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“ This complication is what makes Steel Division special.

Preparing to attack.

“ Eugen used actual Royal Air Force recon photos to create the maps.

The Beute Firefly: Devastator of multiplayer matches.

“ It's seriously imposing for people who aren't WWII buffs.

Lines of sight: they're a little bit important.

“ Steel Division is entirely focused on constant and fair tactical combat.

Defending a town in the campaign.

Unlike the stereotypical World War 2 strategy sim, Steel Division isn't about pushing counters across a map and waiting for some dice rolls to turn out in your favor. It's a great-looking game, for one, with lush, detailed maps and units. Controlling it feels good too – any real-time strategy veteran should almost immediately feel at home with its interface. There is a significant learning curve in terms of how to play Steel Division well, but it's attractive and enjoyable enough to get started with that it's hard not to want to play more.Conceptually, Steel Division works like a rock-paper-scissors game with 10 different options instead of three. Infantry can hold most defensive positions, but move slowly and are easily pinned down in the open. Tanks are the most versatile offensive unit, but well-positioned anti-tank guns and enemy tanks can knock them out with ease. Anti-tank guns can be negated by artillery, but both are susceptible to bombers, which can be deterred or destroyed by fighters and anti-air. It's a complicated dance, and it can be punishingly difficult if you don't get it right. Defense is easier to grasp than offense, so even if you're losing you can still pin down opponents and feel like you've accomplished somethingWhat makes Steel Division even neater is that the tactical combat of individual tanks and airplanes also matches the grand strategic goals of World War II; success comes from pinning down an enemy with infantry and artillery, then flanking with tanks and vehicles. At both the macro and the micro levels, Steel Division is a superb WWII wargame.Very specific quirks like that give Steel Division more depth, as veteran players can end up engaging in a poker-like set of bluffs and counter-bluffs. Some matches are brutal, World War I-style slugfests of infantry constantly being thrown into the meat grinder, while others have long, slow feeling-out processes where two players may not even significantly engage with one another directly and try to find victory by focusing on other regions of the map.That's possible because every map in Steel Division is designed for up to 4v4 matches, except for a couple of gigantic 10v10 battlegrounds (which are far more impressive in theory than practice, as they tend to be won by whichever team has the fewest disconnects). Six or eight players is Steel Division's sweet spot. It can be overwhelming to try to manage every aspect of a battlefield as a single player, but with teammates (either as AI in Skirmish mode or human in multi) the ebb and flow of the battle becomes far more manageable as players cover each others’ flanks or focus on different aspects of the battle to overcome weaknesses, like a plane-heavy division providing air support to an infantry battle.Yet once you do get deeper into Steel Division, that level of variety and customization can turn into another strength. Each division has its own personality and unit quirks: the American 101st Airborne, for example, is heavy on air power but light on tanks, while the Scottish 15th Infantry can flood the field with elite foot squads but has very little air support. Steel Division is detailed enough that a single unit can totally alter an encounter – such as how the German "Hitlerjugend" division can deploy an elite Beute (captured) Firefly tank in a match's earliest phase.While Steel Division has a great engine, interface, and maps for World War II combat, the structure of its matches can feel arbitrary. Each match is divided into three phases – A, B, and C – with a certain set of units available in each. Phase A has largely recon, infantry, and outdated/cheap tanks and airplanes, B has the bulk of conventional units, and C has the elite and high-tech units. Every few minutes, each player is granted a certain number of points to purchase units which then drive up to their deployment spot (there's no resource gathering of any kind). This does do a good job of making sure that a wide variety of different units are used, but it also feels somewhat over-rigid in terms of the internal narrative of each battle.There are a set of single-player campaigns which are cleverly put-together, but they are not Steel Division's main selling point. Each campaign follows a single division through four battles in the Normandy campaign. For example, in the first scenario of the easiest campaign, as the 101st Airborne, you land behind German lines and take out their artillery so the troops from the beaches can progress inland. Each of the missions in the campaign is around a half-hour each, so it's possible to complete one in a single sitting if you're winning.What the campaigns do manage to do (especially the first American one) is introduce Steel Division's concepts in a more controlled fashion than the skirmish mode. First you learn deployment and defense, then recon and offense. The next mission trains you to use forests to cover infantry units while also pointing out great points to place anti-tank units for long sightlines down key roads, which is probably the single most important tactical concept new players needs to learn.The campaigns are helpful for learning at the planning level as well. The Battlegroups you put together are much smaller and more manageable initially, and helpfully introduce new tactical choices slowly over time – the 101st Airborne, for example, doesn't have tanks and airplanes available initially, but gets them after a couple missions where you have to show you know how to use infantry and artillery. There's also a narrator who explains the strengths and weaknesses of specific units, a feature unfortunately missing from the rest of Steel Division.