the operational art of war iv screenshots

The only real bit of micro in Regiments is that your on-field artillery pieces require you to give them a target before firing. However, if left idle, units in the game will eventually dig in and become really hard to shift from the forward arc. And you can even do realistic tactics, like smoking and suppressing an enemy position, and then rushing infantry to within 300 meters to dismount and give them what-for. Dismount and remounting are just a hotkey press away. In any case, I love this system! It’s so easy to use and fun. You’ll only ever have a handful (and never more than in the campaign), but they cover things like artillery-delivered smoke, barrages, and illumination (not everyone has the sweet NATO thermals), fixed-wing air-strikes, area reveals, and just chucking a conventional theater-level ballistic missile at someone. Oh, and what wonderful call-ins we get, with their own separate points pool and recharge times. Sometimes, you just need to hold the line a little longer for the reinforcements to reach you and the call-ins to arrive in. Of course, retreating isn’t always viable or desirable. Just try not to get to that point, and scoot sooner rather than later. You’ll still see your units shoot at the retreating troops, sometimes actually destroying the platoon before it gets away.

Sure, retreating first turns the unit tag grey, and then it entirely disappears, but your tanks don’t just vanish off the table. A unit that retreats instead of getting blown up will keep its veterancy level and can redeploy on the table that much faster. Retreating is a very important feature of Regiments, though. The reserve formations from KdA Militarbezirk III can put a lot of bodies on the field even with a handful of platoons. However, you do have the option of staying and completing more objectives (read: capturing more zones) if that is what you wish. Sometimes, if you’re that good of a commander, you can finish operations faster by completing objectives and advancing onto the next stage. You might also fight on the same map several times as you inch towards victory. Operations can be of variable size and length, with some only lasting a couple of battles and others taking much longer. “Operation” is what Regiments calls its campaigns, though they’re closer to scenario bundles. With unrest sparking in Poland and Germany (where you actually get to participate in the action), and then spilling out into a larger war, you alternate between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces from operation to operation. Unlike Wargame, which used to have several campaigns covering different scenarios of the hypothetical popping off, Regiments is focused on a single possible conflict. I guess the kids all grew up and are nostalgic for that because Regiments just released, adding to the list of Cold War Gone Hot games we have coming out right now. But for the dads, it meant playing out the what-if scenarios of war breaking out in hex-and-chit games.

Being a kid during the Cold War meant dealing with the fact that you could find yourself turning into a handful of radioactive ash at any moment.

The operational art of war iv screenshots