Wars and Battles: Normandy

I decided to give this game a thumbs down, not because it is bad, but because it is too expensive for what you get.
What you get is a map representing Normandy and the surrounding areas. It is big enough to play out the landings, the subsequent expansion of the beachheads, the capture of Cherbourg, the bocage battles, the breakout, the liberation of Caen, and the Falaise pocket. You can fight a campaign on the whole map or in small battles on parts of that same map. That is it.
The entire system is too basic. The units have no hierarchy or relation; you can mix them up regardless of what division, corps, or army they belong to. Lines of communication and logistics do not exist. Bocage has little impact. You can't dig in or cut off supplies. The widespread interdiction campaign and strategic bombardment lacks representation. Allied airpower is a shot in the dark. Artillery is supreme(and perhaps rightly so). You can't regulate the behavior of your troops(like a retreat or standing fast when there are overwhelming odds). You can bypass troops and drive in deep inland as no supply lines are needed.
It is a basic game that might be amusing for a short while, but only for a few dollars or euros, nothing more.

It is a compex/realistic game. Very surprise for its value

Brought this game some time ago, but only played the smaller scenarios. Frankly, they are a bit of a slugfest. OK to learn the game system, which is hardly complex for a Wargame, but you'd not play them more than a couple of times.

Over Xmas I had time to delve deeper into a few games I own, but had hardly played, of which this was one. I jumped into the full campaign, as the Allies, and I am so glad I did. For a fairly simple game system, this is a very enjoyable game. The action point system means you will never have enough resources to attack along the whole front, and this is where the game shines for me. Should I favour a US breakout attempt over a British one, or vice versa? Perhaps try to maintain a steady pressure along the whole line? Which ever you choose, try to cut off enemy units from supply for the best results. Not played from the Axis side yet, but anticipate a dilemma over where to spend my even more limited resources.

This is a fairly simple, but very enjoyable, game. Well worth the asking price,but play the campaign as soon as you are comfortable with the game system. Brought the October War game on sale as a result, and hope more titles in the series make their way to the PC.

Got this on 50% sale. Well worth the money although the game is not supported anymore. The game has just the right balance of easy to get into without being too simplistic. You have reinforcements, artillery, bombers, naval support and simple but effective supply rules when playing the grande campaign. Terrain modifiers and replenishment and also a limited amout of action points so you have to prioritize which troops to move and fight with.

Every turn summarises the victory points achieved by capturing or holding objectives and destroying enemy units. All units have their right historical units with some history as well as description for the unit types themselves. Since the game is not supported anymore it is not possible to save different save games slots. Only when you exit to the menu you are allowed an automatic save. I had some crashes when starting the game or returning to the main menu but nothing that corrupted my grand campaign autosave.

While the game lacks certain features like bonus for flank attacks and - in my meaning - limited drawbacks of being out of supply the campaign offers you several challenges against the A.I which plays ok. It is often falling into my traps and my tactic is to use pincer moves to surround and isolate enemies in order to destroy them which is hard as a german player when the allies have huge quantities of naval, air and land units. The A.I might perhaps be a little to passive but it is enough to give some challenge.

The game is more advanced than it looks so don´t be fooled by the easy graphics. I also like the historical information for each date. It teaches something every time. You even have commanders in the campaign battles but I never really understood their use.

When playing the large campaign the A.I is unable to defend its supply lines and easily let itself be surrounded without any attempts to escape or relieve the pockets. Using this tactic you will eventually win. Also there are some bugs in the game that reinforcements arrive at places you already occupy and in one case even forced me out of the town I occupied. Not good. The reinforcements should either not arrived at all or arrived at the map border if the original target was already overrun by the enemy.

Wars and Battles is a game system developed by French indie game studio Battle Factory, originally released in November 2014 for iOS and Android with the first campaign, 1944 Normandy. The plan was to follow up with more campaigns in the same system, titles like 1973 October War, 1943 Kharkov, 1944 Market Garden, 1950 Korean War, 1863 Gettysburg, etc., to be released in 2015-16. But somewhere along the way Battle Factory went under, leaving a website (warsandbattles.com) whose forums have now been over-run by spammers. Recently, British game publisher HexWar took over the game, re-releasing the first campaign as Wars and Battles: Normandy for Windows and macOS. But you won't find it on their website (www.hexwar.com). So this game was developed by a now-defunct French company, and is now distributed by a small British company, without either company stepping forward to advertise or host the new release on their website. Very strange.

The game itself has both single and multiplayer options. But the multiplayer option requires submitting your e-mail address to the Battle Factory server. This server still appears to be functioning, but since I don't currently have a throw-away e-mail address to use for registering, and I don't want my permanent addresses to get spammed relentlessly, I haven't registered. Therefore my review only covers the single player game.

Battle Factory put a lot of effort into this game before they went under. The manual is comprehensive and, unlike HexWar's other releases, actually provides the game scale: 3 miles per hex, battalion/regiment/brigade sized units, and 48 hours per turn, often divided into two rounds or "impulses" per turn, from June 6 - August 25, 1944. The overall campaign map is 43 x 29 hexes, but unless you play the full campaign, you'll be playing individual scenarios on smaller subsections of the map. The graphics are nicely done, including the historical badges identifying a unit's parent division, which looks cool and makes organizing your units easier as you can recognize their parent units by their badges, rather than going by their numbers (US 1st Infantry Division, German 21st Panzer Division, etc.). Units include US, British, Canadian, Free French, Polish, SS and Wehrmacht/Luftwaffe, ground units plus (for the Allies) air and naval units. Also included are leader HQ units (Montgomery, Patton, Rommel, etc.) which can modify combat dice rolls when stacked with an attacking/defending unit. Scenarios take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to complete.

Each 48-hour turn has one or two rounds or "impulses," in which both sides are issued with a certain number of activation points. One player goes first, using activation points to activate units for movement and/or combat, then when the first player has finished the other player goes. Combat is either bombardment (ranged combat by air, land, sea) or assault (attacking an adjacent hex, possibly with ranged supporting fire). Units activated in the first impulse can't be activated in the second impulse (if there is a second impulse). Assault is odds-based using a die-roll to randomize outcomes; bombardment is points-based using a die-roll. For assaults, leaders and fire support can affect the die roll. Each ground and sea unit has a certain number of life points, with the unit's attributes being degraded as it loses life points, until the unit is eliminated when it has no more life points. Units can heal by being taken out of the front lines (for the Allies) or by manually allocating life points (for the Germans). Allied air units can be knocked out of action for two turns by anti-aircraft fire, and sea units occasionally must skip turns to refit. Advantage derives from unit integrity (stacking three or more units from the same parent unit in the same hex), combined arms (mechanized + infantry stacked together), terrain, supply, leaders and weather. Overall, movement and combat is simple (from the player's perspective) but involves a high degree of complexity (under the hood from the computer) to calculate odds and determine outcomes. Add supply, weather and terrain considerations into the mix, and you've got a sophisticated game system.

Single-player scenarios can be played as either Allies or Germany, including basic, advanced, and campaign scenarios, historical plus counterfactual "what if" scenarios, including a point system to rank you so that if you sign up for a multiplayer account you can get a sense for how good your opponent is.

The graphics are pretty good: you have 2D and 3D viewing options, and terrain is usually easily identifiable. The game has fog-of-war built in, with limitations on your ability to see enemy units and their attributes.

Game AI is decent but not great. You must take care to make sure the enemy doesn't race through gaps in your front line, cutting your units off from their supply. But the computer does not make full use of its advantages, like pressing the attack when it's got you surrounded or bottled up in a salient, or going for broke to bust you out of a scenario objective that you hold. Experienced players will be able to win (at least with a marginal victory) every scenario, whether playing as Allies or Germans, historical or counterfactual. Based on this, I imagine that the multiplayer scenarios are pretty well matched, though of course the Allies have the advantage in most cases.

Overall, Wars and Battles: Normandy is a sound game system. My only complaints are three: (1) that the computer AI should have difficulty options, so that you can play against a tough computer opponent if you want -- currently there are no options for how tough the computer AI is; (2) that it would help to know what exactly is going on with the game, as opposed to HexWar's silence and Battle Factory's obviously defunct and outdated website with its forums over-run by spammers; and (3) that it would be good to know whether the multiplayer server is functioning properly and not over-run with spammers like the website's forums, so that players know they can sign up for an account without being spammed to death. I'm betting that there are players out there to play against, but at least for now I'm not risking one of my permanent e-mail addresses to find out. I'm hoping HexWar steps up and fully takes over this game, including the other campaigns that Battle Factory planned to release (October War, etc.). But for now it looks like Wars and Battles: Normandy is a one-off release by HexWar, without plans to support the whole series. Too bad, because the game system is sound, and with a little work the computer AI could provide a full spectrum of opponents, from easy to difficult to almost-impossible-to-defeat. Still, for the price, it's a nice little game. Recommended, especially for fans of turn-based wargames.

One of my favorite games on ipad now on pc!

You can zoom, right mouse button then use scroll wheel. Rotate screen with left mouse button. Amazing looking 3d map, good AI and plays much faster on my pc then my ipad. Looks better on a large screen as well.

Simple clean rules, lets you see the odds with all the combat factors applied before you attack so you get a sense of the importance of the units different abilities, really important if you try the german side. After the enemy turn there is an after battle phase where if you click on the hex the battle took place you can see what units fought what modifiers everyone had and the dice role that let to the battle result, ie why your unit disappeared retreated etc.

There is a manual that comes with this game but most stuff can be figured out by playing. I always play the full campaign which i like the best.

Highly recommend this game!

I really like this game. It is obviously made by a real wargamer. Beneath the hood, there are a lot of stats percolating to give you an accurate accounting of a battle just finished. The only reason I can see that someone would not like this game is the graphics. They are not "wargamy"--boot it up and Grognards will know what I mean. Give it a chance without "filters" and I think you'll like it.

I bought this game because I'm really interested in World War II. Do I recommend Wars and Battles: Normandy to buy? Yes and no.

The game is divided into three parts. You have the Campaign Scenarios part, the Advanced Scenarios part, and the Full Battle Scenarios. You decide from the main menu in the game which scenarios you want to play and proceed from there. You can play has either the Allies or the Axis military forces in the game.

Yes I do like how the game is very detailed on the Normandy battles during World War II and you have battle lines that divide opposing armies on the map and the AI is quite good at playing against you in the game.

But I can't recommend the game based on three things that bother me about the game. The first thing that bothers me is there is no zoom feature in the game. You can not zoom in and out on your units. The units are suppose to be very detailed but I can't really tell because I can not zoom in and out to take a close look at my units. You can at least rotate around on the map which is nice to see battles from different angles but I want to be able to see my units up close too. When you go into Settings for the game, all you can setup for the game is the volume for the Music or Effects. There are no other settings for the game. If you want to find out how to play the game you have to go to the game developer website and download and save the game manual to your computer to read. Why can't there be a game manual directly with the game?

The second thing that bother me is when you play the Campaign Scenarios and the Advanced Scenarios you are playing on a small map within a large map of Normandy. I felt like I was playing within a small box on my computer screen when I played these scenarios because I am not using the whole computer screen to play on. At least when I played the Full Batlle Scenarios I'm playing on the whole computer screen and not in a smaill box on the screen. Which by the way doesn't make any sense since you would think playing the Campaign Scenarios you would playing on the whole computer screen and not in a little box on the screen.

The third thing that bother me was after every turn I played the game has me go into a Post-Combat Observation of the battlefield map where I really can't do anything but observe and then I go out of the battlefield map and into my Battlefield Journal to see what my objectives are for the scenario. I already look at my Battlefield Journal at the beginning of the scenario to see what my objectives are so I really don't need to go back into the Battlefield Journal again and again after each turn in the scenario. The game forces you to do just that and I wish there was a way to turn off the Post-Combat Observations or going into the Battlefield Journal after each turn you play in the game. I just want to go right from my turn of moving and fighting the enemy right to the enemy turn of moving and fighting me without all of the other stuff in between. There should be an option to turn the Battlefield Journal and Post-Combat Observation on and off during your turns in the game.

I hope the game developer addresses these problems with future patches. Also I thought I would warn you that you need to be very careful where you place your units on the maps because terrain and weather can effect your units fighting ablilties. I had extremely strong units fight weak enemy units and get completely wipe out becasue of where I placed my units on the map.

I like the game but I feel like the game has the potential to be alot better than it is now if the game developer addresses the problems I observed with this game.


Update:

andrewgy pointed out in his review of the game that Wars and Battles Normandy has a zoom feature now. That makes a huge difference to me on how you play and look at the game. The zoom feature makes the game a lot more fun to play. The game developer must of put that feature in recently because i never noticed that feature before. It make the maps much more bigger on your computer screen to play on.and the units on the screen are more highly detailed to look at which is one of the major complaints I had about the game when Wars and Battles Nomandy first came out on Steam. Now the maps don't look like little tiny boxes on my computer screen anymore with the zoom feature added in. The game is still not perfect and there still more I think needs to be fixed in the game but I'm changing my review of the game to a thumbs up because that was a game changer for me. Thank you andrewgy for pointing out the zoom feature in the game.

Another Update:

I downloaded and I tried to play this game again and this game now will not start up or play. Instead I end up getting a screen at the beginning of the game that says I need to put in a user name and show what country I'm playing from to access an account to be able to play this game. I never needed an account before and I never add an account to play this game before. I don't even know how to setup an account. And that is playing in the windowed version of the game. You can't even play this game in full screen. There is no help at all from the developer of this game. I think the developer might of went out of business. My recommendation is do not buy this game because this game is definitely broken and should not be sold on Steam.

Cheers