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Sorry for the delay everyone. But I feel I have to mention. I was a playtester for this earlier, and I have to applaud. The developers are among the most friendly but consciencious I have yet worked with and are a welcome change to some I can name. The game is fun - if still tricky - and while in its present forms is modeling 1914 with systems closer to 1916 (and the need to research cooking food in the field) it is a worthy challenge and enjoyable game. You will struggle, but you can readily prevail. 

Seeing the game evolve even in the stage it has from the pre-demo playtest to now should show anyone the team is dedicated and takes feedback very seriously.  I'd recommend this to just about anyone, as well as an invite to join their Discord.

Hope to see you all there.

For some reason it seems like the second night is bugged, with there just being a sliver left of "Enemies" but none showing up.

It does not seem to be starting for me, and the size seems very small even considering a zip.

Awesome. Someone else in this mentioned it. I actually had the V 5 from way back then, but I did not know how to fix the kill on start.

Something is badly bugged. Getting water in my containers suddenly results in me dying from blood loss.

You are a GOAT. Thank you so much.

I like the premise, but a bunch of things are not very clear. For starters, what the upgrades do. Likewise where we need to click (I figured it out fairly early but still notable). I also did not hear any VO lines. No "Andre" or "Umeko" or anyone. Also the map in the corner is rather hard to read and your progress is not at all clear, and it seems like the game crashes with an error (or at least cryptic partially coded text) at the end. Finally, after upgrading the coin button enough it becomes very hard to see the prices for it; it might be useful to move the buttons slightly to the side.

I admire the effort, and I hope this game and your future efforts flower.

Likewise. This does seem promising. I didn't hear any voice lines either.

Hello? Did you get it?

Here it is.

https: //www .mediafire .com /file/g4lpfbvg0btlaot/Command_Of_War_-_Kickstarter_Demo...

Did you get it?

Here it is. It contains both Beta 4 and Beta 5. Hoep this helps.

https://file.io/jTLCCDedBhXV

I have Beta 4 and Beta 5, and I can send them to you if you can specify some medium. However, Beta 5 is currently inactive due to having been "permanently disabled" in some way, apparently by a popup that hits if you try to enter any of the scenarios. Still, I applaud you for your efforts to keep this old game's memories alive.

I remember this. it looks like it is a re-hosting or adaptation of Beta 4. I still have fond memories of Beta 5 (the last one before the Kickstarter failed). Is there some way to make that active again? It was so much more advanced.

Apologies for the delay, but yes I can.

My graphics card is Intel(R) HD Graphics 530 (getting on there in years but capable of running new juggernauts like Company of Heroes 3 or Last Train Home).

My CPU is an Intel(R) Core i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40 GHz and has 64 GB of installed RAM, running on a 64 bit operating system and a x64 processor.

This should be absolute overkill for these games, and if my phone is capable of running them this should not be a problem for these.

I have been eyeing this game for quite some time and purchased it rather recently, but I have been utterly disappointed at how things have gone. I keep having it crash to desktop. The Microsoft Store at least shows the loading screen, but it still ends in the same place. This happens for both this game and 1938. I am bitterly disappointed, and any help would be appreciated or else I may have to consider refunds.

I thank you greatly. Much appreciated.

With the full game now arrived, can we get the Student Demo version back? I wanted to play through it again before taking on the full game.

The game at present seems to be monumentally off-kilter on first playthrough. I went in assuming that I would need to conceal information about the actual, you know, Operation Valkyrie. And that in turn I would need to "keep my powder dry" to lie/destroy information about what was truly crucial, such as say Hitler actually surviving the Bunker. So I operated under the assumption that stuff like the Soviets advancing along the East, the Western Allies moving in Tuscany, or even investigations of anti-war literature and stolen V-2 Plans 

But apparently this doesn't work. Because somehow Army Command knowing about some completely different person passing V-2 Secrets off or the fact that Vinnytsa is no longer returning their calls except for in angry Russian compromises or undermines the security of the Valkyrie Plotters. In spite of them being unrelated and there being no particularly logical reason why these things should compromise the security of Operation Valkyrie.

So because of my very damaging and exposing decisions to tell German High Command that a missing soldier returned to base drunk and that the Western Allies are marching on Florence, Stauffenberg doesn't even get to plant the bombs due to some kind of Collective Hive Mind allowing the Gestapo to correlate me telling them about events on the front unrelated (at least directly) to the conspirators to results in them cracking Valkyrie open. Because I'm very sure that information about Soldat Drunkard and Soviet possession of Collective Farm Red October outside Kyiv really endangered the plan.

This tells me the game needs some kind of fundamental re-balancing and re-jiggering. One that puts less emphasis on just the amount of messages you destroy or send through and more on what those messages actually say, with you/the conspiracy suffering far more for say letting news that Hitler survived the bomb plot contrary to what your friends said being far more damaging than = again - the Front Line in the East speaking Russian.

It might also be worth refocusing the game as a whole, for a more tight and narrow experience. Starting it later just before or around the time of the actual Bunker Plot and having to balance communications from the front, the National Socialist loyalists, and the plotters so that the plotters can succeed without it all being foiled by the Nazis getting a clue.

What lookingforsomegames said.

Fair enough and thank you for the quick reply. It might help to mention that more explicitly in the demo and documentation, at least until it is fixed.

There's a very serious bug where the game is only playable from the German POV. Not only do you only get "Deploy"ed as one of them if you hit it, but if you go to the bother of manually spawning British or French units and going into one of them, your allies will IMMEDIATELY turn their guns on you and mow you down, in spite of there being no logical reason for this.

I'd greatly appreciate it if this could be fixed ASAP.

Going to echo what so many others have said as probably one of the few players to actually achieve a total victory. This is a beautiful little game that needs some more crucial work, because at present it is basically unplayable as intended, but utterly exploitable to the point it is broken thanks to abuse.

The graphics, the sound, and some of the basic mechanics work very nicely indeed, and I can already see how the game as a whole would work.

But the issues. First, a Bug: By late game now when I have started to send 3-4 "medium" sized (40-80 sized) task forces out in close proximity, there is a chance that if their missions complete near simultaneously one will more or less overwrite the other, meaning I have a bunch of valuable- really, priceless- troops stuck in limbo and permanently unusable, more or less deciding to skip the war out (I can't say I BLAME them in light of everything I am going to touch, but it is an issue).

But the more pressing issue is mechanics.

I agree with Kieronymous that at present, the game mechanics basically give too much reason to "Hide in the Forest and wait until Liberation Day." The Germans never target you, the traitors and informants never threaten your existence like the briefings indicate, and so on. And since the main mechanics of the game are so troubled, one might as well stay in.

But I'll go further.

There are two major issues with this game, besides the almost tertiary issue of there not being much of a "spur" or momentum meaning you're disconnected from the nominal success or failure of your missions.

The first is that the game puts you thoroughly at the mercy of RNG in really bad ways.

The second is that there are not enough mechanics to assess or manage risk.

One of these by itself would be hard but manageable. But together they absolutely devastate the game.

Ok, so starting with a random number of partisans? That's ok. Random chances of success or failure in missions? NOT that great but POSSIBLY Ok. Random mission popups? Ok.

The issue is the sheer amount of RNG. In particular in battles. Like one time I sent 196~ some troops to storm one of the German garrisons. We "Lost", losing something like 6 and including more than a hundred dead. I say "that's pretty good" and- not knowing if the enemy automatically refills or what have you- I send my troops again. This time they spank us, I lose 40something and they lose 20something.

No real rhyme or reason to it.

This sort of plays havoc all over. The RNG has too much of a hold on battle results, which coupled with the ludicrously vague descriptions of enemy forces and whatnot and the arcane (at best) or random (at worst) criteria for success or victory means that i player that isn't savvy can "win" themselves and their partisan army straight into the grave, Pyrrhus style.

But even this would be tolerable except for the other horn. I came up with a decentish way to theoretically win the game about five minutes in, namely avoiding direct confrontations with the bulk of the German forces and knocking off "lighter" targets (i say that, but I don't really care that much if the mission fails or succeeds, more on that later) and slowly build m way u pto attacking the death squads, and then to the fortresses.

AND then I ran out of the "soft" targets in spite of waiting. Which brings us to the other issue. Of all the things that are random in this game, the ability to actually skip missions is not one of them.

Your "victorious" army reduce itself from 150 to 20 people and looking for a good Prisoner Search mission to try and rebuild your forces? F You, enjoy taking on Hunter-Killer Squads. You want to wait a bit so you can rebuild your forces by recruitment and training? F You, only way to recruit is by battling, and getting a random proportion of troops, hence why you might save an entire village from the Einstatz that have been inexplicably taking months to kill everyone, lose have your army but triumph, and have not a single soul join up.

This flips one of the key advantage of real guerillas on their heads. The ability to pick and choose their battles is one of the VERY FEW advantages they really have, and here the fact that every mission will linger permanently until taken takes that away from you.

There BADLY needs to be some way to "skip" missions, to lay low and wait until one can find a better chance to strike. That ideally shouldn't go too far- because the game rewards doing nothing too much as it is- but we shouldn't have to.

What's even worse is the lack of specificity. How much is a "Small" enemy force? 10 people? 50? What are our chances or winning?

The only reason I know about the size I need for garrison   attacks is because you mentioned it in the comments.

This is bad, because intelligence is one o the most crucial skills for a guerilla. So having some ability to gather intel and get a ballpark estimate of A: the number of enemy, and B: what our chances of taking them out with more or less this force goes.

Especially since the game really doesn't specify much. Did the traitor escape because he saw half of Belarus making a single, coordinated march towards his village, so maybe a smaller unit would be more likely to catch them by surprise? How large are the "Squads" going around burning villages?

I don't know, because the game doesn't tell me. I suspect because the game honestly doesn't know itself, due to the wildly counterproductive nature of the RNG spitting out ludicrously contradictory results.

And this is made worse because the player doesn't really have much way to CONTROL whether a given mission succeeds or fails, and worse doesn't have much reason to care. I'm not happy unless I am taking in more partisans than I'm losing, which is why I'll be happier to "lose" a mission that sees 5 Partisans die, 3 Germans get killed, and whatever mission we went off fail, so long as we get 9 Partisans recruited than a "Victory" that sees the Germans and I lose dozens of men apiece while I get 12 people. There is no real "hunger" for victory, to kill more Germans, and so on. Nor is there much hedging one's bets. There is only RNG.

Which is how I actually learned the secret to Guerilla War Theory, according to this game.

From my camp deep in the woods, I would look over the missions, and- outside of easyish prisoner missions- I would designate a single Comrade for a given mission. Let's call him "Comrade Suicide Bomber." DorkaDorka Stalin Urrah, if you will. I would then gleefully send the designated Comrade Urrah alone towards their almost certain death at the hands of whatever opposition I faced. Most times they did indeed die, but sometimes they surprised me, whether it was singlehandedly saving villages (sometimes posthumously) or assassinating traitors.

Then as often as not, assorted people might be inspired by this Solo Comrade's act of usually suicidal bravery, before picking up the map on their corpse and walking back to camp, usually giving me far more people for a mission than the one person I lost. Rinse and Repeat, especially since this cleared mission markers and let them respawn.

And eventually, this is how I mustered a Great Patriot Army capable of storming the German garrisons and annihilating them by late 1942.

I take it you can see the problems with this.

Which is a shame. I like this so so much, and at essence it could be such a great way to represent partisan warfare.

But as it is, well...unworkably broken, including on some of its fundamentals.

I hope you don't leave this. I wish you the best of luck.

Regards!

EDIT: Addendum to my previous comments, but this is getting ludicrous.

So I managed to completely destroy all three garrisons of Germans by April 1943 (and even that would've been earlier had it not been for RNG making me lose 240+ men when destroying the second, forcing me to spend months rebuilding) through the wonders of completely ignoring all nuance or hedging in favor of being Communist Hashashin. 

Now the game doesn't acknowledge that I did this and won the "Glorious Victory" and I had to wait to win the "Normal" victory. But apparently my brave Comrades killed 2,025 Germans while losing only 717 and recruiting 1,065, fgirues that would indicate I am greater than Tito, Washington, and Mao put together.... when I'm really just throwing troops out.

The map is dotted with stranded troops.

This needs serious work, for starters to acknowledge when the victory conditions are met.