World in Conflict

World in Conflict is a strategy game where the player defends the USA against invading Soviet forces in World War 3. It is set in the 80’s when the Berlin Wall should have fallen but it didn’t and after Europe was taken over the Soviets moved on to the US.

The player leverages every weapons technology available at that time and up till today (not very much has changed in that regard), from foot soldiers over vehicles and aircraft to air strikes and the ultimate weapon, nuclear missiles.

Typical for a real time strategy game it has both, single player and multi player modes but it is aimed at player versus player conflict.

The goal of the game is for a team of players to cooperatively dominate the opposing team by performing certain tasks related to specified areas of the battlefield, called ‘Command Points’, depending on game mode chosen before the start of the match.

Victory conditions:

• Domination: Capture all command points or hold the majority over a period of time
• Assault: One team starts out holding all command points and the attacking team has to capture them
• Tug of War: A front line keeps getting pushed back and forth, the team which ends up controlling most of the battle field wins

The main type of conflict is physical, achieving goals by shooting or blowing things up but also economical as all players have to manage their resources. Players can pick a role at the start of the game, such as troops, vehicles, air units or artillery support.

The game developers took a new approach to the handling of resources. Instead of having to gather resources and build a base to support the war effort which usually results in a slow game start, each player is given an equal number of points that he can spend to buy units right at the start of the round. That pool of points is fairly small, restricting him to a handful of units at a time. Over time and as own units are destroyed, the pool will refill and the player can order new units. If a team has a good balance of roles and good teamwork they can effectively ‘bleed’ their enemies dry of resources by eliminating their units with appropriate offensive/defensive units while not sustaining heavy losses. The enemy will have to sit there and wait until their timers are up so they can order new units.

The image above shows an example of an efficient tactic. These ground troops and the vehicle are not capable of dealing with airborne targets, so the helicopters will win this engagement. The ground is still burning and there is a lot of smoke which suggests that this area has been carpet bombed, so these ground units might be whats left of a bigger army which was holding a command point and the heli’s are cleaning up before their ground troops move in to secure the command point. The conflict between the affected players here has been resolved.

The conflict can be fairly intense when the player joins the battle at the front line but it comes in stages. As the player loses units he has to track back to the drop points in his team’s safety zone where reinforcements are inserted and command them to drive/walk/fly to the front. Once engaged in a fight the player has to concentrate on issuing the right orders with the right units on the correct opposing units and using their special abilities to counter incoming attacks or to launch an offensive move.

As part of the interface, there is a bar on the top of the screen which indicates progress towards victory or defeat by displaying markers for command points held, the round timer and the team score points gathered. On the ground, each command point held by friendly units is marked green, both on the ground and on the mini-map. That makes it easy to see where to focus the next attacks.