Defcon
"Berlin hit, 2.8m dead."
The monochrome words blip into view, detailing the destruction with all the emotion of a spellchecker. A soft white disc forms briefly above what used to be Germany to mark the explosion.
I was a fool. The US and I had allied together to fight off the growing far eastern menace, and we had already disabled two of their silos in China and seriously hindered future crop harvests in Thailand. So when the spy satellites picked up a series of nuclear launches from somewhere in Nevada, I thought they were just finishing the job. It wasn't until four minutes later, as the little vector representations of ICBMs were picked up by my Scottish radar base, that I realised they were coming in to land closer to home. My silo in Denmark was still in launch mode, and would take far too long to revert to defence and shoot down the incoming missiles. I had no choice but to take the hit and accept that our peace treaty was over. I could have prevented it. Iceland would have made an excellent spot for a concealed launch site that would have monitored and disabled any attacks from the US. I could have kept a naval fleet in the north Atlantic instead of directing them to the African coast to watch for subs. I could have, but there's no way of recruiting new forces once war has broken out.
I should have just sent my bombers stateside and waited for the US to launch their missiles, revealing their silos to the world and signalling that their defences were down, then taking them all out in one swift bombing raid. But then my fighters would not have been able to intercept the Chinese air force scouting eastern Europe, and I could have lost that incredibly useful radar station in Turkey.
For a war game with only a handful of units, Defcon is surprisingly tough on the brain. The premise is simple: It's the mother of all battles, full-scale global thermonuclear war. Six continents (with Asia being divided into Russia and the far east), each pack up to 100 primed weapons of mass destruction, and the fight isn't over until 80% have been launched. There is no tomorrow to worry about, no resource to save, no empathy to be had for the innocent civilians. Two points for every million you kill, minus one point for every million you lose.
| We have a situation |
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| Countdown to destruction... |
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| DEFCON 5 Deploy |
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| DEFCON 3 Attack |
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| DEFCON 1 Annihilate |
The game begins in defcon 5, peacetime, in which you can construct radar, airbases, naval fleets, and of course the all-important silos. After a few minutes, defcon 4 is reached and the enemy appears on the radar. At defcon 3, war is declared and the air and sea forces are allowed to engage in combat. From this point there are no reinforcements, and no more construction.
At defcon 1, the nukes are armed, and would the last one left alive please turn out the lights.
Graphically, Defcon is an unusual affair. It is presentationally minimalist, taking its cue from the likes of Wargames and displaying the world as an 80's style vector map with little text labels marking population points. Play is conducted from this single screen, tersely decorated with simple icons that have become an Introversion tradition. Rectangular ICBMs leave neon trails across empty skies, detonating as shaded white discs. Faint rumbling sounds cover the ambient music of haunting choirs, lonely violins, and distant people crying. It takes some getting used to, but there is more atmosphere to be found in this cold, dehumanised command bunker than in any high-poly HDRI bump-mapped world above. Deaths are measured in the millions as cities are levelled, and you'll be debating whether or not nuking Houston again is worth the missiles.
There is no minimap, nor are there hotkeys to select your forces. The world is really quite a big place when you think about it, and when it takes a missile a good few minutes to travel across a continent, there is no need for shortcuts. Indeed, the lack of speed is a key factor in Defcon. Silos take minutes to switch between attack and defence mode, and even launching a scout fighter from a carrier comes with a minute's delay. The idea that seeing an incoming ICBM means it's already too late to react means you are constantly on edge, trying to second- and third-guess your opponents' moves. How many missiles do you launch at the enemy silo? Three hits will destroy it, but how many will reach the target? If you send five, and all of them hit, you've wasted two valuable payloads. Can you trust that their defences will be down by the time your explosive volley enters their territory, and can you risk leaving your own airspace unguarded in order to make the launches? With just a few simple rules and near infinitely many ways to play, Defcon is more like chess. With nukes.
Much like chess, Defcon is an ironically social experience. AI players can fill the ranks, but there is little challenge to be had from them and little joy in psyching them out. In one recent game alone against two AI players, I managed to win without a single home casualty. Throw in internet or LAN play though, allowing alliances to be forged and broken in the space of a heartbeat (which is about three minutes at Defcon pace), and cold war paranoia sets in fast.
Still, this is war, right? The Big One. There can be no real winner because we are all doomed, and if there's no winner then there's certainly no second place. It's kill and be killed, and fair play doesn't matter because there will be nobody to write the history books. The US should have thought of that before double-crossing me. I surface the fleet of concealed submarines stationed just off the Florida coast and within a few minutes they have launched nearly 30 short range nuclear missiles in a scatter pattern over the east coast. It's not revenge for what they did to northern Europe; it's just settling the score.
In Conclusion
It is a testament to the power of tactical play that a game in which everyone has over 100 nukes and just one goal - to use them all up - can take hours to finish, and to the power of atmosphere that you can order the death of hundreds of millions of people and be left shaking without having seen a single one die.
| Launches |
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| Strikes |
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| Final Score | |
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| Graphics: | 80s |
| Politics: | 60s |
| Destruction: | Mutually assured |
| 150,000,000 out of 200,000,000 | |
| Like learning to stop worrying and love the intercontinental ballistic missiles. | |
