Nations At War Digital Core Game

Abandoned by the developers in a very poor state despite promises that they were working fixing it.

Your opponent always deploys first, gets first turn, gets the initiative four turns out of five, causes a casualty four shots out of five, and receives a morale recovery four times out of five. ♥♥♥♥ this one-sided nonsensical bollocks. It's no wonder that it's abandoned by the developers and players alike. It also comes as no surprise that the follow-on isn't popular because nobody is prepared to trust anything the studio has turned out.

Originally written as a reply to a forum post but I think it sums up the state of the game: Not sure if I would call this product abandonware quite yet. It could be more accurate to call it backburner-ware. The Publisher “Lock 'n Load Publishing” had to rescue the project from the original developer and since then things have been quite slow. LnL Publishing has a few of their own games in active development and is continually pumping out new DLC for their main products (LnL Digital Core Game now has a library of about 30 DLC in 4 years) as well they have launched the Grand-Strat-with-event-cards style civil war era “Victory & Glory”. So, what do you get? Well for the regular price equivalent of USD$5 you get a fully functional game that although labelled as EA (Early Access) actually works quite well in single or multi-player without stoppages to games or corrupted game saves. That in itself is quite a feat in today’s world of shovel-ware that fill the STEAM EA lists. The core game does only come with 4 scenarios including tutorial but for $5 …? That’s a pretty good price point to get a very competent game engine especially in a nice looking board game style, turn based…

Good port of the board game. For experienced wargamers, easy to pick up. For beginners, tutorial is excellent.

I particularly like the HQ command system. You have to watch how far your units wander from the HQ. And the random initiative can make a game very tense.

Nations at War is a WW2 tactical level platoon based war game. It’s quite similar, to AH’s popular 1970s war game trilogy “Panzer Blitz”, “Panzer Leader” & “Arab Israeli Wars” with the added layer of command and control & randomized player turns. The game looks great, having quite nice graphics. Play is relatively easy to learn and the command and control aspect adds some depth. In overall terms, its a decent game but one with a number of drawbacks. Drawbacks: AI: As mentioned in other reviews, the AI is subpar: For example: defending enemy units in improved positions will, on occasion, move out of their hex to charge your troops. Vehicle’s will sometimes move around in a circle or back and forth for no reason. In some cases, enemy units will just never move. However, it should be said that the AI isn’t terrible, for the most part it functions well enough to be mildly challenging. Unit Accuracy: Unit’s combat characteristics are modeled poorly for AFV: One example: the Tiger’s 88mm KwK L/56 & Sherman's 75mm L/38, along with the Pz-IV, StuG-III, Cromwell, & 76mm Sherman, all have the same AP firepower value of three. This, no doubt, is due to the game makers decision to compress…