Conflict: Europe

Oh my God this was one of my favourite games of the 80's...Still an absolute belter of a game now...

I owned CONFLICT EUROPE for my Amiga 500, not long after its initial 1989 release, so was pleased to see it available on STEAM. This strategy game centres upon tensions between the NATO Alliance and Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. It contains 5 scenarios, which may be played as either side, and is simple to play. Indeed, much of the game is spent on a single screen, a virtual War Room, with a series of terminals to access various commands. The main screen displays a map of Europe with the units (represented as coloured squares) already in position. Each turn has 3 phases which are always followed in strict order - Movement, Assault and Rebuild - and every turn represents a single day of combat. Moving a unit consists of merely selecting it and placing it in an adjacent space. All units, with the exception of a Russian Paratroop Division on its first turn only, may move one square. Once we are satisfied with our force disposition we are allowed to assault adjacent enemies, this time by selecting our unit and then the one we wish to fight. Long range firepower is not present here! Battles are resolved, casualties inflicted and any eliminated units immediately removed from …

I played an earlier version of this game ("Theater Europe") on my old Atari 800XL when I was a kid, and this game (at least the "Gambit" portion of it) is extremely similar to this game. The only difference is that "Theater Europe" had an option to "take control" of a specific unit's battle & fight enemy ground/air units with guided missiles - doing that just used up your Supply points though, so no big loss there. The graphics of this game are obviously poor, but it's a decent lil strategy game that shows how hard a conventional war in Europe in the 1980s might have been for NATO. Winning on the Warsaw Pact is usually very easy, but not so easy for NATO without a lot of finesse. The individual games don't take very long to play through, and I'm not sure if you can save games as you go along though - the *.pdf rules still show having to "format a floppy disk" for that. ;) This game uses some kind of DOS emulator to work, but it runs fine on my PC laptop.