History YMMV / WargameRedDragon

** Blue Dragons also lacking in strong infantry, heavy armor, and [=ATGMs=] ([=Chu-MAT=] is the only ATGM infantry available), but their air force is slightly stronger.

* ScrappyMechanic: Despite naval combat being the main new feature of the game, it is mostly considered poorly implemented and a waste of potential, with it being nothing more than throwing two blobs of ships and planes at each other with the larger blob winning.
* TierInducedScrappy:
** '''High Tier''':
*** Eurocorps is an extremely well-rounded coalition, combining West Germany's heavy tanks and [=IFVs=] with France's mobile firepower, recon, infantry, and air force.
*** NORAD shores up the United States' weaknesses with Canadian infantry and short-range air defense, like the coveted ADATS.
*** USSR contains all of the units one needs to succeed, with strong helicopters, transports, armor, and artillery along with a powerful air-to-ground air force.
*** Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact is effectively a mini-USSR with a wide assortment of strong infantry and support options, but armor and airpower are on the weaker side.
*** Most DLC nations are capable of standing on their own, with powerful units mostly making up for their shortcomings. Finland and Israel are particular standouts. Coalitions that include them (Entente, Baltic Front, etc.) serve to bolster them at the cost of activation points.
*** Dutch-German Coalition can drown opponents in a sea of Leopard [=2s=]. The Dutch have good infantry, wheeled transports, recon, and air force that help make up for the gaps in West Germany's arsenal.
** '''Low Tier''':
*** Red Dragons, while giving the game its name, is rather weak, lacking truly cost-effective infantry, [=ATGM=] infantry (it's 16AP at 40% accuracy or nothing), good helicopters, and heavy armor, and having a weak air force.
*** Blue Dragons also lacks strong infantry, heavy armor, and [=ATGMs=] ([=Chu-MAT=] is the only ATGM infantry available) and while its air force is stronger, it's not by much.
*** Most national decks mean you are restricting your arsenal in one way or another in exchange for massive availability bonuses. Individual nations often lack a critical part of a good deck, such as Poland not having any mortars. This inflexibility could have serious consequences if your opponent knows how to exploit them.
** '''Mixed''':
*** US National is hamstrung by a lack of strong infantry and anti-tank options, forcing it to rely on tanks, helicopters, and aircraft to deal with stubborn opponents. It also has limited anti-air options, instead, relying again on aircraft. Those systems are really good, but also expensive and dependent on good micro and multitasking to stay alive.
*** Commonwealth has exceptionally strong infantry in strong wheeled and tracked transports and fire support to help assaults, but lacks the recon, armor, air defense, and air support for adequate staying power should they encounter strong defenses.
*** Scandinavia suffers the same problems as Commonwealth. They have good infantry and a decent air force, but not much else, with their heaviest tank being a Leopard 2A4.
*** Landjut: Denmark has a decent air force, air defense, and good grinding infantry, but their mechanized focus means they don't bring anything new to West Germany.
*** BLUFOR and REDFOR decks are able to draw on a wide variety of units from either faction, but the limited activation points, lack of national/coalition bonuses and inability to use prototypes will result in having to make do with fewer amounts of somewhat less capable units, unless a specialization is chosen.

*** Red Dragons, while giving the game its name, is rather weak, lacking truly cost-effective infantry, [=ATGMs=] (it's 16AP at 40% accuracy or nothing) and heavy armor, and having a weak air force.

*** Landjut: Denmark has a decent air force, air defense, and good grinding infantry, but their mechanized focus means they don't bring anything new to West Germany.

* AcceptableBreaksFromReality: Takes the same breaks from reality for ground and aerial weapons in the sequels, then takes them to a whole new level with naval combat:
** The P-270 Moskit with the [[ReportingNames NATO Reporting Name]] SS-N-22 Sunburn, deployed onto the Udaloy, Sovremenny & Tarantul ships has a range of 120 kilometers in real life. In-game, it's reduced to just over 9.4 kilometers. It is still the longest-ranged anti-shipping missile in the game.
** The Patriot missile and ATACMS, both expensive land-based artillery in real life, are theater-level weapons. In this game, they're pared down to simply being an airplane sniping platform and precision cluster munition launcher, respectively. Only the US can use them, they take a [[MemeticMutation metric week]] to reload, and they can one-shot more or less anything they hit.
* AnachronismStew: Several of the ships, tanks, and aircraft weren't even being ''tested'' when the game is set. While it could be excused that rising tensions would increase the rate in which ''some'' of the examples were developed, it is a bit hard to justify ships such as the LaFayette Class frigates which weren't commissioned until '''1996''', a good five years after the games 1991 cut-off date.
** The Kongo Class Destroyers are an especially egregious example as the last one wasn't completed until 1998. However, in the Soviet Campaign, there are four of them backing up the US Fleet as it responded to the Soviet invasion of Japan. This fleet can be successfully intercepted and sunk by the Kuznetsov Battlegroup which can have up to '''five''' Udaloy II Class Destroyers.... which weren't even finished until '''1994''', and which only one has ever existed.
*** The Kongos presence in that campaign could partially be justified as they are similar in appearance to the Arleigh Burke Class Destroyer (which they're based on), and have similar capabilities. The Udaloy could also be justified as the Udaloy II is a modified design of the Udaloy I, which heavily emphasized Anti-Submarine Warfare over most else. The Udaloy II, being better able to handle anti-ship, was a better choice for the designers, but for a game so focused on accuracy, it does make one scratch their heads as to why the designers didn't do the research on the very ships they intended to include.
** The American Super Hornet. The prototype didn't fly until late 1995. The type wasn't truly in production until 1997, and it was another two years before the type entered active service.
** Yugoslavia's Padobranci '90 wield the Bumbar anti-tank missile, which was designed in '''2005'''.

* MemeticMutation: Warchat, Wargame's in-game messaging app before it was disabled, was completely unmoderated and filled with completely nonsensical, bigoted garbage. Some players were speculated to only log on to Wargame to participate in it. However, some running jokes had risen to the top.
** "Navy has been canceled" became a meme during the public beta, so much so that even after release people still use "[=XYZ=] has been canceled" to get laughs in chat.
** "PUTIN GAYSEX F-35" basically sums up the three most popular topics on Warchat and guaranteed to get laughs. Expect this to be spammed in various colors and [=ASCII=] letters.

** The P-270 Moskit with the [[ReportingNames NATO Reporting Name]] SS-N-22 Sunburn, deployed onto the Udaloy, Sovremenny & Tarantul ships has a range of 120 kilometres in real life. In-game, it's reduced to just over 9.4 kilometres. It is still the longest ranged anti-shipping missile in the game.

* AnachronismStew: Several of the ships, tanks, and aircraft weren't even being ''tested'' when the game is set. While it could be excused that rising tensions would increase the rate in which ''some'' of the examples were developed, it is a bit hard to justify ships such as the La Fayette Class frigates which weren't commissioned until '''1996''', a good five years after the games 1991 cut-off date.

** The most infamous one is "helicopter rush". Warsaw pact can deploy large amount of cheap, well-armed and armored gunship helicopters. There's almost NO way to stop them since most anti-helicopter units are ground-based, can only engage one target at a time and will be quickly swarmed without very good position; helicopter with anti-air missile performs better, but they can only shoot down one or two enemy before run out of ammo. The main counter is anti-air infantry in cover and positioning your anti-air vehicles so the helicopters won't see them until they're right on top of them, decreasing the number of helicopters that can shoot back at once and increasing the chance that the AA will hit, making them more likely to take the helicopter down quickly so they can move on to another. That and planes, since only a few helicopters can actually fire back at planes.
** The aforementioned Moskit missiles carried by the Tarantul-class corvettes, and the Udaloy-class and Sovremenny-class destroyers outrange anything the Nato fleet has. Combine with coastal [=FOBs=] or local resupply ships and they can go back and forth to the frontlines, snipe whichever ship happens to be closest to them and head back to resupply without so much as taking a shot in return. The Tarantul is especially good for this tactic as it reloads quickly, moves very fast and fires two missiles per salvo. A 6 ship group can fire off two sets of 12 missiles in 10 seconds, enough to take out any capital ship in the Nato fleet unless it has major escort. Even a decent sized NATO fleet will fall back should their opponents begin repeating this tactic. Of course, they don't have very far to fall back most of the time.
** On the flipside, Nato anti-ship airpower is extremely impressive. They have two planes, the F111 & [=A6E=] TRAM which can fire 4 Harpoons each, and don't have to worry about resupply. If care is taken where to attack, most of the time the Communist ships won't be able to fire back as they'll be too busy fending off the Harpoons. Add in various F18's with two Harpoons each, and a full NATO stack of 9 planes can launch 24 Harpoons.

** The Israeli DLC introduces the Maglan unit, a ten-man (of course, they have been nerfed to a 5-men squad, and as a result, more vulnerable to blind bombing or mortar/artillery fire, and tank main guns, etc) special forces squad packing more firepower than almost any other infantry unit in the game. Aside from an obvious superiority in infantry combat, they are classified as a recce unit, allowing them to spot enemy forces from a long way off while remaining undetected, and they carry around a set of Spike-MR anti-tank missiles, allowing them to independently spot and kill most land vehicles in the game from standoff range. A squad of Maglan operators in the right position could single-handedly lock down a large portion of the map, barring heavy artillery and aerial bombardment. On top of that, they can be flown in on a flight of Yas'ur Nimrod, a variant of the CH-53D heavy lift helicopter equipped with one of the most devastating anti-tank missiles in the game.

* HilariousInHindsight: The US F-15D Eagle bomber used to be referred to as the F-15E Strike Eagle, but was renamed after players noticed that it did not have its distinctive conformal fuel tanks and Eugen did not want to put in the effort to remodel it. Come the Israel DLC and F-15I Ra'am, an F-15 with conformal fuel tanks. Unfortunately Eugen did not port the model over to the US.

** Light Riflemen have a weak ATGM overshadowed by other light infantry, but being the only ATGM the US has in the infantry tab, it's as good as you've got if you're playing US. Cavalry Scouts can at least bring a recon transport with them.

** "Navy has been cancelled" became a meme during the public beta, so much so that even after release people still use "[=XYZ=] has been cancelled" to get laughs in chat.

* ScrappyMechanic: Despite naval combat being the main new feature of the game, it is mostly considered poorly-implemented and a waste of potential, with it being nothing more than throwing two blobs of ships and planes at each other with the larger blob winning.

*** NORAD shores up the United States' weaknesses with Canadian infantry and short range air defense, like the coveted ADATS.

*** Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact is effectively a mini-USSR with a wide assortment of strong infantry and support options, but armor and air power is on the weaker side.

*** Dutch-German Coalition can drown opponents in a sea of Leopard [=2s=]. The Dutch have good infantry, wheeled transports, recon and air force that help make up for the gaps in West Germany's arsenal.

*** US National is hamstrung by a lack of strong infantry and anti-tank options, forcing it to rely on tanks, helicopters, and aircraft to deal with stubborn opponents. It also has limited anti-air options, instead relying again on aircraft. Those systems are really good, but also expensive and dependent on good micro and multitasking to stay alive.
*** Commonwealth has exceptionally strong infantry in strong wheeled and tracked transports and fire support to help assaults, but lacks the recon, armor, air defense and air support for adequate staying power should they encounter strong defenses.

** For larger games, the most common maps tend to be Strait to the Point (large) and those that are not too large to lose track of your units.