War Leaders: Clash of Nations

by Dreamcatcher

Product Features

• The game offers 250 different units, 41 different maps, all the nations and 175 regions along the entire world to explore and use
• Real WWII personalities (Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill, and more)
• Variety of game modes including Campaign, Multiplayer, RTS battles, and more
• Unique blend of turn-based global management and Real-Time Strategy.

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002EQU56M
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches ; 4.8 ounces
• Media: DVD-ROM
• Release Date: September 9, 2009
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,974 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

In War Leaders, gamers will assume the role of historical commanders, in an attempt to lead their nations to victory in World War II through economic, diplomatic and military means. Players must lead their nations both on and off the battlefield, negotiating with allies while crushing those who dare oppose them. Immerse yourself in a beautiful 3D strategy game where your efforts can truly change the course of history!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 5 Stars and off the charts!, September 20, 2009

By 

Warspite2 (USA) - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: War Leaders: Clash of Nations (DVD-ROM)

Ok let me start out by saying that I am a veteran with these exact type of games. I have been playing these things for over 30 years now. I have every one of the Hearts of Iron games, I have Making History, Gary Grigsby's World at War, Axis & Allies (all versions that were made on the comp), just to name a few. Now I have this War Leaders and I tell you after watching all the gameplay videos on youtube, I had to get it! How is it? Well, it has bits of every one of those games I listed above all in one. A huge thing to say since those are all great games. Not to mention the graphics and effects, one word... WOW. This is one little jewel and the only thing I wonder is how in the heck it was only $[...] is beyond me. Especially considering all the actual WW2 units in the game that look like their real historic copies. Check out their webside and see what I mean. Oh one thing I absolutely NEED to mention is the map is totally original, a globe! One huge globe of the world. Ever played Super Power 2? That was the only game I ever remember doing that. If you are a fan of these games as I am, then put this game in your collection if its the last thing you do, it is off the charts! Search warspite2 on youtube and see all the footage I posted on some battles.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Deal, February 1, 2011

By 

Cleat C. Roberts (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: War Leaders: Clash of Nations (DVD-ROM)

I'm a bit stuck between 3 and 4 stars. The game quite isn't average although it's not super awesome either. I really like the game as well so I lean towards 4 stars.

Game Report:

Overall:
If you played the most recent Axis and Allies game by Atari this game is alot like that but much much better. The game is a WW2 grand strategy game where individual battles can be decided via an RTS scenario. The meta-map is a 3-D globe and units are represented by sprites in the territories on the map (miniature 3-D models). What is especially nice is that rather than having a generic infantry unit or a generic armor unit, the model is accurate to each country. The Allied countries present are: USSR, United Kingdom, United States, and France. The Axis countries present are: Italy, Germany, and Japan. Each country also has it's famous war leader as a movable model. This leader has some special effects on the game (see taxes) and if he's killed it's game over man. The leaders are: Stalin-USSR, Churchill-UK, Roosevelt-US, De Gaulle-France, Mussolini-Italy, Hitler-Germany, and Tojo-Japan.

Gameplay can be very confusing at first as it takes some time to get used to the controls. However, the game developers did a very nice job making some tutorials that explain it really well. It does take some time to get used to playing the game (pretty much like any other game). Once you do, you'll be navigating it with no problem.

You have two types of games you can play a single player single battle RTS game and then the campaign. In the single battle RTS mode you have the option of a randomly generated quick battle or a battle where you have so many points that you can spend on you units. The computer gets to spend its points too.

The campaign has different levels of difficulty, historical accuracy, and various special things to take into account like resources and fog of war. These are adjustable at the beginning of launching a campaign. The campaign is also turn based. While choosing which war leader to play there is also a really nice short history blurb about them you can read.

The Turn:
During a player's turn you have many things to pay attention to: taxes and resources, diplomacy, unit production, building production, research, attacking and movement. Each turn corresponds to one week of time.

Taxes and resources:
First up are taxes. Each territory has a tax rate that affects something called regime affinity. If a territory's regime affinity goes into the negative from high taxation (or if you just captured it) then you can have an outright revolt on your hands. Furthermore, not all territories are created equal, some have more wealth than others (represented by wealth rate). The wealth rate highly affects the amount of money you can get from the territory. Each territory seems to have an ideal tax rate where the regime affinity pretty much is stable (ie doesn't change). I've found it a good idea to max out regime affinity as soon as possible by charging territories less than the ideal rate to boost affinity. Affinity is also boosted with having soldiers present as well as having the war leader present. The war leader also seems to exert a positive regime affinity radius affect on territories around the one he's in.

Resource management is very important in that if you don't have the resource then you don't get to build the unit that needs it. Furthermore, pay attention to how much oil you're bringing in because if you run out then any unit that needs gas to move around isn't moving. For example, while playing Italy, I had a tough time because I didn't have rubber. This meant I couldn't build (or repair) any of my cannons, planes, ships, trucks, and tired recon vehicles. That was bad. Similarly, as Germany there was a time when I ran out of oil and suddenly found my units were stuck still (which also was bad). The resource is represented by a small icon in each territory and if you have that territory then you have that resource. Each resource also has a description screen that you can open up with a double click.

I should also mention here that you don't want to run out of money. This is a bad situation. I did run into the negative 2 times and both times I slashed expenses and raised revenue to get out of it immediately. But you can lose units if you don't pay for their maintenance. I'm sure other bad stuff happens but I haven't wanted to find out. I like having suplus money. :D

Diplomacy:
Trading seems to be the may reason for needing to conduct diplomacy. You can trade a resource that is extra (more than one on your resource screen) for a resource you need. It seems rather simple and of course the country you trade with always wants the better deal. I've found that gold is a good trading resource. I usually found myself trading for rubber and found Thailand to be the trading partner of choice. You can also trade technology, oil, and territories. You can also declare war, sign a truce, make an alliance, or declare peace. The alliance pact seems a bit weird, you would think that a country you're in an alliance with would go to war with your enemy. But for some reason they don't always do that. Odd. But at least that country isn't at war with you and you do get to see all the units they can see. And you do get to move through their territory.

Unit Production:
Axis and Allies players are pretty familiar with this part of the game. Make lots of units and go conquer. But, do be careful. This took me some time to get used to, each unit has an initial cost, build time, and a maintenance cost. Units also fight different, serve different purposes, and may need special resources (and tech) to make. So if you're playing Italy and have no rubber then you'll be building lots of men and tanks. Furthermore, unless you take Albania, you could be stuck with no iron and only be able to make men. And yes the men spam can work!

Building production:
This is pretty straightforward. In A&A, you have to have a factory to place units on the board. In this game, pretty much the same but you have to have the correct building for that type of unit. So for example, you have to have a barracks built to produce infantry in that territory. Some buildings aren't available right away because you have to research them. Also there's a coastal gun building for aiding you naval units in sea combat and a research building for technology development.

Research:
You can devote some of you money to developing technology. Better technology means better weapons. Some of the tech also helps with your resources such as synthetic rubber (no longer need the rubber resource) and diesel fuel (cuts down on how much oil you use to move around oil based units). Some tech unlocks new weapons systems such as light alloys which allows you to produce some better planes. Be careful with this because it costs quite alot of money (and you do get it unlike A&A where it's random chance). The number of research buildings you have affects how fast you research and how much money it takes. The further you go down the tree the more expensive and time consuming it is to get the tech. There's alot on the tree including jets and atomic bombs. But you may find that you don't need those things (yes the men spam can work!).

Attacking and Movement:
This took me a little while to get used to. I'm so used to things have different movement rates in A&A that I found myself thinking alot yeah I can just blitz these tanks here, bomb over here, move my ships here, and so on. Then I found out that it's a little more complicated. All units except planes move one space per turn. I think fighter planes move 2 spaces and bombers move 4. Furthermore, planes must land in a territory with an airfield or crash and burn. It takes a little getting used to but this means that if you're going to attack a space with a plane then it needs to still have some movement left in order to land so fighter planes only can attack the space adjacent to the one they start in and bombers can 2 away. Another extremely annoying thing is that you can't use your planes in a navy battle unless they're on an aircraft carrier and even then I don't know if they are present then because in the navy battle cutscene the planes are not shown. The other thing about planes that took some getting used to is that if you're playing the U.S. and want to move your bombers over to Britian to use for bombing runs well, it's not as simple as moving your units over. For some weird reason, you have to park your bombers on an aircraft carrier. This is really odd for us A&A players and also is really odd in that I don't recall any bombers on aircraft carriers ever in WW2 except in one daring mission that involved U.S. B-25 Mitchells and bombing Japan. And then the B-25's were crash landed.

Other than the planes being odd, the rest of movement is pretty simple. For convience, you can stack up to 16 units together into an army group. If you've won some major battles you could possibly have a general and it's a very good idea to stack units with him.

A nice feature of this game is that if your units take part in a battle they are not necessarily destoyed. Sometimes units are lost and sometimes they are just damaged. Having medics and engineers in your army groups is a good idea because they will heal the damaged units over time at no cost to you (medics for men, engineers for all machines except planes, I don't know why). Furthermore, if you lose a battle sometimes your units will retreat instead of becoming dead. Also, if there are adjacent friendly territories, you have the option of retreating your units instead of having them get wiped out. I have found that... Read more ›

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Two Games in One, September 18, 2009

By 

Kenneth C. Clark "sablestar" (Cherry Valley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: War Leaders: Clash of Nations (DVD-ROM)

First, let me say that this is quite a value - very inexpensive for a new-issue game. And you get two games in one.

Playing a skirmish game will put you into a tactical game. You pick a map and you have so much money to spend on your army--buy infantry, tanks, howitzers, bombers, whatever--there is quite sufficient variety in what you can buy. Your opponent does the same and you are off to battle.

Or you can play the campaign game, which brings up a globe and a very strategic game. You can pick one of several world powers of the time (pre-WWII). You can set parameters as actual for the time or random. Your country is composed of several territories, each of which can be built up with buildings, airfields, etc. Units can be created in the territories, as well as heroes and generals. There is a tech research tree to develop. There are components such as morale and diplomacy. It's actually a great game, if tough to find a solid economic balance between building and fortifying and having cash (and oil, which is needed to move your troops).

But here is why I bought the game--My buddy (1,000 miles away) and I love to play online, so we are always looking for new games where we can do that. For us, these must have four characteristics; 1) each game must be different, with random maps and elements, 2) you can actually connect into an online game, not always easy, 3) You must be able to select your team. He hates it when I beat him, so we usually play cooperatively, which means we pick the same team and 4) Have an online AI opponent available, preferable with varying difficulty levels. This games matches all of those except #4--if you are playing online, you are only playing with live people (and there were no players online the times I looked). So, if my buddy and I played, it would have to be against each other, which he will never do. So, we still have to go back to the old standards- Sins of a Solar Empire, Civilization and Warfront. Probably, I'll never play this game again, even though I can recommend it as a solo experience.