Allied General

It's 1944 and Allies are prepared to launch their attack against Germany. The only question is where should the allies land troops? You have been choosen to be the general of the Allied forces. Command the Allied forces across all of Europe in a series of campaigns against the Axis powers. Watch your troops improve with each victory as you push the Germans all the way back to Berlin.

The term "Armchair General" was coined for this kind of game. Being a serious wargame effort, rather than an action title, Allied General is played in turns. The turn scheme means that each action must be carefully considered - Allied forces make the moves they can, attack viable targets, collect replacement forces, or perform other special functions. The process is then repeated with the Axis forces. Certain objectives, such as the capture of a city, or the destruction of a certain portion of the enemy, must sometimes be completed within a fixed number of turns - changing what might otherwise be tactically simple circumstances into deliberate, squinty-eyed races against time, deployment, terrain or - more likely - all of them combined.

Once each unit's attacks have been designated, the player is presented with generalized, close-up animations showing the results of combat in terms of actual losses - groups of infantry suddenly reduced by half, surface cruisers taking hits or dishing them out, and so on. Allied General can be played as a human-vs.-computer game (be prepared not to leave the house for days), or as a two-player contest. But the proposed two players should be reasonably patient and very determined - and not mind the inevitable, nasty bouts of waiting while the enemy player carefully plans and re-plans his moves.