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Wargame: Red Dragon is an RTS game released by Eugen Systems in 2014, the sequel to Wargame: AirLand Battle, itself a sequel to Wargame: European Escalation. This version of the game changes the setting from the European front to East Asia, and includes Chinese, Korean (of both flavours), Japanese, Australian and other forces in that sphere of influence. The gameplay is built around commanding a combined-arms force of forces from either side, choosing your arsenal from a vast array of pretty much every unit fielded by the in-game nations. The game has multiplayer matches from 1v1 to 10v10, as well as a campaign mode playable in 1v1 or versus the AI.

The gameplay is similar to that of the previous game, involving ordering your units to capture territory and engage the enemy whilst managing your troops' supplies and ammunition levels, with the addition of the ability to control aircraft. As such, gaining air superiority is a vital part of winning any battle.

The main addition to this version of the game is the introduction of naval combat, although it stays more to the littoral side of things. The biggest ships available are the Japanese Kongo class destroyers for BLUFOR and the Soviet Udaloy 2 and Sovremenny class destroyers for REDFOR.


"It all comes down to the infantryman and his tropes":

  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality: 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 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 note  and they can one-shot more or less anything they hit.
    • All units are represented as a single infantry squad or vehicle and can operate by themselves. The aforementioned Patriot is presented as only the launcher and would still need radar and command vehicles to function.
  • Anachronism Stew: 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, sometimes it gets a bit silly:
    • 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 capabilities over anti-surface and anti-air. The Udaloy II, being better able to handle anti-ship, was a better choice for the designers.
    • 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.
  • Arbitrary Weapon Range: Averted. While most shells and rockets hit the ground if they miss, missiles can easily exceed their stated range and go flying off into the wild blue yonder and, if one is unlucky enough, back down onto a command vehicle kilometers from the front line.
  • Art Evolution: New base game vehicles are higher fidelity than previous titles. The models for DLC units are notably more detailed than the ones that shipped with base game, which were often recycled from previous games.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • The AI sucks at logistics, no matter what difficulty they are set at:
      • The AI will never place a second FOB, even if their deck has one. This massively reduces the supplies available to them and their side.
      • AI is terrible when it comes to supplying their forces in the field. While they will sometimes repair and rearm some units, for the most part they prefer just to call in more units. They are especially bad when it comes to refuelling, meaning that most battles eventually result in the map being littered with vehicles that are undamaged and have almost full ammunition stocks, but aren't actually doing anything because they've run out of fuel. Again, this happens regardless of how many supply units they have in their deck. To make things worse, trying to refuel their vehicles will usually result in them moving the vehicle away as soon as it has any fuel, meaning it basically just wastes the fuel and stops a few meters from where it was. If you want to play single-player skirmishes, get used to managing both your logistics and your allies.
      • The AI loves sending some of their helicopters on long trips over water, which often results in them running out of fuel and being stranded over water, meaning they can't land, meaning they can't be refuelled.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: Just like in reality, armored vehicles tend to have the bulk of their armor on their forward face; learning how to flank enemy vehicles to take advantage of their weaker side armor is an absolute must.
  • Aussies with Artillery: Australia, along with New Zealand, is a new playable country. Ironically, their artillery is rather... unimpressive, consisting only of a Vietnam-era M108 self-propelled howitzer and a mortar carrier.
  • Authority Equals Asskicking: While most of the infantry command squads are only regulars, the East German Fuhrungstrupp are considered shock troops, and as such fire more accurately and can move faster than any other command squad in the game.
    • The T-80UK is a superheavy tank that can also capture zones by itself.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Heavy bombers capable of dumping as many as thirty bombs can flatten entire city blocks, but they take a long time to become ready again, as might be expected from having to bolt all those weapons onto the airframe. This is one of the reasons cheap light bombers remain popular.
    • The most powerful artillery pieces in the game tend to carry only one or two shots before they need to be resupplied, making them useless for suppressive fire, or if you need an actual artillery barrage. Even worse, each shot requires a lot of supplies, making lighter howitzers and mortars far more cost effective.
    • Superheavy tanks note  have enough firepower to destroy most other vehicles and enough armor to survive other tanks' guns, but you only get one card of two, maybe three, tanks that your opponent will be sending everything they have to destroy. "Good" superheavy micro involves a lot of babysitting them in smoke, only advancing with them when absolutely needed.
    • Exceptional-optics ground-based recon units. While it is tempting to take them, their exceptional optics are largely a waste because there are a lot of line-of-sight blockers that prevent them from utilizing their optics fully. They are also significantly more expensive and don't have anything else to justify their cost.
    • Unlike in real life, ATGM vehicles (e.g jeeps/scout cars with ATGM launchers) tend to be this in game. Because they are guided and must stay still to aim their ATGM at their targets, they will usually be detected and fired upon before they have a chance to run- and many of them have little to no armor. The Chinese WZ-550 and Israeli Hamer MAPATS downplay this as they have enough range to pull this off, but even then they are less commonly picked choices than gun-based vehicles.
  • Awesome Personnel Carrier: Everybody gets more than one choice for this, since all infantry come with transports. This makes for choices: do you take cheap, spammable APCs to maximize the number of infantry you could call in, or do you spend more on expensive IFVs with powerful autocannons but cost as much as some lighter tanks?
    • US decks can feature the famous Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, armed with a Bushmaster autocannon and TOW missiles.
    • USSR is no slouch either, with their world-famous BTR and BMP series of APCs/IFVs, respectively. Of note is the BTR-T (used by Soviet engineers) which is heavily armored and features a grenade launcher.
    • Israel is able to use a version of their Merkava main battle tank as an APC, and it is just as effective against other tanks as the normal version (though it carries only 9 rounds for its main gun, since the normal storage area is left empty to allow them to carry troops). It also carries an automatic grenade launcher, making it extremely effective at clearing out entrenched infantry.
    • West Germany is also particularly well known for their Marders, which are armed with potent 20mm autocannons and very accurate MILAN anti-tank missiles. Then there's the Marder 2, which doesn't have missiles but makes up for it by packing a massive 50mm autocannon capable of knocking out light tanks.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Each country's units will speak the language of that country—French soldiers speak French, Russians speak Russian, et cetera. They mostly seem to be the same lines translated, however.
    • Finnish units are voiced by a native-level speaker and script is absolutely overloaded with references, to the point they would need a page of their own to be properly listed.
  • Boring, but Practical: The bulk of the fighting is usually done by cheaper units. Using top-of-the-line units can certainly control the battle, but they are expensive and limited in number, making them a massive risk to expose and potentially lose. Sometimes, being able to deploy more average units is better than being able to deploy only a small number of excellent units.
  • Break Out the Museum Piece: Very cheap, very old units are available en masse, if you want a lot of units on the field right now.
    • All the REDFOR factions (except Finland, China and Czechoslovakia) get access to the T-34/85 tank of WWII fame. Their T-34/85 version is from 1969, but it is a tank that dates back to World War II.
    • North Korea takes things a step further with the ability to field SU-76M tank destroyers, a unit that was obsolescent by 1945.
    • South Korea has the option to field old M18 and M36 tank destroyers; the M18 in particular is the fastest tracked unit in the game.
    • Finland has with units equipped with weapons dating back to before WWII (The M/39 Mosin-Nagant rifle and the Suomi SMG). Finland gets the Charioteer (an up-gunned WWII-era Cromwell), and the Sturmi, a StuG III. Their reservists- who are uniquely fire-support teams instead of line infantry- use the Lahti anti-tank rifle, from 1939.
    • Yugoslavia takes this even further than other countries, to the point some of their units can probably fit right in Steel Division. They have access to the MG42 of WWII fame note , and they deploy the M8 Greyhound, M18 Hellcat, M36 Jackson, and T-34/85. Their reservists use M1 Thompson SMGs and come in M3 halftracks, while their special forces use the StG-44.
    • The British and ANZAC use the Bren Gunnote  and the M1919 machine gun. All three Commonwealth nations make use of the Sterling (or in Canada's case, the C1) SMG, which was designed in 1944 and officially adopted in 1951. It should be noted that, unlike the T-34, these aren't used by cheap units, with units using the Sterling and the Bren actually being special forces or shock infantry. In fact, the only militia unit available to the Commonwealth, the British Territorials, don't use any of these, instead carrying the L1A1 and M72 LAW.
    • Israel has access to the 105mm-armed M51 Shermans of Six-Day War fame. Unlike with the T-34, it isn't a cheap tank but instead a cheap tank destroyer and fire-support vehicle. They also have access to a version of the M3 Halftrack, which they pretty much only use for their militia unit.
    • The Norwegian armoured contingent can choose to make use of the M24 Chaffee light tank from 1943, in all its unmodernized, gas guzzling, cheap as dirt glory.
  • Canucks with Chinooks: This iteration of Wargame adds several prototype units- that were phased out or rejected due to the end of the Cold War- to Canada's arsenal. One of them is the Chimera, a monster of a tank destroyer that never left the concept stage due to mechanical issues with the weight of the vehicle versus the strength of its engine, and may have never even been meant to be built, simply being a design created by some Canadian engineers as practice.
  • Chinese with Chopper Support: China is a new playable country. While their choppers are largely unimpressive, they also get access to the Z-9 chopper, which comes in variants mounting a 23mm autocannon (used for infantry transport), HJ-8 anti-tank missiles, or HY-90 anti-air missiles.
  • Clown Car: Infantry transport vehicles are somewhat abstracted; they either can act as transports, or they can't, and infantry squads are 2, 5, 10 or 15 men. This can occasionally lead to silly moments like a 15-man Marine squad piling out of a six-seat Humvee, or a 10-man VDV squad debussing from a BMD (actual passenger capacity, four). Occasionally inverted as well; a two-man ATGM or Recce team will take up the entire passenger space in a Chinook helicopter.
  • Cool Plane: Lots of them. While there are no propeller planes, there are still a wide variety of planes available. From cheap trainer/light attack aircraft such as the A-37 Dragonfly and L-39 Albartos, iconic fourth-gen aircraft such as the F-16 and MiG-29, to planes that were still in/never left prototype stage such as the Lavi or the Novi Avion. If the nation hyper-theoretically had/operated/designed a jet plane in the period from 1945 to 1995, chances are it is in here.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: While a "Naval" deck is only able to be selected in a naval battle, having a deck for land + water battles dedicated to mostly naval units can result in an early defeat if the rest of your team don't bother with the naval combat.
  • Critical Existence Failure: Aside from morale damage and critical hits that apply debuffs, units will fight with 1 HP just as effectively as they do with 10 HP, even infantry squads reduced to one man.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts: For balance reasons, "HEAT" type anti-armour weapons will inflict at least 1 points of damage when it hits a target, even if the target's armour cannot be pierced. (The other type of anti-armour weapon, kinetic, cannot inflict damage on a target if it cannot pierce its armour. To compensate, the armour-piercing value of kinetic weapons increase as you move closer to the target.) This, together with the fact that all land units, except the non-combat unit FOB, have at most 10HP points means even the most heavily armoured modern tanks can only take 10 hits from HEAT weapons (such as infantry RPG, the main gun of some tanks, all ATGM) even if said weapon is laughably outdated. This makes it dangerous for tanks to go into forest or towns, as even a few militia squads have a reasonable chance of scoring a few hits on a modern tank with their otherwise harmless rocket-propelled grenades.
  • Do Not Run with a Gun: Most units' accuracies will go straight to hell when fired on the move, unless they're very well-trained infantry with a CQC-capable squad automatic weapon, or a vehicle with a high stabilization stat. It's a bit more intuitive than in Airland Battle, since stabilization value is displayed.
  • Draw Aggro: Infantry squads usually come with some sort of anti-tank weapon and a machine gun, but can't use both at the same time. The recommended tactic when fighting infantry in towns or forests is to advance your own infantry in front of their fire support, tying them down while allowing your vehicles free shots.
    • This can be replicated with tanks by using cheaper models to soak up fire for more expensive ones.
  • Dutchmen with Destroyers: The Netherlands is a DLC country.
  • Easter Egg: Some of the vehicles models have hidden details on them only visible if you look closely at them:
    • The ANZAC ASLAV-PC has "Cook the man sum eggs" written on the side of it.
    • The American Heavy Hog has a face drawn on its grenade launcher.
    • Several helicopters and airplanes have the classic shark face nose art, including the A-10 Warthog, of course.
    • Several planes and helicopters have markings indicating what unit they belong to, and several of them are for actual units:
    • The Finnish Charioteer has a heart on it, and their Hawk 51 has a bear painted on the tail.
  • Easy Logistics: To a much lesser extent than most RTSes. Although supplies are abstracted, the game tracks ammunition, fuel, and health (abstracted as "spare parts" or "infantry reinforcements") for units, and keeping supply lines open to support your advance and to keep units' fuel, ammo, and health topped off is a vital part of any match. As a bonus, supply trucks and forward bases can be captured.
    • Naval logistics is handled in the same way, but without fuel, which is abstracted since in reality it usually takes a ship at least a week to run out of fuel. Ships can be re-armed from a FOB located on the coast where possible, or from the new Naval supply ships. Which can themselves be resupplied from the FOB.
  • Finns with Fearsome Forests: Finland is a DLC country. They, like any other faction, can also fight in forests.
  • Garrisonable Structures: As always, infantry can defend buildings. A properly supported and dug-in infantry force can be nigh-impossible to dislodge and stop an armored charge in its tracks.
  • Gatling Good: Various vehicles are equipped with miniguns, Vulcans, and other rotary cannons allowing them to dish out damage at a high rate of fire.
  • Glass Cannon: ATGM units and helicopter gunships don't last long when they're engaged, but they can easily inflict many times their own cost against an armored advance. French tanks take this dynamic, too: light armor, high mobility, powerful guns. Perhaps the purest manifestation is the Chinese PTZ-89 tank destroyer, a tinplate-armored light tank packing a 120mm cannon that rivals the main gun on super-heavy tanks like the T-72BU, M1A2, or Leopard 2A5.
  • Gratuitous Japanese: Japanese vehicles use transliterations of their Japanese names rather than numerals, such as "Kyu-Maru Shiki" for the Type 90 MBT. This serves to distinguish them from other nations that use the same Type-Model Year naming scheme.
  • Guide Dang It!: Most of the game, as the tutorials are extremely short text descriptions that don't even cover most of the mechanics.
  • Home Guard: Reserve troops, like West German Heimatschutzen or British Territorials, are available troop options, for when you need a lot of low-cost troops to hold urban sectors. Mostly armed with older weaponry (SMGs, battle rifles (either bolt-action or semi-automatic), or last-gen assault rifles) and an old anti-tank weapon. The US and USSR, having large professional militaries, don't field reservists.
    • Danish/Swedish reserve troops get an MG. While the Swedes are armed with bolt-action rifles and the BAR, the Danish have a submachine gun and the coveted MG3. This bumps them up to 10 points, basically making them inferior regular infantry.
    • Chinese Yubeiyi and North Korean Juckwidae are 15-man units with, respectively, assault rifles and submachine guns available in large quantities, keeping with the "people's army" organization they have.
  • Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: The gunners on board the various ships often miss when shooting at land or sea targets, unless the target is very close.
    • They avert this trope when engaging enemy anti-ship missiles. It's not uncommon to see the Kongo's 5-inch gun just snipe an incoming P-270 Moskit out of the sky. On top of that, the CIWS of most ships almost never misses its mark when missiles are incoming.
    • Older model ATGMs and MANPADS also suffer from this, often missing whatever they fired at.
    • Panicked units suffer a large accuracy penalty, often resulting in this.
  • Israelis with Infrared Missiles: Israel is a DLC country. They also brought their infrared missiles, including the famous Spike ATGM.
  • Kaiju Defense Force: Japan is a new playable country. They don't fight Kaijus in this game, though.
  • Kiwis with Carbines: New Zealand, along with Australia, is a new playable country. They definitely use carbines for their infantrymen.
  • Lethal Joke Character:
    • Rover WOMBATs are squishy 10 point jeeps with 14 AP recoilless rifles, better than its counterparts and surprisingly deadly in swarms that can quickly ambush and side-shot armor.
    • The Bushranger and CH-118 Gunship are low-end attack helicopters with fixed miniguns and HEAT rockets that can wreck tanks.
    • Vulcan SPAAGs like the M163 and K263 have short aiming times and have a single, continuous magazine, making them competitive against more modern vehicles at air defense and fire support.
    • Humble transports can make all the difference when fighting against infantry, suppressing them for your own infantry to take them out. Transport helicopters with rocket pods can end up being more effective than their dedicated attack counterparts.
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Cheerfully served up by a variety of realistic units, including helicopters, airplanes, MLRS rocket artillery, and warships.
  • Military Mashup Machine: France stuck autocannons on some of their tanks to help deal with helicopters, and the Czechoslovakian T-72M2 Moderna also has an autocannon. North Korea takes it to a new level by installing MANPADS on a lot of their tanks and IFVs, allowing them to bring their own (flimsy, but functional) air defense.
  • Multinational Team: A key mechanic in deck-building is the coalition: for instance, 'Eurocorps' (France and West Germany), 'Commonwealth' (Britain, ANZAC, and Canada), or 'Eastern Block' (Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia). The coalition option unlocks country-specific prototypes and in some cases provides additional bonuses. They tend to be slightly more well-rounded than a single-nation deck, at the cost of less total deployment points, and fewer units per slot (e.g. Canada on its own can have 20 hardened Airborne units per slot, but in a coalition it only gets 14 per slot).
    • Individually, ANZAC is a combination of Australian and New Zealand troops, most likely to bolster the numbers of the new faction.
  • No Kill like Overkill: SEAD missiles are the king of this trope ingame, generally inflicting enough damage to oneshot any surface-to-air missile launcher vehicle in the game. What's more unusual is that they can home in on vehicles armed with any radar-based weapon system... occasionally leading to the point-defense-immune SEAD missiles striking enemy warships.
    • Taken to extreme measures with the North Korean B-5, which drops a massive 3000kg bomb capable of obliterating anything caught in its massive blast radius.
  • Not the Intended Use: Blowpipes and Strela-2s are infamously awful MANPADS, having such low accuracy that they'll only stand a chance of hitting flying units by deploying them in dense swarms. However, they're only five points plus transport. This makes them better used as pickets to guard against flanking helicopters.
  • North Koreans with Nodongs: North Korea is a new playable country. You cannot use the Nodong ballistic missiles, though.
  • One Stat to Rule Them All: Armor penetration is the most important stat in the game, especially given the numbers of armored vehicles and tanks. 16 AP is generally considered the number that makes or breaks an anti-tank weapon or gun, as that can one-shot the 2 armor often found on transports that otherwise make them resistant to small-arms fire.
  • Painfully Slow Projectile: ATGMs travel quite slowly and you could easily make out their progress, but only in comparison to high-velocity cannon rounds streaking across the battlefield. If the ATGM unit gets taken out, suppressed or loses line of sight, the missile will almost always miss.
    • Averted with the anti-ship missiles which are very fast, which like in Real Life is mainly because they are much bigger and therefore have bigger engines. Ironically, as discussed in Point Defenseless below, warships have many more options for doing something about incoming missiles than your typical land unit.
    • The Spike anti-tank missiles available to Israel and Finland are a notable aversion as well. They have enormous range and an extremely quick flight time.
  • Point Defenseless: Averted. As in real naval warfare, the only way to successfully sink a modern ship (that is, one with air defenses installed) using missiles is to overwhelm it with dozens of missiles or to somehow close to gun range without being first obliterated by swarms of enemy missiles. As defender, you can often win a naval battle by properly positioning your ships so that all of your point defense systems complement each other. Once you've shot down all of the incoming enemy missiles, you can then launch your reply at leisure or close to gun range.
    • ATGMs, on the other hand, can partially bypass point-defenses as ships will not fire on them, and instead simply use countermeasures (flares) to spoof them.
  • Power Creep: Zig-zagged. The new nations added have powerful units that make them stand out, but most of them are minors with deficiencies that put them on the weaker side, such as ANZAC completely lacking helicopters and heavy armor. Returning factions also receive new units to keep them viable that may even out-perform their counterparts, such as the East German LStR-40, a 90's variant of the FJB-40 that possess more firepower than the equivalent SAS, and the US Patriot, the longest-ranged anti-plane AA there is.
    • The DLC nations, in order to encourage people to buy them, have more well-rounded arsenals that can stand on their own or with a coalition, and often have conceptual or anachronistic designs as powerful units. To build off of the LStR example, Finland gets the Erikoisrajajaakari, a unit with a similar loadout but also possess recon capabilities. They also get F/A-18 Hornets that are better armed than their American or Canadian counterparts, which they only bought after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  • Punny Name: Many of the maps: Jungle LAW, Strait to the Point, Another D-Day in Paradise, 38th Perpendicular (38th Parallel rotated 90 degrees), Final Meltdown, etc.
  • Scenery Porn: The IrisZoom engine allows for massive maps depicting tranquil rural valleys, rocky deserts, and dense jungle with good detail from high overhead or zoomed all the way down to ground level.
  • Selective Historical Armory: One of the issues with the naval combat. The game's cutoff point for including historical units is 1995, but in the pursuit of game balance and to avoid having the BLUFOR naval deck be almost entirely American, there are several units which are much more common than they should be and others which are absent despite being very common. For example:
    • The Japanese Kongo-class destroyer is an offshoot of the American Arleigh Burke-class. Only the Kongos are featured in the game, but only 1 Kongo had even been built in 1991, and she had not yet been commissioned. However, there were already 3 Burkes afloat and the first had actually been commissioned.
      • Making it all the more baffling, by 1991 there had been 19 US Ticonderoga-class cruisers built, which have very similar (slightly heavier) armament to the Kongo and Arleigh Burke-class ships. They do not feature at all.
    • A similar story with the Japanese Hatsuyuki-class destroyers (11 built) completely displacing the similar American Spruance-class (30 built).
    • Towed artillery and other mostly-static defenses are not implemented due to difficulties in simulating them in a mostly vehicle-based game. For example, Poland has no mortars because none of them are mounted on vehicles. This contrasts with infantry units lugging around wheeled recoilless rifles or even light multiple rocket launchers like the Inflict (though still not artillery).
  • Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: The ships are horrendously short ranged compared to their real-life counterparts, mainly due to the scale of the maps being set up for land units, which are normally limited by things like hills, buildings, and trees.
    • For example, the max range of the in-game Harpoon missile is 8750m, or about 4.7 nautical miles. The real life RGM-84 Harpoon has a max unclassified range of 50-75 nautical miles, depending on the model.
    • Shipboard guns suffer similarly, with the OTO-Melara 76mm gun mounted on a variety of BLUFOR frigates having an ingame range of 3150m whereas in real life, depending on the ammo, it can reach out anywhere from 16000m to 40000m.
    • Air-to-air missiles have a similar issue, not to mention that no plane has a speed above 1,100km/h. Eugen seems to have skipped on planes being able to throttle up/down; they travel at a constant speed no matter what.
    • Inverted with some infantry weapons, such as submachine guns capable of engaging targets at more than 400 meters and the M72 LAW having a 525 meter range (real effective range: 200 meters).
    • Tank guns are capped at 2275 meters and most ATGMs have a maximum range of 2800 meters, lower than their actual ranges. Air defenses and artillery also have shorter ranges due to the size of the maps.
  • Smoke Out: Most mortars and tube artillery can fire smoke shells, vital for cutting lines of sight and concealing units against enemy fire.
  • The Smurfette Principle: North Korea's Jeongchaldae recon sniper team is the only female unit for REDFOR and Israel's Milium for BLUFOR, at least as it appears on their unit cards.
  • South Africans with Surface-to-Air Missiles: South Africa is a DLC country. True to their name, they have a variety of surface-to-air missiles that you can deploy in your deck.
  • South Koreans with Marines: South Korea is a new playable country. Their Marines also feature as shock infantry.
  • Splash Damage Abuse: Low-hovering helicopters are vulnerable to explosion damage, and killing unwary helis with aerial bombs and artillery shells happens occasionally. Against particularly careless enemies, even weapons like the 165mm HESH shell from the M728 CEV or a rocket barrage from a gunship helicopter will do the trick, if you target them correctly and account for dispersion.
  • Straight for the Commander: Like in the prequels. Doing so nets you a lot of victory points, as well as neutralizing a key map sector.
  • Tank Goodness: If a tank was fielded by any East Asian nation in this game's time period, it's probably in here somewhere.
    • As with the other games, a lot of other units like armored cars, ATGM vehicles or artillery are also available.
  • Urban Warfare: City sectors play a prominent role on most maps, and make infantry an absolute necessity, since urban fighting is guaranteed to be extremely messy for all combatants involved. ATGMs sheltering in a city block will stop a tank charge in its tracks. There are also cities outside of control zones, which can be filled with infantry and their armed transports, and which can entirely lock down roads that run through them (unless the attackers have napalm...).
  • Veteran Unit: There are five levels of veterancy: Rookie, Trained, Hardened, Veteran, and Elite. Each level comes with some sizable but not game-breaking buffs to accuracy, rate of fire, and resistance to shock. Unlike in most games, however, you can often choose to buy higher-experienced units from the start: you'll just have less of them per card. (Would you prefer two rookie A-10s or one elite?)
  • Videogame Flamethrowers Suck: They do not. Sapper/engineer units and some specialized infantry carry napalm weapons, which are especially deadly in urban fighting and can kill tanks at short range.
    • Napalm artillery deserves special mention; the TOS-1 Buratino can wipe small towns off the map.
    • Zig-zagged on some special forces, such as USSR Spetsnaz and Chinese Li Jian '90. They carry thermobaric rockets, which are essentially long-ranged flamethrowers that also deals heavy damage on enemy infantry and light vehicles. These are the most efficient anti-infantry units in game, but are defenceless against armoured vehicles (As they don't carry anti-armour rockets used by normal infantry). Which means they are rather situational.
  • Villains Act, Heroes React: Is the case with the 3 BLUFOR campaigns, where the player has to withstand a REDFOR assault with limited defenses before turning the tables with late-arriving reinforcements.
  • War Is Hell: While not depicted outright, it is common for everyone to lose the majority of their forces in a drawn-out match. Having multiple platoons wiped out in a second by carpet bomber strikes or whole tank columns shredded in an ambush aren't uncommon occurrences.
  • World War III: War in Korea or various other parts of Asia are part of the campaign. The most fitting example is the "2nd Korean War" campaign, with China, North Korea and the USSR invading South Korea, who has to hold out with only their own forces and the USS Enterprise carrier strike group until relieved by French, British, Canadian, ANZAC, and (more) American reinforcements.
  • Zerg Rush: Can be done with lots of small ships or cheap tanks. Its effectiveness has been toned down somewhat in recent patches; in the past, "spam T-55s and T-34s" was a popular option. Of particular note is that, due to the game necessitating actual logistics management in the form of fuel and ammunition, throwing so many weak and cheap units at the opposition as possible in order to make them run out of ammo is a perfectly viable tactic.

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