Orders. Click a unit, then click where it should go. Choose Fire, Capture, Clear obstacles, Unload or Wait. Right-click or Esc steps back. Arrow keys and Enter work too; E ends the turn, M toggles the minimap, V (or the Hide UI button) hides the interface to show the whole map, H asks your adviser for a suggested move. Click an enemy (or press R) to see what it can reach; press T, or the Danger button, to shade every tile any visible enemy could attack next turn. N (or Next) picks up the next unit you have not used; U (or Mine) rings your units in gold and the enemy's in red. Hover an enemy with a unit selected to see the damage forecast: what you will do, what you will take back, and why. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. On a touch screen, pinch to zoom; tap an enemy once to see the odds and again to attack, and tap open ground once to see what it is.
Terrain. Stars are cover. Bocage hedgerows (3★) are miserable for tanks and wonderful for infantry. Bunkers give 4★, trenches 3★. Beaches, roads and marsh give none. Boats cannot pass beach obstacles; tanks crush wire but not hedgehogs. A unit that stops in a minefield loses 2–3 HP.
Engineers. Combat engineers blow lanes through obstacles, wire and minefields next to them, and their flamethrowers and charges are deadly against bunkers.
Fixed defences. MG 42 nests and 88 mm casemates never move. Hit them with artillery, naval gunfire, engineers and aircraft rather than walking into them.
Aircraft and ships. Aircraft carry fuel for about a week aloft: end a turn on or beside one of your airfields, towns, ports or depots (forward landing grounds), or alongside your carrier, to refuel, or the aircraft is lost. A destroyer's, battleship's or carrier's main guns need two tiles' range, but their secondary guns, depth charges and flak take on a ship right alongside at half weight (depth charges on a U-boat hit full), and a ship alongside fires back. Destroyers can run in on a U-boat and depth-charge it in the same turn.
Damage. Units fight at strength: a unit with 5 HP hits half as hard. Direct-fire units take return fire; artillery, mortars and rockets never do but cannot move and fire in one turn.
Veterans. Units earn experience for damage, kills and captures: Veteran, Elite, then Legendary, each stronger. Ranked survivors of a victory join the core force and deploy in later missions.
Towns and depots. Infantry capture (20 points; each HP is one point a turn). Each property pays 1,000 a turn. Units resting on your property repair 2 HP.
Seeing what you can hit. When you select a unit, blue shows where it can move and red shows everything it could fire on this turn. Enemies inside the red are outlined with the damage they would take, or KILL. Press R (or Y on a controller) over any unit to see its danger zone.
Time. Each turn is a slice of the real battle: an hour on Omaha, four hours at Pegasus Bridge, a day at Bastogne. Nights darken the map: aircraft are grounded and you see only what your units can see. Some missions have fog of war all the time.
Digging in, weather and bridges. Infantry and guns that hold position for a turn dig in for an extra star of cover. Snow slows vehicles off the roads; rain makes mud for wheels. Engineers can blow a bridge or build a Bailey bridge over a river for 3,000.
Controllers. D-pad or left stick moves, A selects, B cancels, X opens the general's menu, Y shows a unit's range (on empty ground, the whole danger zone), LB/RB jump between units still to move, triggers zoom, the right stick pans, Start ends the turn. Tab cycles units on the keyboard.
The war at sea. Submerged U-boats are invisible until an escort's asdic finds them within two squares, an aircraft passes overhead or any ship comes alongside. A U-boat that fires gives itself away until its next turn. Escorts (corvettes, sloops and destroyer escorts) and torpedo bombers are the U-boat killers. Battleships fire 2–7 squares; carriers launch air strikes up to 8 squares away, but not at night, unless the crews were trained for it, like the Swordfish at Taranto. Convoys win by getting enough merchant ships to the far edge.
Jungle, paddies and reefs. Jungle hides infantry and stops wheels; rice paddies give no cover. Landing craft ground on coral reefs: infantry must wade, but amtracs crawl over.
Generals' temperaments. The computer plays each general in character: Rommel, Patton and Yamashita attack hard; Model, Heinrici and Kuribayashi stay in cover and make you come to them; opportunists like Manstein and Chuikov grab towns and pick off stragglers.
Last Stand. Hold your HQ against endless waves, each bigger than the last, with veterans, then armour, then aircraft. Supplies arrive with every wave; build reinforcements at your depots. Your best on every map is kept.
Dead of Night. A zombie survival mode. The dead come in waves from the far edge, then the flanks, then from everywhere: shambling Walkers, Runners, bile-spitting Spitters, Brutes that tear open tanks, and an Abomination every fifth wave. Any of your infantry they kill gets up again on their side, so keep them at arm's length with machine guns, artillery and armour.
Map Builder. Paint terrain, towns and units with the game's own tiles. Brush, rectangle, fill and eyedropper; right-click picks up terrain; turn on mirroring for fair two-player maps. Save maps in your browser, share them as a code, play them, watch two computer generals fight on them, or use them for a Last Stand.
Multiplayer. Hotseat on one machine, turn codes by any messenger, or online on claude.ai with a five-letter game code.
Generals. Every general has a permanent effect and two powers: bombardments, airborne drops, reinforcements, or armour that acts twice. Fighting fills the star meter; click a portrait to read them.