Click any tile of yours to place a unit there; select a unit to remove it. The clock starts when you press Start.
Tides of Steel
Operational battles of the Second World War, and the wars that never were
Alternate history
Made in part with AI because developing a game solo is hard
Choose a battle
Choose your side
MoveSelect a unit, give it an order, start the clock
AttackRead the odds and win a battle
EncircleCut the enemy off and finish the pocket
RecruitSpend your funds on a new division
WinThe objectives, the sitrep and the final assault
The red army holds still while you learn. Your saved game, if you have one, is kept.
Choose your side to see how hard this battle is.
Field manual
How to play
Quick start
New here? Pick Tutorial on the title screen: a guided first battle that teaches all of this in about ten minutes.
Pick a battle and a side. The game starts paused: look around, then press ▶ (on the clock) or Space.
Click a unit (or drag a box round several), then right-click a tile to move there or attack it. On a phone, tap the unit, then tap the tile.
Win your three objectives, listed under ★. Most battles are won by surrounding the enemy: troops cut off from supply weaken, starve and surrender.
Check the Sitrep (its button, or Tab): the picture of the battle (both armies, the fighting, losses, funds, who is on the way, the sky) and what needs you now: battles going badly, units cut off, weak spots, armour standing idle.
Spend your funds: click one of your towns to raise a new division there.
Play a friend online: pick the battle and your side, choose Friend where the computer's strength goes, and press Host. Send your friend the code (or the link); they press Join a friend on the title screen and type it in.
Orders
Select: click a unit. Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on a Mac) adds more, a drag draws a box around several, double-click selects its whole army (or everything in its tile), Ctrl+A everything on screen. A counter with a gold number is a stack of units: one click selects them all. On a phone, tap a unit; Add, Box and All pick several.
Armies: you start with none. Select some units and press Group as army (or G, or the + card on the army bar) to make one, and it pops up as a card on the bar along the bottom of the screen, the way Hearts of Iron shows its armies: the portrait is its general's once it has one, the number under it is its ready units of its total, the thin bar its strength. Click a portrait to select the whole army, click it again to bring the map to it, Shift-click to add it to what is selected; Shift+1 to 9 does the same from the keys, a double-click on any of its units selects the whole of it, and the army's number shows on the corner of each counter. Ungroup takes the selected units out again.
Generals: an army you form has no general until you appoint one, and generals are hired. Select the whole army and press Appoint a general (or the appoint mark on its card): every general of your nation is on the sheet with his price, from a tenth of what an infantry division costs you for a man of one star to nearly half for one of five. You pay him once. From then on he is on your staff: he moves between your armies for nothing, picking one who leads another army trades the two, and a new army takes a free man of your staff by itself. His portrait sits on the army's card, his stars on its corner. Skill (one to five stars) adds 2.5% a star to the attack and defence of every unit in the army; traits help where they say (armour, infantry, attacking, defending, rough ground, towns, rivers, the cold, supply, rest, speed, planning). Change general (or a click on his portrait) puts another at its head. The computer's formations come with their commanders and pay nothing. Generals earn stars from the casualties their armies inflict. Who they are: the real commanders of each battle, each with the rank he held on its first day. On your side they are the commanders who served with your side in that battle (in the two battles that never happened, Sea Lion and Los Angeles, men of those armies in 1940 or 1943). On the computer's side each formation names the man who led the force it stands for: an army or a corps its own commander, a corps or division that the game shows under a bigger formation's name the man who led that corps or division. In a battle of your own making each nation fields a fixed staff of its own commanders. Their stars and traits are the game's. On your side each man fills the place in the roster that fits his record best; on the computer's side each formation keeps the stars and traits the game gives it, so a man can show different stars depending on who leads his side. Each portrait was painted for the game after a period photograph (the Credits name the photographs); a general whose portrait has not been painted yet is shown on a plain card.
By sea: Normandy, Los Angeles and Sea Lion are fought from the sea, and all three keep the same rules. The sea is the invader's alone: a unit on the coast can be ordered to a stretch of coast it cannot march to, and it embarks, sails as a little convoy and lands, but only on a shore its side holds, a beachhead or a harbour, and never where the enemy stands. Landing costs organisation and any planning built up, so give the troops a moment before they fight. Every crossing pays a toll to the enemy's ships and aircraft, set by who rules the sea: nothing in Normandy, where the Allied navies own the Channel; two men in a hundred off Los Angeles, rising to one in sixteen as American submarines and then bombers close in; in Sea Lion two in a hundred on S-Day and one in sixteen once the Home Fleet raids the barge lanes from 24 September (the Kriegsmarine's minefields keep it out of the Strait). Into a harbour the invader holds (Cherbourg; San Pedro or Long Beach; Dover) a crossing costs less than half as much, in a gale half as much again. The preview of the order says what it will cost, and the news says when the toll changes.
Reinforcements by sea: the invader's reinforcements cross the same sea and pay the same toll. In Normandy and at Los Angeles they sail in as convoys and land on the beach you hold nearest the one they were meant for, about the hour they are due; in Sea Lion the second wave loads in the French ports and you ship it across yourself. The defender's come by road and rail.
Move or attack: right-click a tile (on a phone, tap it). The thin lines on the map mark the tiles; the one your order would go to lights up gold, with the odds of an attack and how long the march takes. On a phone, keep your finger down to see this before you let go. Clicking a counter, town or battle sends the order to its tile. A unit always stands in the middle of its tile: call off a march and it walks back there.
A route of your own: hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and right-click the tiles one after another, and the selected units go through each in turn (the route is drawn with numbered stops); a plain order forgets it. On a phone, press Path, then tap the tiles in order.
Attack together: select several units and send them at one enemy tile, and they strike as one. The first to arrive wait at the border for the rest (up to a day and a half), so the odds you saw are the odds you get; Attack now in their panel sends them in at once.
Battles: each fight shows a medallion of crossed swords where the attack goes in, with a bar under it: the green share is yours, the red the enemy's, and the figure beside it is your side's standing from 0 to 100 (the ring round the medallion shows the same). When one side's organisation runs out it falls back. Click a medallion for the forces and what helps or hurts them.
Recruit: click one of your towns that is in supply (or a unit standing in it, then Raise troops here), or the Funds line of the Sitrep, and buy a new division.
Funds: every morning at 06:00 each side is paid for the places it holds, by size (the key city most, then cities, towns and villages), with extra for the standout ones (rail junctions, ports, industry, airfields), plus a small base; a side whose strength lay off the map, like the Red Army in 1944, gets more of that base. A place just taken pays half for its first three paydays, and one cut off or under attack pays nothing until it is settled. Hover or tap your funds for the breakdown, or a town for what it is worth.
Find things: the ★ panel has your objectives and the Sitrep; click a row of the Sitrep to jump to it. Its ✕ (or ★ again) puts it away; on a phone, so does a tap on the map. The outliner down the right edge lists your armies, as HOI4's does: click one to select it, again to go to it. Pan with right-drag or WASD, zoom with the wheel; on a phone drag and pinch.
Map modes: the three buttons at the lower right (or F1, F2, F3) show the ground with each side's colour washed over its land, the flat political map, or the supply map, where ground in supply is green and ground cut off is red. The thick red line is the front, drawn as HOI4 draws a border between two countries at war.
Sitrep: the Sitrep button (and the Sitrep tab under ★) lists what needs you, the worst first: battles you are losing, units cut off, weak spots where a few of your troops face many next door (red when the enemy is already marching in), worn-out units, enemy pockets to finish off, units with nothing to do and funds to spend. Click a line, or press Tab, to go there (Sitrep again, or ✕, puts the list away); a weak spot keeps your selection, so a right-click sends it. Empty ground is not listed: a front this size was never a continuous wall, and gaps between formations and sectors were normal. In a battle's panel, Reinforce sends your idle units next door into the fight.
Saving: the game saves itself as you play, and the title screen offers to continue it. An online match is not saved: it is played in one sitting.
Time: the clock at the top right works as HOI4's: ▶ and Space pause and go on, − and + (on the clock or the keys) step through speeds 1 to 5, and the keys 1 to 5 set it, even while paused: the clock keeps the speed and Space runs it; the five pips under the date show it. At speed 2 a day passes in half a minute, so the whole campaign takes about 18 minutes; 3, 4 and 5 hurry it along, 1 slows it for a tense moment.
Sound: battles, orders, the radio, the news ticker and the interface are all made in your browser, with wind and distant guns behind them while the clock runs (louder near a fight). The speaker on the bar or M mutes; Sound & settings (on the title screen and in the menu) has the volume, the background and Reduce motion.
New in 2.0
Keys
Space · 1–5
pause and go on · the speed
Tab · Shift+Tab
the next thing in the Sitrep · the one before
H · F
stop the selected units · make them fall back
G · Shift+1…9
group the selection as an army (or ungroup it) · select that army
C · Ctrl+A
centre the map on the selection · select everything of yours on screen
WASD · Esc · ?
pan · clear the selection, then the menu · this page
M
sound on or off (the volume, the background and Reduce motion are under Sound & settings)
Ground, supply and pockets
Every tile belongs to one side: blue is German, red is Soviet, and the red line between them is the front. Troops are drawn as HOI4's NATO counters: the side's flag in the strip at the left, the unit's symbol beside it (a cross for infantry, an oval for armour), the count of a stack at the right, and under the box its strength (green) over its organisation (orange); the figure below is its men. Move troops into an enemy tile with no enemy troops in it and it is yours the moment they get there; the tile flashes in your colour. If enemy troops stand in it, your troops attack them first. A ring only holds where troops stand in it: leave a tile of it empty and the enemy can walk through.
Supply runs from your side's map edge (west and north-west for Germany, east for the Soviets) through ground your troops hold. Ground of yours that the enemy has cut off from it is a pocket, and the units in it are encircled (a red ! on the counter). Encircled units get no replacements, so every man lost stays lost until a breakout reopens the way; they do not rest, and after a day their organisation drains away. Their attacks weaken, hunger thins the ranks, and after four days men start to surrender. An encircled unit that is beaten with no ground of its own to fall back to is wiped out. Trap the enemy in a pocket and the battle is won; that is how Kiev fell in 1941 and how Army Group Centre died in 1944.
Fighting
When troops attack a tile the enemy holds, a battle starts, and its bubble shows who is winning. Both sides lose men and organisation (the gold bar under each counter); the side whose organisation runs out falls back, and troops beaten with nowhere to go are wiped out. What decides it, roughly in this order: numbers; the ground (forest, hills, marsh and towns help the defender, and attacking across a river is costly); tanks, whose armour the enemy's guns may not pierce; attacking from several sides at once; supply; and how fresh and experienced the troops are. Enemy aircraft only wear troops down a little faster: they never decide a fight on their own. A battle's panel lists what helps and hurts that fight, and the odds show before you attack.
The numbers: Hearts of Iron IV's rules
Combat uses Hearts of Iron IV's numbers. Every unit has soft attack (against infantry), hard attack (against tanks), defence, breakthrough, armor, piercing and organisation, per 1,000 men as in HOI4's divisions; open a unit to see them. Each hour of a battle, the attackers' attacks are set against the defenders' defence, and the defenders' attacks against the attackers' breakthrough. An attack hits 10% of the time while the target still has defence (or breakthrough) left over and 40% once it has none, so a side that out-attacks the other's defence does four times the damage. Hits cost organisation (the gold bar under a counter) and men; when a side's organisation runs out it falls back, and a beaten unit with nowhere to go is wiped out. Tanks whose armor the enemy cannot pierce take up to half the damage and deal 40% more to organisation.
Units: infantry (4 km/h), cavalry (6.4 km/h), motorized infantry (12 km/h, the cross with a line through it) and tanks (9 km/h, the oval). A side can raise only the kinds of unit it actually fought with in that battle (no Soviet motorized divisions at Kiev, no cavalry in the Ardennes), at HOI4's relative costs and training times.
Experience: Green -25%, Trained 0, Regular +25%, Seasoned +50%, Veteran +75% to attack and defence, set for each formation from its history.
Terrain: each tile is plains, forest, hills, marsh or urban. Attackers lose 15% in forest, 25% in hills, 40% in marsh and 30% in towns; troops move at two thirds of their speed through forest and hills and half through marsh. Tanks suffer more in forest and towns, motorized troops a little.
Rivers: attacking across a small river costs 30% of attack and breakthrough, across a large river 60%, and crossing slows the march by a quarter or a half. Only the attacker pays, so a river line is the defender's best friend.
Pinned down: a unit whose tile is under attack holds it. It cannot march off or fall back until the attack is beaten off, or until it is beaten and forced back, and it does not advance out of the tile while the attack lasts. It can still strike the tile next to it from where it stands, and fresh troops can always march in to help.
Combat width: a tile only has room for so many troops in a fight (70 on plains, 60 in forest, 50 in marsh, 80 in towns, less on the smaller maps). The rest wait in reserve and keep the fight going longer. Attacking from more tiles at once adds room: half as much again for each extra direction.
Planning: troops that stand still in supply prepare their next attack, up to +30% attack and breakthrough over ten days; it is spent in about three days of attacking. Prepared offensives start with it built up: Uranus fully, Bagration and the Ardennes halfway.
Defenders: troops standing still dig in, +2% for every 12 hours up to +10%. A tile surrounded on every side costs its defenders 30%. A fort costs the attacker 15% a level, less for each extra direction it is attacked from. Defence belts dug across open ground (Kursk) are forts too, but only for the side that dug them.
Supply, weather and air: troops out of supply attack and defend far worse. Snow costs 20% of attack and 20% of speed, deep snow and mud twice that, and hard frost more (troops used to the cold feel half of it). Air superiority only wears the enemy down: under enemy aircraft, troops lose organisation up to 25% faster in battle (less in forests and towns), and nothing else changes: not attack, defence, losses, speed or funds. The clock shows the weather and who rules the sky, and the news says when either changes. In the Ardennes the Germans ran on scarce fuel: from the fifth tile past their start line they are in low supply. At Stalingrad the Luftwaffe flies supplies into the pocket (a supply rule, separate from who rules the sky): while Tatsinskaya or Morozovsk still holds, the troops inside go hungry at a tenth of the usual pace. In the invasions the invader is fed from the sea: over its beaches, since it rules the sea there for the whole battle, and through a harbour it holds (Cherbourg; San Pedro or Long Beach; Dover).
Winning
Each side has three objectives, in the ★ panel, taken from what the operation was for: in France the Channel coast, the ring round the armies of the north and Dunkirk, against Dunkirk held, the armies kept in supply and the panzers bled; at Kiev the ring, Kiev and the Southwestern Front; in Bagration the pockets, Minsk and Army Group Centre; in the Ardennes the Meuse crossings and Bastogne; at Stalingrad the ring at Kalach against Hitler's order to hold Stalingrad and the relief of the 6th Army; at Kursk the salient cut off and Kursk itself against the belts, the fronts kept whole and the panzers bled; in Normandy the pocket closed, Falaise and the gap shut at Argentan and Chambois, against the line held, the army brought out over the Dives and the spearheads bled; at Los Angeles the city, the roads east at Pomona and San Bernardino and the defenders destroyed, against Los Angeles held on 4 April, the army kept in being and the beachhead bled; in Sea Lion Dover, London and the British Army broken, against Dover held, the invaders killed, captured or drowned and the Army kept in being. Saving an army counts that army's own men: at Kiev the Southwestern Front's armies, at Stalingrad the 6th Army with the IV Corps and the 29th Motorized trapped beside it, not the troops raised or sent in around them; at Kursk every Soviet soldier still in supply on 23 July. A ring counts once it has held for half a day: troops cut off for an hour and freed again do not count. The attacker (Germany in France, at Kiev, at Kursk, in the Ardennes and in Sea Lion, the Soviet Union in Bagration and at Stalingrad, the Allies in Normandy, Japan at Los Angeles) wins at once by meeting all three; otherwise, on the last day of the campaign, the side that has met more of its objectives wins.
Make your own battle
Pick the map first: Kestria, a made-up land (the Korvath Mountains in the north-east, the Sarn Sea in the south, and the broad Varnis between the west and the east), or any of the real battlefields with its ground, rivers, forts and supply as they were and everything else yours to choose. On a real map the two sides are the ground each army held in the real battle (the note under the choices says which is west), the attacker's objective is the real one when the roles are history's and a big town about five tiles in when they are reversed, and the computer makes its own plan of pincers for it. Then pick the nation you lead and the one you fight, your side of the map, whether you attack or defend, how well trained each army is (green to veteran, HOI4's experience levels), the season (summer, autumn rain and mud, winter snow, or deep winter frost), the size of the armies, the length of the battle and who rules the sky. Then set up your forces: click any tile of yours to buy a unit there, or press Auto-deploy (it sets up by sectors, as real armies did: strongpoints on the key ground, gaps between them, reserves behind), and press Start the battle. The attacker gets 60% more to spend and must take the key city (in Kestria Varnholt if the west attacks, Dornholt if the east does); the objectives are sized to the armies you both set up. You can play a custom battle against a friend online too: make your choices, pick Friend and press Host and set up; you each set up your own side, and the battle begins once you have both pressed Start.
Playing a friend online
Any battle can be played head to head: one of you hosts and leads the side picked on the title screen, the other joins and leads the other side. There is no computer in a match, and none of its strengths or handicaps: the battle is the one history set up. To host, choose Friend where the computer's strength goes and press Host; the game shows a six-character code and a link to send. To join, press Join a friend on the title screen and type the code, or open the link. The two browsers talk directly to each other (a free public service only introduces them), so nobody needs an account. The host's game runs the battle and sends yours what happens as it happens; your orders go to it and come back with what came of them, in a blink. Either of you can pause the clock or change its speed, and the bar at the top says so; a menu does not stop the clock in a match. If one of you drops out, the game pauses: the guest can come back with the same code, or the host can let the computer take the empty side and play on alone. Rematch on the end screen plays the battle again on the same sides. A match is not saved.
The computer
The computer fights each operation the way its commanders did. It drives its armour for the operation's objectives and meets its pincers, holds what it must hold, keeps a ring shut, and crushes what it has surrounded: the troops around a pocket strike its weakest tiles together and walk into its empty ones, with a force sized to the pocket rather than the whole army. On the defence it counterattacks, two or three divisions together, wherever the odds are fair: spearheads that have run ahead of their infantry, spent units, ground that cuts its supply and ground it has just lost; it moves reserves to the pressed sectors, puts a unit in the path of a spearhead before it arrives, and never leaves rested troops idle in the rear for long. Surrounded troops gather behind the weakest point of the ring and break out together, or dig in where an order says stand fast. Each operation adds its own standing orders: the Allied march to the Dyle and the Breda dash in 1940 and the German 6th and 18th Armies' march on Brussels, Rotterdam and Antwerp, each army going as a whole and Student's paratroopers holding the Moerdijk and Dordrecht bridges until the panzers come, the British and French falling back into the Dunkirk perimeter from 25 May, with de Gaulle's blow at Montcornet and the British one at Arras, the Bryansk Front's blows at Guderian's flank, the fortified places of 1944 that held to the end, Patton's drive on Bastogne from 22 December and the German turn on the town after Celles, at Stalingrad the Soviet tank corps going in through the breaches their rifle divisions made and racing for the Don bridge at Kalach, the 6th Army standing fast on the Volga with its infantry in its lines while Hoth's relief gathered at Kotelnikovo and came up the railway from 12 December, the Italians holding the middle Don until 16 December, the 2nd Guards Army sent against Hoth and the 5th Shock Army to the Chir, and the Soviets besieging the pocket rather than storming it, and at Kursk the axes of the Citadel plan, Rotmistrov's tanks thrown in at Prokhorovka on 12 July, Kutuzov's blow at the Orel bend the same day and the German armies going back to their start lines from 15 and 17 July. At Kursk its panzers also advance as the panzer corps of 1943 did against the belts: they widen a breach before they deepen it, leave no tile behind them empty with the enemy next to it, and turn back to hold the one tile that links them to the rest of the front when it is in danger. At Kiev the 5th, 37th, 26th and 38th Armies hold Kiev and their stretches of the Dnieper and the Desna under Stalin's orders until 18 September (Kremenchug only until 9 September), and no Soviet pocket round Kiev breaks out before then; the Bryansk and Southern Fronts keep to their own fronts; Kleist's panzers wait for the blow from the Kremenchug bridgehead on 11 September; the 6th Army's corps before Kiev stay there and storm it only from 16 September; and once the ring is shut the panzers hold it, troops march for days to seal its gaps, and those around it break up the starving pocket. In Normandy the American armour drives the long hook through Le Mans, Alençon and Sées, its infantry holding the towns behind it, waits on that shoulder from 13 to 17 August under Bradley's halt order and then strikes for Chambois; VII Corps and the British push to the army boundaries and no further, and the Canadians and Poles grind down the Falaise road from 8 August. The Germans, short of fuel, strike for Mortain from 7 August with what the panzer army can spare from its line; their pockets stand fast under the no-withdrawal order until 16 August, when the armies fall back behind the Orne, and from the 19th they make for the Dives. At Los Angeles the landing army wheels around the city it cannot storm — Hollywood, Pasadena, the valley towns — to strangle it, goes over to the defence from 21 March as the convoys thin out, and from the 25th the American counteroffensive comes back along the foothills with the new divisions off the trains. In Sea Lion the German corps drive for Folkestone and Dover, Newhaven and the Ouse, Hastings and Rye as the final plan ordered, the second wave sails from Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk the moment it is loaded, and the British strike back at once with the New Zealanders from Canterbury, Leese's brigade at Newhaven and McNaughton's VII Corps from Surrey, while Dover's garrison stays put whatever happens. Those orders are its plan, not a script: play it differently and it answers what is on the map. If you go somewhere the real armies never went, it moves its reserves there; if you slip out before a ring closes, its pincers come after you; infantry holds its towns and its armour stays free to counterattack, and a town far from the fighting keeps a small garrison until the enemy comes close. Only four orders hold whatever you do, because they were the blunders that decided their battles: Stalin's order to hold Kiev (to 18 September 1941), Hitler's halt order before Dunkirk (from the evening of 23 May to 26 May 1940, while the panzers hold Abbeville: they stand on the canal line while the sieges of Boulogne and Calais go on, and Dunkirk itself is not stormed before 27 May; and if they have reached the sea, Kleist's panzers leave the line on 29 May), his fortresses in 1944 (until 25 June, and one division stays after) and the 6th Army standing fast until 19 December (its infantry never leaves its lines, and Stalingrad and the airfields at Gumrak and Pitomnik are always garrisoned, though they can still be taken). They only bind the computer: play that side yourself and you are free to do better. Normal is the battle as history set it up: the computer at full strength under the real orders. Easy and Hard keep the same orders, objectives and timetable and change only how well it carries them out. Easy: it thinks less often and moves its reserves late, fights at -15% and earns 30% less, but it attacks, counterattacks and moves like the others. Hard: it reacts faster, accepts closer odds, raids behind your lines, fights at +15% and earns 35% more. In some battles Easy or Hard makes the computer weaker or stronger than that strength usually is, sometimes only when you lead one side, and never at Normal; point at a strength to see what it does there. (Those were set before the stamps were measured again, so a strength may still wear the same stamp as Normal.) Where Normal already wears the first stamp or the last, the strength beyond it breaks the meter: Way too easy or Way too hard. You can still play it, if you really want to.
Once you have picked a battle and a side, the stamp beside the strength says how hard that game is, from Very easy to Impossible, with the reason in a line. The ratings were measured, not guessed, and for version 2.0 they were measured again: the computer played every battle, side and strength 200 times in your place, at the game's own clock step, with exactly the historical forces and no bonus, half the games thinking as it does at Normal and half as at Hard, and with a free hand where the real commanders had none. The stamp follows how often it won, a draw counting half. It used the tools that came with 2.0 only as the computer does (a staff plan, a rest and refit, a supply drop into a pocket of its own, works at the town it must hold, guns for its infantry in the line), so a commander who makes good use of the others will find a battle somewhat easier than its stamp. A battle of your own is rated from its set-up, by sums fitted to games played before 2.0 and not measured again; there the training of the two armies counts most.
What is real and what is game
The map, the towns, the rivers and the front come from the historical maps of each battle. The formations are the real corps and armies of the day, placed on their sectors. Their commanders are the men who led them, with the ranks they held on the first day; a general's stars and traits are game values. Troop numbers, costs and combat values are game values set for play: in France 1940 about 710,000 Germans with seven panzer divisions in the Ardennes attack some 650,000 Allied troops of four nations in the north-east (the full fronts from the sea to Switzerland were far larger on both sides), and close to 160,000 French and British troops form new lines as the front breaks; in Kiev 1941 the Southwestern Front's armies, with the 21st Army that joined it in early September, add up to about 765,000 (Russian figures give the Front 752,000–760,000 men on 1 Sept) and German corps count about 13,000 men per division; in Bagration 1944 Army Group Centre fields about 475,000 against 1,390,000 in the four Soviet fronts, close to the historical three to one; in the Ardennes about 240,000 Germans open the attack on some 90,000 Americans in the line, and close to 280,000 Allied troops arrive in the weeks after, on the days the real divisions did; at Stalingrad about 610,000 Soviet troops open Operation Uranus against some 490,000 Germans, Romanians and Italians, and close to 200,000 more come up for the battles against Winter Storm and for Little Saturn; at Kursk about 690,000 Germans of five armies face 1,180,000 Soviet troops on 5 July, the Western and Bryansk Fronts that struck at Orel included, and some 240,000 more come up during the battle (for the defensive battle alone the historical figures are about 780,000 Germans against 1,910,000 in the Central, Voronezh and Steppe Fronts). What happens after the start is up to you. The battles on the alternate history shelf are a different bargain: in Los Angeles 1943 the ground, the towns and most of the American formations are real, and the premise is not — in our world Midway broke the Japanese carrier fleet, an invasion of the mainland was never within Japan's shipping, and the only "Battle of Los Angeles" was the night of 24–25 February 1942, when the guns of the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade fired over 1,400 shells at a sky that turned out to hold nothing. In Sea Lion 1940 the plan, the beaches, the German divisions and the British defenders are real and the crossing is not: Hitler postponed it on 17 September 1940, and when Sandhurst played it out in 1974, with veterans of both sides as umpires, the invasion was over within a week.
Army
Its general
Skill adds to the attack and defence of every unit in the army; traits help in the fights they name. Generals earn stars from the casualties their armies inflict. A general is hired once, for the price on his card; from then on he is on your staff and moves between your armies for nothing. Picking one who leads another army trades the two.