28 hours has to be enough. Second (if not third) Flashpoint Campaigns game I’m getting off Slitherine – and the first one I’m [gendering] up to review. Because I promised the good folks online – nobody in particular really, just the general online population – that I’d do it. So here it goes: Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War is the best Cold War game you can play on this, the publication day of the article.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think there’s a canonical timeline to Flashpoint Campaigns. It’s 1989 and the Cold War is no longer cold. Newborn me, [-30 to +10] days old at the time, is not involved in the conventional conflict once again bringing ruin to Europe. Meanwhile, the Americans, the Soviets, the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Germans, the Poles, the Czechs, the Belgians – they’re finally going to fuck and get it out of their system in the technothiller hyperwar to end all hyperwars.
Finally, someone decided to make a good game
Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War is the sexiest, most accessible hex-and-chit game there is, and we’re lucky that it’s about Cold War. What’s even cooler is that the devs didn’t even bother with any skirmish or random battle modes. It’s all scenarios all the way down, from what promo materials claim to be 60 stand-alones to around 40 others scattered over 10 campaigns. You’d think that four battles per campaign might not be much, but with battles like these, boyyyy…
See, where most Cold War games fail – and Eugen’s titles fail spectacularly – is introducing any sort authenticity. They don’t simulate command and control or friction or doctrinal differences, or do anything more sophisticated than transforming TO&Es (or TOEs if you’re too lazy for Shift+7/a foot pervert) into unit models. But Pepperidge Farm remembers that On Target Simulations actually know what they’re doing.
And the most spectacular thing about a game built out of spectacular things is the command cycle mechanic. Or as I’d say, making the game asynchronous turn based, which is a wilder take on turn-based simultaneous-resolution. The latter has the players submit their orders separately before the game runs the turn to see how those orders collide with each other. You may know it from Combat Mission: you submit orders, potentially by email, and then you watch essentially a one minute cutscene of those orders getting people killed. The former, however, takes it a step further.
With asynchronous turn based gaming, my turn isn’t the same length as your turn. The NATO player may act every 14 minutes of in-game time. The Warsaw Pact player may do so every 23. This is reflective of the two different doctrinal approaches to organizing forces and fighting wars while also being baller as fuck. Because the asynchronicity of it all isn’t set in stone.
As the match goes, various circumstances might change. You may submit more orders one turn and fewer the next. Your units may be in disarray. The enemy electronic warfare may jamming the waves by blasting HEALTH – Blue Monday. Your HQ radio emissions – from all complaints about how its anachronistic for 1989 and the New Order version would be more appropriate – may have been picked up by signal intelligence and subsequently your command staff was washed away by some 203mm downpour. All of this can make your command cycle either longer or shorter.
You want your OODA cycle to be shorter than the enemy’s because I’m desperate to use the fencing analogy of getting within the opponent’s reach, obstructing their swings.
As such, Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War recreates something authentic of how wars are fought, touches upon real doctrinal differences between the major power blocks, and produces another game to play over PBEM because not everyone has the time to coordinate live games. And yet it goes deeper than that.
Keep your Team Yankee where I can see it
So the basic unit the NATO player is likely to control is a platoon. For Warsaw Pact, that’s a company. It’s not an Asiatic hordes thing – it’s just that Soviet Union, due to various historical reasons, never really revamped troop training; the NCOs were thus never meant to do more than keep men in line. Unlike redoing a training machine that handles millions of conscripts, it’s a lot easier to train a bunch of excellent commissioned officers who will put their forces in the position where their relative tactical inferiority won’t matter.
You’re the one left carrying the bag. Playing NATO is fairly easy: they are favored by the command cycle, their units can be spread out more effectively and, by 1989, they have the technological superiority. Well, the forces with thermals, Abramses and Leo 2s do. Those riding around in Leo 1s and M113s are much closer to parity. But that’s OK, most scenarios have NATO on the defense, and if there’s an easy task in the world, it’s selecting positions with good sight lines to snipe the endless flood of T-80Us from relative safety.
Meanwhile, the first issue that Warsaw Pact encounters is that the game discourages having more than a company in a hex. It causes traffic jams (a hex is 500 meters) and artillery crews feel their blood move towards the genitals at the mere thought of a target larger than a platoon. And you’re on the attack, so you don’t know the land, every bush can be an ITOW launcher, and you have inferior night vision equipment. Good luck!
But if you get just a little bit good, playing Warsaw Pact is exhilarating. Will you be able to use terrain masking and pre-planned fires to deliver your troops safely to a position where they can grab the enemy by the belt? Get close enough and even 2A28 Grom becomes dangerous. Will your recons die efficiently to ensure the safety of the followups? A BRDM is a lot more expendable than a T-64. Will your heart be able to handle annoyingly, dedicating a company to be attrited by assaulting a platoon position?
I’ll give you a hint for the last one: military wisdom is that you want a 3:1 numerical superiority at the very least on the attack. Maybe having tho shepard companies isn’t that bad in the end as long as you don’t stop, just fucking go.
“Move deliberate” is the only order worth remembering
I almost feel like it’s pointless to discuss the differences between factions/countries at a deeper level. For one, you’re not choosing a faction or building an army – that has been done for you. You can’t meta your way out of this one, even if you can optimize your play some with a bit of gamey system mastery.
For example, I don’t know whether a battalion-to-division commander should be able to set how many rounds a mortar barrage will use. I have recently realized, via reading the game manuals, that you can make smoke barrages deploy just a round or two per hex, which will suit most circumstances, speed up smoke delivery, and allow you to develop a curtain long enough to hide your shame.
And I have a sneaky suspicion that there’s a very gamey reason why Assault – one of the three unit orders, alongside Move Hasty and Move Deliberate – is the only one that has a 40 minute lead time. Units on Assault may be slower than on Hasty, but it is more defensive; they’re less protected than on Deliberate, but faster and can enter enemy hexes. If not for the 40 minute penalty, you’d always be assaulting.
“Hol’ on,” you may say. “What do you mean ‘three unit orders?’ Are there no others?” Well, yes, there’s Hold, Screen, and Rest and Resupply. But Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War doesn’t have all the fiddly attacks orders and other nonsense. In fact, outside of ordering artillery to strike a hex, you’re not the boss of anyone’s targeting priority. You just have to hope that your recon units will live long enough to spot the enemy and that whatever mysterious processes happen in the background will pass that information to the T-72 company tearing ass down the highway.
Trust me, the task of getting where you want them to be when you want them to be there is challenging enough to base most of the game around. But since Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War isn’t a simple game, there are a lot of SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) modifiers you can tack onto units and specific orders. But oops, this is getting too mechanical for this review – and the game doesn’t lack mechanical depth.
World War III is all vibes
However, Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War (and the series in general) is the kind of deep game where you don’t really need to know the inns and outs of the engine to play it. There’s no part of the game that is as impenetrable as Shadow Empire’s districts. The SOP system is easier to grasp than Armored Brigade’s. There’s no reason to know which tank has a Hull-to-Turret Ratio 7 or what ACAH4FSR even means. As long as you can handle orders, as long you know that the job of recon units is to die instead of real people, as long you know where and when to drop artillery, you will be fine.
And if you don’t know such things, I hope you have your favorite PDF ready ready, because Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War is lovingly documented and fully reliant on PDFs for tutorials. In fact, while devs are putting out videos to make the game clearer – personally, I most likely learned the basics from watching Grey Hunter’s videos – read the PDFs and play the tutorials. They’re well written and will provide you with ample instructions on all parts of the game and, what’s best, even the theoretical military thinking behind them.
Do it now.
Seriously, when it comes to grog games, even having a tutorial isn’t always a given. And even then, the tutorials only tell you how the game works. It’s often left to the player to figure the military art that the game is meant to be simulating. But here, it’s all laid out in neat PDFs.
Now, to mention the big change in Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War when compared it to its immediate predecessor Flashpoint Campaigns: Southern Storm (that was supposed to get DLCs but the publisher insisted on new game): transportation. Previously, Flashpoint Campaigns was a series of mechanized warfare. If you wanted leg infantry, you had to manufacture it by making it lose all its transports in an assault. Now, you can have units that don’t have organic transport – but that’s OK, the transport mode will take care of that.
Transport planner is a fairly simple new menu for organizing serials; that is, simple sequences of orders for transports to pick up lads and put them somewhere else. This is the job for helicopters and trucks, and dumb shit is both possible and encouraged. The devs themselves showed that you can shove some guys into a small helicopter and then sling-load onto a bigger helicopter. In my futile attempt to see whether it’s possible to do fixed wing transport to on-map airstrips (no), I managed to sling load an An-2 under a helicopter.
Congrats on Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War for finally solving the issue plaguing a lot of World War 2 and Cold War gaming: what do we do with units that have transports unsuitable for combat? You just make them a separate unit.
Build the war you want to fight
But this opens possibilities. For 1989, it’s VDV helicopter assaults, heliborne ATGM blocking ops (hiii to Marco Cimmino and Fabrizio Vianello!!!) and harebrained scenario editor ideas about KdA reserves in trucks rushing to reinforce positions against an American counterattack in D+7. But it also allows for such 1960s ideas like “a rifle company can be mechanized from the divisional APC pool” if and/when you want to take the game into earlier Cold War.
Because that’s what the scenario editor allows at least theoretically. The force structures are accurate for 1980-1989, but if you look closely, you can see that a Soviet tank force can be equipped with T-10Ms and T-34/85s. In fact, when you set the scenario date, the editor only gives you units that were available at that specific time – sadly, we’re talking about squad types and vehicles, not OOBs. There’s also the issue that not all force selectors go that deep – set the scenario in 1969 and the only tanks Americans will have available are Sheridans, with M48s presumably deathly terrified of T-55s and Long T-55s (T-62s).
Theoretically, there’s nothing stopping players from making lists for 1960s save for missing Russian language sources (warplans.org isn’t returning my emails) and having too much sanity (Something Awful’s own LatwPIAT is more of a late 80s gal anyways). The PDF FM09 Data Structures and Editing tells you about the meaning of all the weird unit statline phrases and, crucially, confirms that all the data is stored in Excel sheets. And FM08 will tell you how to replace all the art PNGs and audio zips, and even guide you, step by bloody step, in turning an image ripped from Tank Encyclopedia into a sil (silhouette). The only thing missing is Workshop support.
I will sneer at you if you replace unit art with random historical photos of tanks. If you replace unit art with AI gen stuff, I will hope your next trip to the bathroom necessitates hemicorporectomy.
What I’m trying to drill down once again is that Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War is a game that is very friendly to players, a rare treat for a grog game. Sure, Command: Modern Ops finally has an interface a human can look at and War in the East 2 really tried making nice PDFs to guide dum-dums (send me a Steam code, Paolo!), but then we also have Combat Mission and its age old reluctance to even have pop-ups.
No, what we’re dealing with is a small group of dedicated devs (last I checked, On Target Simulations is 6 lads) that want you to play this game.
I’ll go a step further: Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War is also a very pretty hex-and-chit game. While there’s little actual art and the units are either NATO counters (for infantry) or sils (for vehicles), the colors and the counter designs are very pleasing. Each new window that I open assaults me with data, yes, but also charms with minimalist beauty.
Meanwhile, the maps are just detailed enough and really colorful – something 3D World War 2 game devs should take to heart rather than painting their games with all the colors of a mud puddle. In addition to that, craters and (and, if I’m not mistaken, this is user contribution that ascended to game feature) simple casualty markers transform the pristine landscape into a bloodless abbatoir to horrify any [gender] of culture.
I already have a Pavlovian response to the fire sprites and explosion sounds that mark the destruction of subunits. It is a good feeling.
Now, a word for our Linux-bros, Cachy-hos and Debi-enbies: Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War (and at least Southern Storm) works, thanks to Proton. It is not ideal, and there are some visual issues you have to learn to live around. But if you don’t want to, here’s the github ticket I posted in October, feel free to military formation between battalion and division it.
Game Good
So, to put this baby to bed, Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War owns bones, kicks ass and slaps shit. It’s engorged with great features and tumescent with potential. I just hope I have it in me to put in many more hours into it. And Southern Storm owners have a 50% discount to do the same.