At first glance, Unity of Command 2
may look intimidating, the familiarity of the pint-sized tanks and
military men that populate its World War II battlefields obscured by an
impenetrable fog of unintuitive jargon and confounding icons. But once
the confusion clears it reveals a surprisingly straightforward wargame
whose keen focus on establishing and severing lines of supply delivers
remarkable strategic depth.
This isn't really a strategy
game about marching your troops forward to attack the enemy. Unity of
Command 2's twist on the genre makes it a game about manoeuvring your
units to occupy spaces that maintain clear supply lines to your forces
and deny supply to the enemy. In fact, the winning move often involves
holding your position. Sometimes you don't even need to engage the enemy
at all; you just have to starve them out.
Placing
you in charge of the Allied forces in 1943, the campaign opens in North
Africa before pushing up through Italy and into the heart of Western
Europe. Missions arrive in groups known as conferences, one of the first
off-putting terms you'll encounter. At the start of a conference, you
can spend prestige points on upgrading your field headquarters,
extending their range and efficiency during combat, and on purchasing
theatre cards that you can play in battle to grant additional abilities.
Beat all the missions in a conference and you unlock the next, along
with another chance to upgrade and purchase.
Luck and
short-term planning combine here in an interesting way. The cards
available to purchase are shuffled randomly, meaning you can't always
rely on picking up a favourite and may need to accommodate a curveball
or two. And the choices you make are locked in for the duration of the
conference, so you've got to manage with what you've got in terms of HQ
upgrades and make those cards last over several missions. Knowing you
have only three opportunities to use a naval bombardment over the course
of a single mission does a lot to focus the mind. Such constraints
force you to make bold choices about which targets you absolutely must
hit and when precisely is the right time to do so. Get these plays right
and you feel like the greatest general the world’s ever seen. Extra
cards can be collected during missions as you complete certain
objectives, but they arrive more as a relief package--an unexpected boon
to your cause rather than a way to undermine the decisions you
finalised at the last conference.
At
the outset of each mission you're able to survey the map and plan your
approach. Usually there are a couple of primary objectives that must be
fulfilled to complete the scenario, accompanied by a few secondary
objectives that, if achieved, offer a bonus reward or even a slight
tactical advantage in the next mission. These objectives are designed in
such a way to guide you across the map, and the attentive player will
glean useful advantages from them. For example, if the objectives ask
you to take a certain town by turn 5 and a second town by turn 8, then
it's likely that taking the first town will be beneficial to your
efforts to take the second. And if you're tasked with taking and holding
a location then doing so will undoubtedly accord an ongoing advantage.
Clear, concise objectives provide a structure to each mission that makes
it easy to digest what's expected of you, and when you should be aiming
to have it accomplished.
Rounding out the preparatory
phase, the units at your disposal are pre-assigned as per the scenario,
so you're never burdened with choosing whether or not to deploy the US
13th Airborne or the 7th British Armoured Division--they're already
there, conveniently positioned on a hex, ready to go. Although units
come in only two types--tank and infantry divisions--there's a host of
critical attributes that can distinguish one tank division from the
next, assuming you can get your head around the collection of arcane
icons used to describe them.
Units
are composed of "steps," an offputting, unfamiliar term that basically
measures the health of the unit. All else being equal, a five-step unit
will beat a three-step unit. Yet in these variable battlefields, things
are rarely equal. Tiny stars and crosses next to a unit indicate whether
it's an elite, veteran or regular unit, but these icons are
all-too-easily missed, and even after dozens of hours of play I still
found myself occasionally not noticing I was sending a regular infantry
to their doom against an elite. Other, multi-coloured symbols represent
various specialists serving in the division, but there's no tooltip or
in-game explanation as to how a specialist can benefit a unit. I had to
rely on an external guide, alt-tabbing out to remind myself that the
dark blue icon with the chevron indicated a self-propelled anti-tank
specialist while the chevron and dot meant it was a towed anti-tank
specialist. There's a lot to remember and keep track of, and
unfortunately, the tutorials and in-game tooltips aren't up to the job.
However,
once you've taken stock there's the opportunity to make some
last-minute adjustments, adding more regular or specialist units to this
squad or that, to better suit the strategic gambit you wish to employ.
Deploying an engineer specialist to the siege at your primary objective
will help whittle away the enemy's fortification bonuses, but maybe
you're better off assigning them to the infantry in the east to help
ford all those rivers and secure a secondary objective? All these
resources are limited, though, and the trade-offs you're forced into
always carry weight.
The importance of every decision
you make is heightened by the tight turn limit applied to each mission.
Of course, you're free to take all the time in the world on each turn.
But Unity of Command 2 is a wargame with a fast turnover, and that's
precisely what makes it so accessible. Brief skirmishes are the order of
the day rather than long, drawn-out stalemates. Often you'll be asked
to tick off secondary goals within three or four turns while 10 or 12
turns is a generous amount of time to secure the primary objectives.
Experimentation is encouraged by the short time scale. Roll the dice on
one strategy, fail quickly, and then before you know it you're back at
the battle planning stage, pondering a more effective approach based on
the lessons taught by your unsuccessful sortie.
Battles
are won through a combination of clear, decisive strikes and a
conservative support structure that can swiftly respond to any breach in
your line. The way you have to manage logistics through the supply line
system turns what could have been a puzzle game about finding the
correct solution into a meaty strategy game brimming with flexibility.
Victory is all about identifying where you really need to break through
the enemy line to secure that vital railroad junction that will cut off
supply to every enemy unit in a particular region of the map. Or it's
about realising that you can drop those paratroopers behind enemy lines
to blow up a bridge that will deny the Germans' ability to keep
supplying the frontline. Seeing your plan executed successfully is
incredibly satisfying, but at the same time, it's still entertaining to
see a plan fall apart as enemy tanks overrun a key chokepoint, suddenly
finding yourself scrambling to hold the line and divert supply to your
now-stranded troops.
Unity of Command 2 is an overall
excellent wargame. The early going can be tough as it takes time to
acclimatise to some idiosyncratic terms and learn to interpret the raft
of poorly-explained icons. Persistence--not to mention some handy
community-written guides--does pay off, though. Stick with it, and
you'll be rewarded with one of the finest strategy games in recent
times.
