I'm fond of several of GDW's games.
Assault (
Boots & Saddles, Bundeswehr, Chieftain) covered WW3 action, the players as battalion/regimental/brigade-level commanders. Counters are platoons. I'm in a VASSAL PBEM game of this right now.
I have
First Battle/Last Battle, GDW's skirmish level game of moderns, adapted to T2k. I didn't like the rules much, although they were pretty simple. They did have air-to-mud rules, unlike
Assault.
Third World War had division or brigade counters, and covered the German front.
Arctic Front covered Norway, Sweden & Finland,
Southern Front had the Balkans, and
Persian Gulf covered Iran & Iraq and neighbors. The last one included a card game of pre-war diplomacy, to allow variations in which nations or factions might end up on NATO's or Pact's side. My main criticism of it was that sub-divisional units, especially supporting artillery, were largely ignored. The sequence of play was different for the Pact and NATO players, forcing the Pact player into using echelon-style operations, which I think is a strength. Bonus point: all four games can be linked together into one big one. This could make a neat group game someday.
Victory Games had
NATO, another division-counter game of the Inter-German border, Denmark and Austria. It had some good concepts, but its Pact OB seemed out of step with other things that I've read.
At sea, I have all of Victory Games' "Fleet" series, each one covered a different part of the ocean. I suppose they could be connected, but I don't remember any rules for them. A neat design element: each turn, a player chose in which order he would resolve subsurface, surface and air actions.
VG's
Aegean Strike and
Gulf Strike were also air-naval integrated games, but they never sang for me.
As for miniatures, I played a fair bit of
Dirtside II in the 90s, but not as a WW3 game. It certainly could be adapted to that, and it's a great system. The skirmish-level version,
Stargrunt, has some neat C2 elements as well. I cut my WW3 teeth on GDW's
Tacforce miniatures rules, but I don't remember much beyond the fact that we never had any miniatures, so we tried making them out of graph paper. That, and the hit
enetration charts were very similar to
Assault's.
Harpoon was a good, if technology-focussed, set of naval rules.
I like GDW's
Air Superiority/Air Strike air games for modern stuff. The Air Strike maps are compatible with
Assault, btw.
Not GDW: I have all 5 games of SPI/Decision Games' Central Front series. These were released in Strategy & Tactics, and at least one was independently sold in a box.
Fifth Corps, BAOR and
Fulda Gap were all released by SPI, and had one rules system, while D
anube Front and
North German Plain were released by DG with a completely different rules set. There's also a Berlin '85 game, which I think is the same rules as the SPI games. I have all six, but only learned the DG rules. These were the whole front, battalion counters and 2km hexes. I'd like to merge them somehow and run it as a convention game someday.
Drive on Frankfurt was from a magazine (
Command?) in the late '80s. Battalion counters, it actually included EW rules and their effect on HQs. That was a neat wrinkle. Also neat: units took step losses, but you had to draw the step-strengths randomly, so you didn't quite know the exact strength of each unit. It made for great solitaire play in my dorm room in 1987.
During my last house move in 2000, I realized it had been years since I had played any of my WW3 stuff, so I boxed them all together in a big plastic bin. I opened it up recently, to get at
TWW and
Assault.