The Entente: Battlefields World War I
| The Entente: Battlefields of World War I | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Lesta studio |
| Publisher(s) | Buka Entertainment |
| Platform(s) | Windows 98 / NT / Me / XP |
| Release date(s) |
2004 (Windows) 6 June 2014 |
| Genre(s) | Real-time strategy |
| Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer (LAN) |
The Entente: Battlefields World War I is a real-time strategy PC game published in 2004 by Buka Entertainment. It simulates World War I from the perspective of the five main combatants: Russia, France, Germany, Britain and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. It is similar in many ways to other real-time strategy games, focusing on economy and military paths to victory.
Single player
The single player battles in The Entente are the standard battles of the game. The first option for single player games are the missions. They are battles of the Great War that don’t fit any of the campaigns, particularly on the Eastern Front.
The second option is the combatants’ own campaigns. These represent some of the main battles that the countries fought that were linked in some way. The final option is random maps. Similar to the Cossacks series random and death matches, these games start with the player having a single building and several workers. The victory condition for these games is to destroy the enemy completely.
Multiplayer
Games can also be played over the Internet using LAN with up to eight players.
Units
The Entente: Battlefields World War I sports an array of different units from all aspects of the First World War and can be broken up into several different types-infantry, artillery, vehicles (including tanks and transport vehicles), ships, and planes.
Infantry are ranks of foot soldiers often supported by several officers (or workers), although specialist infantry such as machine gunners, flame throwers, elite foot soldiers, mortar teams, and mounted infantry can also be used.
Artillery allows the player to wipe out key enemy positions like buildings and large blocks of units. The basic artillery units in the game are howitzers and guns such as the 105mm Schneider and the 80mm Gun.
Vehicles include tanks such as the Whippet and the A7V that can be used to support infantry and trucks can quickly transport infantry. Anti-aircraft guns are effective against planes when used in large numbers.
The most destructive units in the game are ships. These include destroyers such as the Russian Narvik, cruisers, battleships and merchant ships. Most of the ships in the game can produce considerable amounts of firepower.
The Entente includes several of the most famous aircraft of the era such as the SPAD XIII and Fokker D.I, reconnaissance planes such as the Etrich Taube and light and heavy bombers such the Maurice Farman S.11 and Sikorsky Ilya Muromets.
An invention of the First World War, poison gas is a final weapon that can be used. The gas cloud will slowly kill any infantry enemy units in the gas cloud for a few minutes until it disappears.
Resources
Resources are collected in The Entente to fund the construction of units and buildings.
The six resources in The Entente are food, wood, iron, gold, oil and electricity. The resources in the list can be gathered by workers working in farms, sawmills, iron mines, gold mines, oil rigs, and electric power stations.
Buildings
The Entente has buildings in the game that fairly accurately represent each country’s style of architecture during the 1914-1918 conflict. Buildings can all do different tasks, including building units and gathering resources.
Historic basis
The game is considerably accurate, and extensively researched. It runs on a basis of a war of movement, rather than the stereotypical image of World War I being dominated by trench warfare, and units are created in huge masses, rather than that appropriate for small skirmishes. There are no trenches. The units' uniforms are accurate, almost to the full, but both historic factions share some units, such as officers, mortarmen, all artillery, flamethrowers, and ships, since from a distance they were more or less identical. Machine gunners and transport ships are identical in all factions. The vehicles used are also well researched, if not controversially distributed. The anti-aircraft artillery piece is based on the Russian 7.6 mm cannon (only used by Russia). The tanks that are included in the game were mostly used by their sponsored nation, but not specially during World War I. For example, the Renault FT, as used by the Russians as well as its French manufacturers, was only used by the latter in the Russian Civil War, and was a slightly modified version. The K.u.K meanwhile, uses A7Vs for balancing reasons, whereas Austria-Hungary possessed no tanks during the War.