Regiments Pc Game Review

[Maggie Szydlowski]

Theslavering hordes of Wargame-grown Abramsphiles have doomed me to forever review Cold War RTS games set in late 1980s. But no matter how distasteful I find this period, Regiments is still a good game.

You can sometimes rush it and complete an exit objective early to finish faster, but Regiments still allows you to hang around after accomplishing that. Why? Because you may want to capture some secondary zones for those sweet, sweet operational authority points.

Some matches may make it prudent to add some tanks early on, others will beguile you with the siren call of on map artillery pieces (which actually need to be directed to fire, unlike the much more self-sufficient mortars) and stronger call-ins.

A deployed infantry unit has a lot more firepower than just the transports alone, plus, the infantry act like ablative armor, taking some of the hits that would have gone to their transports. Thankfully, only vehicle losses are tracked in Regiments! Once you retreat a unit and then re-summon it, the transports will be carrying a fresh serving of footsloggers.

Knowing when to retreat and when to hold is crucial in Regiments and makes it you consider trades. And I love any game that makes you consider making bad trades. It also helps to do a bit of tactical storytelling in conjunction with the limited call ins.

Regimental reviews are one of the oldest cadet traditions. The Corps of Cadets, led by the Regimental Commander, marches onto Washington Parade in formation, using a precise set of commands and close-order maneuvering. Reviews take place in the fall and spring.

After you complete your application, please e-mail the Sponsor Family Program Coordinator at CadetFamilyS...@uscga.edu. In your e-mail, you must include the e-mail address and phone number of every adult living in the home. The Sponsor Family Coordinator will then initiate the background check process and you will receive an email with further instructions.

There is a Sponsor Family Training that is a one-hour training which we ask sponsors to attend once every four years. This training is designed to give you an overview of the program, what is expected of you as a sponsor, and what you can expect from your cadets. This training will also help familiarize you with the cadet regulations onboard CGA. You will be notified via e-mail once the training is scheduled.

The matching process of swabs to families will occur during July and August. Please bear with us and remain flexible through this process. There will be a meet and greet scheduled on Campus, typically in late August. This will give families an opportunity to formally meet their cadet if they have not already done so. Details on this will also be via email.

Monstrous Regiment is the 31st Discworld novel, but it mostlystands by itself. You arguably could start here, although you would missthe significance of Vimes's presence and the references toThe Truth. The graphical reading orderguide puts it loosely after The Truth and roughly in the IndustrialRevolution sequence, but the connections are rather faint.

There was always a war. Usually they were border disputes, the national equivalent of complaining that the neighbor was letting their hedge row grow too long. Sometimes they were bigger. Borogravia was a peace-loving country in the middle of treacherous, devious, warlike enemies. They had to be treacherous, devious, and warlike; otherwise, we wouldn't be fighting them, eh? There was always a war.

Polly's brother, who wanted nothing more than to paint (something that thegod Nuggan and the ever-present Duchess certainly did not considerappropriate for a strapping young man), was recruited to fight in the warand never came back. Polly is worried about him and tired of waiting fornews. Exit Polly, innkeeper's daughter, and enter the young lad OliverPerks, who finds the army recruiters in a tavern the next town over. Onekiss of the Duchess's portrait later, and Polly is a private in theBorogravian army.

I suspect this is some people's favorite Discworld novel. If so, Iunderstand why. It was not mine, for reasons that I'll get into, butwhich are largely not Pratchett's fault and fall more into the category ofpet peeves.

Pratchett has dealt with both war and gender in the same book before.Jingo is also about a war pushed by aruling class for stupid reasons, and featured a substantial subplot aboutNobby cross-dressing that turns into a deeper character re-evaluation. Ithought the war part of Monstrous Regiment was weaker (this is partof my complaint below), but gender gets a considerably deeper treatment.Monstrous Regiment is partly about how arbitrary and nonsensicalgender roles are, and largely about how arbitrary and abusive socialstructures can become weirdly enduring because they build up their owninternally reinforcing momentum. No one knows how to stop them, and a lotof people find familiar misery less frightening than unknown change, sothe structure continues despite serving no defensible purpose.

Recently, there was a brief attempt in some circles to claim Pratchettposthumously for the anti-transgender cause in the UK. Pratchett'sdaughter was having none of it, and any Pratchett reader should have beenable to reject that out of hand, but Monstrous Regiment is acomprehensive refutation written by Pratchett himself some twenty yearsearlier. Polly is herself is not transgender. She thinks of herself as awoman throughout the book; she's just pretending to be a boy. But shealso rejects binary gender roles with the scathing dismissal of someonewho knows first-hand how superficial they are, and there is at least onetransgender character in this novel (although to say who would be aspoiler). By the end of the book, you will have no doubt that Pratchett'sopinion about people imposing gender roles on others is the same as hisopinion about every other attempt to treat people as things.

That said, by 2023 standards the treatment of gender here seems... naive?I think 2003 may sadly have been a more innocent time. We're now deepinto a vicious backlash against any attempt to question binary genderassignment, but very little of that nastiness and malice is present here.In one way, this is a feature; there's more than enough of that in reallife. However, it also makes the undermining of gender roles feel a bittoo easy. There are good in-story reasons for why it's relatively simplefor Polly to pass as a boy, but I still spent a lot of the book thinkingthat passing as a private in the army would be a lot harder andriskier than this. Pratchett can't resist a lot of cross-dressing andgender befuddlement jokes, all of which are kindly and wry but (at leastfor me) hit a bit differently in 2023 than they would have in 2003. Theclimax of the story is also a reference to a classic UK novel that to evenname would be to spoil one or both of the books, but which I thoughtpulled the punch of the story and dissipated a lot of the built-upemotional energy.

My larger complaints, though, are more idiosyncratic. This is a war novelabout the enlisted ranks, including the hazing rituals involved in joiningthe military. There are things I love aboutmilitary fiction, but apparently that reaction requires I have somesympathy for the fight or the goals of the institution. MonstrousRegiment falls into the class of war stories where the war is pointlessand the system is abusive but the camaraderie in the ranks makes serviceoddly worthwhile, if not entirely justifiable.

This is a real feeling that many veterans do have about military service,and I don't mean to question it, but apparently reading about it makes megrumbly. There's only so much of the apparently gruff sergeant with aheart of gold that I can take before I start wondering why we glorifyhazing rituals as a type of tough love, or why the person with someauthority doesn't put a direct stop to nastiness instead of providingmoral support so subtle you could easily blink and miss it. Let alone themore basic problems like none of these people should have to be heredoing this, or lots of people are being mangled and killed to makepossible this heart-warming friendship.

Like I said earlier, this is a me problem, not a Pratchett problem. He'swriting a perfectly reasonable story in a genre I just happen to dislike.He's even undermining the genre in the process, just not quite fast enoughor thoroughly enough for my taste.

A related grumble is that Monstrous Regiment is very invested inthe military trope of naive and somewhat incompetent officers who have tobe led by the nose by experienced sergeants into making the rightdecision. I have never been in the military, but I work in an industry inwhich it is common to treat management as useless incompetents at best andactively malicious forces at worst. This is, to me, one of the mostpersistently obnoxious attitudes in my profession, and apparently mydislike of it carries over as a low tolerance for this very commonattitude towards military hierarchy.

A full expansion of this point would mostly be about the purpose ofmanagement, division of labor, and people's persistent dismissal of skillsthey don't personally have and may perceive as gendered, and while some ofthat is tangentially related to this book, it's not closely-related enoughfor me to bore you with it in a review. Maybe I'll write a stand-aloneblog post someday. Suffice it to say that Pratchett deployed a commontrope that most people would laugh at and read past without a secondthought, but that for my own reasons started getting under my skin by theend of the novel.

All of that grumbling aside, I did like this book. It is a very solidDiscworld novel that does all the typical things a Discworld novel does:likable protagonists you can root for, odd and fascinating sidecharacters, sharp and witty observations of human nature, and a mostlyenjoyable ending where most of the right things happen. Polly is great; Iwas very happy to read a book from her perspective and would happily readmore. Vimes makes a few appearances being Vimes, and while I found hisapproach in this book less satisfying than in Jingo, I'll stilltake it. And the examination of gender roles, even if a bit less fraughtthan current politics, is solid Pratchett morality.

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