Customer Reviews

War Leaders: Clash of Nations

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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 having overwelming numbers is a good idea here. But you do have to be careful. I've mentioned the men spam can work but if your infantry are going up against tanks with no anti-tank equipment (bazookas or anti-tank guns), then your men could become spam (the weird meat stuff in a can). [Sorry Soilent Green reference]

I should mention this here: I had a battle last night where I was playing the Italians against the French. I had horrible tanks and lots of men. My men outnumbered the French at least 3 to 1. They had more tanks than me by like 2 to 1. I won. I'm not sure why. I guess they just ran out of bullets and gas. This is why I've been saying that the men spam can work.

There's really no distiquishing between combat movement and non-combat movement. They all take place at the same time.

Lastly, I'd like to mention that it's not always a good idea to move all of your units out of a territory. As mentioned before, you have a tax rate and a regime affinity rate in each space. Having a garrison helps get you more money out of the territory. If you pay attention to the maintenance cost of the garrison units and the amount of money you're getting out of it then you can easily get it where your garrison is helping push up the regime affinity so you can charge them more in taxes. So far, I've been trying to leave a 5 unit garrison of 1 medic and 4 regular infantry-men. I haven't perfected this yet. The other benefit about having a garrison is that you have men standing there for moving up to the front lines and just incase an opponent decides to attack that space, well they won't get it for free and sometimes they might just lose. Usually, I keep my army groups separated from my garrison groups for easier management.

Developer Support:
There is a link in the launch screen that will take you to the developer's website but you'll find the information there is minimal. There's no forum dedicated to the game, no mod tools, and very little about it on the internet. So it appears it has little support. That's really too bad.


My Opinions:
I think this is a really nice game. It's not the best game I've ever played in my whole life. But at this point in my life the game is a great fit. The AI is really weak at the weaker levels and is acceptable at the Expert level. Historical accuracy is adjustable so for what-if fans this a fun feature. Imagine Germany and the USSR in an alliance against the U.S..

The RTS mode is a nice feature and so far this game is the best I've played in integrating a meta-campaign with an RTS battle situation. I've played Axis & Allies, Command and Conquer, and Dawn of War. This game is much better than them, and really their solution is incredibly simple: all units are generated in the campaign mode and then those units you've moved into the territory are the only units you have in the RTS mode. Makes sense to me.

Some of the other reviewers' comments may give you the impression of a weak AI here, however to be technical their complaints were about what's known as a pathing problem and not the AI. Pathing refers to the paths that the units take when they are moved around on the map. The RTS mode is sort of just average. The pathing isn't so great. You can group units together and select different stances but as they move across the screen they end up getting spread out and sometimes with one guy left way behind. This is too bad. Yes, tactics can matter here. I don't have alot of experience playing the RTS mode but I will say that the straight up rush the enemy tactic doesn't always work especially if your units are crossing open ground and the enemy has field guns or entrenched tanks. This means alot of dead men, your men. Can you outsmart the AI, sure you can. But a rush isn't going to do it. Having artillery is awesome, flanking is awesome, having trucks to move around troops is a huge bonus, sticking men into buildings helps them live longer. Running straight to the enemy is stupid and your men will die.

The meta-campaign plays alot like Axis & Allies. I have quite a bit of experience having played the board game for many many years. Lately, I've played the free online game as well as a generic Axis & Allies game called TripleA. I really like the way the units are represented on the game board with miniture 3-D models that are accurate to each country and to their tech level to boot.

The 3-D globe map took a little while for me to get used to and I've come to like it. The game does have some ridiculous load times and I suspect the 3-D globe to be why. Personally, I would rather the game load quickly and have a flat map of the world. This is why I haven't played the RTS much because I can't stand waiting for the maps to load up.

I haven't encountered any game breaking bugs and the only ones I've encountered I'm now listing. The game has crashed on me a couple of times but that's like only 2 times in probably 20 or so hours of play. And then those crashes only happened one right after the next in one particular game. So I just started a new one. No big deal here. I've also run into my generals getting stuck to the map where I cannot select or move them. But, I found a way around that, go to the territory details window and select the army stack from here. Next, remove all the units out of the stack. When you go back to the main map screen, you can select all of the units again including the general. Lastly, this game doesn't like other programs running at the same time and can lock up something like a download interupts it or a Weatherbug alert. So just don't run other programs. You also cannot alt-tab out of the program.

Areas of improvment would include a better AI, the expert level AI is passable but it would be nice for something harder than that an AI more willing to take risks. The load times are horrible and it would be nice to have them greatly reduced. So far I find other things to do while the game loads up like going and making some iced tea. Lastly, the voice acting in the RTS just plain sucks. Every unit from no matter which country sounds like a drunk redneck. That's not so bad for a hoe-down on the farm. But when you're trying to command your Japanese units it really gets on your nerves to the point where it's better to just turn the sound off.

Final thoughts:
I really like this game. You have to approach it more as a computer version of a board game. With that in mind you'll understand it alot better and it can be alot of fun. This isn't one of those super immersive type games with amazing bells and whistles. And this is where I think a game like this shines. Do we really want every game we play to be addictive and immersive when we have household responsiblities like cleaning and taking care of our kids? Do we want to be totally absorbed at the end of a hard day's worth of work? I think a more relaxed game with some nice graphics and a passable AI are just fine. You can play this game and if you have to stop and get up and take care of something that requires your immediate attention (like a 4 year old running around with a philips screw driver).

And finally, if you enjoy WW2 history, this game is really nice with lot's of highly accurate models and information windows on just about everything. Also it has some fun what if scenarios too. The most satisfying game I've played thus far was last night when I played the Italians on medium historical accuracy with an expert AI.

All of this for less than 10 bucks is a great deal.

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.

A fantastic mix of turn based and realtime strategy. The complexity of the strategic mode is somewhere between Axis and Allies and HOI. The end result being a playable, fun game.

I have not had any bug issues whatsoever. The game is smooth as silk and is just a joy to play. One of the things that appeals to me in this game compared to others in its genre (WII grand strategy), is that each country actually has strengths and weaknesses as far as military units go. Instead of "medium tank", for example, being the same thing for all counties; there is a clear difference in this game in equipment. Also, having aircraft roaring overhead while artillery shells are exploding every where during a heated infantry battle is simply a fantastic experience.

If you have any interest in the grand, world conquest, change history type of game... This is definately worth getting.

*Note that multiplayer is completely non-functional. If you are buying this to play with someone else, don't waste your money. As a single player game, it is great.

This is a fantastic game that allows the user to control or automate several operations inlcuding: researching technology, collecting taxes, recruiting and ordering troops, and constructing buildings and fortifications. This is essentially a Civilizations game set in WWII. The graphics are good, the controls are easy, it allows you to play as one of the superpower's leader from WWII. You can adjust many settings to your liking and you can control the troops in individual battles or simulate the battle. If you like strategy games or WWII games, and especially if you like both, this is a must buy.

First, I'm 48, spent most of my life with or on computers but I'm no gamer. I have no console and the only other games on my system are the ones that ship with vista. I got this because I wanted to try out a strategy game and liked how it combined real-time play with strategy.

So far, I've just played the single player, mini-battle scenarios, but it's good fun. I think I'll enjoy using the 'leader' roles and doing the research for the real gameplay.

Hey, if an old man like me, not well steeped in video games, can like this, pretty much anyone can.

No issues installing or playing on my M1530XPS laptop, either.

Sorry guys this was a big disappointment. Beat the game in less than a day at the normal settings. The game was a good concept but lacked depth and feel. I liked how the battles played out but really it is just a poor attempt to bring a Total War aspect to the WW2 field. The research tree unimaginative and narrow in its choices. A complete lack of re playability. Over all if you need a new game in this field try it if you can get it cheap otherwise save your cash for something better.

War Leaders is a poor man's Hearts of Iron III, which may be a good thing for beginner and intermediate wargamers. If you can get it for $20 or less, I found it certainly worth the price. And I do not particularly like RTS games. You can also just play the game from the strategic map and auto-resolve the tactical battles. Lots of units that are historically accurate. Overall, a solid introductory game, like Risk on steriods. Making History Gold would be the next step up, and then HOI3, the holy grail of grand strategic complexity.

I tried to give this game a shot. As a strategy game it is very basic compared to games such as Civilization, or even MOO2. I played only in the campaign mode and didn't get a chance to get into the in depth battles. My major problem is this game crashes, regularly. At first I though I was running too many programs, so I shut everything else down and tried just running the game, still crashes. Started a new campaign, and at about the same amount of turns, like clockwork it crashes. Once the first crash happens that campaign seems to crash every 3 or 4 turns after that. I gave this thing every chance, but its just poorly written software.

Wow. So much hype. None of it realized. The battles are said to be the highlight of the game, but they are a a poor approximation of the original Command and Conquer, with better graphics. Strategy? None. You've got one major army to move around the board. The game plays more like risk at the strategy level and the combat is more like the "magnet ball"games you get when 5 year olds play soccer. Steer clear of this title. It doesn't deserve to have strategy mentioned in the same sentence. If you're looking for something along the lines of RTS try the C&C series or it's kin.