Axis & Allies is a real-time strategy World War II video game developed by TimeGate Studios and published by Atari for Microsoft Windows. The game was released on November 2, 2004. It is based on the board game series Axis & Allies from Milton Bradley and also on TimeGate's Kohan series. Set in the years after Japan and the United States entered into the war, the game allows the player to act as a World War II commander to build military forces to fight against other generals, using military units and technologies from the war. The player is able to alter the history of World War II.
The game is TimeGate's best-selling game release, upon the company's closure in 2013. The game was met with positive reception, although GameSpy and GameSpot stated the game fell short in terms of AI mechanics and in an overemphasis on base management. Axis & Allies: Collector's Edition was released as a new name for the game on August 28, 2006 by Encore Software.
Gameplay In Axis & Allies, the player assumes the role of a military general of one of the five superpowers of World War II: the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Soviet Union, and Japan. Each nation has access to its own unique military units, such as Katyusha rockets for the Soviets, flamethrower tanks for the British, and King Tiger tanks for the Germans. Four generals exist for each nation, with each general having access to unique Special Operation abilities, such as summoning fake tanks, deploying a secret agent, or giving an area buff to friendly units. Particularly noteworthy are the most expensive Special Operations, which include large damaging area of effect abilities such as carpet bombing, kamikazes, V-weapons, and nuclear bombs.
The player battles against other generals in one of three game modes: World War II, custom game, and campaign mode. Gameplay is played mainly in the real-time strategy genre, though turn-based strategy is used in WWII mode. The primary objective of gameplay is to destroy all opposing enemy military forces, though some campaigns and maps require other objectives to be completed, such as capturing certain cities, escorting a caravan, or defending a specific area. A "City Control" percentage option may be enabled, in which the winner of the battle goes to the first side/team to capture a set percentage of cities on the map.
Like in other RTS games, the player must expend resources to construct buildings and recruit units to fight the enemy, while maintaining an economy, progressing through a build tree, and researching upgrades. In standard gameplay, the player deploys building trucks from a Corps HQ, the main military headquarters building. These building trucks can "unpack" into all other essential buildings, which aid in producing combat units, technologies, and the three major resources of the game: money, ammo, and oil. Money is obtained as a constant flow of revenue from specific buildings and is used to purchase combat units and technologies, whereas ammo and oil are static resources provided by buildings, and are used for combat unit upkeep. Combat units of their corresponding types are deployed from four classes of buildings: Infantry, Airborne, Mechanized, and Armor Division HQs.
Axis & Allies also includes special gameplay features, such as regimental control, chained supply, and morale.
"Regiments" are the base combat groups that the player can control. A regiment is composed of a certain squad of units, where a unit can be, for example, an Anti-Tank Infantry, a Halftrack, or a Light Tank. The player controls the entire regiment as a whole, but cannot select and control its individual units. Every unit within a regiment is different, for example, a tank destroyer will paralyze units while mortar units will splash bombard. A regiment can be toggled into three states of unit formation, which trade the regiment's movement speed for attack efficiency, meaning hit-and-run attacks are less damaging than slow advances. There is also a feature called "entrenchment" in which a regiment gains a large defensive bonus if idle for a certain period of time. Furthermore, regiments gain experience from battles and have four tiers of veterancy, which improve the attack and defense of the regiment's units with each level.
The game includes three types of units: ground units, air units, and naval units. All regiments are made up of ground units; they are blocked by mountains and slowed by forests, sand, and cities, though infantry units gain a defensive bonus while in forests or cities. Secondly, air units can fly over mountains, but they move and attack automatically; they can be deployed but not controlled by the player. Thirdly, naval units travel in water, but can neither be healed nor recruited, and thus they only appear in campaigns.
In addition, the game employs a feature called a zone of supply for replenishing regiments, defined by a surrounding green border. Regiments heal and replace missing troops within the zone of supply through "chaining" to Division HQs of their type. The player's main Corps HQ, as well as cities, are the primary sources for emanating the zone of supply. Other buildings can extend the zone of supply so that regiments far from a base of operations can replenish troops. In addition, most buildings are able to be packed and relocated to redraw supply lines, if needed.
Battles are also fought around a special feature called morale, which represents a regiment's tendency to rout from battle. Each regiment features a morale bar, which decreases as the regiment is engaged in battle. If morale drops below a threshold, the regiment's banner will flash white and the regiment makes an uncontrolled retreat away from the enemy. If the morale bar reaches zero, the regiment becomes frozen in place until it either gains its morale back or is killed. This makes prolonging battles costly, but the player can avoid regiments from routing by manually retreating them before their morale drops too low. Enemy artillery fire and flame attacks diminish the morale bar more rapidly. Some Special Operation abilities are used to affect the morale of friendly and enemy units.
WWII mode
WWII mode is a game mode which allows the player to wage war across the globe in a traditional turn-based fashion. It resembles a turn-based computer variant of the Axis & Allies board games, but with the option to fight battles in RTS mode. The player fights WWII in how they see fit, effectively "changing the course of history."
At the start, the player chooses a nation and a general to play as, then the game displays a game board showing a panoramic map of the world with territory tiles. A number of territories, such as Australia or Germany, have defensive pieces already in place. The player and computer players take turns purchasing infantry, mechanized, armor, and air support pieces from their home country and move them across the map to engage enemy armies and territories. Each nation has reduced recruitment cost for a specific military piece; for example, Germany recruits cheaper armor pieces, Russia has cheaper infantry pieces, and Japan has cheaper air support pieces. Moreover, each nation can purchase technologies to increase the chance that its battles will be successful; these are the same researches encountered in RTS mode. Either the Allies or Axis wins when two capitals of the opposing side are conquered.
Battles that occur are chosen by the player to be fought in either of two ways: as a "quick resolve" battle or as an "RTS battle". "Quick resolves" are computerized simulations of the battles and the outcome is immediate. Probability of victory is based on army sizes and technologies researched by the attacking and defending armies. In contrast, "RTS battles" are fought using the normal real-time strategy mode. These battles procedurally generate their maps from the board game state. The quantity of military pieces attacking and defending a territory determines each player's starting money and starting forces in the RTS battle. Furthermore, the particular types of pieces contesting a territory restricts the types of units (i.e. infantry, mechanized, armor, air) that each player is able to deploy. A special feature is that if pieces converge to attack from multiple territories, forces appear in the corresponding directions in the battle. In addition, these battles take place in the appropriate biomes of the contested territories (e.g. island, coastal region, desert, forestland).
There are only two major resources in WWII mode: money and technologies. Money is used to purchase military pieces and technologies. It is obtained every turn as the sum of the income values of controlled territories. Technologies, on the other hand, are purchased to increase the probability of victory in "quick resolve" battles. Purchasing technologies also pre-researches them in RTS battles.
The primary rules of the board game are as follows. If an attacking army defeats a defending army, the weakest piece of the defeated army is destroyed and the rest of the army retreats to a nearby allied territory. If the defending army is unable to retreat to nearby allied territory (i.e. completely surrounded), then the entire army is destroyed. However, if the defender is the victor, then the weakest piece of the attacker's army is destroyed and the rest of the attacking army retreats back to their original territory. If a piece moves into a neutral territory or an abandoned enemy territory, it will automatically capture that territory at the start of the next turn.
In contrast to the Axis & Allies board games, each player can only attack one territory per turn. Also, naval and air units are not built on the board but appear only during an RTS battle resolution. Moreover, each movable game piece is only given a movement speed of one tile.
Custom battle Custom battle is a game mode in which real-time strategy battles are played on either a randomly generated map or on a pre-built map. Both randomly-generated and pre-built maps allow up to 8 players, and are played with the computer or online with real players. For randomly-generated maps, the player is allowed to choose the map's biome (e.g. desert, jungle, grassland), what land features are present on the map (e.g. mountains, forests, sand), how much money and experience points each player starts out with, and many other options. Axis & Allies''' built-in random map generator then procedurally generates the map according to the terrain options selected. When playing on a randomly generated map, each player always starts in random locations on the map with the iconic setup of a primary Corps HQ building, some bunker defenses, and a supply depot truck. Gameplay proceeds as usual until a victor is decided by the victory condition of either destroying all enemies or capturing a set percentage of cities, if that option is set.
The Axis & Allies Map Editor allows players to make their own custom battle maps to play in both singleplayer and multiplayer mode. Players are able to customize many map options, including player starting units, scenery objects, terrain layout, audio sources, and game triggers. Game triggers allow for custom creation of cutscenes, unit & VFX spawns, storylines, and military objectives.