After I lost those control centers, I was in such a scramble to get them back that I tried to overwhelm my enemy with cheap infantry: a dumb mistake that cost me everything. In retrospect, his late entry let him save up his resource points and devote them to powerful armor units.
My Johnny-come-lately opponent has won, 100 points to 85. I pry my hand off the mouse to type into the global chat: “Hello?”Īfter a moment, a response comes through: “sorry I was afk lol.” Tanks and mortars and armored cars and machine guns and sniper teams light up my minimap, and my men start to die. As I round 80 percent, my fear gives way to confusion. My victory points climb to 50 percent, then to 70 percent. I have every squad hunkered down behind cover, their guns trained on the foggy fields and dirt roads that the enemy should be marching down. My men have captured all three control points in the center of the small, one-versus-one map. To say I'm wound a bit tight would be an understatement. In a horror game, an empty rural village would be cliche, but in online RTS play, it's unbearably tense. The town in my first match, a French village with a robust shipping and industrial neighborhood, seems completely empty.
The shortest games are the one-on-one fights, which typically last only a few minutes and end with a decisive winner. In resource-capture modes, cash for troops accrues gradually, and each soldier type has a cooldown timer after recruitment. The most interesting is Assault Zones Extreme, a jumbo-sized eight-on-eight version of the standard resource-capture game mode. There are five multiplayer modes, but, true to form, the differences between their rulesets are never fully explained. Hours of experimentation later, I decide to make the jump to multiplayer. Moments later another assault wave begins, all of my men run out of ammo, and everyone dies. At that moment, I learn that soldiers can run out of ammo and that every soldier in the game has his own inventory system full of grenades, bandages, and entrenching equipment. They've held off a counterattack, and I see one soldier has a red ammo clip over his head. My Marines are having a hell of a time taking this unnamed island back from the Japanese-even with my assistance in the form of a dead-shot sniper squad leader in Direct Control mode. Self-education takes time, so at this early stage I'm incompetent.
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