I’ve been relearning how to play strategy games old-skool style, thanks to Petroglyph’s Forged Battalion. It’s not been an easy game to get into. It has a steep learning curve, but once you start to understand some basic strategies you’ll find there’s a fun experience hidden within.
Released in 2018, Forged Battalion is a real-time strategy game clearly influenced by the Command and Conquer series of games. It bears that same feeling of slowly expanding your base, harvesting resources, and building a large enough army to overwhelm your opponent. While not perfect, it brings back that old style of RTS that many older gamers remember fondly.
Forged Battalion is a game that suffers from its early game experience. It can be overwhelming, both in information being thrown at you and no holds barred difficulty. In this article I’ll document my playthrough as I slowly started to understand and actually enjoy the game.
The “Tutorial”
The first thing you are told when you load up the game is that you should read the manual before playing. You are then presented with a series of image and text-filled screens that the developers expect you to read through before playing.
Some screens have videos to demonstrate certain features, which is a nice touch. Still, it’s a lot of information to get through, and at some point I found myself losing interest as I clicked through images, videos, charts and tables. I could see this putting people off the game, since these days not many people want to read a novel before they start the game.
The game would be more accessible with an interactive tutorial that teaches you the basics of the game as you play, rather than a text dump. It gives you the feeling that the developers either didn’t care, or didn’t have enough time to develop a proper introduction to the game. Not a great first impression.
Factions
After reading through or skipping the tutorial, you can start a campaign. When you do so, the first thing you are presented with is the Faction Creator. This part of the game is an interactive tutorial that teaches you how to create and edit the units you will use in the game. Faction creation is a key component to Forged Battalion, so it makes sense that they would want to push this up front.
However, I feel like this misses the mark slightly. Players have no context for what they are creating or editing, so this is meaningless to them until they’ve played a mission. While I’ve gotten used to the Faction Creator after playing the game for a while, it would be nice if the game had you play a simple mission to get used to way buildings and units work before introducing the ability to customise them.
The First Mission
The next step is to start the campaign. I start the first mission, expecting to be able to take my time and learn the ropes. When I have a few defenses in place and have expanded to gather more resources, I start to build out my army. This is when I’m attacked en masse by the huge army the enemy has already built up.
My turrets are wiped out near instantly, and I don’t have enough troops to hold them off. In this game, you can only build one unit of each type at a time – infantry, light vehicle, heavy vehicle, and drone. It doesn’t matter if you build extra factories, there’s no way to build more than 4 units at a time.
So, of course, I can’t build a new army fast enough and I watch my building explode one by one. My headquarters is blown to pieces and the mission is lost. Forged Battalion punishes hesitation and rewards early aggression, whether a player is ready for this or not.
I attempt the mission again, but this time I am prepared. I start building my army earlier, and when the enemy sends its first wave I’m able to all but destroy it. As the troops retreat back to their base, I follow them with my army. Having lost most of their troops, the base is mostly undefended and the mission is over quickly.
Progression
After a mission you will gain Research Points (RP). Even if you lose, you will still gain points, though you will get less of them. Research Points can be spent on upgrades that unlock new ways to customise your faction. These can be new weapons for your troops, better armour, new movement types, upgrades for your headquarters, or a new superweapon.
Since these upgrades are not tied to the campaign at all, it’s possible to grind for RP by replaying levels. In fact, every time I go to launch the game on Steam, I’m shown a custom level in the workshop that is designed just for farming RP.
This is an odd choice, given that it limits how well the developers can design levels. They don’t know what level of tech a player will be at each level, which means they can’t design an appropriate challenge for players.
The purpose of this is so that the player’s focus is kept on the Faction Creator. It becomes a minor gripe when you realise that it’s still important to keep some weaker units, since more advanced units will require you to construct more buildings before you can access them in a mission. It can be a good strategy to have some cheaper and faster to build units so you can start growing your army early.
Protect the Tower
The second mission is to protect a communication tower and destroy an enemy base. It starts out fairly well. I know to build an army quickly, and defend anything the enemy throws at me. I make a couple of attempts to destroy the base, but am forced to retreat. No matter, I have time to build a bigger army.
Then the enemy starts sending waves of drones to attack the communications tower. I have no troops protecting the tower, so I rush my army over to save it. I do so, but barely. The tower has very little health left.
The enemy keeps sending wave after wave, and I manage to fight them off. But each time they chip off a little more health from the communications tower. I can’t keep up, and eventually they destroy the tower, and I lose the mission again.
My second attempt goes much better. I ignore the enemy base for the time being, and focus on sending troops to protect the communications tower. I also learn that I can repair the tower – something that might have saved my last attempt. With the tower protected, the rest of the mission plays out like the first. I build a large enough army, and wipe out the enemy base with ease.
“Impossible” Time Trial
The third mission seems to go well at first. I have to protect an ally at the center of the map, so I send troops to protect it while I build up my army. There are two enemies on this map, and I have to wipe out both. After one enemy sends a large wave that gets obliterated, I march my army to their base and destroy it with ease.
Only one enemy left, so I top up my army and march it over to their base. Then the mission ends in defeat for no apparent reason. I’m left confused, so I start it up again. In the top left one objective states that I need to defeat the enemy “within the time limit”. Somehow I missed this objective as it’s not clearly communicated.
I would blame myself for this screw up, but I’m not the only one who managed to miss this. Whether my fault or the game’s, I know the objective now so I set about doing the mission properly. This is where I get stuck and frustrated.
No matter how fast I build up my army and start my attack, I’m either left with too little time to destroy the second base, or my army isn’t powerful enough and gets destroyed before it can do any real damage. I fail this mission a lot.
I look for any guides or tips, and all I can find are suggestions that I need to unlock better tech. The only way to do this is to grind for RP. I hate grinding in games. I don’t want to do the same repetitive task over and over just to unlock the next fun bit. At this point I’m almost ready to give up.
I decide to see if I can find a Let’s Play and see how others have completed this mission. In the first one I watch by a Youtuber called tkragon, I notice they play slightly differently. And this is how I figure out how to play this game properly.
When I play the game I build my power plants and important buildings in the back of my base to keep them safe. I use turrets to expand to new areas and build new refineries to harvest resources. This means that things go a lot slower and cost a lot more, since I need to build more units and spend more money.
The way tkragon plays is different. They use power plants and factories to expand to new areas, only building turrets to help defend the allies. They also take care to build their army slowly, until there are several refineries generating income. This means they generate income faster, and can build a larger army sooner.
I retried the mission using this strategy, and suddenly it was easy. By the end money was pouring in faster than I could spend it. I had a large army of cheaper units that overwhelmed one base with plenty of time to destroy the second. With a simple change to the way I build, I was closer to mastering this game.
The Importance of Onboarding
This wasn’t an easy game to get into. With a better tutorial, and a couple of easy missions at the beginning, players could be eased into this game and would be more likely to keep playing. Instead, you need to put a bit of effort and research into learning how to play this game properly, which many players won’t do.
So though I would recommend this game to others, I understand why it has mixed reviews. It’s a good game, but it’s hard to get into due to the lack of early game onboarding. If a player’s first interaction with a game is filled with confusion and challenges that seem unfair, they are more likely to look for a different game to play.
