A WWI strategy game turned me into Benedict Cumberbatch

So many historical wargames portray conflict and war as something 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 dismisses all notions of bravery and heroism with a sobering portrayal of the futility of war.

Campaigns in The Great War are split between a turn-based overview of the Western Front and real-time combat that plays out 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 enemy headquarters or completely exhaust your enemy’s national will – a numerical representation of losses in battle. In this way, setting up a strong defense that costs the enemy a prohibitive number of losses is a perfectly legitimate strategy.

To command a defense The Great War, however, will force you to forget the habits RTS games have taught you to keep the enemy at bay. You might be tempted to create a one-line no man’s land, littered with trenches and machine gun emplacements and backed by artillery, but this paradoxically leaves your defenses incredibly vulnerable.

Make no mistake, if there is a hole or a weakness that your enemy can exploit, they will gladly fly to your HQ without a second thought. A cleverly layered defense that allows you to quickly adapt to your enemy’s strategy is much more effective. However, it is inevitable that you will not have enough supplies for every weapon or vehicle you want. This is where one of the cold truths of the Western Front begins: tanks, planes and machine guns are expensive, but arming a bunch of men with rifles is cheap.

Image: Petroglyph/Frontier Foundry via Polygoon

All too often I found myself simply plugging a gap in my line with an unreasonable number of soldiers who I knew would inevitably perish, but gave it no thought as my pride had convinced me I only needed a few hundred had. more bodies to repel the enemy’s offensive. This strategy worked a few times, but in the end it cost me more than just giving up the fight and saving a few thousand families from reading conciliatory letters from the War Department.

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 him. No, I was determined to push through the front with such force that we would have the boche on the run by Christmas. I assembled a force so large that it effectively bankrupted my country, but I was confident that it would be worth it to end the conflict quickly.

I chose my time and place carefully, a rainy stretch of land close to the English Channel that my spies had assured me would be scarcely defended. I set up row after row of soldiers to push into enemy lines. Meeting the expected resistance, they were cut down and demoralized by artillery barrages and machine gun fire. But as the death toll mounted without my forces accomplishing a single objective, I fooled myself into thinking that all I needed to win was just two companies of good men—regardless of the fact that we already had 20 others were lost, just like them.

Image: Petroglyph/Frontier Foundry via Polygoon

As I reflected on 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, who is so sure he has the enemy on the run that he is willing to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to their deaths without thinking twice. Then I realized: it was me. I was Benedict Cumberbatch. Instead of joining forces and playing smart, my fame hunt turned me into someone willing to throw away lives for a piece of land that would inevitably be retaken in two months.

Image: Petroglyph/Frontier Foundry via Polygoon

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 totally okay with just having a bunch of dudes go to a bad time without thinking about it. But The Great War forces you to question whether grabbing that narrow spit of otherwise useless dirt was really worth what you paid for it.