History Line ([url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_Line:_1914-1918]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_Line:_1914-1918[/url]) a precursor of the Battle Isle was quite good although nowadays only as abandonware available.

I especially like the trench line fights and early tanks. For a game of 1993 it was remarkably good. I remember that the AI needed minutes to think...

History Line is included in the Battle Isle Platinium bundle, that is available from GOG.

The time the AI needed to think depended on CPU speed. Nowadays it's a matter of seconds or even faster.

I have this and it's pretty much like a blitzkrieg ww1 mod, pretty fun if you like the series. Looks like it's not being sold anymore though.

http://www.gamersgate.co.uk/DD-WWI/world-war-i

I am surprised that they never talked about that war in your schools. It was after all the first major armed conflict of the cold war, and a rather important piece of history, in particular for the US (and well, obviously Korea & Russia). They even talked about it in my school, and while it was never given as much time as say WW2, or the French revolution, it was still an important topic.

While they did know how to fight, neither side were prepared to fight a war like that. It had not been done before, so both sides were trying to figure out exactly what to do. Technology had also advanced quite a bit in the field of "how to kill people" (machine guns, mass produced artillery), so the way the war was fought was a response to that. Neither side could afford to not be defensive. Had they French not built trenches, the Germans would have penetrated deep into their territory, and had the Germans not built trenches in response they would have been massacred.

I can understand why though. While everyone knows about WW2, and what was going on (even if they don't know the details), most other wars are more obscure, and thus it is harder to convince people to buy games based on them. I don't think that's exclusively an US thing, I think that holds true for the rest of the world as well. How many actually knows about the Boer wars? How would you convince someone unfamiliar with that conflict to buy a game based on it?

Sometimes a joke can speak volumes about the reality of a tragic situation. The Onion hit the nail on the head with the outbreak of WWI.

I believe there was a very good Battlefield 1942 mod, total conversion to WWI. Considering 1942 is one of the better WW2 games, that's arguably one of the best WWI games there ever could be ;)

Good post. WW1 is a good setting, if you can get past the crushing bleakness of it. But I still maintain that unless you're a grandmother who has no idea what these computer things are, you're going to absolutely annihilate any opponent you face in a WW1 strategy game - simply by applying some strategy. So how do you overcome that without making the battles stupidly weighted against you?

Battle would probably have to be primarily out of the trenches. If it focused on trenches or had tactical importance it would probably have a lot of elements of tower defense, while strategizing tactical routes for your troops on the desolate battlefields to try and outmaneuver the opposing artillery, snipers, aerial bombardments, and more.

If it was a direct area map like many RTS games it would probably play similar to anything from Empire Earth to Rise of Nations. If it was turn-based it could play from anything like Civilizations to Panzer General, or even Europa Universalis, but it need not be like anything else.

I have until recently been completely turned off from most military games, and even pretty much every post-apoclyptic game, because of how bleak the settings can be since I know that in reality, a war, or worse yet an apocalypse, would be a very depressing and devastating situation. But I've been blowing stuff up and stabbing people for years in fantasy settings, sci-fi settings, and pre 20th century historical settings because of personal fascination, and it being more intriguing to me. No I'm enjoying a bit of everything and relishing the historical significance, as well as the more fictional parts of games.

Yeah, weapon technology was far ahead of telecommunications and transportation and it wasn't until the last year or so of the war where those two areas finally caught up. They didn't even have radio communication in the first years, armies had to run telephone wire from the battlefield HQ to the front. When the wires were cut, they had to rely on runners. You had all this fancy new artillery but no proper way to coordinate the artillery with the infantry. So artillery barrages were being targeted on the same ground that your fellow infantry were charging on.

Same with transportation. Supply lines were limited as the only effective mode of transportation at the time was railroad. Some places did not have enough lines to support the amount of supplies and troops which needed to be moved. It also wasn't very hard to cut off/destroy tracks. Hell, they still were using horses as a mode of transportation.

Firepower was 20th century but other areas were still stuck in the 19th.

Strategic Command: World War I is a pretty good game:
Look it up on Battlefront.com. I can't post links (probably because this is my first post).

Not sure I agree with that. For the niche market of historical strategy games ( or even "worse" the ultra-niche market of wargames ) , potential customers probably have either some knowledge of history either an interest in it. Those games would be "something they haven't had the opportunity to play yet". The reason is probably elsewhere. For games made for a more general public, I would agree with you. Those conflicts would anyway be a hell of a research to do. Add to this that the second boer war is something that would be difficult to treat in a politically correct way. ( For more on this google "Boer war scorched earth" )

Welcome then

I posted the link above anyway

And , yes, you will have to post a bit longer to gain access to that function.
It certainly is one of the best. But WW1 looks too clean once seen from a flyboy point of view. On the other hand a Tank Mk IV simulator would have been quite sluggish.

Welcome :)

I can only speak from my own experience here, but I play hex based tabeltop wargames (World in Flames, advanced squad leader and Lock 'n load), and when suggesting that we should get some non-WW2 non-Vietnam games to play, I was met by people saying that they would mainly be interested in playing games about wars that they are more familiar with. Heck, it can even be tricky to convince people to play games based on lesser known parts of WW2. And while there certainly is a niche market games based on less well known conflicts, the lesser known the conflict is, the more niche the game becomes.
Most people (probably the vast majority of them) who play hex-based wargames are history geeks.