RTS The Great War: Western Front turned me into a WW1 villain

In many wargames, conflict is seen as something that only a few people can solve. If they work hard enough or are intelligent enough they can change the course of events.The Great War: Western FrontPetroglyph Studios’ new strategy game, “” is a real-time strategic game that quickly dismisses all notions of heroism and gallantry, while presenting a realistic portrayal of war’s futility.

Campaigns The Great WarThere is a turn-based view of the Western front and there are real-time battles as armies clash in every hex. Your goal in the campaign, whether playing as the Central Powers or the Triple Entente, is to either capture the enemy headquarters or completely deplete your enemy’s national will — a numerical representation of losses incurred in battle. This is why mounting a solid defense against the enemy that causes them to suffer a significant amount of loss is perfectly acceptable.

Photo: Petroglyph/Frontier Foundry via Polygon

Commanding a defense in The Great WarThis will however force you to abandon the RTS-style tactics that you have learned about keeping your enemy at bay. You might be tempted to create a single-line no man’s land riddled with trenches and machine gun emplacements and supported by artillery, but this paradoxically makes your defense incredibly fragile.

There will always be a weak spot or gap for an enemy to exploit. They’ll make their way straight for your headquarters, without hesitation. A smartly layered defense that allows you to quickly adapt to your enemy’s strategy is far more effective. Inevitably, though, you won’t have enough supplies for every weapon or vehicle you want. Here is the harsh truth of the Western Front: While tanks, planes and machine guns can be expensive, arming men with rifles will cost you very little.

Photo: Petroglyph/Frontier Foundry via Polygon

All too often, I found myself simply plugging a gap in my line with an unconscionable number of soldiers I knew would inevitably perish, but didn’t give it a second thought, because my pride had me convinced that all I needed was a couple hundred more bodies to turn back the enemy’s offensive. Although this strategy was successful on some occasions, I realized that it did more harm than just conceding battle and saving the lives of a few thousand families by reading the conciliatory letters sent from war departments.

After tasting the bitter taste of many pyrrhic wins, I resolved not to wait for the enemy’s turn to confront me in the trenches. No, I was determined to make a push through the front so powerful that we’d have the boche on the run by Christmas. The force I assembled was so large that my nation was effectively bankrupted. But I trusted that the effort would pay off to resolve the crisis quickly.

My choice of time and my place was carefully considered. I wanted to be in a dry area close to the English Channel. However, my spies assured me that it would be well defended. To surge in on the enemy’s line, I set up rows upon rows of soldiers. They encountered the expected resistance and were defeated by artillery fire and machine gun fire. But as the body count rose without my forces capturing a single objective, I fooled myself into thinking that all I needed to win were just two more companies of good men — never mind the fact that we’d already lost 20 others just like them.

Photo: Petroglyph/Frontier Foundry via Polygon

Reflecting on my military dilemma, I thought back to the dramatic final scene. 1917, wherein George MacKay presents orders to a callous and scarred Benedict Cumberbatch, who is so certain that he has the enemy on the run that he’s willing to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to their deaths without a second thought. That was it. It was Benedict Cumberbatch. Instead of consolidating my forces and playing smart, my glory-hounding turned me into someone that was willing to throw lives away for a piece of ground that would inevitably be retaken in two months’ time.

Photo: Petroglyph/Frontier Foundry via Polygon

The human cost of war isn’t something I typically think about when playing a historical RTS like Company of Heroes, or even some entries in the Total War franchise, in which I’m totally OK with just marching a bunch of dudes into a bad time without giving it a second thought. But The Great WarThis forces you think about whether the small amount of dirt you grabbed was really worth the money.