfully damage with its available weapons. * A transport carrying infantry should generally unload those infantry when they are better suited to deal with the immediate threat. * An AA vehicle should have some concept of what it is actually protecting. * A unit should recognize when continuing to move toward an enemy is simply going to result in its destruction without accomplishing anything. None of this requires an AI capable of playing *Wargame* like a human. It doesn't require sophisticated operational planning or an understanding of combined-arms doctrine. These are essentially basic unit-level state and priority decisions. That is what makes the state of the AI so frustrating. *Wargame: Red Dragon* is an extraordinarily complex tactical game, and I would have no problem accepting an AI that occasionally makes poor decisions because of that complexity. But there is a fundamental difference between an AI making a bad tactical decision and an AI apparently failing to understand what its own units are capable of doing. The result is that the single-player experience can become less of a battle against an opposing force and more of an exercise in exploiting the AI's numerous behavioral deficiencies. The player isn't necessarily defeating an opponent that made worse decisions; they are frequently watching units behave in ways that a reasonably attentive human player would never consider. This leaves me with the uncomfortable impression that Eugen treated the AI as something that merely needed to exist rather than something that needed to provide a competent single-player experience. I don't expect perfection, and I don't expect the computer opponent to match a skilled human. But I do expect the developer to make a serious effort to ensure that individual units at least behave in accordance with their weapons, capabilities, and roles. At times, *Wargame: Red Dragon* gives the impression that this effort simply wasn't made to anything approaching an adequate degree. And if the single-player component is part of the product being sold to customers, I consider that a serious deficiency - not merely an amusing quirk of an otherwise sophisticated game.

Great game. Play it.

kewl have been playing since like 2015

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