Overview
One guide to rule them all! This 2019 guide is an extensive overview of Wargame: Red Dragon for new and experienced players alike, that also provides links to all the other updated and important guides, arranged in order of importance. Built through thousands of hours of gameplay and study, in consultation with Wargame’s best players and mentors at r/wargamebootcamp, this is designed to teach you about all major aspects of gameplay in as few words as possible. For those who want to continue their study, there are dozens of hyperlinks and an entire section of links to other important guides and gameplay videos. I designed this document so that it is the only thing you’ll need to learn everything there is to be read or watched about one of the best RTS games in history.”It is great. This is a lot of knowledge collected in a very nice and understandable way.” -Putin187, #3 ranked player in the world, repeat tourney winner.”Your guide is good.” -Tyrnek, r/wargamebootcamp and author of many of the linked Wargame guides.
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this guide is to provide a strategic framework for how to play Wargame: Red Dragon, especially in 1 vs 1 ranked format. This document explains the “big picture” of how to approach a Wargame: Red Dragon match. A theoretical foundation and strategic doctrine are important components of learning Wargame, which is too unique to rely on strategies taken from other RTS or RTT games. This guide will be helpful to complete noobs and experienced players alike, but it is intended to be read after watching the , which is what the in-game tutorial should have been. Part 5: FURTHER READING contains the many other important and detailed guides about tactics, units, mechanics, and deckbuilding—arranged based on the order in which they should be read. It also includes directions to the Wargame community.
The first two parts compliment each other—PART 1: THEORY is how to make sense of the factors at play in a Red Dragon match, and PART 2: COMBAT MANEUVERS articulates the consensus on how most good players negotiate those factors during play. Admittedly, you will improve substantially with just the combat maneuvers, but without a theoretical grounding you will be forever programmatic and predictable—unable to adapt, and quickly bored. And due to the importance of the metagame factors in Wargame: Red Dragon, your success without theory will be short-lived against any thinking player. Knowing the theoretical concepts will allow you to be creative in your approach, and ultimately make the game more engaging and dynamic. PART 3: PRAXIS & THE ARC OF A MATCH shows how all of the previous maneuvers and concepts work in concert over the course of a conquest match. PART 4: POST GAME includes some important community etiquette information to ensure that you find other players and behave appropriately to have an enjoyable multiplayer experience.
NOTE: while most of the concepts in this guide are applicable to all types of matches, they will focus on 1 vs 1 conquest mode. That is not an insult to team/destruction games, but a reflection of my personal experience. There is also no mention of naval play, which does merit insult.
And with that, let’s jump into it!
PART 1: THEORY
Key concepts: initiative, defensive advantage, winning position, value, metagame
In a way, it is easy to think of Wargame as analogous to chess: you have an array of units of varying capabilities and values, which you must synergize to capture territory and eventually attack your enemy’s command unit. Infantry are much like pawns: cheap and plentiful, often both the front line and backbone of your forces, and disposable but dangerous if you get too close. Superheavy tanks and planes are like queens: capable of quickly destroying targets at range, but often sought after by your opponent, and requiring support from surrounding pieces to be used most effectively. And command vehicles, or “CVs” are like your king, in that they are kept away from combat (if you’re smart) and losing them means losing the game. A Wargame match is like a chess match in that you have a set number of pieces, you gain advantage by taking more ground and pieces off the board than your opponent, and your opening moves will play a pivotal role in the outcome of the game. In tactical situations, Wargame can be thought of like chess combined with rock/paper/scissors, where you know all of the factors at play and which units are most effective against which other units. Strategically, however, Wargame is more like poker, and we will draw on concepts from both games to develop our strategies.
In chess, you can see all of your opponent’s pieces. As a result, chess is about both players engaging the board, for no matter what happens in your opponent’s head, you know exactly where all of their pieces are at all times. Wargame, by contrast, is a game in which information is one of the most important components—knowing OPFOR’s position and which units they have allows you to use the rock-paper-scissors elements of Wargame to great effect, and a game can end very quickly if one player finds out where their adversary is hiding their CVs! You will only ever have a partial understanding of what your opponent is doing, and this requires a fundamentally different approach to how the game is played.
Chess also has a mathematically limited number of outcomes, while a Wargame match can unfold in mathematically infinite ways, and is fundamentally about the players rather than the pieces. Although every unit has limited capabilities worth understanding, anticipating their use is fundamentally about predicting your opponent’s behavior and developing contingencies for the most likely events. In this regard, Wargame is more akin to poker: in poker, each player has cards of varying strength, and the key to victory is through deceiving your opponents about your own force while attempting to uncover theirs. And like Wargame, the information is always partial and often speculation, requiring the player to re-assess the likelihood of certain events, and to make moves according to their perceived probabilities. These probabilities can be as simple as the likelihood of a tank missing its intended target, or as complex as where and when your opponent will assault your lines. Anticipating outcomes is not about probability equations in your head though; you just need a rough idea of the factors at play. Individual hits and misses, or the precise location of smoke, can have pivotal influence, but Wargame is ultimately about strategic and tactical skill far more than random number generation (RNG). Now let’s move through some chess, poker, and general game theory concepts that will help you in Wargame.
1.1 Initiative
Initiative[en.wikipedia.org] in chess is the ability to make moves that force one’s opponent to respond, allowing the attacker to control the direction of the game. Having the initiative gives you creative control over when, where, and how engagements occur. This keeps you one step ahead of your opponent and allows you to plan coordinated attacks that your opponent can only react to. For example: you spot an enemy tank on the field and respond by immediately purchasing an ATGM plane or a tank of your own; whatever plans you had before have been modified based on your opponent’s behavior. Another example: you are planning to invest units for a large attack, only to find there is an enemy recon unit near your spawn zone, so you instead spend 60 points on an attack helicopter to destroy it. In both cases, you may have made the correct choice, but in both cases you are definitely responding to your enemy rather than forcing your enemy to respond to you. The best way to gain initiative is to play aggressively: a static and defensive force is not acting, but waiting to be acted upon.
1.2 Defensive Advantage
Impeding your aggression, however, is the fact that static units in Wargame: Red Dragon have many advantages over moving units attacking them: static units are often hidden until they fire, giving them the first salvo; static units almost always have higher accuracy; static units can be repaired and resupplied; and infantry nestled in buildings and treelines gain hitpoint (“HP”) bonuses. These factors give static units and formations defensive advantage. As a result, attacking forces must contain a larger point investment than defensive forces to be successful.
1.3 Winning Position
This next term, I’ve appropriated as a Wargame neologism: winning position. Our goal at the outset of a match is to gain winning position. Winning position is control of enough command zones to win the game. If your push is intended to stop at a point that, were the front lines maintained for the game’s entirety, you would not be able to secure a +1 or greater tick, then you need to have a subsequent push or infiltration planned. Of course, winning position is an abstract idea complicated by the back-and-forth of real matches, the need to change plans based on your opponent, and the ability to gain early point leads by starting with multiple CVs. But it is a very helpful frame for effectively planning your match. There will be moments in the middle of a match where you need to ask yourself, “What do I do to win?” A more concrete question is “Where does my front line need to be to win?” The answer to that question is winning position.
1.4 Value, Trading, Force Disparity
The goal of every click in a Wargame match is to extract value[en.wikipedia.org] from your units. “Value” is a catch-all term I’ve appropriated from poker that describes the potential return on investment for a given action. To bluff in poker, as you probably know, is to gain value without having the force to back it up. “Betting for value” by contrast, consists of investing a certain amount of your chips with the assumption that they are backed by sufficient power (your hole cards) to win you more chips, based on your opponent(s) making the incorrect wager. In Wargame, your deployment points are like your poker chips, which you must spend in the ways you find most advantageous. So if a player can, say, kill a 170-point tank with a 15-point infantry squad, they have gotten a very large amount of value from their 15-point investment. Conversely, their opponent would likely regard this as a serious loss (although the opponent would look at their expensive tank in terms of the amount of value it was able to produce before being destroyed). Thinking about this can be helpful in deciding what units to take in your deck, and whether you are using them effectively.
A related concept is trading units. When you lose a unit to kill another unit(s), this is known as “trading,” and to “trade well” is to lose less expensive units—or less valuable units—than your opponent. Profitable trades can be qualitative as well as quantitative: quantitative gains result in a greater ratio of points on the field (in the form of units) compared to your opponent, and a qualitative advantage can mean eliminating an entire unit type. For example, if you manage to kill all of your opponent’s anti-plane AA within the first 20 minutes, you can use the latter half of the game to take advantage of your air superiority with bombers and ground-attack jets. Qualitative disparities also have tactical value: if you can remove a unit of a certain type (like AA or a heavy tank) from a particular front, you can exploit this gap with a timely attack using units no longer threatened (in the rock/paper/scissors sense).
Repeatedly trading well in a match will result in an increasing force disparity between you and your adversary. All players begin the game with the same number of points to spend, but as the game continues and units are destroyed, there is potential for a greater and greater disparity between force size, meaning that steadily trading units in your own favor will afford you a decisive advantage in the late game.
Always avoid floating more than 200 points. Unspent (“floating”) points are useful for their flexibility (they have not yet assumed the form of a specific unit), but leaving more than 200 points floated is generally considered harmful to maximizing your forces on the map. Remember: it takes time for purchased units to reach their destination and start accruing value.
Also note that preserving a unit does not necessarily maximize its value—a unit that never sees combat, gathers intel, or otherwise affects your enemy is a waste of points—also known as a dead buy. But don’t restrict your thought on value to the units destroyed in the post-game kill list! That list is deceptive—it only accounts for the units that dealt killing blows, and is not an accurate reflection of the value of most pieces. Many units—expensive and inexpensive alike—will not kill more points than their cost, even in games you win with ease and large point deficits in kills. But that’s okay—good use of combined arms means that some units are meant to take damage, or deal only some damage, while others deal killing blows. Furthermore, and more importantly, conquest games such as those in ranked matches are not about kill/death ratios! Who kills more units in conquest matches is correlated with the winner, but the winner of a conquest match is the one who achieves more conquest points or who kills all enemy CVs.
As a result, getting value should not be thought of solely as killing OPFOR units: gathering intelligence, gaining ground and strategic position, refitting your own forces, and slowing down the enemy all produce value. For example, a FOB that continually resupplies a Longbow attack helicopter and reduces the need to buy fresh supply trucks can add tremendous, somewhat unquantifiable value. Conversely, a FOB that only loses a few thousand supply points over the course of the game might be a “leak” in value that needs to be removed, based on your playstyle. But no matter how much you can calculate value in your head, it is worth nothing in Wargame if you don’t factor in your opponent’s playstyle. And in order to do that, you need to understand the metagame.
1.5 Metagame
In Red Dragon, the metagame[en.wikipedia.org] (“meta”) is basically a collection of assumptions about your opponent based on your past experiences and talking with other players. To excel in Wargame, you need to have some sort of idea of what your opponent is going to do if you want to effectively counter them, and this is something you will learn most from practice. For example, some players exploit the trend of using only mid-tier ASFs in ranked matches by adding top-tier ASFs to their decks. The choice is not as cost-effective from a purely mathematical perspective, but it’s a wager that can allow the intrepid player to have air dominance over their more conservatively-minded opponents, resulting in adding value to their matches. As a consequence of this, more players begin adding top-tier planes to their deck, and this trend may continue to the point that players begin wagering that some other alteration to their decks or playstyles will be incorporated to exploit this trending investment in Rafales, Eurofighters, or SU-27PUs. In other words, always pay attention to the other player(s), and rely more on information about them and dominant patterns than just the units on the field.
The extension of this thought is that surprise is one of the most powerful tools you have in your arsenal. Especially on ranked maps, almost all openings are one of two types of push. This means that even experienced players will become complacent and expect certain enemy moves, which they will generally feel comfortable responding to. But if you do something your enemy has not seen before, you will likely catch them out of position and make them stop and think. Of course, surprise is fleeting, so the more time your enemy has to adjust to a novel turn of events, the more the balance of power will shift back towards skilled tactics and experience, so strike hard and strike quickly—consolidate your advantage before the enemy can counter it.
1.6 Mental Load
Wargame: Red Dragon is a game that revolves around managing many different complex, dynamic elements—especially in smaller and 1 vs 1 matches. Even the best players can struggle to manage all of their units and remember to complete all of their planned tasks. At any given moment you will likely be thinking about calling in reinforcements, directing an infiltration mission, managing supply trucks, and smoking your superheavy. I would therefore be remiss if I didn’t touch on the factor of mental load, or your brain’s limitations in the frantic multitasking that can make Wargame so stressful and exhausting. Most importantly, remember that your ability to multitask and increase your actions per minute (APM) will improve over time: you will develop a sense of the rhythm and arc of a match that will transfer the work of many tasks to muscle memory. That being said, remember that there are ways to decrease your own mental load (through learning to use hotkeys and queuing unit orders) and increase your opponent’s (by playing aggressively, harassing enemy positions with indirect fire, and advancing in multiple areas at once through probing and infiltration). I would argue that making OPFOR’s alert horn sound with something as effortless as a mortar strike will gain metagame value in terms of their mental load!
1.7 Tilt
Tilt[en.wikipedia.org] is emotional agitation from incurring losses, and it causes players to act more irrationally than they would if they were calm (and adds to their mental load). As both poker and Wargame involve making frequent gambles and either winning or losing, tilt occurs in both. In poker a player bets, raises, or calls with their chips; a Wargame player buys units they command into the fray. When this move results in a perceived loss, it registers emotionally. Tilt is important to recognize in both yourself and the other player—to minimize it in yourself and, within reason, maximize it in the other player. Now let me be clear: I am not endorsing cheesy tactics or metagames like verbal abuse to induce tilt, and you should upbraid any player who does. However, it helps to remember that the value you get from destroying your opponent’s units has an effect not just on your position, but on your opponent’s morale and mental load. In Wargame, a unit’s morale affects how well they perform their duties—a panicked unit will become useless and may rout[en.wikipedia.org]. You can induce this behavior in the other player as well if they are prone to tilt, resulting in them making errors or even surrendering prematurely. Killing expensive units like tanks, planes, and CVs are especially acute moments to induce tilt, and therefore should be understood to produce metagame value. Conversely, be mindful of your own tendency to tilt, and try to keep yourself calm. Many players become verbally abusive when they tilt and start typing about “OP DLC” or make other excuses for directing vitriol at their opponent. I tend to direct anger at myself and start typing about how I am terrible at the game. Don’t do this. Nobody wants to hear it. Take a deep breath and remember: it’s just a game, and repeated failure is the pathway to success.
PART 2: COMBAT MANEUVERS
Key concepts: Situational awareness, probe vs push, infiltration, retreat/consolidate, reposition
Now that you have an idea of the concepts that underlie your Wargame decisions, let’s look at the major plays that can achieve your strategic goals. I will attempt to break down some of the main troop movements you will use in a match. But first let’s talk briefly about situational awareness.
2.1 A Note on Situational Awareness
The first thing I want to say is, quite simply, ZOOM OUT! You cannot maintain optimum situational awareness zoomed in very far, and you gain little in doing so outside of very specific actions, such as positioning recon right at the edge of a forest, or trying to see what kind of unit was just destroyed. Get adjusted to staying almost completely zoomed out most of the time. You can enjoy the aesthetics in the replay—for now stay high up! It may be tempting to zoom in while microing your superheavy, but you will find that this leads to missiles bursting from the top of your monitor with no warning and killing it, because you couldn’t see the incoming ATGM plane.
Field of View
The second portion of situational awareness is to use that annoying attack horn to your advantage. When you hear it, look at the top-center of your screen for the red text: if a unit has been destroyed, it will tell you the unit type. On your minimap, that unit will be identified with a circle and, if killed, also appear as a red “X.” If you are not sure where the attack occurred, press the spacebar and your camera will center the attacked unit.
Interface
Set your UI to the displayed settings (necessary for tactical micromanagement) in the menu by selecting OPTIONS > INTERFACE and set “Labels Style” to “European Escalation.” You can include icons if you like, but the main point with this setting is to turn unit merging off.
Hotkeys
Hotkeys allow you to quickly select key units to manipulate them, so that you can quickly respond to the dynamic battlefield. This is extremely efficient with units that require quick reference that may be muddled in a large group or out of frame.
My hotkeys are as follows:
1 – mortar
2 – All ASFs
3 – left/first radar AA
4 – right/second radar AA
5 – MLRS/artillery
In addition to these keys, I have assigned the following keys to the thumb pad of my mouse:
Unload
- Turn weapons on/off
- Land
I find having these keys on my mouse very helpful, but all that is important is that you learn to commit hitting all of these keys to muscle memory. Spending a few minutes in a game with no opponents just practicing selecting units via hotkey will go a long way.
How you arrange your hotkeys is really up to you, as long as you have a hotkey system and use it. At the bare minimum you should hotkey your heavy radar AA and mortar.
2.2 Probe vs Push
The two most central offensive maneuvers are the probe and the push. Pushing is often discussed—it is the act of assaulting territory to take ground by force, best achieved with a mixture[honhonhonhon.wordpress.com] of units. Probing is moving up units with the intent of either gathering intel about the enemy’s position (recon), or to take ground “for free” that the enemy is not contesting. It is essential that you know the difference between these two maneuvers before you start moving your units, because each one has different consequences. Probing requires only one unit, and usually the scouting unit is worth losing in exchange for the information gained. Probing is usually done with cheap infantry, recon, or 5-point transports. Pushing is only profitable if new ground is taken or enemy losses are so great that you emerge with a superior strategic position. If you “push” with a few units that get destroyed while exposing enemy positions, you have just lost many points for intel that a few cheap units could have secured, and you gained no free ground. On the other hand, if you “probe” with a large force to only kill a few cheap units and don’t gain a strategic advantage, you’ve essentially just whiffed a big punch and are now off balance: you have a whole bunch of points in an irrelevant position. Know what your intended goal is with your offensive movement, and plan accordingly.
2.3 Infiltration
Similar to probing is infiltration, but this gets its own category since it involves a more deliberate special mission. Unlike probing, infiltration is not about gaining ground, but about gaining intel and killing high value targets like CVs. Infiltration is usually a matter of dropping off recon or special forces (“SF”) infantry on flanks for the sole purpose of identifying and/or killing enemy CVs and heavy artillery, or to at least identify their location to launch airstrikes/artillery. However, infiltration can utilize vehicles and helicopters as well, and need not be on the margins of the map—a single AMX-10 RC can often drive right up the middle of Nuclear Winter Is Coming and reach the enemy’s spawn zone! Infiltration can also serve a counter-infiltration role, since the same routes are often trafficked by both sides. During infiltration missions, it can be useful to turn off some or all of your unit’s weapons, so that they do not reveal themselves until their mission is completed. With infantry units, you may want to attack-move with only the AT weapon on, or just standard move to avoid attracting the attention of destroying vehicles. After all, once your infantry unit is discovered, the enemy will react, but a passive recon unit can give you intel about what your opponent is deploying for the entire game. Which tactic brings you more value will be a judgment call. To avoid this happening to you, use base defense in the form of recon, high-rate-of-fire (“ROF”) weapons to stunlock infantry and helicopters, and tripwire units. Tripwire units are those that have minimal offensive power, but act as warnings of infiltration by getting attacked. The best tripwire units are empty 5-point transports that should not be on the front lines anyway.
2.4 Retreat and consolidate
An important aspect of maintaining your forces in Wargame is to anticipate the outcome of engagements. It can be tempting in an engagement to let your forces fight and kill as many units as possible, but this should only happen if you are trading favorably. When that is not the case, you should retreat as many units as possible to a safe position that you will then consolidate with reinforcements. To consolidate is to concentrate and arrange your forces in such a way that they are stronger than the mere sum of their parts; this just means putting units in advantageous position to work together, rather than a single column or a disorganized clump. It can be worth advancing a few cheap infantry squads during a retreat to take damage and slow OPFOR’s advance—allowing more valuable units to escape. Once you have established a new front line farther back, you will have the defensive advantage as well as be closer to your spawn point than your enemy is to theirs, providing better immediate position and a chance to mount a counteroffensive. Experience will build your instincts for the outcome of an engagement and allow you to react faster, but get in the habit of thinking about the outcome whenever a unit is about to open fire on another.
When you reinforce a battle line, especially during heavy action, always order your reinforcements to a point behind where the battle may be taking place when they arrive. Too often, players will order new units to the front line, only to lose ground and end up watching their infantry transports fast-moving into a hail of shells. This is called feeding: the unintentional giving of points to the enemy, instead of attacking in a coordinated force. To avoid feeding, resist the temptation to attack with homogenous unit types, and call in reinforcements to locations safely out of reach of enemy advances.
2.5 Repositioning
Now that we have covered moving units forward (probes, pushes, infiltration) and backwards (retreat) we will cover moving forces laterally (repositioning). Although repositioning is less utilized by newer players, it is a great force multiplier[en.wikipedia.org]. Shifting forces speeds up your ability to concentrate forces[en.wikipedia.org] on the field, and a more mobile force allows you to defeat in detail[en.wikipedia.org]. The simplest form of repositioning is for superheavy tanks. A superheavy tank is a very potent weapon, and an unused superheavy is essentially a gift to your enemy in the form of dead points on the field. If your superheavy lies on a dormant front, retreat it back towards your spawn zone and then bring it to the active front, taking care to avoid this maneuver being seen by the enemy. Doing so not only keeps the tank safe, but may make your enemy think you have two superheavies when you have only one! You can do the same with other forces as well: during your openers, you may need to reposition the entire column of your push based on where your enemy is pushing. The main idea is to remember that your forces are not static—they can move, and infantry can be reloaded into transports. Moving your units is usually faster than calling in reinforcements, and basically means you can bring more firepower to any engagement than an opponent who does not.
PART 3: PRAXIS & THE ARC OF A MATCH
Key concepts: opener, mid game, late game, switching fronts
Now that we have learned about how to think about our play, and the main concrete actions we take, let’s put this all together in a match, from start to finish.
3.1 Opener
During the deployment phase, we need a plan. Our plan should involve investing 450-700 of our 1000 starting points into a
at a specific point on the map and gain winning position. In addition to the bulk of your forces required for your initial push, you will want to have several units sent to other parts of the map that are important strategic defense positions. These units will not be enough to stop a dedicated push, but will act as recon and tripwires to increase your situational awareness. Adding more defensive units is wise in areas that frequently come under attack in the early game, to hold the enemy back long enough to re-route your main push or call in reinforcements. Infantry are ideal defensive pieces, especially ATGM or Eryx infantry. Fire-support (“FS”) vehicles can oversee typically quiet flanks, but will die so quickly to dedicated pushes that you may not get to see what is approaching. Infantry, by contrast, remains hidden, takes longer to kill, and can engage in passive recon before being spotted. I strongly advise taking a 30-40 point recon helicopter in all of your decks, which you can send directly towards the enemy spawn at the beginning of every game. It will usually die without killing anything, but the value of knowing where your opponent is pushing is well worth it, and you will occasionally make it all the way to the enemy CV for a decisive snipe!
Finally, how many CVs should you start with? The general rule is that in 1 vs 1, you should start with as many CVs as there are spawn zones on your side of the map. So on Nuclear Winter is Coming and Highway to Seoul, always start with two CVs and send one of them to the nearest other spawn point at the beginning. On maps where each side has a 2-point zone like Punchbowl and Plunjing Valley, it is acceptable to start with a second (but never a third) CV. Starting with a CV to occupy “your” 2-pointer diminishes the amount of points you can invest in your push, and thus encourages more conservative play; this is not bad, just a judgment call. Some starting positions, such as the forested side of Plunjing Valley, are widely considered inferior to the opposing side for aggressive play, making 2-CV starts—that swap ground for point leads—more appropriate.
Once your push is underway, remember that pushes are inherently offensive, and the goal in conquest mode is to take ground. Several popular players have said “push until you meet resistance” because there is a common noob problem of “enemies everywhere” syndrome, in which they overestimate their enemy’s forces and play too defensively. I would add the caveat that your column should always spread out and attack-move in a defensible position. If your column is fast-moving towards the enemy and you forego a comfortable place to spread them out, you may end up getting slaughtered by an entrenched force or bomber. So yes, push until you meet resistance, but also be sure you spread out your units and begin attack-moving them before it’s too late and your fast-moving column is carpet-bombed into oblivion. With experience, you will quickly learn where you will meet the enemy on each map, and pushes will become fairly standardized and routine. But don’t forget about your other units! Make sure your CVs and flank units are going to their appropriate destinations, and use shift-commands to see that all infantry unload automatically at their destinations.
Managing your opener
Many players struggle with effectively micro’ing openers. It is the only time in the game when you will be simultaneously moving so many units, so it is understandable. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to maximize your speed and accuracy. For the following steps, I will be relying on the unit card list that appears horizontally across the bottom of the screen when more than one unit is selected.
Before the match starts, decide which units most need the split-second speed advantage and then pick the order of which group will be selected first. When the match starts, select the entire group and fast-move them to a point on the map that will require them to take the correct road initially, until you are able to give each unit individual orders. Usually this looks like: select left flank force, fast-move order; select mid force, fast-move order; select right flank force, fast-move order. This way, all of your units are moving in the right direction without any delay, and subsequent orders will not slow them down. With the entire group selected, place a move order that will be applied to one or more units in the group that will not cause other units to change direction immediately.
Once you have placed this move order, hold TAB and left-click the unit cards who you want to go to that destination, to de-select them.
Repeat steps (3) and (4) until you’ve given all remaining units their move orders. Generally, I place movement selections for the left-most unit card and then de-select other units who I also want to move there. Remember to hold SHIFT and queue unload orders for transports.
Select and hotkey your radar AA pieces and mortar, or any other units you prefer. Turn off radar ASAP. Assign mortar smoke orders if necessary.
This streamlined routine will be hard initially, as you get used to using the commands, but with practice it will get faster and easier. Once these steps become second nature, it will reduce chaos and errors, and let you focus more on observing your opponent’s moves. The end result is more consistent, sophisticated, and dynamic attacks.
After your push captures the intended area, be sure to reposition your forces to consolidate your position, and bring in supply trucks to repair and refit. If you realize, however, that your push is going to either fail or result in a Pyrrhic victory[en.wikipedia.org], pull back immediately to preserve your forces to gain a defensive advantage. Once you successfully break the enemy lines, remember that little or nothing stands between you and the enemy spawn, meaning that your units can probably gain value by moving forward en masse. The balance with aggression is between taking more ground and the danger of overextending: moving your forces too far forward without adequate resupply lines and defensive positions, resulting in being overrun. This is why it is important to push in stages: push, consolidate, refit, repeat. Moving forward can cause unsuspecting opponents to feed you units, but moving too far forward will result in haphazardly approaching a well-defended position. And the closer you get to your enemy’s spawn point, the more of a reinforcement advantage they have over you!
3.2 After the opener (mid game)
Regardless of how your opener fairs, you will need to consolidate your position across the board. It is possible to lose your opener and still win the game, although this will require superior strategic and tactical play to offset your opponent’s early force advantage. This period, during and immediately after the opening push, is best used to fill gaps in your lines. Once you have established a front, your next move will be to guard your flanks and spawn with recon and tripwire units. You may also want to begin an infiltration mission while your opponent is least likely to have spent points on their own defense lines. This is also when players often buy their first ASF, to attain mobile air defense.
Once you have this foundation in place, you can either purchase a CV to start ticking, or immediately begin to saturate a front with fighting units to prepare another push. The former will give you a command point advantage, but many a player has overinvested in CVs early on, only to have their lines roll up like a carpet from a stronger opponent, who can then easily recoup the initial deficit. Generally, it is not even a problem to let your opponent tick +1 on you for several minutes (+1 is 15 command points per minute) while you build a push. Once your opponent is ticking +2 or greater, however, have a plan to buy a CV on the horizon. On maps with 2-point zones, a CV is often a player’s first purchases after the deployment phase. At the latest, buy one after your push has become a stable position.
Even if you succeed with your intended opening push and gain winning position, do not cease your aggression. Some decks, especially those composed heavily of wheeled units, excel at taking positions in the early game and adopting a defensive posture for the rest of the match. But remaining strictly defensive takes pressure off of your adversary and allows them more time and mental energy to maneuver. Continue to probe, infiltrate, and push even if you have winning position, as long as you have adequate defensive resources, to maintain initiative and redirect their points away from their own stratagems.
3.3 Switching fronts
Keep in mind that you need not continue to attack the same area for the entire game. It is very common for players to establish a combat zone and then pour virtually all of their points into that line, with neither side making substantial gains. Meanwhile, the rest of the map is scarcely occupied or even looked at. If you are struggling to attain winning position in a match, it may be best to change your strategy by switching fronts. If you can resist OPFOR advances on an active front long enough to surreptitiously build up a push on a quiet front, you can launch a devastating offensive that gains position and initiative. And on weak fronts, once the recon units are destroyed, there is probably nothing behind them to spot what your units are doing, rendering OPFOR vulnerable to further pushes and infiltration. The defender must then decide whether to abandon a previously intense front by repositioning, or risk those units becoming dead buys that produce no more value on a now-quiet front.
3.4 Late game
The late game, for the purposes of this guide, is the point at which only one or two strategic moves can have a decisive effect on the match. When time is of the essence, cheesy and cancerous play becomes a much more likely choice for the opponent who is behind. This can include increased use of helicopters and indirect fire to kill CVs, and may be combined with a final large push attempt. Pushes in the last three minutes of a game can often be much larger than earlier pushes, due to the accrual of deployment points as well as the decreased need for maintaining defensive lines (since the game will be over before a counter-attack can be launched, and losing units does not affect the score of conquest matches). If you are ahead in the final minutes of the game, it is wise to invest in defenses against such drastic tactics by increasing “base defense” and buying anti-helicopter AA. If you are ahead in points but your opponent is on the verge of winning by destroying your CVs, buy a CV and hide it in a remote corner of the map. Drastic measures are not necessarily dishonorable if you are behind, but remember that the amount of MLRS strikes on CVs and the number of helicopters you push are both inversely correlated to your reputation (and by extension your ability to find games).
PART 4: POST GAME
Key concepts: strategic error, tactical error, unit choice error, blunder, multiplayer etiquette
4.1 Evaluating your gameplay
After every match, if you want to improve, you should watch the replay at least once. I often watch the replay once with a “neutral” view and another time with my opponent’s view. That way, I can see what they saw. This allows me to know when my units were spotted and helps me get into their head. You can find the replays in Profile > Replay. You can also rename your replays by clicking “RENAME.” You can find replay files as text documents in the Wargame folder, which also contain
[PSA] How to use replays and extract deck codes from them too from wargame
.
There are four types of errors in a RD match: strategic, tactical, unit selection, and blunders. Knowing the types of errors allows you to easily identify them and remedy the problem.
Strategic errors are approaching a match the wrong way: attempting to control the wrong areas at the wrong time, using the wrong spots as bridgeheads[docs.google.com], capturing a zone prematurely, etc. Strategic errors require you to review the map and the best approach to it.
Solution: read evil_kommie’s map guide[docs.google.com] for map-specific information.
Tactical errors are failures in troop movement: pushing in a way that does not maximize the value of your units, failing to micro the weapons on your units to avoid detection or attack at the right time. Tactical errors are probably the hardest error to correct since they require fine motor control, attention at the right moment, and instinctual reaction. Tactical errors also include poorly timing a push, such that your units do not engage at the right moment. To remedy tactical errors, the best solution is just to practice them until they become reflexes. You can also watch top players like https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClep0xM588JPu-_xtlazJ_Q/videos and , and observe how they move units.
Unit Choice error is when you bring the wrong unit to the fight. This can be a problem with your deck, or just your instincts in terms of what unit is needed in a particular scenario. Unit choice problems can be identified by poor performance of your units in their engagements.
Solution: consider the role of your chosen unit and whether there is a better unit (or you are using it in the wrong role). Watch Razzmann’s of your selected faction for more unit info. If your pushes often fail, this could be a tactical error or poor unit composition—read the hon guide’s section on pushing[honhonhonhon.wordpress.com].
Blunders are unforced errors that you know are errors but make anyway—which is extremely common. These include failing to buy base defense, failure to unload troops (e.g. infantry CV) at their destination, sending units to the wrong place due to a misclick, allowing your superheavy to be discovered and killed, or deploying units in a way that feeds them to your opponent. Perhaps you always forget to buy recon for your push and your fodder units are destroyed without revealing OPFOR’s fire support.The most common blunder is failing to turn off your radar AA (failure to turn it on is a tactical error). Although very common and a little embarrassing, blunders are relatively easy to fix.
Solution: prioritize avoiding the blunder in matches, to the detriment of your other responsibilities. Put off that push until AA arrives even if it loses you initiative; allow a few bombing runs to go unmolested because you didn’t turn radar AA on fast enough; ignore the attack horn while you are babysitting your engaged superheavy. As the blunder activity is more habitually avoided, it will demand less and less of your conscious attention until it weaves seamlessly into your gameplay.
4.2 New comrades and multiplayer etiquette
When the game is over, regardless of who wins or how one-sided the match, it is customary for all players to type “gg” for “Good game.” If you are especially impressed by your opponent’s play, you can write “wp” for “well played.” After the game is a great opportunity to debrief with your opponent about what happened and share insights into how to improve. When I lose a game, I almost invariably ask my opponent for tips, or what they noticed I did wrong. You may not agree with your opponent’s analyses, but two heads are better than one and you lose nothing from hearing their view. The quickest way to learn is collaboratively, and the quickest way to have other players to play with, is to add them as friends. After a match, you can click on your opponent’s title bar and then click the “Add Friend” button, which will bring up a Steam overlay, since the Wargame friend list has essentially become just an extension of your Steam friend list. You may have to click a few times to bring up the Steam overlay. This is important, as it allows you to invite any online friends to lobbies you are in, whether or not you are the host. So if you’re trying to fill up a lobby with players, you can speed that process up. Adding someone as a friend is also a gesture of good will that shows you want to play with them again, and if you come across them later, you can expect that they will probably not play in an anti-social fashion.
You also have the option to mute a player. This is helpful for verbally-abusive Wargamers, but can serve an important indexing function: bookmarking players who helorush (the closest thing to cheating in Red Dragon, and immediate grounds for making a player persona non grata!). This list can be especially important for ranked matches, and to account for the fact that players can change their names as often as they like. In addition to muting players you can mute entire channels. The first thing you should do in Wargame: Red Dragon, is mute the wargame lobby (often called “warchat”). Trust me, it’s not the part of the community you want to join.
PART 5: FURTHER READING
Despite the length of this guide, it offers breadth at the expense of depth, and there are lots of little facts, tips, and tricks that make the difference between a strong and a weak player. I have assembled all other reputable resources below, and in the order of importance that I think makes most sense for the new player. In the postscript, you can find links to some of the best Wargamers with gameplay videos on YouTube.
, by TheNebster22
video series, by Razzmann
The honhon guide[honhonhonhon.wordpress.com], widely considered the best tactical guide, by fadeway
video, by Nick-Da-Man
Index of Critical Hits[docs.google.com], by Eukie et al
video series (deckbuilding), by Razzmann
by Tyrnek
[PSA] How to use replays and extract deck codes from them too from wargame
, by Aeweisafemalesheep
by Tyrnek
Armory Tool[forums.eugensystems.com], a more detailed and accurate version of the game armory.
[Theory] Force Multiplication and Red Dragon from wargamebootcamp
by Tyrnek
List of key values to keep track of for beginners from wargamebootcamp
, by Dr_Mancold
by Tyrnek
Rate of Fire spreadsheet[docs.google.com], by vLern
Hidden stats spreadsheet[docs.google.com] (OUTDATED)
How I Learned to Stop Wargaming and Love the Tag (Wargame icons), by Aquilifer et al
Find mentors and training buddies through r/wargamebootcamp, and join the discord!
PS: I would not be able to write this guide without training from my long-time mentor, [BrG] Killing Smalls. I also learned a tremendous amount about the game from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7Nio7Qc4S9Fu95zq49ANpQ, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDJo0KMxUxOYBEWN6KPRJ3Q, Faust, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClep0xM588JPu-_xtlazJ_Q, https://www.youtube.com/user/XanderTuron, and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCytHOtU4GTwZ3yK9uajoZCA. The only reason I started playing Wargame was because of Stealth17.
Please rate and share this guide!
-True Orb, aka [LCol] GuilloTeen Vogue
January 23, 2019
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