Having played AACW & AACW2 extensively I was pretty much able to jump right into RUS right away--albeit with a copy of W. Bruce Lincoln's
Red Victory: A History Of The Russian Civil War, 1918-1921 in hand to cram some history while playing in order to throw some light on a subject I was pretty sketchy about.
I've played out a few of the smaller scenarios and have worked through the campaign game to July 1920. Overall I think this is destined to be a classic--if their ACW study is the tour de force in gaming that conflict, I doubt that RUS can be surpassed in it's treatment of the Russian Civil War. The historical detail and chrome is grognard catnip, the map is superb, and the scale nicely has individual armies and corps battling over critical rail nodes, whether occupied by a major city or not. There is rarely any sort of WW I type of continuous front. As the Reds you will be fighting off the incursions of a large host of dysfunctional White allies, and on all points of the compass. Like the Confederates, the Whites have far better generals; however they will end up discovering that quantity (of Red troops) has a quality of its own.
I played the Western Whites and it starts out deceptively simple. By the time I was well into 1919 it had become clear that the effective use of replacements, new levies and allocation of resources, is critical. It gets complex because your base pool has to be shared by your main White armies in the south, the Cossacks there, Whites in the Baltic, Whites up north in Murmansk as well as Brits, French and Americans to a lesser extent. As well, you get very few brigade options and end up micromanaging elements to put together divisions for the most part and the work gets intense when you are well into it as you are raising literally hundreds of rgts to form divisions. Perhaps a future patch could streamline this as a thought. I was also surprised to see that even militia rgts cannot be put together as a 2-element unit as they can in AACW2. My only other criticism is the same with AACW: The list of events in a tiny font that is someone awkward to use. I would love to see that with an option to view it (or even print it) as a doc file.
All in all a superb study of the Russian Civil War and I imagine future patches will make it even better.