Razzmann’s Extensive Wargame: Red Dragon Tutorial

An up to date, relatively short text guide which are the basis for tutorial videos (also included), made by a pretty good player, me.

Extensive Wargame: Red Dragon Tutorial Text Version

Important information: What you will read now is the script for the video tutorial I did, do not be surprised if some formulations are a bit weird or if there are typos / grammar mistakes leftover in there, I only decided to make this public after most of it was finished.

If you see typos and the such, feel free to point them out so I can correct them.

Here is the link to the video playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3d-ZYWK9TPkb8zuvxNRArw1gyi1fgb0R

And here is a Red Dragon Glossary, if you should ever be confused about some commonly used terms: http://forums.eugensystems.com/viewtopic.php?f=155&t=39106

Part 1.1: Controls and Basics

There will be at least 9 tutorial parts - more may come later - if you only want to read the parts about specific topics, every part has its own title.

Before we get into it, very shortly something about me, so you know that I am not just a scrub trying to sell my lies as facts. Currently I am Rank 3 and 5 on the ranked leaderboard and had quite some success in recent tournaments.
I felt there too many so called tutorials with either false or outdated information and while the game is already 2 years old, it will still get supported for quite a while so I decided to do another, hopefully better, tutorial. But enough of me stroking my ♥♥♥♥, let’s get into the tutorial.

Controls and Basics. A big difference to many other strategy games is the different control of units, especially ground units. It is also the most important thing to learn which is why I decided to start the series with this part. In most other games you tell your units to move simply by right clicking to the destination where you want them to move to. In Wargame however, every ground vehicle has two types of speeds. First the road speed, which is standardised into 110 and 150 km/h and then the normal speed which is based on the speed the vehicle is or was able to reach in reality. Note that in nearly every case the difference between road and normal speed is quite big. When you click on the fast move button and then to a destination your unit will try to get there the fastest way and will utilize roads if there are any on the way. If you move your unit via normal right click, it will get there using the shortest, most direct route. Also, if you tell a unit that is currently on a street to move somewhere via right click, it will never utilize the road speed even if it technically drives on the road the whole time.

Another important button is “Reverse”. If you click that button and then on a point on the map, your vehicle will move backwards to that point. This is important if you want to retreat since every armoured vehicle has the highest amount of armour on the front. This movement does not utilize road speed.

The next and just as important button is “Attack Move”. It works just like the other 2 that you click it and then click where you want your unit to move. The small but important difference is that whenever an enemy unit is in sight and you are able to shoot at it, your unit will stop moving and do exactly that - shoot at it. If the target is dead, out of range or out of sight, your unit will continue moving to the initial destination. “Attack Move” also does not utilize road speed either.

I will get deeper into the role of movement in respects of armour in part 5 of this series.

The rest of the buttons should be straight forward. When it comes to the button “Stop” keep in mind that it only stops the unit from moving, but not from firing at enemy units.

You can also turn your weapon off one by one by just clicking on them.

The unload button is only available to transports that have infantry in them. To load infantry back into transports, just select your infantry and right click on the transport. There is no size restriction, but keep in mind that even if you have 2 squads of infantry with only one man left, only one of those can enter an empty transport. That goes for both transport helicopters and transports vehicles.

The change altitude button allows helicopter to hover right above the ground making them able to take cover behind trees and buildings. You can’t use this function on top of trees or buildings though. The same goes for landing.

On the left you can also see the air plane tab and the chat button. I will get more into the plane tab in a later part of this series.

And lastly on the bottom you can see the button that opens the unit information panel. I strongly suggest you set the keybind for that to a key that you can reach very quickly as this feature is of very high importance for both new players and veterans.

A thing regarding the User Interface. I strongly recommend turning off label merging in the settings, that way unit labels overlap each other and you get a much better overview when zooming out. Label merging only makes you zoom in and lose the overview once you have a decent amount of units on the battlefield.

Moving on to the basics. Before I get into the game modes, you can see that the map is divided into zones. You can capture the zones with command units which you can identify via the little star symbol in their name. They are very expensive and generally only lightly armed and armoured - if at all. An exception are command tanks. The command units can either be infantry, jeeps, APCs, Ifvs, helicopters or tanks.

To capture a zone all you have to do is have a command unit of your choice standing in there. If you capture it, it will be coloured in the colour of your team and you will have a variety of bonuses depending on the game mode you are playing and the zone that you captured. Every starting zone or sector has an arrow pointing to it, which you can see if you zoom out far enough. The white arrow means that you can spawn ground and helicopter units there if you control it. The other, thinner arrow means that you can spawn planes there. On some maps there are more zones from which you can spawn units, you can them capture over the course of the match.

If both teams have one or more command units in a zone it gets neutralized and no team gains anything from it. It does not matter how many command units are in there, one is enough to so called counter cap. That means that under normal circumstances there is no reason to have more than one command unit in any zone.

On to the game modes. In Wargame there are 3 different game modes: Conquest, Destruction and Economy. In Conquest, each zone has a set value. If the combined value of all the zones you control is higher than those of your enemy, you get the difference in Conquest points every 4 seconds which is the same rate with which you gain income. The team that reaches the point limit first or has more points after the time ends - if there is a time limit - wins. The income is fixed. To put it short: this game mode is all about map control.

Destruction is all about killing enemy units. If you kill an enemy unit, your team will get points equal to the units cost. Whoever reaches the point limit first or has more points when the time is over wins. There is also another way of playing Destruction, Total Destruction. Those are often played with no time limit and end once you killed all command units of your opponent. Income is determined by how many zones you control. Zones often have different values, which means that some generate more income than others.

The third game mode, Economy, is barely played, you will have a hard time finding games, even if you host your own lobby. I am not going to bother explaining the game mode too much so to put it short, it is all about spending your points at the right time. It is a very flawed game mode which is one reason why nobody plays it.

Then there is also Ranked. The game mode is conquest and you basically choose to play either 1vs1 or 2vs2, choose a deck, press launch and when the game finds an opponent for you, it will choose a map by random. For 1vs1 obviously only 1vs1 maps. Also, no maps with naval spawns. After the game you will lose or gain ranked points depending on whether you win or lose the match and the difference in points berween you and your opponent. Your starting rating is 1500.

Something all games have in common is the differentiation of Bluefor and Redfor or NATO and Warsaw Pact if you want to call it that way. All games will be played in either Bluefor vs Bluefor, Redfor vs Redfor or Bluefor vs Redfor which is played in most cases. That means you will never be able to play USA while your teammate plays Poland for example.

Part 1.2: Controls and Basics

When the game starts you will first be in the deployment phase. Here the game stands still and you can buy and place units. Once the game starts the units will stand exactly where you put them so you don’t have to spawn them first. Note that each player has to start with at least one command unit. To place a unit just simply click on the number on the top left which shows the amount of points you have. Then click on the tab from which you want to buy the unit and then on the picture of it. Now just place it anywhere within your starting zone. To delete it just right click it or its label. Once the game has started you can deploy new units anywhere, just keep in mind that they have to spawn at the nearest spawn first. Then they will travel to your designated point on their own. Note that ground units will spawn 10 seconds after you placed them, so you can still cancel them if you suddenly decide not to buy them.

Part 2: Unit info cards

This time we will take a look at the unit information cards which are very crucial for understanding how strong units are. First of all, it is definitely not necessery to learn all those stats and remember them. But it is necessary to understand what is explained on them, both when building a deck but even more so when facing units you do not know yet. Knowing how to evaluate the unit cards will make your life a lot easier when learning Wargame.
Most of the stats are fairly self explanatory as you can just hover over something and it will tell you what this means.
A simple, but fairly effective way to quickly see how good a stat is, is just by looking at the colour in which it is written. This is not always a perfect way of doing it but at the start it is a decent way of evaluating units. Blue means very good stat, green good, yellowish mediocre and red means bad.

I will explain the different weapon and damage types in the respective part, so don’t think you are missing out on that. .

Since every unit has so many stats it is very crucial that you have the unit info card set to a hotkey that you can reach very easily because sometimes you have only very few seconds to determine whether to retreat your unit or not.

Generally looking at the cost lf a unit shows you how good it is. But keep in mind that you have to look at the relative cost. 70pts is a high price for an anti air unit and you get a very capable one for that price, but a 70pt plane is most of the time not very survivable and does not carry a lot of strong weapons. But you will get a feeling for that in a short amount of time.

A stat that is not very well explained is raining which is found on all infantry types.
They are divided in 4 categories: Militia, Regular, Shock and Elite. Training determines the accuracy and rate of fire of the primary weapons, the availability per card, the infantry’s speed and its veterancy level. These then influence the price of the unit.
Rule of thumb is: The higher the training, the stronger but also more expensive the infantry is.

A stat that is very misleading is autonomy. Although it shows you the distance a unit can travel it is just a timer in reality. That means that if 2 units have the same autookmy, but different speed, they will drive for the same amount of time, but the unit with higher speed will be able to drive further despite having the same autonomy.

Part 3.1 : Armory & Deckbuilding

This will probably be the longest and most boring part. I tried my best to keep it short while also covering the most important parts.

But before I get into it a quick information for you. The unit cards you will see are partially not the same ones you will see in your game because I modded my game so they look different. Just throwing that out there so you do not get confused. The unit names are identical to yours though unless some names get changed in a patch coming out after I made this video.

The armory is quite simply just a database of all the units ingame. You will have nearly the same interface when creating or editing a deck.

So let’s go to the deck building right away as most of this stuff also applies to the armory.

When creating a deck you first have to choose between Bluefor aka Nato or Redfor aka Warsaw Pact. Pretty straight forward.

Next up you have to choose a nation, coalition or frankly nothing. A nation is just that, a nation. All nations get an availability bonus based on their strength and have 60 activation points available. I will explain those a bit later.

Coalitions are formed by two to three nations and can easily be identified as those if you see two or more flags besides each other. Coalitions have 55 activation points, access to all the prototypes of the nations it consists off and has an availability bonus depending on its strentgh. Some coalitions have no availability bonus however.

Last but not least you can choose to not choose anything. This means you have access to the units of all Redfor or Bluefor nations - depending on which side you pick - however you cannot use any prototypes. Whether a unit is a prototype can easily be seen on its unit card. These so called mixed decks have 45 activation points and no availability bonus.

Next up are the specilizations. Specializations give you various bonuses in one or more categories. These bonuses can be additional XP for units, which means that all their veterancy levels get increased from the get go. Or you can get cheaper and more slots for specific unit types. Cheaper in this context does not mean that the units cost less, but rather that you do not have to use as many activations points to put them into your deck. Where and how many of those bonuses you get depends on the specialization you choose. A big disadvantage of them is that they heavily reduce the variety of units you can bring. On the unit card of each unit you can see to which specializations they are available to. However you do not have to use a specialization which allows you to play with every unit accessable to the deck. Also keep in mind that not every deck can choose every specialization simply because some of them would be unplayable.

Lastly you can choose to pick a time era. These eras restrict your unit choice in a way that you can’t use units from a specific year onwards. As a tradeoff you get additional activation points. I do not recommend choosing an era at all as this weakens your deck severely.

So let’s finally build a deck… sort of. I will not tell you how to exactly build a good deck because that would take too much time. Instead I am quickly going over the tabs and explain you what the different types of units are there for. In my last part I will show you different decks that you can use since the starter decks suck.

Each deck has to fulfill only one thing and that is having at least one command unit in it. Without that you can’t use your deck, the game will refuse to save it. And like I said, they can be identified by the star in their name and the minimum cost of 100pts.
Next up there are supply units in 3 forms. The FOB, the supply trucks and the supply helicopters. The FOB has a huge amount of supply, but it has to be bought in the deployment phase and it can’t be moved once the game has started. Supply trucks and choppers work the same way, but they can be moved and bought throughout the whole game. I will get more into detail on how supply units work in a later video.

Next up: Infantry. The main type of infantry is rifle infantry. They have an anti tank launcher as their secondary weapon and an MG as their third weapon. Their training goes from Militia to Shock which - like I said in the last part - determins their overall effectiveness. Then there are Special Forces which are basically the same just with Elite training and can be recognized by their special, red background picture. There are also some exceptions like SAS which have an anti air missile instead of an MG.
Fist squads are 5men with no MG but their anti tank weapon can also fire against infantry and often has a higher rate of fire than the anti tank launcher of other infantry.
Manpads are 2 or 5 men with anti air missiles and no MG.
The same goes for ATGM teams, they just have long range anti tank missiles instead of anti air missiles.
Lastly there are engineer teams which are either 10men and have a flame thrower or 5men and have a napalm launcher.

One thing to note is that some infantry come in transports or helicopters that can very well fight on their own, some examples are the Mi-24D or the M2A2 Bradley. Some of them decrease the amount of infantry you get in those transports so watch out for that. Whether to take infantry in those more expensive transports is up to you, just keep in mind that there are often situations where you do not need the transport at all but want your infantry as cheap and maybe also as fast as possible.

The support tab holds 2 kinds of units artillery and anti air vehicles.
Anti air basically consists of SPAAGs and anti air systems with missiles. Missile systems usually have higher range than SPAAGs, especially against planes. Anti air units with radar weapons usually also have a greater range than those without, again, especially against planes.
When it comes to artillery, there are many different types. Multiple rocket launchers with either High Explosve rockets to kill and stun infantry and lightly armoured targets or cluster ammunition to kill all kinds of vehicles.
Then there are the howitzers that have a long aiming time - except for the high end and expensive ones - but therefore great range and a high amount of high explosive damage. They can also fire smoke rounds to block line of sight.
And lastly there are mortars, which have less range and do less damage than the howitzers but are cheaper and have a fast aiming time. They also come with a lot of ammunition and can fire smoke rounds as well.

About tanks there is not too much to say. They are best at killing vehicles but can also fire at infantry. Tanks below about 50pts are usually used as fire support or to kill basically anything lightly armoured that is not a tank. Tanks more expensive than that are bought to kill enemy tanks and to basically have some sort of defense that the enemy can’t break without their own tank or specific counter to it. This is only a very, very rough rule and there are several exceptions but this should be good enough for new players.
Tanks usually only have a fairly weak MG as a secondary weapon, sometimes an autocannon and rarely a grenade launcher. A lot of Redfor tanks are equipped with anti tank guided missiles as well.
All tanks have their strongest armour on the front and are highly vulnerable at the side, top and rear armour.

Part 3.2 : Armory & Deckbuilding

The recon tab can be roughly divided into 3 categories which then have their own sub categories. But I’ll keep it simple and leave it at the 3. Also, the recon units are the only ones that have optics which are better than medium, which means good, very good and exceptional. On top of that, every recon vehicle has medium stealth, which means that they don’t get detected as early as other units which does not only help them when trying to spot, but also when fighting.
Now, let’s get into the different types of recon. First there are the helicopters. Here you can barely make anything wrong, there is no helicopter that is awfully bad. These helicopters can go from cheap, lightly armed ones with good optics to very expensive ones that are armed to the teeth and maybe even have stealth on top of that. The most dangerous recon helicopter is without a doubt the Longbow.
Next there are the recon vehicles. Especially the ones with good optics and autocannons or tank guns are very good at both protecting flanks and at helping to attack so having one card of that type is always good to have.
Last but by no means least, the scout infantry. Very crucial since they all have at least very good stealth - with the 2 exceptions being the militia scouts - and they all come with very good optics. Put them into a building or in a bush and they are basically invisible. Most elite and shock scout infantry can also hold their ground on their own and make good fighters.

The vehicle tab. There are all kinds of different units in there, but the 2 main types are probably cheap fire support - often in form of world war 2 or just post world war 2 vehicles - and ATGM carriers. There are also low range spaags and other weird stuff. This is probably the quote un quote wildest tab with both ancient tank destroyers and most modern atgm carriers. Their usefullness can also reach from garbage to god tier and it would take way too long to explain which are good and which aren’t so let’s leave it at that, as this tab is the least important one.

When it comes to helicopters, it is nearly impossible to easily explain how useful they are so I try my best to keep it simple. First of all, it is often enough to take 1 or 2, rarely 3 cards of helicopters. They are very fragile and hard to use. You usually want one anti tank helicopter and one anti air helicopter
or a cheap helicopter with rocket pods as fire support. Depending on the deck, one of those roles may already be filled by a recon helicopter - the Longbow for example.
The general rule for helicopters is the more expensive, the better they are since you rarely rely on them. Most of the time you only call 1 or 2 out in a single match. There are also exceptions to that rule, like the Fennec Tow 2 for example which is also a good anti tank helicopter despite being very cheap.
Like I said, hard to give tips without getting too much into detail.

Planes. The type of unit that can turn around the game on their own - in both ways.

First air superiority fighters, or short: ASFs. Generally, don’t take any that is cheaper than 100 pts and if you have the veterancy choice between 2 or more planes, always take the lowest number. If the lowest number would be one, then it is purely up to you. The high end planes like Rafale become even more deadly but you only get one of them per card so if you lose your plane, you lose your whole card.

Before I get into the next type, I am gonna explain the multi-role planes which are in my opinion no real multi-roles besides a few exceptions. The game already calls a plane multirole when it carries 2 short range anti air missiles. In reality though, they should only be your last option when fighting planes. The only real multi role planes - in my opinion - are those equipped with AIM-120s or R-77s as their third weapon. For example the Su-27M or the Danish F-16 MLU. So before you get confused, I will call planes like the Tornado IDS bombers despite the game categorizing them under multi roles.

Speaking of bombers, rule of thumb is again, the more expensive, the better. Also, few bigger bombs are usually better than many small bombs, unless of course the proportion is way off, for example when you compare the payload of the Su-24M with the MiG-29S’ payload. One thing to note is that accuracy on bombs is irrelevant. With bombs you always want to fire position your targets, never right click an enemy ground unit with them.
HE bombs are mostly used against infantry but also kill lightly armoured targets and can damage tanks. Cluster bombs are again purely against vehicles and napalm bombs damage anything but only over time. It is mostly use to prevent the enemy from crossing a choke point.

ATGM planes are a bit different. Nearly all that have 2 ATGMs with less than 30AP are rather bad because they cannot kill a superheavy from the front unless the latter is damaged. Exceptions are planes like the MiG-27 because their gun can penetrate armour. Don’t forget, I will go deeper into damage in a different part.
The more AP the better is the rule of thumb. Accuracy is also very important so if you have the chance to take 3 at low veterancy or 2 at high, nearly always take 2.

Next up SEAD planes. Their missiles work basically like ATGMs but they can only target radar aa which is turned on. The plane will also spot said anti air unit if it is turned on. Many SEAD planes also have stealth making them harder to detect and identify.

Last there are the LGB planes. Ingame they are classified as bombers, but in reality they are mostly anti tank planes - with the exception of the Nighhawk which is also a very good bomber. Their laser guided bombs work like ATGMs which means you do not want to click fire position, but right click the target. They can target both vehicles and infantry and have a 100% hit ratio making them very deadly against all ground targets. And despite doing only HE damage they still do a lot of damage to vehicles and tanks since these bombs hit the top armour and not the front armour.

Before I end the plane part, when you look at different ATGM planes and ASFs you will see that some of them have Semi Active missiles while others have Fire and Forget missiles. Now, you not only have to always keep sight on the enemy unit when using semi active missiles, but you also can’t fire off the next one until your previous missile hit or missed. Against ground targets the accuracy increases the closer you get, not against planes though.

I am not going into Naval units, there will be an extra video for that, but I will talk a bit about veterancy.

With nearly every unit you have the option to take them on different veterancy level. Higher veterancy increases the units’ accuracy and makes them recover from morale more quickly, which is the main benefit they get. Note that the number of the accuracy increase is wrong, but the rough rule is, the higher the veterancy level, the bigger is the bonus compared to the previous level.

Now, how do you know whether to take units like rifle infantry, where the difference is not that big, at higher or lower veterancy? Fairly simple, just try them out. If you have them at higher veterancy and you run out of them, take them at lower veterancy and the other way around of course.
The combat effectiveness is generally not that big, it is mostly notable on planes and aa units, but can always be a decisive factor on any unit.

Lastly, to import a deck, just open the deck menu, press the import button down below and paste the deckcode. It works the other way around if you want to export a deck. Do not that sometimes youtube adds random hyphens if you copy deck codes.

Part 4: Concealment & Recon

If you already played the game a bit, you will notice that sometimes the labels of some ground units blink or flash - whatever word you prefer. This is a feedback for you that the unit is in cover and not seen by the enemy. This is important, because if your unit is in cover and the unit label does not blink - unless the unit just shot a few seconds ago - it means that the enemy can see this unit and that he has a unit nearby that can spot it.

Whether your unit gets spotted or not depends on several factors:

One factor is the type of cover of which there are two types, forests and towns. Now first of all only infantry can hide in towns but also in forests. Vehicles can only hide in forests. Also there is no difference between a small bush and a big forest, unless you hide your tank deeper in the forst of course, but if you have a tank at the edge of a forest or standing in a bush that is smaller than itself does not matter.

Obviously not every bush counts as cover, but to find out whether something is cover, just hover over it with your mouse, if it turns blue, then it is cover.

Furthermore, infantry gets receiving damage reduced when they are in cover. 70% damage reduction in towns and 40% damage reduction in forests, whereas vehicles get their speed reduced when driving through forests.

The next factor is the stealth level of your unit. The better the stealth, the closer your enemy needs to have his unit in order to detect it, both in cover and in the open. Something that is very important is that size has no effect on when your unit gets detected! While there is no ground vehicle with good or very good stealth, a tank and an infantry with both good stealth would get detected at the same time.

Then there are optics. The better the optics, the earlier your unit can spot units and identify them, both in cover and in the open.

And the last factor is your unit shooting. Your unit shooting creates something called noise - no not the noise you hear ingame - and often makes your unit visible to the enemy - of course, providing he has a unit there to spot it. Remember though, that no matter whether your enemy has a unit nearby, your unit and its label will always stop flashing for a few seconds once it shot at anything.

Something that is also very important is line of sight. If you have no line of sight to an enemy unit, you can’t spot it, no matter how close you are or how good your units optics are. That means that if a tank is fairly deep in a forest, you won’t be able to spot it from outside no matter how good your optics are - unless you fly over it of course.
To check line of sight with a unit, just simple press the button for fire position and then hover over the place where you want to check and see whether the line to said place is broken or not.

Some standard strategies using the line of sight mechanic is having a tank shoot out of the forest and reversing it immediately so guided weapons can’t lock on to it.
Also you can break line of sight with smoke from artillery or napalm.

Another thing is that line of sight obstructions do not matter for planes. If you have sight on a unit, your plane can shoot at it - providing it has a weapon that can target it - no matter how deep into the forest it is or whether it is a town.

Part 5: Weapon and Armour basics

Let’s start of with the big guns. There are two types, HEAT - meaning High Explosive Anti Tank - and kinetic, or just KE. Nearly all tanks have kinetic guns, HEAT is mostly used by vehicles with recoilless rifles, but also some tanks use these rounds. Infantry based anti tank weapons and all ATGMs - short for Anti Tank Guided Missiles - also use HEAT.
I will keep it simple. Kinetic guns can’t penetrate any armour that is higher than its AP - short for Armour Penetration - value, but for every 175m that you are closer to your target, you gain 1 AP. That means a 16AP gun with 2275m range, will have 17AP if it shoots at an armoured target at 2100 to 1926m. And so on.
HEAT will always damage any armour, no matter how high the armour or how low the AP of the HEAT weapon is, it will always deal at least one damage.
If you want to know the exact formulas, values etc. you can check another video I made a while ago, the link is in the description.

Next damage type is HE - High Explosive. All guns that have an AP and HE value can also shoot at infantry and will deal HE damage to them, not AP. They will also ONLY shoot at infantry with their HE rounds. The reason why I tell you that is that guns which deal solely HE damage and have the AoE tag - short for Area of Effect - can also shoot at any vehicle no matter the armour. So for example a Gepard A1 can shoot at a T-90s with its HE gun, deal a very low amount of damage but stun and panick it, but also dealing some critical hits. A Leopard 1A1 however will never shoot its HE rounds at the tank because its gun has an AP value. I hope you understand what I mean. but that is just how the game works.
However you can force any tank to shoot with HE at any ground vehicle by using the fire position command. The fire position command only works with guns that deal HE damage, it will not work with weapons that have no HE value.

This basically covers guns, but there are also ATGMs. These can be divided into 3 types: Guided, Semi Active and Fire and Forget.
The first ones are only found on ground units, infantry, tanks and vehicles. Guided means that the unit firing the ATGM has to stand still and constantly keep line of sight to the unit it shoots at in order to be able to hit it.
Semi active ATGMs can be found on some tanks, on nearly all helicopters and on some planes. It works just like guided with the difference that you do not have to stand still.
The last type, Fire and Forget, is used by the Planes and the Longbow as the only non plane unit. Unlike the previous 2 types, you only have to keep sight while aiming and you do not have to stand still either. Once the missile is fired, it does not matter what the enemy unit does, only the accuracy will determine whether you hit or not.

And the last thing regarding weapons; when you click on a single unit you can see the weapons at the bottom. Whenever it uses any of them, you can see two bars filling up and a percentage being shown. This number tells you the current accuracy of the weapon, which basically means the chance of the unit hitting whatever it is targeting. This number already considers accuracy modifiers like ECM and size.
Now the bars. The upper bar shows you the aiming time of the unit which is often just 1 second, however some untis like infantry and a few vehicles have lower or higher aiming time. It is also influenced by the morale of your unit. Any unit has to aim only once with its weapons if it is shooting at the same target continuously but re-aim whenever it shoots at a new one or if the target gets out of sight for a short amount of time.
The lower bar shows the reloading time. Generally your unit does not have to reload when it starts engaging an enemy, unless it just shot a round at another one. Units do reload outside of combat, e.g. if your tank just killed a vehicle and there is nothing else left to shoot at. Sounds sensible, however you can’t really see how far it is with reloading the weapon unless it wants to shoot at anything. When reloading it does not matter whether your unit stands still or not, which means that even your infantry will reload its anti tank weapon while moving.
Rocket artillery has the longest reload time, if you just shot a salvo with e.g. a MARS and want to shoot again shortly after, you can see the reload bar being stuck every few seconds since the reload time is that long. Reloading is also influenced by the morale status of your unit, unless it has an autoloader.

I basically already covered the armour basics, but I repeat what I already said in an earler part, all vehicles have the strongest armour upfront. Some may have the same armour at the front and the side, but especially tanks have very low side and rear armour compared to their front.

Part 6: Supply and Morale

I already told you a bit about supply units in a previous video, but this one is more about the mechanics behind them.

First of all if you have 2 different supply units- be it a FOB, a truck or a chopper - the one with the higher amount of maximum supply will fill up the one with the lower amount - providing it is not full. That means that you can easily fill up your empty supply trucks at your FOB, so don’t throw away your used supply units.
Next up, supply units have to not be under fire for the last 60 seconds to supply a unit, same goes for the unit that goes supplied unit.
And last but definitely not least, the more supply units you have, the faster your unit will be supplied, which means that bigger is not always better. What I mean by that is that more expensive supply units get more supply per point than cheap ones, however for the same cost, the cheap ones supply faster. So do not blindly take the most expensive one into your deck. In my opinion there is no best option, it always depends on what you want.

Morale is more or less simple. Every weapon deals morale damage as well as quote un quote normal damage. Some more, some less. If your unit receives a specific amount of morale damage, its morale will change, the stages are the following from best to worst:
Calm, which is in what stage your units get spawned, then worried, shaken, panicked. If your morale is not calm, the aim time and accuracy of your units will get decreased, making your units at panicked very often worthless. On top of that, infantry gets a speed penalty for being at lower morale.
Also if friendly units die near your own, they will also lose morale. You can easily see this when you just unloaded your infantry and their transport gets killed right after that.
Something that you should know is that some tanks and a few IFVs - infantry fighting vehicles - have autoloaders, which means that their rate of fire does not get decreased by morale. Auto loaded tanks are a vast majority of Pact tanks whereas only very few NATO tanks have an autoloader.
Morale will get recovered over time if your unit does not get shot at.

Part 7: Planes

Planes are completely different from any other unit - yet they use the same mechanics for the most part.

The most obvious difference is the usage. Unlike every other unit, you do not have to place it where you want it and then wait for a few seconds for it to spawn. You buy it and once you have at least one plane, the air comm tab gets opened where you can see all the planes you bought - up to a maximum of 9.

In the part about deck building I talked about the different type of planes, so if you missed that, check the linke in the description.

So, moving on. All planes - except the North Korean B-5 - have 10HP. Most missiles have around 5HE, some more, some less, the difference between 4HE and 5HE is obviously much bigger than the difference between 5 and 6 for obvious reasons. Watch out for those small details when choosing your ASF as this can be the difference between killing the enemy plane with 2 or 3 missiles, which is of course very crucial.

As you may have noticed, some very few planes have armour. To keep it simple, the difference between 0 and 1 armour on planes is negligable. Having 2 armour is a huge difference though, as this halves the HE damage it receives, and planes only receive HE damage. SPAAGs like the Otomatic only shoot HE at planes and helicopters.

Unlike ground untis, planes do have a timer rather than a range for how long they can fly. The fuel has no impact on that gameplay wise, it only tells you how long it has to reload after it evacuated.

Speaking of that, your plane will evacuate in 4 scenarios. The first one is when it runs out of fuel - called evac bingo -, the 2nd one is when you tell it to do so - evac ordered - and the third one when it dropped its payload - called evac Winchester. When speaking of payload, this means ground based weapons. So if a plane with bombs and anti air missiles dropped all of its bombs, it will automatically evacuate even though it still has weapons left - the missiles. In the gameplay options you can change it so that planes never automatically evacuate when dropping their payload, if you prefer to have it that way.
The 4th type of evac is also called evac ordered and happens when your plane receives a special kind of critical hit, though I do not remember the name of that one. This happens very rarely though.

Most of the stats on the plane unit cards are pretty self explanatory, Air Detection is basically the optics against planes and also found on every anti air unit. Besides SEAD planes - which only detect turned on radar aa - none of them can detect ground units on their own, though they can detect helicopters that are not landed.

Ground units and helicopters can also detect planes, though not nearly as good as your own planes or anti air units. Stealth on planes basically works exactly like it does on ground units. The better the stealth, the later it gets detected.

Using planes is very simple, you click on the plane in the panel on the left and then the destination on where you want it to fly to. After it reached that point it will just circle around that area but use weapons if there are enemy units in range. This only goes for missiles and excludes bombs.

Part 8: Naval

Don’t play it, it is ♥♥♥♥.

Part 9: Starter Decks & Conclusion

This will be a short one. The starter decks provided by the game are ♥♥♥♥, use the ones I provided in the description, I also put a screenshot with each of them because youtube sometimes adds random hyphens if you copy the deck codes.
Also those decks are specifically for starters and not complete copies of decks I use. I also try to keep the deck codes updated since they always change when units get changed.

This is not all to know about Wargame though, I also have a series called “What Wargame does not tell you” which covers a lot of so called hidden knowledge and goes deeper into the mechanics. If you wanna know more about the game, make sure to check that out.

That’s the end of the tutorial “so far”! Now, have fun playing Wargame!

The decks that were previously here are outdated, here are other ressources though:

The decks that I used relatively frequently: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Epdkekr46xR3pHnCCvZzITysixYynPrWvzbn6KfAHmI/edit?usp=sharing

A subreddit dedicated to newer players, with more help if you need it: https://www.reddit.com/r/wargamebootcamp/

Part 10: Combined Arms

This is the first new addition to the tutorial.

This time, we will focus on the importance of combined arms. This is probably the first thing you will have to learn on your own, by playing. Just watching other people doing it will only get you so far because the situation is never the same.

But before I get into it, I want to mention something important. While most of it goes for 1vs1 as well, this is mostly focused on team games since you should not start with 1vs1s if you are new. But especially the point values I mention can be much different from what you see in 1vs1.

So, let’s get into it. The basic concept of combined arms is that you never attack with only one type of unit. Even two types of units will only work out in small skirmishes on the flanks.

If you spam only one or two types of units you can get punished very easily and it might be a very frustrating experience for you.

Imagine attacking with lots of infantry squads and their transports. Just a few medium tanks will eradicate them in seconds.
They get killed very easily, without doing any harm to the enemy tanks.

The same story with tanks. There will be ATGMs coming at you and you will not be able to spot them. And then there are anti tank helicopters, picking off the tanks one by one.

You could repeat this with basically any type of unit, but I think you get the point.

So, what basics should you cover if you defend or attack an important frontline? Besides tanks and infantry of course. First of all, scouts, it is very important to see what your enemy has in terms of units when attacking or defending. If your enemy has tanks standing in a hedge row, you might not even be able to spot it.

So for defending take a couple of infantry scouts and put them in bushes or towns in the first row.
As for attacking it is always good if you can sneak infantry scouts in a bush or town at the frontline, but what you can also do, is sending a few scout tanks or vehicles right with your tanks. They may not have that great optics, but are plentiful and can act as fire support as well.
Helicopters are always a good choice, just be careful not to go to deep into the enemy anti air net, as they can easily die that way.

Next up is anti air. Helicopters can do an extreme amount of damage and kill all your tanks within a minute. However they can die just as easily to a single anti air unit that does not even cost half as much.
The same goes more or less for planes.

So rule of thumb is you should have at least around 100pts of anti air at your main frontline. Don’t be afraid to buy another anti air vehicle if your enemy seems to spam planes.

It is always good to go for a unit that is more helicotper focused and a second one being more plane focused. But 100pts should be the minimum no matter whether you attack or defend. Also, always keep an eye out whether your anti air unit has a radar or not. If you are already somewhat familiar with the game, then try to always have your radar aa - short for anti air - turned off and only turn it on when there are planes or helicopters without a SEAD plane in the area. This is a much safer way than turning your radar aa off when you see a SEAD plane because that can be too late sometimes. But if you are fairly new to the game, then don’t get confused by all the talk about SEAD and radar.

And last but not least the fire support. Sometimes your tanks are already your fire support or your infantry comes in transports that act as such. Depending on what deck you play, your infantry might be a lot weaker than your enemy’s and you have to rely on fire support to kill the infantry. The best way is to use them is behind your infantry. Let the enemy infantry shoot at your infantry and basically use them as meatshields (literally) for your cheap but plentiful vehicles.
Good examples for these kinds of vehicles are the East German BMP-1s, Marder 1s, BMP-2s or CV90 when it comes to transports. The M36, M163CS or Centurion AVRE when it comes to vehicles. There is also the BMPT which is basically a tank with loads of anti infantry weapons slapped on it.
Fire support can also come in the form of artillery like mortars, howitzers or MLRS. They should be easy to use, just make sure that you do not hit your own infantry or walk into your fire as the shells have some travel time of course.

You might think I forgot something, planes and helicopters. Well I somewhat have, but helicopters are usually not necessary for the basics of defending or attacking and planes can be very situational and you need to roughly know how strong the enemy aa net is in order to get value out of them.
That is something that I can’t teach you in just a few minutes, you will figure that out by yourself over time. But here are a few tips:
If you or your team have several bombers or ground support planes, then use them at the same time to both cover a bigger area and to “overload” the enemy anti air net as there are too many planes to deal with at once.
And the 2nd tip: do not spam planes if you are behind in ground control or just got pushed back hard. It is not a good idea to use them when you are currently losing as they might get a few kills, but if you have no units to push up with - or too few units - then you will achieve nothing in the end and might even lose your expensive plane.

So, that basically sums it up, and ideally attacks should then look like this.

But of course, like I said in the opening: Every situation is different, which is why I can’t tell how you exactly it should look like but can only give you some examples.

Nonetheless I hope it helps you.

[PanosTheWonderChild]

peepee poopoo

[Razzmann]

Don't bother with naval, it is completely unbalanced and nobody plays it. Also the AI is terrible and does not prepare you for multiplayer.

[Sumitis]

Thanks for this guide, but there is something very basic that I still don't understand at all.
I am a Company of Heroes player, and as example, when I try naval fights, its very disturbing for me, because the AI units will stop almost all my missiles and I won't be able to kill his units in almost all cases. The game seems very complicated to me and I don't understand.

[LeoJohn787]

A stat that is not very well explained is raining which is found on all infantry types.
*training

[Razzmann]

Use Jäkääri '90 in their 5 point transport. Jäkääri themselves are very cost efficient vs infantry, and in forests can easily deal with light armour. The BTR-50 is also a really good fire support vehicle against infantry (for its price). Mix them with a Pansarjäkääi '90 squad here and there for sime high AT.

[Earthshakerson]

This is by far the most useful guide I've seen so far. I wasn't even aware that the reverse key existed until now.

On a separate note, do you have any advice as to how to use the Finns? I understand that they are primarily shock troops, but they seem to do a poor job of attacking through forests and towns.

[Razzmann]

@Montag no idea why it does not work. I guess you could try to recreate it since there is a screenshot of it as well.

[Montag]

I get an error on import of the US deck. Following Content Missing - Nation Reds. The other decks work for me.

[Razzmann]

Yeah deck was a bit outdated, updated it.

[Licht]

Mr Razzmann, what the fuck is that yugo deck mah dude. Is that a joke?

-2 cards Base proleteris.
-Spat BOV for 40 instead of a superior in everyway possible FOKA.
-Igman instead of m84a.
-2 Cards of ASF and 4 cards of AA.
-Downvetted Neva...
-Greyhound instead of Izvidijac...
-Cheap ATGM in an overpriced transport..

And for all of that shit you bring 1 card of supply trucks.

How high were you when you made that deck?