Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War
by
Matrix Games
This is a piece that comes straight from the designers of Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War. If you play computer wargames, you will be well aware of their last two releases:
Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm
Flashpoint Campaigns: Southern Storm
My name is Robert Crandall and I’m the founder of On Target Simulations, the studio behind the Flashpoint series of games. I started work in 2002 after talking to Matrix Games, and I’ve been working on it ever since. It was a solo project for the first few years, but then I smartened up and started recruiting partners to help out. We divvied up the jobs, and I found that the game itself improved significantly once the others joined in on the design. The downside was that the rate of development actually slowed as we added more people. We had so many ideas that we wanted to do that starting them all made it very hard to finish anything! (Cue the eye-rolling by Matrix here). Such is the life of a software development team.
We currently have a core group of perhaps 19 people who are seriously contributing to Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War. Some are full-time, and some are evenings and weekends. All get a say in what the game looks like. During our six-month beta testing period, we had over 60 devoted testers who provided feedback on scenarios, identified bugs, and made suggestions that we considered. There were over 700 surveys filled out by testers with feedback! There is no doubt about the players helping shape this game and will continue to do so beyond our game launch on November 20th.
The game itself? Ah, yes, it is a tactical ground combat simulation set in 1989 West Germany, positing a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It is as high intensity as combat can get. You command a force ranging in size from a reinforced battalion to a reinforced regiment on a 500-meter hex map, 15 by 25 km or larger, for 4 to 14 hours of game time. Maneuver units are typically platoons for NATO and companies for the Warsaw Pact.
We model equipment right down to the individual vehicles, guns, and sensors, but the real game is at a much higher level. You are the overall commanding officer, and you must give orders that have time lags and uncertainty associated with them. You don’t have time to micromanage your forces, you must think big and see the total picture through the fog of war.
If you can operate a standard Windows program, then you can operate this game. Yes, there is a learning curve, but we try to make it easy to start. We have tutorials and lots of docs to get you going. As much as possible, you just need to point and click to get things started. The game is hard to master, though, because it tries to reward good tactics. Good tactics are, well, hard and very situational. With practice, though, you will develop an eye for these situations and get a feel for when and where you should push hard and when you shouldn’t.
As you get going, you will find yourself dipping more deeply into the support reports and map overlays to get a better sense of potentials and possibilities. You don’t have to, but they are there waiting for you. If you take the time to study the terrain and think about the capabilities of both your and the enemy units, you will find yourself doing better and better.
This being the Cold War, there is a lot of interesting new stuff for a gamer to play with beyond the usual tanks, infantry, and artillery. We have attack helicopters, ATGM firing units, weapon locating radars for counter battery work, and off-map artillery that you can call in. We have air strikes and air defense suppression assets. We have ten nations in the database (so far) and 80 maps to play on. The maps are some of the most beautiful you will play on in the wargaming realm.
There are over 50 standalone scenarios and another 46 between 10 campaigns. We paid special attention to researching the historically accurate units stationed in the various locations across West Germany. Where we could find accurate orders of battle, we use them. It’s amazing how many fans and our own team members bring forward anecdotes from their own time serving in their respective military and share resources that we can draw inspiration and information from.
New in this iteration of the game is tactical transport. This allows you to load leg infantry into helicopters to do air assaults, something that was a big part of the Warsaw Pact plans and something the NATO allies really wanted to use as well. Look for a scenario called “Rendezvous with Destiny” to see a big NATO air assault by the 101st Airborne Division. I strongly suggest you do the “Tutorial - Air Assault Operations” first though. There is lots to wrap your head around here.
If you are familiar with the predecessor game, Flashpoint Campaigns Southern Storm, from three years ago, you will see numerous improvements in the UI, speeding up the orders giving, more variety of unit types, and new features like tactical transport, group movement, artillery fire support groups, and new Staff reports. We have also brought in Belgian and Polish forces to the battle, bringing the total nations represented to 10. I should mention that the game needs a 1920 x 1080 minimum screen resolution but otherwise makes no particular demands of your hardware. The standalone scenarios can be played from either side, but the campaigns are for one particular side only. All of the scenario editing tools ship with the game. Flashpoint Campaigns has always been designed to be played while wearing your tactical thinking hat on to be successful. It’s a classic wargame in the sense that it’s a safe environment for planning a bold course of action and witnessing as it unravels your force or pays off.
Flashpoint Campaigns: Cold War
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