Douglas Hill
Character: Ric Flair
Name: Douglas Hill*Nationality:* American*Affiliation:* Allied Forces / United States*Role:* Commander*Previous status:* Retired veteran and war hero*Specialism:* Ground warfare and armoured units*Doctrine:* Direct assault*Enemies:* Soviets, Empire of the Rising Sun, FutureTech*Game:* Red Alert 3: Uprising
Main mode: Commander’s Challenge*Status:* Not specified Douglas Hill is an American veteran of the Allied Forces and a former war hero. After leaving active service, he agrees to come out of retirement amidst the turbulent aftermath of the Third World War.
The former soldier believes that the war and its aftermath are not being dealt with firmly enough. He therefore returns to active duty with two objectives:to train the new generation of Allied Peacekeepers and to help impose a particularly harsh policy on defeated Japan.
Hill thus represents a much more conservative and militaristic strand within the post-war Allied Forces.
An old-school veteran
Douglas Hill’s personality is perfectly in keeping with his military experience.
He is an old-school Soldier, extremely self-assured, who regards battlefield experience as superior to virtually any other form of expertise.
He readily adopts a moralising tone towards younger Commanders, does not hesitate to provoke his opponents, and turns almost every confrontation into an opportunity to demonstrate his supposed superiority.
His contempt is not, moreover, limited to the Allies’ traditional enemies.
Hill harbours deep hostility towards the Soviets, but also towards the Japanese, which is in line with his determination to impose particularly harsh terms on the Empire of the Rising Sun following its defeat.
Despite his age and long period of retirement, however, those who have seen his armoured units in action still regard Hill as a dangerous Commander. Some military analysts consider him outdated, but his mastery of ground operations and tank formations continues to earn him a solid reputation.
Armoured Specialist
Hill favours an extremely simple military doctrine: to strike the enemy directly with superior ground forces.
In the AI setups for Uprising, Douglas Hill also adopts the ‘Direct Assault’ profile, previously used by Warren Fuller in Red Alert 3.
But unlike Lissette Hanley or Lydia Winters, who favour specialised units and sophisticated tactics, Hill prefers tanks, Artillery and frontal assaults.
He is particularly associated with the FAV Peacekeeper, the new Allied heavy Artillery unit introduced in Uprising.
The vehicle can fight whilst on the move and then deploy to use its gigantic guns as a long-range Artillery piece.
In the Ready to Roll Out challenge, Douglas Hill commands the very forces that enable the FutureTech Commander to obtain this technology after defeating him.
The Commander’s Challenge
Most of Douglas Hill’s story unfolds in the Commander’s Challenge mode of Uprising.
In this particular campaign, FutureTech sends its own Commander around the world to face the best military Officers still on active duty and recover their technologies.
Hill quickly becomes one of his recurring opponents.
He is notably faced in Dead Meat.
When he discovers his new opponent, Hill treats him almost like a young Recruit who still has a lot to learn. He tells him that he will personally teach him a lesson in defeat.
The result is exactly the opposite.
The FutureTech Commander defeats the Allied Forces and Hill is forced to acknowledge, very reluctantly, that his opponent may have some redeeming qualities.
This first defeat, however, does absolutely nothing to dampen his ego.
‘War is about who’s left standing’
Hill reappears in High Water Mark, where he takes part in an offensive against the island controlled by the Imperial Commander Shinzo Nagama.
His military philosophy is perfectly summed up there: for Douglas, a war does not necessarily determine who was right, but simply who is still standing when the fighting stops.
This view sums up the character rather well.
Douglas Hill is neither a diplomat nor a particularly subtle ideologue. He belongs to a generation of Soldiers for whom military victory is the ultimate proof of a strategy’s validity.
The self-proclaimed tank mastermind
His love of armoured vehicles is even more evident in No Match for the Guardian.
In it, Hill commands substantial armoured forces and boasts of having practically ‘written the book’ on tank tactics.
Once again, however, he underestimates the FutureTech Commander.
His forces are defeated and Hill is forced to acknowledge that his young opponent does, after all, have a genuine military future.
This dynamic gradually becomes one of the character’s comic tropes: Hill almost invariably arrives utterly convinced of his superiority and leaves having been defeated.
The alliance against FutureTech
Douglas even ends up agreeing to cooperate with some of his enemies in an attempt to stop the FutureTech Commander.
In Be Quick or Be Dead, he takes part in a three-against-one attack alongside the Soviet commander Oleg Vodnik and the Imperial commander Takara Sato.
The alliance is quite revealing.
Hill detests both the Soviets and the Japanese, but FutureTech has become a threat significant enough to prompt the three powers to temporarily set aside their differences.
Even with this numerical superiority, they fail.
The FutureTech Commander successively defeats all three of his opponents, humiliating Hill once again.
The oil fields of Arabia
Douglas also intervenes when FutureTech seeks to obtain the resources needed to fund its operations.
In Saudi Arabia, several commanders simultaneously seek to take control of the region’s numerous oil rigs.
Hill represents the Allied Forces, whilst Kenji Tenzai defends imperial interests and Vera Belova those of the Soviet Union.
The FutureTech Commander ultimately succeeds in seizing the resources and eliminating the three rival bases.
These successive clashes reinforce Hill’s role as a recurring opponent for the player in the Commander’s Challenge, rather than as a character in a fully scripted campaign.
Douglas Hill also has one particularly memorable distinguishing feature: he is played by the famous American professional wrestler Ric ‘Nature Boy’ Flair.
This choice goes a long way towards explaining the character’s over-the-top personality: his taunts, boasting, insults and absolute confidence in his abilities are a direct reflection of Flair’s on-screen persona.
Electronic Arts even took the joke a step further in the game’s promotion, with several videos featuring Ric Flair facing off against a Soviet War Bear.
Douglas Hill is thus less a major character in the storyline than an unapologetic caricature of the ultra-competitive American veteran: a war hero returned from retirement, a tank specialist, convinced he has seen and learnt it all, but constantly confronted by a FutureTech Commander capable of proving him wrong.