Unveiled during the last Home of Wargamers, Headquarters: World War II is promising to be a turn-based and fast-paced strategy game set during the Second World War at the tactical level. There’s a obvious emphasis in armored warfare, and this is what this first dev log adresses.

But don’t take it from me, here’s what Oleksandr, from Starni Games has to say about it: “Headquarters: World War II is a tactical level turn-based strategy game. So, you can expect a realistic scale, with many factors being considered during each attack, including a major impact of your troops’ positioning. The game is set during the Normandy landings and has 3 campaigns: the British, the Americans, and the German sides”.

The team prides itself in the granularity it created with its directional armour and the impact it has in the gameplay: “However, in many games, it is often a very basic representation, where if your attack angle is somewhere between front and side, it would just choose whichever is closest. In Headquarters: World War II, we calculate the exact angle of attack and arrive at an adjusted armour value based on the front/side armour value and the attack angle. For example, if you attack an enemy tank at 60 degrees to the side, it will have 1/3*Front armour value + 2/3*Side armour value = Adjusted armour. There could also be a third side – top armour – taken into account if you are firing from an elevated position”.

While the focus is clearly on the armoured aspect, it also appears that we will be able to control infantry squads “During a recent playtest my AT Infantry squad managed to ambush my colleague’s fearsome Tiger II tank in the woods (tank on the forest road, infantry in the forest) and attacking its side made quick work of the powerful adversary.”

Surprisingly, Headquarters is doing something I’ve be advocating for quite a while which is several combat predictions with different amounts of information. This kind of information availability also goes a long way to help players plan their next moves and what kind of variables to have into account when making a move. Here are a couple of screenshots of the game’s Short Combat Prediction first, and Full Combat Prediction second.

The next Dev Log will tell us more about how randomness works in the game, the 4 possible outcomes of an attack, how morale, buildings and cover works.