RTS The Great War: Western Front turned me into a WW1 villain

So many historical war games portray conflict and war as something to be resolved by a small group of individuals. Heroes who, if they fight hard or smart enough, will eventually turn the tide. The Great War: Western Fronta new real-time strategy game from Petroglyph Studios, quickly discards notions of bravery and heroism with a sobering portrayal of the futility of war.

campaigns The Great War are split between a turn-based overview of the Western Front and real-time battles that are fought as armies clash in each hex. Your goal in the campaign, whether playing as the Central Powers or the Triple Entente, is to either capture the enemy headquarters or completely weaken your enemy’s national will – a numerical representation of the casualties suffered in battle. In this way, building up a strong defense that costs the enemy a prohibitive number of casualties is a perfectly legitimate strategy.

Image: Petroglyph/Boundary Foundry via Polygon

commanding a defense in The Great War, however, will force you to forget the habits that RTS games have taught you to keep the enemy at bay. You might be tempted to create a one-line no man’s land riddled with trenches and machine gun emplacements and supported by artillery, but paradoxically that makes your defenses incredibly fragile.

Make no mistake, if there’s a loophole or weak point your enemy can exploit, they’ll make a beeline for your headquarters without a second thought. An intelligently layered defense that allows you to quickly adapt to your enemy’s strategy is far more effective. However, you will inevitably run out of supplies for every weapon or vehicle you want. This is where one of the cold truths of the Western Front kicks in: tanks, planes, and machine guns are expensive, but arming a bunch of men with guns is cheap.

Image: Petroglyph/Boundary Foundry via Polygon

All too often I found myself simply filling a gap in my line with an unimaginable number of soldiers who I knew would inevitably die, but I didn’t think too much about it because my pride had convinced me that that I needed only a few hundred more bodies to repel the enemy’s offensive. This strategy worked a few times, but ultimately it cost me more than simply admitting the battle and saving a few thousand families from reading conciliatory War Department letters.

With the sour taste of too many Pyrrhic victories in my mouth, I vowed no longer to cower in the trenches, waiting for the enemy to attack me when it suited them. No, I was determined to push through the front so hard that by Christmas we would have the Boche on the run. I raised a force so massive it practically bankrupted my nation, but I had faith that ending the conflict quickly would be worthwhile.

I chose my time and place carefully, a rainy patch of land near the English Channel that my spies had assured me was only sparsely defended. I deployed rank after rank of soldiers to penetrate the enemy line. They met the expected resistance and were crushed and demoralized by artillery and machine gun fire. But as the death toll mounted without my forces capturing a single objective, I fooled myself into believing that all I needed to win was just two more companies of good men—not to mention the fact that we had already lost 20 others like her.

Image: Petroglyph/Boundary Foundry via Polygon

As I contemplated my military quagmire, I was reminded of the climactic final scene in 1917, in which George MacKay gives orders to a callous and scarred Benedict Cumberbatch, so certain he has the enemy on the run that he is ready to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to their deaths without a second thought. That’s when I realized: That was me. I was Benedict Cumberbatch. Instead of consolidating my powers and playing smart, my pursuit of fame made me someone willing to throw life away for a chunk of land that would inevitably be reclaimed in two months time.

Image: Petroglyph/Boundary Foundry via Polygon

The human cost of war isn’t something I usually think about when playing a historical RTS like Company of Heroes or even some entries in the Total War franchise where I’m perfectly fine with just throwing a bunch of guys into one Evil march time without thinking about it. But The Great War forces you to wonder if grabbing this narrow spit of otherwise useless filth was really worth what you paid for it.