Strategy

SR2020 Warfare Guide - Chapter 21 - Strategy

Submitted by Balthagor on Fri, 01/04/2013 - 20:26 Military strategy deals with the planning and conduct of campaigns, the movement and disposition of forces, and the deception of the enemy. Strategies are a broad, far-reaching plan for victory, such as how to win a war; "Tactics" are more localized plans or methods used to accomplish immediate goals, such as how to win a battle. SR2020 is classified as a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game so obviously strategies are an important part of it.

In a recent "After-Action Report" a player, who was playing as the U.S., narrated his winning strategy that allowed him to become "Supreme Ruler". The elements of this strategy were as follows:

1. Select "Allied Victories" and "Hot Relations" as starting game settings.
2. Choosing The Western-European democracies, Israel and South Korea as allies.
3. Supporting Israel with huge amounts of money and obsolete units to assist it in taking over the Middle-East.
4. Supporting South Korea with the necessary weapons to wage a war on China, including long-range AA, infantry, patrol boats, destroyers and thousands of missiles.
5. Pushing Research to the maximum.
6. A massive military build-up.
7. Construction of 677 missile fabrication facilities that enable massive missile attacks.
8. Focusing unit fabrication on just a handful of designs of the most powerful units.
9. Powerful carrier and amphibious forces arranged into battle-groups.
10. Fighting in areas where allies can assist.
11. Managing CB by allowing other Regions to DOW on the U.S. and not the other way around.
12. Engaging China early in the game (August 2023) before it became too powerful.
13. Conquering all non-allied Regions left standing.
14. Allowing African Regions to fight among themselves and then waiting until the end-game to conquer its remaining Regions.
15. Aggressive pacing to create a short (7 years) game.

So to summarize, in this example the important strategic elements were:

1. Appropriate game settings.
2. Choosing strategically-located allies with common interests.
3. Heavily supporting warring allies with money and large quantities of quality units.
4. Heavy Research and a pushing towards a high tech level.
5. A massive military build-up.
6. Intelligent unit fabrication of a few selected powerful weapons.
7. Massive missile production.
8. Using allies for combat support.
9. Aggressive but defensive military posture.
10. Smart military planning.

Pacing

When you begin a new game you have the option of choosing the "Scheduled Game End" which is how long the game will last. In other words you can choose the maximum amount of time that you will be given to win the game. Here it may be tempting to select "None" for a no-stress open-ended game. However for the military strategy game this is not recommended.

Since you will have about 183 Regions to either conquer or ally with the game will take a long time to play, both in game time (4-12 years) and in real-time (48-144 hours or more). This is OK - it is your time after-all. But the problem is that the longer the game lasts, the slower it becomes - as more game years pass, your unit's slow down and each game day takes longer to execute in real-time.

The game starts out fast and you units will rush across the map if you set the game clock to its fastest speed. A game day may take 20 seconds in real-time or faster. The reason for the gradual and profound slow-down is that each game year almost every Region on the map (183 of them!) builds more and more units. Regions that are drawn into wars automatically go into a "massive military buildup" mode. This means that each successive game year the game engine has more units to manage - move, navigate, fight, update statistics, refuel, etc.

I won't belabor this, but the point is that you should set some time limit to motivate you to finish the game as soon as possible. The longer the game draws out, the less enjoyable it will become to play, unless you are very patient.

Region Size

The size of your Region will strongly affect your war strategy. Large wealthy regions may start out with a strong military, limited allies and abundant resources. Small ones may need to cultivate many allies and trading partners in order to assure years of managed growth, in order to accumulate the wealth, population and resources for successful military adventures.

Regions with protective geographic features such as oceans or mountains may be able to scrimp on defensive military expenditures and focus on offensive ones.

Joint Operations

For all military strategies, it is important to intelligently and creatively integrate your Army, Navy, Air Force and their Missiles into joint forces that complement and strengthen one another.

The following scenarios are examples of the type of joint operations that are necessary to successfully winning wars in SR2020:

• Amphibious ships transport land units under the protection of fighter and interceptor aircraft.
• Land units call in the support of naval shore bombardment while aircraft supply close air support.
• Infantry captures sea-piers for Naval use while being supplied by over-head transport planes.

Strategic Bombing

Strategic bombing is a strategy used in a total war with the goal of defeating an enemy Region by destroying its economic ability to wage war rather than destroying its land or naval forces. It is a systematically organized and executed attack from the air on targets deemed vital to an enemy's war-making capacity.

The Strategic Bomber class of units, such as the Russian TU-95KM Bear-C, have inherent Bomb loads and can attack ground targets without loading missile units. Furthermore SBUs can attack from mid-level air and escape low-level AA.

Other strategic weapons are the long or medium-range ICBMs, such as the TL 119 U.S. UGM-116 Trident III-C1 missile and the nuclear-armed fighter-bomber aircraft such as the U.S. FB-111G Aardvark. Another strategic weapon is the long-range air-launched cruise missile is the U.S. AGM-86C ALCM with a range of 2500 km.

SB is not effective in SR2020 due the difficulty in destroying enemy buildings built around a sustaining hub/complex. Furthermore, any commodity or product that you deprive your enemy of will just be obtained on the world market.

Proxy War

What defines a proxy war?

• This is where units from a region are able to engage units of a neutral region on behalf of an ally or mutual defense partner due to being stationed/positioned in a way representative as part of the partner's military forces.
• Wikipedia Definition

Do units fire on proxy enemies in true enemy territory?

• direct - yes
• indirect - yes in select cases

Example of Proxy War

• What was the US and USSR involvement?
  • Sometimes directly, often through arms, equipment and training
  • If they supplied forces, money, guns for purpose of war the other side should have a chance to find out, through espionage and use it to cause tension, and influence nations.
• Did they fire at each other?
  • No

Wikipedia List of Proxy Wars

Other Strategies

Although this topic is intended to explain war strategies, the game can also be won through Diplomatic, Unification, Approval Rating and Total Score (Complete) strategies.