Strategic Command: European Theater

This is what you play when your latest Gary Grigsby conquest has collapsed into a pit of fire. Operation Barbarossa? Oh that's like six hex units upper cutting their way into Russia with some little plane icon wrecking havoc on all. Things looking bad? Don't worry, one reinforcement unit takes up about on fifth of the map and it will come drop kicking onto the scene like a hurricane. The simplicity of the game makes it epic. If you have ever found yourself interested in hex based war games but unwilling to dive into the labyrinth, this is the best jump off point you could wish for. Enjoy!

I bought this game from Battlefront when it was released and frequented the game's forum on Battlefront. The was a great community built around this game which now may look relatively simple but packs a serious strategic punch. This is really good game and I still play it today in 2022 despite owning all of the Strategic Command games. Hubert is still making great games and this is where it all began.

For a minute there, I thought I had stumbled onto a computer version of an old GDW or SPI wargame. Strategic Command: European Theater brought back memories of wishing that someone would stop the cat from knocking over my stacks of cardboard game pieces lined up on the Eastern Front in SPI's great Operation Typhoon wargame. But, to be sure, SC: ET is not quite 'Operation Typhoon.' Neither, thankfully, is it the tragically poor computer version of the Avalon Hill's Third Reich boardgame. Strategic Command: ET is a good balance of strategic and certain operational principles. I found it fairly easy to learn, but difficult to master until I found the battle rhythm of using combined arms of the various units, supply lines, entrenchment levels, and the balance between cproduction and research. Overall, I found the game very enjoyable. I played each level as the Axis, starting with the Default (normal, no advantage) setting. The AI is fairly aggressive, and does a good job positioning and repositioning forces. It concentraes forces well, and uses entrenchment values and airpower to slow down the Axis advance toward Moscow. It also uses Allied seapower and airpower very well, aggressively looking for opportunities to invade France (and even Norway) in 1942 after I had taken both fairly early in the game. When the US enters the war in Dec 1941, it begins pouring units into England. This led me to find a key to the game: build U-Boats as soon as you take France, and keep launching them from the Atlantic seaboard French ports. I found that if I invested heavily in U-Boats, and set up a serious network of submarines between the US and England, it enbaled me to leave a minimum force defending France, stopped any early threat of invasion in France by the US and England, help Italy take North Africa and even invade Spain, and allowed me to wipe out Russia on any level of the game at the latest by early 1944. Overall, this is a great game, and well worth the price.

This game is very, very limited. Only the European theater is covered, and after investing hours in the game, you may get the same nasty surprise I did: poised to invade your enemies and win a decisive victory, you see a popup window that declares that the war is over! Not so much flawed as profoundly incomplete. Very little depth, but the trade off is that it's marvelously easy to learn and play. I think an apt comparison is, if you're looking for a game at the level of Chess, this is not it; this is more like Checkers in depth.

Tanks dug in in the hills, attacked by infantry (i'm playing easy) så its a win for me right? WRONG! (and BTW my tanks are uppgraded to tier 4 heavy! they have no uppgrades to there infantry still they take out two of ten tanks and lose NO tropps in the process, well i can counter and take some out right? WRONG! infantry on flat ground beats tanks did you not know? i lose another two tanks and take out no infantry, and infantry i Citys are RAMBOES they can take it all bombers tanks infantry everything! spare yourself find another game this will take logic and beat your ass with it!!