Putting the gust in Carl Gustaf

Wrung all the fun out of Regiments’ long game? Birds Eye Games were thinking of you when they conceived and coded Winds of Change. Here’s what THC guest writer Martynas Klimas thinks of this newly released £11 adjunct.

“I still remember when Wargame: European Escalation came out and ushered in the new dawn of Cold-War-Gone-Hot RTS games. Since then, developers have tried to strike a balance between spectacle, realism, and approachability. Regiments still ranks highly in that regard. Is new DLC, Winds of Change, as transformative as its name suggests?

Sadly, this isn’t a story-campaign expansion. Instead, Regiments: Winds of Change introduces ‘War Paths’. The main title’s Operations featured bespoke skirmish sequences for specific formations as well as unit carry-over and resource tracking. In contrast, War Paths are open to any of the game’s regiments, with the composition of the main body largely identical to the one found in skirmish modes. You also choose the length of the War Path in stages (themselves broken down into one-battle phases) as well as the opposition.

^Oh nyet, the new French troops are attacking the new dismounted mortars!

Amusingly enough, depending on what front you choose – this determines what mixture of enemy forces you’ll run into – you may encounter NATO-allied East Germans!

Randomly deciding to go on the warpath

Anything past that point is randomly generated. The task forces you can reinforce the main body with will change for each War Path, and so will the composition of the enemy forces, allied support, random events (duh), and so on. Having a friendly force roaming the battlefield and getting into trouble can be a major help, just like getting hit with a random event that grounds planes and increased helicopter prices can be troublesome (especially for an air-assault regiment).

At each stage, you’ll be presented with the choice of two missions, which you’ll try to accomplish until you either win or run out of phases. You can also choose to retreat and regroup, though it incurs a heavy victory point cost.

But while the stated aim of randomized maps, main objectives and secondaries is to provide several hundred combinations of scenarios, whether that works in practice is another question. Most of my experience was in the pre-release version, but what I found is that defence missions tend to favour one or two maps. This may be less of an issue in convoy protection – it necessitates a map crossed by a straight road – but is somewhat annoying for regular ones.

Or maybe that’s just an unfortunate effect of the opposing front that I choose. I absolutely do not want to run into GSFG’s T-80s and BMP-3s as France.

^This victory was brought to you by Podplukovník Pyrrhus

Ah, the French. Winds of Change DLC introduces four new nations – France, Netherlands, Canada, Czechoslovakia – with three regiments per nation. France is the obvious standout. It sees the other NATO minors roll in with their own Leopard 1 versions (though the Dutch have their own Leo2s) and says (smugly) “tiens ma bière.” It then shows up to fight WW3 with the AMX-30B, which, at least in Regiments, can be generously described as “a marginal improvement over the T-55A”.

The devs themselves admit that fighting as the French was an experience. They aren’t wrong.

Luckily, each regiment in War Paths is rated on their difficulty – the cool, near-experimental technology-toting forces that make WARNO and Team Yankee fans slobber (US, W. Germans) being the easiest, and the reserve (KdA Militarberzirk III represent), motorized rifle, and French being the hardest.

For real masochists, you can choose to start out with a damaged or really mauled regiment, which means splitting your starting points not only between resources (including new-to-Regiments SIGINT, which gives you increasingly more data on enemy forces, but degrades regularly) and adding new task-forces, but also replenishing your troops.

Anyone who chooses a maximum-length War Path with a badly-mauled Master-difficulty regiment deserves a medal for bloody-mindedness. The only upside to such a choice is that you will never encounter the issue of “having too many points and not enough things to buy”.

In the arms of a Mi-8, fly away from here

Another thing worth mentioning is the introduction of heliborne infantry. It’s not the only new unit type that Winds of Change DLC brings to the game – in fact, the new unit types may be accessible without the expansion – but it’s the most prominent. First of all, it necessitated a rethink of the elegant way Regiments does infantry: mainly, as vehicles with ablative dismounts as opposed to two different units in every other game. How do you do that with helicopters? Surely they’re not gonna march with the infantry.

^Whoa, czech those guys out!

So what the devs did is have the player call in the helicopter unit. Once you dismount the infantry, the helos retreat off the map, granting you a 100% return of points. The infantry platoon on the ground is now essentially free, even if stuck as permanently foot-mobile. Retreat them, and they’ll remount off-screen.

This, however, raises an issue: it’s a very expensive unit to bring in, and the rebate will encourage you to bring in other units. So even if they’re not destroyed, bringing them to the field again will not be trivial as you’d have to retreat at least two other units and wait for their points to trickle back in.

And if there’s one thing true both in Regiments and in the Winds of Change DLC, it’s that you can never have enough units.

All in all, I’m giving this one a thumbs-up. Regiments: Winds of Change DLC introduces several new concepts into the game and shows that Bird’s Eye Games are still hard at work, squeezing all they can out of the engine. Who knows, maybe one day, they’ll find a way to dole out those special weapons stuck in the silly Fire Support platoons to the regular troops.”