My dad just sent me this...

what if I could take a tank back to the Little Big Horn, what if I could take a light cruiser to take on the Spanish Armada, what if I could take a battalion of Marine infantry to meet the Vikings head on in England, what if I had a squadron of P-51's in WWI, what if I had artillery .....what if...what if....

The only thing that comes to mind from my background would be Civilization, but that's not so much a wargame. Anyone have any other suggestions?

I can't think of anything that handles the topic realistically, but it certainly was possible to match WWII bombers against catapults in games like Empire Earth and Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. I think Rise of Nations did some similar stuff as well.Rise of Nations is available on Steam and Empire Earth is available on GOG. They all have map and scenario editors allowing you set up whatever ridiculous scenario you want, if you don't want to play a complete session starting off in the stone age and advancing towards thermonuclear war.

You would think you could rock the world with a tank/plane in the medieval times but the truth is you would run out of fuel, ammo and food and get overrun instantly. Those machines are nothing without an mighty warindustry backing them up.

There's an early 90's PC & Amiga combat flight-sim that does this, just not much of a strategy "wargame". You could take biplane against Harrier and duke it out.

Yeah, both Evasive Action and Chuck Yeager's Air Combat let you do that if I recall correctly. Neither of them are easy to come by these days though.

Those would be my choices as well.

Empire Earth most notably. Though as you might expect you basically obliterate under-teched units so it's not really that interesting beyond the novelty.

Totally reminds me of some cancelled FPS from awhile back that was suppose to allow some interesting match ups, pretty sure one of their examples were WW2 Wehrmacht vs Modern Navy Seals. I have no idea what it was called but it sounded like a cool idea at the time.

It LOOKED good, too. For what they were promising graphically on last-gen hardware they pulled off some impressive stuff.

As far as the topic is concerned, the Wargame series SOMEWHAT covers what you're looking for, with a catch: it covers only the specific timespan we now define as the Cold War. In other words, you can pit an M1 Abrams against a T-34, but that's about the extent of it.

You can also send early MiGs into combat against F-14s, which is...unfair, to say the least.

@burritocat: Its not the exact same thing but Red Alert series is pretty fun. It's not a strict military game, but it is alternative history in a manner of speaking.

Depending on how wide the target time period is, you can sort of do this with some of the Total War games. Medieval II: Total War takes place over the widest time span as far as I know, between 1080 and 1530 (according to the Wikipedia article on it), so pitting early game units against late game units was kind of fun. Total War: Shogun 2 takes place during a much more limited time frame (maybe 100 years or so), but the difference between early and late game technology is probably greater than in Medieval 2.

Thanks guys!