DEFCON Time!

Published April 10, 2012

It’s DEFCON time! We hit up the Steam demo for now and head into the game. We do our usual team-up, of course. Do things go as planned? If you have to ask, you don’t know us well enough, man.

Here’s the layout in our first team DEFCON match. Our foe, cleverly called Player 1, was Africa, I – Bud – was America, and Will was Russia. I hadn’t played since I got my butt kicked by the AI years ago so we were both lost. That’s one hell of a way to start, lemme tell ya.

Will: What do I do?
Bud: Uh, you push… the thing…
Will: What? Where?
Bud: … The thing. It’s on the left I think.
Will: The fleets button?
Bud: The what? What fleets? There’s a radar button…
Will: Ok, I’m pushing radar but nothing’s happening. I can’t place any radars.
Bud: Are you pushing the one of the left?
Wil: Left? Not the bottom?
Bud: I don’t… there’s one on the bottom? Let me check. No, it’s the one on the left. I think.
Will: Which left?

*facepalm* Yes Bud, there are fleets, and yes Will, the radar button is on the left left… oh man was that a bad open. Things didn’t get much better, either.

Here’s Will’s setup. The game was a trouncing, so we’re going to zoom to our one good shot.

What the picture sez.

Same. Yup, that was our one big hit. We spent part of the round firing frantically and hoping things would go right. I tried to conserve nukes but most of my fleet got slaughtered in the Atlantic, with the other half bobbing uselessly in the Pacific. That’s some planning and forsight for waging a war on Africa, let me tell you.

I ultimately unloaded my silos, but it was too late. Damn it all. We lost with scores of 110 (AI), 23 (Will) and 18 (Bud). Ok, let’s try that again, but with better setup. Specifically, a little AI help. Will played Russia, and I tried to take the U.S. again. We named our buddy The Good and our foe Hate Me, who we again stuck in Africa. It turned out that I stuck The Good in South America and me in China. Whatever, that works, too. In fact, that rocks. Our navy and airbases were close enough that we poked most of Hate Me’s silos and radar before DEFCON 1. That made it easy to rain hell on him for the rest of the match.

Early on into DEFCON 1 our AI buddy The Good was taking it on the chin. However, his absorbing of what little Hate Me had left allowed Will and I to drop the last of his defenses. With his silos and radars down it was time to hit ’em hard.

Something like this. It was like finding lost money later when we’d say, “hey, I found another sub full of missles I’d forgotten about,”since they were pretty much guaranteed hits.

Not that there was much left to hit . This was the population chart as the game wound down. There’s NOTHING left, folks. We have turned Africa into a charred husk. I found one of the aforementioned sub with missles after this picture was taken and was dismayed that there was nothing left worth shooting. I shot the nukes anyway of course, since I couldn’t save them for another round or anything. Anyway, I think we’ve won.