The Wargamer

UNDER THE VOLKSWAGEN HOOD, A DAIMLER-BENZ ENGINE!

Commander: Europe at War is a turn-based game of grand strategy. It is almost defiantly turn-based, none of this sissified trendy “we-go” or “continuous real-time” nonsense. I sort of remember asking Iain McNeill: “Why’d you decide to go with an old-fashioned turn-based system?” And he very sensibly replied: “Because we’re old-fashioned gamers, Bill, and the bloody game wouldn’t work as well as a sick sow’s bum if we tried to force it into any other mold!”

The map, which fits nicely on a single monitor panel without the need for much scrolling except at the highest magnification, comprises 150 by 72 hexes. On screen-left are the eastern coasts of Canada and the United States; to the south, the playing area includes all of the terrain in North Africa that was actually fought-over; on screen-right, the steppes of Russia extend roughly to the Volga River and slightly beyond (to accommodate the strategically important bend where the Volga flows into the waters around the Crimea); northwards, the campaigning area extends approximately to the Arctic Circle. Basically, this gives the gamer every square mile of land and sea on which major combat took place in Europe.

The scale of both terrain and unit icons has been cleverly jiggered to appear consistent, and to function with rock-solid consistency in the game, but some hexes contain a full corps, while others (usually key cities, ports, or “fortress” areas, are occupied by vaguely defined but very useful “garrisons” (they’re cheap to buy, when you just need warm bodies with rifles to plug the holes in your line, but don’t expect them to do much besides defend themselves and buy time for you by acting as speed bumps). Naval units are semi-abstracted: a destroyer icon, presumably, represents a squadron or a flotilla, but a battleship icon clearly represents a single capital ship; ditto for aircraft carriers. Aerial units may be “squadrons” or “wings” or “gaggles”—their literal size and number doesn’t matter so much as their cohesion, survivability, and above all other bits of data, their “effectiveness” (which term, itself, denotes the datum you get when you average-out as many as fifteen specific, detailed contributing factors, ranging from technological advances to leadership bonuses; armor and infantry formations operate the same way). How actual historically-calculated unit size might differ from the notional-but-convenient game-size is not explained in the manual and only the truly anal-retentive grognards will even care after the first fifteen minutes of play; suffice it to say that everything “scales” just right, in proportion to everything else. In terms of basic visual design, this is no mean feat of trompe-l'oeil, and is typical of the meticulous care with which every element of this game, vertical or horizontal, dove-tails seamlessly into the next.

Each turn represents, more or less, two weeks of real time—the pacing and tempo are well-matched to the scale of the action and the fascinating, sometimes very tense, competition in research and development, which roughly parallels actual history and results in, first, the Allies and then the Axis gaining a temporary but very dramatic edge in one facet of tactics or strategy, are all finely balanced. Yet despite the multitude of fine-grained design-choices that went into the programming, Commander: Europe at War feels reassuringly solid and robust; “Built”, as folks in my part of the country often say, “like a brick outhouse”. I couldn’t help but compare this game’s “feel” of quiet authority with the twitchy, bi-polar tremors of hysteria given off by Pacific Storm (a game I wanted desperately to like, struggled with for six weeks, ended up mostly loathing, and finally dissected in a schizoid, utterly out-of-control 10,000-word two-part review which Zabek had the good editorial sense to reject).

A BIG WAR, SERVED IN BITE-SIZED CHUNKS

There are several stand-alone scenarios, keyed to critical historical turning-points (“Barbarossa”, “D-Day”, etc) and a truly absorbing grand campaign, which begins on the day Poland was invaded and can either end when the real war did, in the spring of 1945, or can be optionally set to last indefinitely beyond that time. By all means give the open-ended campaign a whirl, if you’ve got plenty of time to immerse yourself in the experience, because it almost inevitably starts to diverge from the historical time-line by late 1943, and, if the Germans knock Great Britain out of the war, the climax can easily evolve into a truly apocalyptic showdown between an Axis-dominated Europe and the economic colossus of the United States (and if you think the Germans showed amazing ineptitude when they couldn’t get it together long enough to carve out a beachhead across the Straits of Dover, only twenty-something miles from its starting point, wait until you try to organize them for a trans-Atlantic invasion of North America, which is sure to be furiously resisted!)

Optional rules also include an on/off button for Fog of War, six degrees of difficulty handicapping (three per side), and for those who demand the harshest sort of realism, the almost sadistic regulations governing “oil consumption”. For the Allies, running out of gas is just a temporary annoyance; for the Reich, it was a life-or-death issue, one Hitler never truly solved. In fact, commanding the German side with the Oil Consumption option engaged will give you an uncomfortable feeling of sympathy for Hitler’s otherwise deranged obsession with marching through the Caucasus Mountains and seizing the Baku oilfields beyond. I’ve always thought that few images conveyed the real-world consequences of the Fuhrer’s delusional strategy more vividly than the newsreels showing Wehrmacht mechanized columns inching through a savage mountainous landscape, shrouded in their own dust, while mutely on the heights around them, bandoliered tribesmen watched from astride their sturdy, bandy-legged ponies and shook their heads in bemusement at this Infidel’s assumption that, simply because the Khan in Berlin ordered them to, armored columns could somehow lurch through to a chimerical victory, when the only routes available to them were almost impassable for indigenous men mounted on specially-bred camels!

THOSE PRECIOUS, PRICELESS, PRODIGIOUSLY HARD TO AMASS, PRODUCTION POINTS!

Every aspect of war-waging in Commander: Europe at War, except, perhaps, bayonet fighting, is dependent upon the acquisition, accumulation, and prudent disbursement of Production Points, which serve as a universal medium-of-exchange, and which are never, ever, available in such large amounts as to permit the gamer unrestricted freedom to take care of every high-priority item on any one turn’s wish-list: the player might be able to perform some long-distance movement, upgrade the weaponry in a handful of units, replace the casualties in a few more and purchase ONE new unit…but he’ll never be able to do all of those things, in quantities significant enough to create a rapid change of fortune in his side’s favor. This can be infuriating at times—like when I couldn’t launch a major operation because I lacked five PPs of being able to get all the necessary units beefed up and in the right locations…gamers will likely find they will have them organized by the next turn, but by then the enemy, human or AI-controlled, will probably have figured out your intentions and maneuvered his units to block you…unless he, too, is short of the necessary PPs!

It seems as though everything except a visit to the latrines requires the expenditure of PPs: declarations of war, embarking and unloading from transports, upgrading equipment, even simple replacement of warm bodies.

Every nation starts with a Base Rate of PPs, as of September 1, 1939, and that is an immutable fundamental datum…except for boot-strapping improvements to the national infrastructure, which cost even more PPs than a whole corps of armored units (and won’t show any tangible benefits for months to come), the only way to acquire more PPs is to fight a war, win it, and seize those belonging to another country! To win in this game, the player must ruthlessly prioritize: if you want, for instance, to level-up in the design of U-boats, you must first make a whopping investment in new research laboratories (which probably won’t leave you with enough PPs to prevent the loss of a some veteran units, due to next-turn attrition), and then wait for that investment to pay off, six months to a year later. It’s one of those tough command decisions: spend those PPs to shore up a crumbling defensive line, or invest them in a major infrastructure upgrade that may allow you, in the medium-future, to boost all your U-boats to Level 5 lethality, while your enemy’s escort vessels are still mired in Level Two anti-submarine techniques. You’re going to gain something and lose something, no matter what your decision is!

This constant, pitiless need to choose between an immediate tactical boost and a bigger hypothetical benefit somewhere in the future, is a tightrope-walk across the cruel Abyss of Irreconcilables, because up until the final stages of a campaign game (by which time it should be pretty obvious who’s got the better chance of prevailing) neither side will usually have enough PPs stockpiled to pick up everything on his shopping list; and more often than not, the most vital items on that list are so costly as to be mutually exclusive! I.e., if you spend enough to bring all your crippled units up to nominal TO & E strength, you simply won’t have enough left to buy a new squadron of Stukas.

If you lack liquidity, the only was to expand your economy is through forcible annexation of another country’s mines, ports, natural gas fields, and heavy industry. Usually, the most valuable resource sites are far behind the front lines and heavily defended; you’ll to fight tooth-and-nail for them and simultaneously try to avoid damaging them heavily—a nice little dilemma for the general who plans your bombing missions! You COULD lose if you don’t pay close enough attention to turn-by-turn frontline events; but if you don’t constantly monitor and fine-tune your long-range strategy for economic expansion, you surely WILL lose.; so, like the historical Axis, you may be compelled to take appalling tactical risks in order to reach distant strategic objectives, without which your industrial base cannot maintain a robust rate of expansion.

The game does provide you with a “softer” alternative to brute conquest. If you’re not strong enough to tear a passageway through to those distant oil fields, you can make strategic bombers your highest weapons priority and launch a grinding air campaign of attrition that will probably cost you hundreds of planes but will eventually whittle-down the enemy’s vital resources. That’s an option certain generals advised Hitler to consider for the Eastern Front, but the Fuhrer thought Stukas were sexier than big, lumbering high-altitude bombers, so virtually none of the potentially very lethal big bombers on the drawing boards ever got beyond a prototype or two. This prejudice in favor of tactical dive-bombers is generally considered one of the worst technological mistakes made by the Germans, and if you elect to command that faction, you’d be well advised not to repeat the same blunder.

But the need for amassing more and more PPs becomes such an obsession, in some games, that it can lead to irrational decisions even when you know perfectly well that they ARE irrational! In one campaign, playing as the Axis commander, I got so exasperated by my economic dependence on imported Swedish iron ore that I finally decided to invade the bloody country, even if that meant heavy losses and a long delay in the executing of much more vital operations far away from Scandinavia. So I did; and the Swedes fought back hard. I’d envisioned a six-turn campaign, and it ultimately lasted thirteen turns, for a while sucking up resources and units at an appalling rate.

I didn’t feel quite so foolish after the dust settled and I saw that, by bloodily annexing this great Swedish land-mass off to the east, I had also made the conquest of Norway infinitely easier and cheaper than it would have been from a seaborne invasion.