Developer log of Conflict-Series by Joni Nuutinen

War Diary (developer log) of Conflict-Series by Joni Nuutinen
Patreon :: Sortable Table of Games :: FAQ :: latest game: Leros

PINNED: New game: Axis Europa 194x! If Android navi bar covers game's status bar, fix it via Immersive Mode & Add Extra Space options.

Finnish Defense and Bougainville received minor updates.

Automatic licence-plate reader Flock adds safeguards after wave of stalking cases by police officers
-- Flock operates 120,000 cameras across the US that capture images of vehicles and licence plates. A lengthy investigation revealed that at least 46 law enforcement officers across the US used the license-plate cameras for unauthorised tracking, including to stalk wives, girlfriends and exes.

News: Google hammers another, extremely petty nail in the Android Open Source Project’s coffin
-- Google has replaced public, instant code downloads for Pixel phone drivers with a manual request form. Instead of publishing code directly to open developer platforms where anyone can grab it, Google now requires developers to fill out a Google Form and wait for someone to send them a Google Drive link.

Video link: First Time Watching Reaction Dr. Strangelove Was Hilariously Hard to Watch
-- "Dr. Strangelove somehow turned nuclear disaster into one of the most stressful comedies I've ever watched."

Operation Market Garden at version 6.3.4. Patch: The initial setup failed to fortify a couple of towns, which made the play-through a bit easy. And while hunting down that, I semi-accidentally rewrite large chunks of the code. Report back if you think that the flow of the game has fundamentally changed.

Book excerpt: fighting for the Arnhem bridge during Market Garden:

"British battalion commanders attempted to co-ordinate their joint thrusts toward the bridge as best they could. A maze of unreconnoitred streets and only a sketchy knowledge of enemy strengths and dispositions were to hamper the advance... 1 PARA was to spearhead this flat route alongside the river and harbour, supported by the remnants of 3 PARA. Both of these battalions had already suffered considerable losses trying to fight through this bottleneck the night before. Indeed, none of the other battalions were aware that 3 PARA was even ready to mount yet another attack. When the assault started, delays were to be caused by paratroopers shooting at each other as the two axes diverged... The houses on the high road were occupied on both sides by WSS Engineer Battalion. These were further overlooked by a group of houses manned by anti-aircraft gunners. The South Staffs and 11 PARA, confined to the streets if they wished to move in strength, were to be exposed to frontal fire once they were past the St Elizabeth's Hospital. There was no room for tactical manoeuvre: it was punch through frontally, or fail."
-- It Never Snows in September, The German View of Market-Garden and the Battle of Arnhem, September 1944 by Robert J. Kershaw

Moscow at version 6.6

Axis Crimean Campaign steps into version 3.3

Utah-Omaha parachutes to version 2.4

Allied Invasion of Italy marches on to version 6.1

The Bluetooth-based offline messaging apps challenging internet shutdowns
-- Governments that deploy internet shutdowns to thwart protesters have struggled to clamp down on offline messaging apps. India's recent response to Bitchat suggests that battle is entering a new phase. Bitchat allows nearby phones to communicate over Bluetooth even when mobile networks or internet access are unavailable.

I have begun, with nonstop pure primal rage-screaming, the registration of free/demo versions of the games and other projects to the google and play store, even though those apps have absolutely nothing to do with google or play store. Imagine having to give your house and car keys to google when you have nothing to do with google. Just stop and imagine it for a second: having to walk to the google offices to give away access to YOUR things - that how infuriating this is. And all the keys and hashes need to be manually extracted one by one using command line tools that are nowhere to be found and then dutifully submitted via crashing google console to google, while getting zero information on what just crashed on the google console. And because I have been active in all kinds of projects over the decades, I don't have one app, or 10 apps, or 100 apps, no, no, no, I have an ungodly number of projects that all need to be humiliated with this processing and fed to the trashfire google console that is literally crashing - or those apps won't work in the future. You would think that having my app on my phone on open source Android that I helped to create and grow, I would have some freaking say, but no, google has to be the ultimate decider of what I can do with my software on my device on kinda my platform. The amount of life I'm wasting on this hostile google nonsense is outrageous. Open Android is truly dead. RIP.

Several content creators in my circles have been scammed when they bought images from "real" artists, and even when requiring images of concepts and progress, they still turned out to be AI-made. One author even prepared to defend the artist that she ordered the cover art for her new book from, before realizing it was all just a guy posing as a drawer selling AI-made images. It's a horrible situation for everyone. Content creators love to support each other if they have extra money, but it's starting to require months of vetting to be sure of anything. That's all time and energy we don't have. Plus, the fake artists are going to be cheaper, so they will be getting most of the jobs. On top of everything else, the AI image tools are getting better each month, as proven by the fact that people professionally in the visual arts are regularly sharing AI-made content on their social media feeds, because it takes so much effort to tell human-made from the AI-made. You can't really enjoy life if every tiny thing requires a week of detective work. At least visual artists who created a name for themselves before this mess have some way to build trust, but imagine being a new visual artist: you will have to work through ridiculously more steps to get any job offers, not to mention having to find a way to be even discovered in the first place in the middle of this flood of fake visual artists. And the same applies to public domain images. Is the below photo real?

This photo of excessively tiny kids in front of a log cabin looks 100% like AI-made, but it's actually a confirmed historical photo of the one of the biggest log cabins ever made, Oregon's Forestry Building. It's taking joy out of life having to background check every last thing.

Anzio & Monte Cassino fighting on at version 5.4

Slowly working on refreshing the old background patterns, some of which are effectively just green on modern higher-density displays. Also adding more options to the red-pattern that is drawn over AI-held hexagons.

Sea Lion lands on version 5.2, reducing the number of British GHQ line fortifications.

If you're a history buff looking for a TV series to burn few hours and learn few new military tidbits: Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny features surprisingly decent segments about various military/espionage stories that were classified for decades. Obviously some of the segments are the old classics, but there is fair bit of less-known stuff too.

Rommel & Afrika Korps big update to version 6.6, adding Ammo Trucks to feed Artillery and Air Force units. This is done to prevent nonstop bombardment of enemy for 70 turns, that can contribute excessively to the enemy HP losses with certain styles of play. In addition, Tactics for units are enabled, hopefully not affecting too much the maneuvering in the narrow coastal strip. Plus added soft sand hexagons which slow down tanks, artillery and non-empty trucks. Also, the British artillery moved back and forth way too much.

Leyte updated to version 4.4 after a big bug was found, that blocked a dozen Japanese units from being included in the play. Apologies, that should have been caught earlier.

By pure random luck, I did manage to see the Hall of Fame server fail silently without any logged errors or feedback to the game app. The next round of updates adds a fail-safe mechanism for any such future event (most likely to happen during a weekend usage spike) by trying to send the high score via a different channel.

History Links (Patreon, full list for paid members)
-- I Went to the Amazon to Fly in a 1942 Workhorse of Aviation
-- Soviet intelligence illegals program: article analyzes 62 illegals dispatched to or designated for the United States and Canada
-- Low water levels in Danube reveal wrecks of German WW2 warships scuttled by their crews in 1944
-- Byzantine gold objects help archaeologists uncover past of ship wrecked off Croatia
-- France's D-Day landing beaches, Greece's Mount Olympus added to UNESCO World Heritage List
-- Das Boot season 2 review: A World War II drama resurfaces on MHz Choice
-- And much more...

Interesting comment on the AI boom: Allowing rich people access to "talent" without paying people with talent.

Operation Luttich reaches 3.0 with several changes that make it easier: Generals gain ability to summon a handful of security division, at times Allied aerial bombardments will switch some empty hexagons in one area to the enemy (explosion marker), reduced number of Allied bridge defenses, etc.

Finland just removed 60,000 liters of fuel from the wreck of Finnish battleship Ilmarinen, that sank during WWII ending up upside-down.There are still 40,000 liters left. I wonder how much fuel is still at the bottom of the oceans as the result of world wars? "Free" fill-ups, anyone...

Allied Invasion of Japan sails to version 4.5.4

South (US Civil War) at version 7.6

The Amazon App Store is deploying some type of new automated duplicate-content detection, and it's erroneously flagging half of the games, especially the unique ones. However, when I visit the developer console, most of the issues mentioned in email alerts are nowhere to be found. Maybe they are manually fixing them as the new AI system goes horribly awry. I'm so tired of getting beaten to a pulp by poorly designed AI guards that are not able to differentiate between a spoon and a pirate ship, yet they have power over humans and businesses. Horrifying, just soul-crunching that dimwit AI bots are wiping out so many creative persons.

Dieppe Raid reaches version 2.4

Poland between Germany & USSR updated to version 1.8, plenty of room in the Hall of Fame after clearout of oldest scores.

Sometimes it hits hard to realize that there are tens of thousands of photos of some WW2 generals and barely a handful of others. Truly underlines how media-hungry some commanders were when you search for a general that was involved in a famous battle and the first cursory search on a handful of search engines shows three grainy, low-quality results.

Axis Endgame in Tunisia fighting on at version 2.4, ridiculous number of smaller text-related fixes.

News: France's D-Day landing beaches, Greece's Mount Olympus added to UNESCO World Heritage List
-- The French designation covers the five Normandy landing beaches (Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold and Juno) where 150,000 Allied troops came ashore on June 6, 1944, along with the Pointe du Hoc assault site... The International Council on Monuments and Sites, which evaluates submissions to the heritage committee, said the sites contain extensive remnants, from German fortifications and bomb-scarred landscapes to Allied harbor structures and sunken vessel.

Leningrad version 4.4.2 adds Brandenburg unit.

Book excerpt: German 1st Panzer Division runs into heavy KV tanks for the first time in 1941:
"The KV-1 and -2 tanks, which we first met here, were really something! Our companies opened fire at about 800 yards, but it remained ineffective. We moved closer and closer to the enemy, who for his part continued to approach us unconcerned. Very soon we were facing each other at 50 to 100 yards. A fantastic exchange of fire took place without any visible German success. The Russian tanks continued to advance, and all armor-piercing shells simply bounced off them. Thus we were presently faced with the alarming situation of the Russian tanks driving through the ranks of 1st Panzer Regiment towards our own infantry and our hinterland. Our Panzer regiment therefore about-turned and rumbled back with the KV-ls and KV-2s, roughly in line with them. In the course of that operation we succeeded in immobilizing some of them with special-purpose shells at very close range 30 to 60 yards... These heavy Soviet tanks were protected by 80-mm. plating all round, reinforced in some places to 120-mm. The greatest headache at first was their armor-plating: one KV-2 bore the marks of over 70 hits, but not a single one had pierced the armor. Since the German antitank guns were useless against these tanks an attempt had to be made to immobilize these giants first by firing at their tracks, and then by tackling them with artillery and AA guns, or blowing them up at close range by high-explosive charges of the sticky-bomb type."
-- Moves East 1941-1943 by Paul Carell

Professor suspected AI usage in take-home midterms, makes finals in-person, only 2 students receive 'normal' score
-- Brown University professor Roberto Serrano suspected that his students were cheating when he gave them a take-home midterm exam, so he made the final exam in-person. Out of the 86 students enrolled, 18 dropped from the class after he made the announcement, and 9 skipped the final exam. Out of the 59 remaining, 3 scored zero, and only 2 students received a grade that's within 10% of their midterm score, with only one of them performing better in the finals.

Guadalcanal at version 4.8

How country with 3 residents has embassies all over the globe and place in the UN
-- This over 900-year-old country maintains diplomatic relations with 115 states, enters into treaties, and issues its own passports, coins and postage stamps. Its two headquarters buildings enjoy extraterritoriality... We are talking of course about the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta.

So, apparently kids are calling the 80s and 90s the late 1900s

Peleliu lands on version 3.4

Most ride-selling apps now factor in how much battery you have left in your device. If you need to get a ride but have low battery, the price doubles. If your battery is alarmingly low, the price triples. The standard now is that the one with the highest battery percent in a friend group hails the ride.

Cheyenne suspends datacenter wastewater after rare bacterium traced to Meta's AI site
-- Cheyenne's Board of Public Utilities (BOPU) traced bacterium Cupriavidus gilardii to wastewater discharged by Meta's $800 million, 715,000-square-foot data center south of the city.

Saipan lands on version 4.0

Eventually something will go wrong:
-- July: Russian warship carried out firing exercise off Plymouth coast
-- June: British couple describe having warning shots fired near them by Russian warship
-- Video: Shocking State of Britain's Navy 2026 - only a total of 13 destroyers/frigates left to rule the globe (and of those 13, only 7 are not being refit/fixed, so basically one UK warship per ocean)

Case Blue at version 3.3

Bougainville Gambit at version 1.6

Patreon: Recent History Links
-- Berlin prepares to demolish the bunker that is the last remnant of The New Reich Chancellery
-- Rare copy of US Declaration of Independence found by volunteer in UK archives
-- Switzerland to open secret files on Auschwitz 'Angel of Death' Mengele
-- The secret postwar meeting between Max Mosley, his father Oswald, Otto Skorzeny and Himmler's daughter
-- And much more ...

Stalingrad

Falaise Pocket at version 2.7.0.1

"The Americans and British were slowly heading for each other and the Falaise salient was steadily squeezed from all sides as the Germans valiantly held open the neck... While the panzer divisions managed to hold the Americans and Canadians at bay, the vast columns of retreating Germans were decimated by the fighter-bombers and artillery, the roads becoming choked with burnt out vehicles, adding to the confusion... For three days 60 members of the 12th WSS clung on in Falaise in the face of repeated Canadian attacks; when the town fell only 4 wounded prisoners were taken... Untersturmfuehrer Herbert Walther, 12th WSS, experienced the full terror of being trapped in the pocket: My driver was burning. I had a bullet through the arm. I jumped on to a railway track and ran. They were firing down the embankment and I was hit in the leg. I made 100 metres, then I was hit in the back of the neck... He later had 13 bullets removed from his leg."
-- Falaise, The Flawed Victory : The Destruction of Panzergruppe West, August 1944 by Anthony Tucker-Jones

Kiev spearheads at version 1.7

I also recently learned, to my shock, that some Samsung devices override the (Unicode) characters you or the app use. So, if you send any messages like "condolences," hey, just be aware that Samsung might override some of those solemn characters with more colorful clown-emoji ones, because, apparently, Samsung thinks this is a super awesome feature.

Fall of Stalingrad holding at version 5.4, tweaking the OOB and initial setup over-lapping issues.

Luzon to version 3.3

People saying, "Why don't we just relocate factories away from China" don't comprehend how fundamental the Chinese advantage is at this point. Let's, for example, take lighters (Zippo): Most lighters in the world are made in one single town in China. That town has a university that grinds out engineers, etc., highly educated people whose only task for day and night is to improve various elements of lighter production (material science, manufacturing process, etc.). This is why the lighter has had the same exact price for 20 years while the price of the raw materials has gone up, price of labor and electricity has gone up. Over time, China has made 87987987987 improvements on that one product, just imagine the combined effect. If you set up a competing factory in some other country, you either have to be smarter than the combined wisdom of thousands of engineers working on optimizing lighters for decades, come up with crazy luxury branding, or use super-high tariffs to protect your product. At this point it is lunacy to think you can out-manufacture China in most stuff. Plus, China now has a lockdown on most raw materials with long-term contracts and due to their scale they will always be #1 customer, getting the best deal. Somebody setting up a lighter factory to take on Chinese production is like using sticks to fight atomic weapons. For the most stuff you can buy, we have reached the level of optimization that there is one single Chinese town making most of that item on this planet.

Cobra: US Breakthrough Strike pushes through to version 1.3

Unsolvable issues, part #98768: If the player can tap (or hit the BACK key) on any text popup to close them, then inevitably they will also close some critical dialogs and complain that they missed them. However, if I add any kind of time delay to prevent super-instant closing of dialogs, some players will get frustrated that the dialogs are "not responding". I have added a setting to tweak this, but... It's an unwinnable user-interface war.

Paris: Uprising & Liberation fights on at version 1.4

"The Allied generals had discounted the intentions of the French Resistance. Like Warsaw Paris sheltered a secret army with the will, and some of the means, to bend the strategy of the forces of occupation... The Paris Resistance was far smaller than the force with which Bor-Komorowski had begun the insurrection in Warsaw... Effective opposition to the German occupation had been slow to develop in France ... The efficient network of governmental power (police, gendarmerie, Renseignements generaux, Surveillance du territoire, and the agencies of prefecture, canton and commune) made subversion a risky business. It was not until the rigorous imposition of forced labor decrees in mid-1942 that young Frenchmen, presented with the stark choice of resistance or deportation to Germany, began to rebel... Colonel Rol, head of the communists in Paris, estimated the number of arms available at only 400, a quarter of the armament at the disposal of Bor-Komorowski. SOE (Special Operations Executive) and the Gaullist organization in London, fearful of feeding the power of the communists, whose strength lay in the cities, had made sure parachute drops fell in the open country: between February-May 1944, about 76,000 Sten guns and 28,000 pistols were parachuted into France, but only 118 and 14 respectively were consigned to Paris... The outbreak of uprising had taken the commander of Paris, Generalleutnant Dietrich von Choltitz, unawares. Appointed to the post only two weeks before... He had assumed that he was to defend the city at its perimeter, and although he had prepared for the demolition of the Paris bridges, he had not envisaged having to fight within the city itself."
-- Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris by John Keegan

Panzers to Leningrad updated to version 4.4.0.1

Video: Train Journey to Pyongyang Across Rural North Korea
-- "Me and my travel buddy became the first foreign tourists who had traveled from China to North Korea by train since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. We took our "privilige" to be passport holders of the only country (Russia) which citizens are currently allowed to visit North Korea. We made it by taking a train all the way to Pyongyang."

Allied Invasion of Sicily lands at version 5.5

American Revolutionary War at version 6.6 (patch to 6.6.0.2 as old devices had issues)

Axis Europa 194x sailing to version 1.0.3 with plenty of tweaks and fixes. And congrats to the one player who won it with All VPs rule turned on.

Downside number 7398756 of living in a tiny country. During some weeks there is literally one (1) Finnish advertiser in the podcast ad pool. So, if I listen to 35 podcast episodes per week, with each having, on average, 3 ads, I'll be hearing that very same ad 105 times. And most of the time the phone is in the pocket or you're busy, so hitting the skip-forward isn't an option. It's jarring.

News: Outrage as California community bans homeowners from flying Stars and Stripes ahead of America's 250th birthday
-- Locals in San Marcos are putting up a fight after their Homeowners Association (HOA) informed them that they would be fined $100 if they continue to display American flags outside their homes. The Ambiance HOA told the married couple that they had 15 days to remove it, or they would face a penalty. Their neighbor, Terri Collins, was issued the same warning despite Old Glory being displayed outside her property for 35 years. The Cookes have the US flag on their property in honor of Chris's grandfather, who died fighting in WWII.

As somebody whose games regularly get warnings and bans for showing ordinary basic flags from western countries, I feel the above in my bones.

Patches to Okinawa (v5.5.3), Demyansk Pocket (v6.8.6), and Operation Spring Awakening (v3.2.2)

Gaming news: Sony to end physical PlayStation game disc production in 2028
-- Sony announced it will stop producing physical discs for all new PlayStation games starting in January 2028, marking a move into an all-digital future. For the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025, digital downloads accounted for 85% of full-game software sales on PS4 and PS5, while physical copies accounted for the remaining 15%.

Interestingly enough, there is ever-increasing movement to switch back to physical media as people get burned out by the deluge of subscriptions and not actually owning digital films and games even if they hit the "buy" button. Video sites have plenty of content in which people document their hunts for huge, cheap scores of CDs and DVDs from garage sales and proudly showcase their latest discoveries. Funny how the pendulum swings back and forth. And if you're of a certain age, you might have purchased the same music album as a cassette, CD, DVD, etc.

AI news: US schools dim the lights to save energy for the data centers
-- Henrico County has been home to massive data-center investment. However, now, a 25% electricity-rate increase is hitting its government and schools. County Manager John Vithoulkas asked employees to turn off lights, shut down computers, unplug chargers, adjust blinds, and avoid space heaters. Price of electricity will see a 24.9% overall increase beginning July 1, followed by at least another 12% increase in July 2027.

AI news: Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna Caught Using chatbot Claude For Drafting Defense Bill Amendment Summary
-- Luna submitted an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, which approves various policies and expenditures for the Department of Defense, and the summary of the amendment had text like "chatbot Claude responded". The website has since removed the references to Claude. As AI usage becomes more widespread, its use in government has become a growing issue. Numerous courts have sanctioned attorneys for filing documents with false information hallucinated by AI, such as citing court cases that don't exist.

AI news: Neighbors barricade windows with mattresses, plexiglass to escape Virginia data center's high-pitched whine
-- Residents in Sterling said the Vantage Data Centers site has become a nuisance due to the noise. The neighborhood was initially told that the data center was testing its generators, hwever, they have not been turned off since they were actived over a year ago. "You just hear this noise, it's just like, you just want to curse, you know, it's that bad," resident Greg Pirio told.

Battle of the Bulge updated to version 7, adding:
-- If Germans seize the massive US fuel depot between Liege-Stavelot Panzer units get some extra MPs at times
-- German Stug III units (less HP)
-- Added: Tactics (per unit) feature -- Trying to reduce several MP loss inducing events piling up on one front line unit
Also, somebody found a way to INSTANTLY maneuver into an effective attack, which seems to completely confuse the AI, so some of the AI priorities have been shifted a fair amount. I'm also finally upgrading the ancient unit-text-tag system to the modern one almost all the other games use, so if you spot any totally out of place unit-text-tags, drop me an email.

Why Google Search AI Overviews Are a "Misinformation Machine"
-- A team of former-Google and former-Apple employees, has conducted a study that gives us considerable insight into some real statistics about Google AIOs. And those numbers are quite disturbing. AIOs are inaccurate overall about 9% of the time. At Google scale of around 5 TRILLION search queries a year — that's trillions with a "T" — the study says that we're dealing with on the order of tens of millions of wrong Google AIO answers EVERY HOUR, hundreds of thousands PER MINUTE.

Dozens of History links (Patreon)
-- Including WW2 'hell ship' found in Philippines with over 1,000 POWs,
--The largest Viking Age coin hoard ever discovered in Norway,
-- Sunken train station on infamous WWII 'Death Railway' resurfaces from Thailand reservoir,
-- Remarkably well preserved: WW2 assault gun uncovered...
-- Video links like Did German pirates reach America two decades before Columbus?

Leros (Last German WW2 Parachute Drop) updated to 1.2. How can this battle which featured unprecedented number of various WW2 special forces be so poorly known?

A ton of patches to Next-Unit button misbehaving for many.

Lucky me, the non-standard Samsung update has once again causing issues, but I'm rolling out updates as quickly as I can to settle that for once and for all.

NEW GAME: AXIS EUROPA 194x!!!

Take over the unified Axis command of European & Atlantic WW2 theaters from 1940 onward just as Germans are about to invade France, land on Norway, and Italy gears up for African expansion! Now at version 1.0.0.7

  ⊕   Play Store (full paid)
  ⊕   local free APK to sideload
  ⊕   Free turn-limited demo at Amazon
  ⊕   Full at Amazon App Store

Time is not on your side. Britain controls the seas. The United States is an industrial giant switching on the war footing. The Soviet Union grows stronger in the east. The longer the war lasts, the more overwhelming your enemies become.

Every offensive is a risk. A single miscalculation can trigger a multi-front war you cannot sustain for long.

Can you defeat the great powers one by one before their combined strength crushes the Axis? Can you balance industrial expansion, fuel logistics, naval warfare, and armored offensives without collapsing under overreach?

Choose where to strike, when to advance, where to fortify, and which enemies to confront first. Allocate scarce resources, direct industrial production, and deploy Panzers, U-boats, and battleships to dominate Europe and the Atlantic.

SCENARIO ELEMENTS:

OIL & FUEL: Tanks, aircraft, and warships depend on a constant flow of fuel. Securing enough oil fields to keep the Axis war machine running is one of your top priorities. Fuel can be transported rapidly across continent by rail fuel carriages built by engineers, while fuel trucks handle the dangerous final stretch to the front lines. At sea, oil tankers enable long-range naval operations for battleships, aircraft carriers, and even U-boats operating far from European ports. A disrupted fuel network can stall offensives, ground aircraft, and leave fleets stranded.

ENGINEERS: Engineers form the backbone of your expanding empire. They lay railways that allow rapid troop redeployment across Europe and into emerging crisis zones. They can also construct smaller support units such as fuel trucks and rail fuel carriages. Beyond logistics, engineers clear terrain for airfields, hospitals, and railway expansion while also strengthening defensive lines with dugouts and minefields. Their time is always limited, forcing difficult choices between expansion, logistics, and defense.

INDUSTRY & RESOURCES: Industrial locations across the advanced nations of Europe produce the major game pieces of war: tank armies, battleships, U-boats, troopships, supply ships, and more. Production automatically consumes fuel drawn from oil fields and, if necessary, from stored reserves carried by tankers, rail carriages, and fuel trucks. Industry also depends on coal from controlled mines, which flows into a shared strategic resource pool. Running short on fuel or coal can cripple your entire war effort, slowing production just as enemy powers begin to outscale you.

DIPLOMACY & TENSION: The game begins with the Axis already at war against the United Kingdom and France, while other nations remain neutral under varying levels of political tension. If tension reaches 100%, war is declared. Neutral nations include the United States, the Soviet Union, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Sweden, Norway, and several South American states. Generals may spend precious movement capacity to reduce tension in selected countries each turn, delaying new enemies from entering the war. Generals are also critical military assets. Beyond improving combat performance, they can recruit engineers, organize emergency auxiliary forces, gather supplies, and scrape together desperately needed fuel reserves.

SCATTERED MAP: While continental Europe, the Soviet Union, the Near East, and British-held India form one connected landmass, the war quickly expands far beyond it. Axis forces must fight across the fragmented territories of North Africa while protecting vulnerable supply routes through the Mediterranean and Atlantic. The road to long-term dominance may lead in many directions: across Spain, down the west coast of Africa and onward to South America, or north through the British Isles and Scandinavia toward Iceland and Greenland. No matter which path you choose, the war ultimately grows into a confrontation with the industrial power of the eastern United States.

Good luck!

Invasion of France updated to version 6.3.2 adding unit-location variation setting and fixes the zone-of-control issue.

Barbarossa at 7.1.5

D-Day climbs to version 7.7.2

Axis Balkan Campaign rolls on to version 3.8

"The Mark IV could probably be described as the first main battle tank. Some 1,200 were built and they participated in every British battle on the Western Front from the early summer of 1917 until the very end of the war, plus one action in the Middle East. Apart from its mass production, the Mark IV was also the first tank to be built based upon experience with earlier tanks and the first to be used en masse in combat, in a battle actually planned around the tank. Even so, it could have been a far better machine had it not been for a serious clash of personalities. The Mark IV was based, mechanically, on the prototype tank Mother, which in an ideal world should have been improved upon by 1917.Everyone agreed that the four- man driving system, introduced with Mother in 1915, was tiresome and inefficient, but what to do about it? Lieutenant Walter Wilson knew the answer, but Major Albert Stern, head of the Mechanical Warfare Department, overruled him. Lacking technical acumen, and unable to see the brilliant simplicity of Wilson's scheme, Stern ordered this first production tank to use the same system as Mother, while experiments were carried out to find the most effective form of transmission. The matter was decided in favour of Wilson's design in competitive trials at Oldbury in March 1917, but that was too late to influence the Mark IV. Stern had managed to delay the improvement of British tanks by a good 18 months."
-- British Battle Tanks World War I to 1939 by David Fletcher

Finnish Defense at version 4.6

Iwo Jima steps ashore at version 6.5.4

Juno-Sword lands at version 2.4

Brits at 2nd El Alamein at version 3.4

Spanish Civil War (nat) marches to version 4.0

Black forest theme?

Fall of German Army Group Center at version 3.0

German Invasion of Poland rolls on to version 5.6

Feedback: How to get it? (free post at Patreon)
-- It gives me such grief when I realize that a serious bug has existed for weeks without anybody letting me know about it.... Getting only polite yet all the critical feedback is such an impossible choice: I want to receive as much info as possible (anonymous feedback), but I also want to maintain my sanity (email). I do not want to outsource handling of feedback because many gold nuggets can only be read from between the lines with actual experience of how the system works....

Demyansk Pocket updated to version 6.8.4

Union patched to 1.8.6.2

Fall of Normandy to version 6.4.2.1

Eastern Front patched to version 7.5.4

Book excerpt:
"In 1940, Roosevelt had used authority granted to him by Congress to prohibit the export of aviation fuel and some other petroleum products and scrap steel and certain kinds of iron to Japan. In July 1941, Roosevelt, reacting to the Japanese occupation of French Indochina, had ramped up economic sanctions on the Japanese. On July 26, Roosevelt ordered Japanese assets in the US to be frozen. Britain and Dutch East Indies followed suit. These moves cut Japan off from from 90% of its oil imports. Japanese planners estimated oil reserves would last 3 years at peacetime consumption levels and half that time at wartime consumption levels. For Japan, the conquest of the British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia as well as the Philippines took on a new urgency... Without a doubt, Japanese strategy in 1941 and 1942 was audacious in planning and execution. But, what if Japan had been even more audacious? What if it had seized a chance to dominate the Western Pacific, but the Eastern Pacific as well? What if it took a chance on seizing complete mastery of the entire Pacific Rim by invading the US? It is intriguing, therefore, to think what might have happened had Yamamoto been able to overcome the dysfunctional relationship between Japan's generals and admirals--and persuade Tojo to truncate the Southeast Asian operation and, along with the strike against Pearl Harbor, launch a full-blown assault on the Pacific Coast... As we know from historic hindsight, this Allied naval strength in Southeast Asia was erased in a series of battles in January and February 1942. After the success at Pearl Harbor, the striking power of the American navy was limited to 3 aircraft carriers. Thus, the naval dominance that would have allowed Japan an immense freedom of action across the Pacific would have been in place. If parts of the massive Southeast Asian offensive had been delayed or postponed, some of these troops (probably most of them) and the supplies that supported them and ships that moved them could have been used for operations in North America.
-- Panic on the Pacific, How America Prepared for a West Coast Invasion by Bill Yenne

Third Battle of Kharkov updated to version 4.2, let's see if this goes through the Play Store review in under 700 years.

Well, I'm regularly pushing out updates to the new game on Amazon while impatiently waiting for the Google Play Store to one day get through their first review process. Google's slowness is made so much more irksome by the fact that Google is very happy to instantly smack gigantic penalties on small businesses if their sites, replies, or apps don't react in nanoseconds. So unfair.

Why manufacture U-boats (in the new incoming game):
-- They can DIVE under the Allied fleets blocking narrow chokepoints.
-- A U-boat can escape bad situations fairly effortlessly with the dive function.
-- Since both the direction of the attacking unit and the direction of the defending unit matter, U-boats can attack from behind, and be able to cause up to 3 HP damage (thinking about making that 4 HP max damage). So 3 U-boats can basically shred a battleship in a turn with some skill and luck.
-- The US sends both liberty ship convoys (that keep up the UK's fighting ability, see UK Supply Percent) and, after the war declaration, fleets made out of tanks and men. If you manage to maneuver a few U-boats on the Atlantic with a fuel tanker, you can wreak havoc on both types of convoys. Which is much easier than trying to push back few tank units that landed in some poorly defended sector of the Atlantic wall.

Pressure is a D-Day film unlike any other before it
-- You might have heard about how the weather almost capsized the Allied invasion on D-Day . Maybe you even know that D-Day was originally planned for June 5, 1944. So what happened to change the date to June 6, 1944? It was not just a date change, it was an entire logistical campaign adjustment... just hours before June 5, an unprecedented, and nearly untraceable, storm threatened to destroy it all, and spell out certain doom for the Allies. It all came down to one man, a meteorologist with 1940s resources and a backbone of iron: Captain James Stagg.

Beta closed for Axis Europa 194x.

Rumor has it that TIK-history might be coming back from his year-long break from everything.

Baku patched to version 2.8.2 apologies for the slow reaction to the crash (one player has a unit outside the map causing issues), but I had previously failed to update one inner-project counter and as a result did not realize the issue was happening in the last version.

How Finnish soldiers fighting in Ukraine would change current military training: Everyone in 20km radius of the front line have to live underground since drones take out everything above ground, this makes gear like tents fairly pointless for the majority of troops.

Allied Invasion of Japan patched to version 4.5.1.2

Union minor patches update to version 1.8.5.2 (several updates stuck in review, once again)

Demyansk Pocket crash fix (part 2) to version 6.8.0.3

Americans from left and right unite to scream "People over profits" to fleeing politicians trying to defend data center
-- Residents packed the meeting venue in Tremonton carrying signs reading "NO data center," "You can't drink data," and "Save our water." Frustrated residents repeatedly interrupted the meeting with chants like "People over profits!" and "We want water!" Tensions escalated so much that county commissioners escaped and continued the meeting virtually while protesters shouted "Shame!" after them.

Nvidia exec says AI is more expensive than actual workers
-- Math pins cost of AI at $28,000.00 per person per month, which is more than each person's monthly wages. Jokes abound right now that "companies have discovered jobs again," and the humor is backed up by a 2024 MIT study stating that 77% of the time, it was preferable to have humans do the work.

$77 million tax break, one new permanent job: JPMorgan data center deal sparks backlash
-- Want another reason why people hate AI data centers? Other than driving up electricity prices, the pollution, noise, and space they take up. A JPMorgan data center expansion project has been approved for a $77 million tax break even though it is expected to create just a single job.

AI-driven data center boom is leading to skyrocketing energy bills for regular people
-- Americans who live near data centers are paying as much as 267% more a month for energy than five years ago, a Bloomberg's analysis determined. Georgia Power, the largest energy provider in the state, imposed 6 rate hikes in the last 3 years. During which time, the Vogtle nuclear power plant went online and Georgia saw a boom in data centers.

History links post at Patreon
-- Including: New search engine reveals if ancestors were members of the NSDAP, US rebuilding WWII Pacific airfields amid China threat, New account reveals dramatic WW2 capture of Tiger 131 tank, SAS founder's priceless archive may never open to public, Videos: Inside the Last German Wochenschau Newsreel of WWII, U-Boat Crews Feared Being Sent Here, etc.

History tidbit: Just before WW2, oil was found in Nottinghamshire, UK. In 1943, the UK secretly brought over 40 experienced American drillers (Oklahoma Cowboys) to rapidly ramp up production. They lived in a monastery to hide their presence secret from German spies. At its peak in 1943, it produced 3,000 barrels a day.

Planned 1945 Allied Invasion of Japan lands on version 4.5

Norway at version 5.3

Camouflaged Swedish warship

Demyansk Pocket at version 6.8 adding few hills and Soviet artillery units

"The German accusation that discipline in the Spanish Blue Division was relaxed was based partly in truth. Spanish commanders did not find it easy to punish men who had volunteered and travelled halfway across Europe to the WW2 Eastern Front in order to fight communism for what appeared to be minor infractions. A good example is the case of an NCO, a master armourer in a Spanish battalion. During the winter of 1942, finding that the MG-34s were not functioning correctly, the man decided to make his own alterations to the weapons, cutting off part of the recoil spring. When the Germans of the Liaison Staff inspected the battalion's weapons they accused the NCO of sabotaging the armament and demanded that he be punished accordingly. Far from complying with the request, the Spanish decorated him for showing the initiative to make sure the weapons worked effectively."
-- Blue Division Soldier 1941-45: Spanish Volunteer on the Eastern Front by C.Caballero Jurado

Crete 1941 parachutes on version 5.4

Research: 66% of underage Australians still have access to social media despite total ban
-- Half of the children who used restricted platforms prior to the ban coming into force say it has made no change to their online safety, while one in seven say the ban has made them feel less safe. 40% of parents observed 2-4 negative impacts, including increased digital inequality, a shift to alternative or less regulated platforms and a reduction in social connection.

Ardennes Offensive advances to version 5.8

History of WWII Podcast Top 5 Technologies of WWII
-- Hosts of The Warrior Next Door Podcast, Ryan Fairfield and Tony Lupo, join WWII Podcast as we discuss the Top 5 technological improvements or discoveries of WWII.

Tinian: Seizing the Runways 1944 at version 1.8

Amazon is cutting old Kindles off from the Kindle Store (For the first time ever)
-- Starting on May 20 old devices can no longer be able to buy or download books from the Kindle Store. The change affects all Kindles introduced and sold in 2012 or earlier, going all the way back to the original Kindle from 2007. Amazon's suggested fix is to buy a new e-reader. The company is offering US users of older Kindles a 20% discount on a new Kindle and a $20 e-book credit for people who upgrade their Kindles before June 20.

Initially there were only semi-formal WW2 book drives by American Library Association etc groups, but over time The U.S. Council on Books in Wartime ended up distributing over 100,000,000 copies of more than a thousand slim editions (Armed Services Editions) to armed forces overseas. These would get passed around until they were illegible. And their adoption transformed the publishing industry, elevating paperbacks from second-class printings to patriot volumes.

Tarawa Atoll at version 2.8

Guam lands on version 2.8

Panzer Missions at version 6.6

Battle of Berlin 1945 at version 5.7

"In a sense, I started writing this book on. April 27, 1945, when, as a war correspondent for the Boston Traveller, I was one of the first three Americans to enter Berlin... By the morning of April 30, all that remained of German-held Berlin was a narrow corridor 8 miles long, reaching from the Alexanderplatz, a dozen long blocks east of the HQ-bunker, to the Havel River in the west. The Russians were attacking all along this corridor, from both north and south. They captured and occupied the foreign-embassy quarter and raged along the stylish Kurfiirstendamm. The Zoo Bunker continued to hold out, smashing at the Russians with its powerful 88- and 150-mm. guns; the defenders stationed in its 7 stories were protected behind walls 10 feet thick... There was no one left at the former OKW headquarters in the Bendler Strasse, no one to command, so Admiral Heinrich Stiegel, the shipbuilder turned infantry officer, went home to at 11 Dernburgerstrasse in Charlottenburg..."
-- Berlin, Story of a Battle by Andrew Tully

Battle of Moscow 1941 updated to version 6.5.0.1.

I wonder how many realize that Iran is, in many measurements, a bigger opponent for the US than WW2-era Japan or Germany.

USS New Mexico (BB 40) is hit by a kamikaze at dusk on 12 May 1945

Allied Invasion of Italy at version 6.0 --- And if I already didn't struggle with various app store rules messing up game names, I also seem to occasionally write the name of this scenario as Allied Italian Campaign to personally contribute to creating confusion.

Japan in WW2: several patches take it to version 1.3.2.2 -- I'm a little bit disheartened by how many fewer bugs that make the game play easier get reported vs issues that make game play harder. I'm very grateful for the honesty of reporting a case that will make your campaign more challenging, as that will make the Hall of Fame equal for all players.

Challenge of me (not) detailing some bugs in the Change Log: If I explain in detail how to cause the bug and it makes the game easier, then somebody can choose to not update and use the older version with the settings/etc that cause the bug and make the game play easier, ruining the Hall of Fame for the rest of us.

Utah & Omaha lands at version 2.3 adding all the latest features.

"Could the millions of Americans who had been hastily converted to soldiers stand against the German soldiers who had overrun France in one month, the men whose actions had defined for the world the meaning of the new word "blitzkrieg"? The American high command was confident that they could, but some outside observers disagreed: one of Churchill's most esteemed generals, Sir Harold Alexander, had labeled the Americans as "mentally and physically rather soft and very green."

Severe intelligence lag caused the German high command to perceive the fight for Omaha Beach much more favorably than the actual situation warranted. Consequently, Germans failed to grasp the vast scale of the invasion and the magnitude of the early penetrations of the beach defenses. No panzer division would arrive in time to seize the initiative from the Americans...

Having penetrated the beach defenses at several points, the Americans could now focus their efforts on seizing the modest Norman villages astride the coastal highway. With these villages in US hands, German counterattacks aimed at rescuing coastal strongpoints could be blocked. Then the Americans could move down the draws in reverse, surround and capture those strongpoints, and open up the coveted roads leading off the beach...

The landing now evolved into four distinct mini-battles centered upon the villages the Americans yearned to liberate...
-- Omaha Beach: D-Day, June 6, 1944 by Joseph Balkoski

E-waste from rich nations floods local markets in Nigeria
- -Nigeria has become a major destination for the developed world's discarded electronics: items often near the end of life, sometimes completely dead, and toxic because they contain hazardous materials... Toxic exposure from informal e-waste recycling poses grave health risks to communities: there are rising levels of heavy metals in soil and drainage channels... Exporting rich nations regularly take advantage of loopholes by means of labeling nonfunctional e-waste as 'second-hand goods' or 'for repair'. Research estimates that over 75% of what arrives in developing countries is truly junk.

Joys of living near the Russian border: I'm getting warnings of exceptionally poor air quality since Ukraine hit Russian harbors near Finland, and all the burning material is releasing whatever pollutants and toxins that are carried here by the prevailing wind.

Axis Crimean Campaign on to version 3.2 -- Let's make it version... 3.2.0.3

Finishing the latest round of updates on Sealion, Rommel and Afrika Korps, American Civil War: South...

These Are the Current Military Fitness Tests for 2026
-- Over the past 20 years, to say that all branches of the military have changed their fitness testing and standards is an understatement. Largely due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military recognized the need to update the decades-old fitness standards and testing methods. Here is a breakdown of the changes and where we are now for each branch of service.

Roughly half of the games have been updated in the last week or two, and the other half are a few months behind. Graphics are improving (gradient boost, better way to draw roads and railways, etc).

History links (Patreon)

War correspondent on motorcycle.

News: Google to introduce overly onerous hoops to prevent "sideloading"
-- If you download an app, you now have to wait for 24 hours before you can use it. Unless, of course, you download the app from Google's Play Store, then you get it instantly. This will effectively kill all other app stores competing with Google.

Okinawa version 5.5.1 adds ability to request battleship repairs (+1 HP) and carriers recently got a short range AA-fire ability.

Finnish spring views...

Example #987987987 of how hyper-elitist Google folks are: if I plug my internet cable into a brand new hyper-fast fiber connection that nobody uses, Google's software will still whine about "too slow connection" and crash since it won't get a huge file instantly. HOW detached are these tech bros from the real world?

A handful of the games have a 3-layered elevation difference. Drawing them decently on 22,000 devices and various display technologies and terrain/shading settings has been semi-impossible from the get-go. I'll be updating those scenarios now with several new twists. Elevation below roads will be removed; it's simply too much visual clutter on some display technologies. Adding new options to both change the intensity of the elevation icons and switch back to the older greenish hexagon-shaped graphics. The H1/H2/H3 elevation markers on units will be of a lighter background color, so they will be easier to read.

Yes, I'm aware of the jitters after first tap on sub-menu on some devices, the next round of updates will remedy that.

Fall of Normandy to version 6.4.0.1, expanding the map south/east one step as this was one of the smallest scenarios.

I guess I have to thank Google for removing almost all the ways to see videos chronologically on YouTube; that has reduced my time there almost 90%. Now it's just pushing the same 10 ancient mainstream videos over and over again, and all the smaller channels and original thinkers and regional features are nowhere to be seen unless you specifically search for their channel by precisely typing the name correctly. I get it; it's safe to hide 99% of the content and only show the most boring, lowest-common-denominator stuff so advertisers don't get riled up.

Leros parachutes onto version 1.1 adding all the latest changes and features.

Eastern Front patching the what-to-produce issue to version 7.5.3.2

Bougainville at version 1.5, one of the last scenarios to get the parent formation's numbers.

Falaise Pocket patch to version 2.6.2.1

Pz Army Afrika at version 3.2<

When one spearhead of the encirclement advances 2 hexagons but other one gets pushed back... At what point you call it quits?

Kiev version 1.6 rolling out, including all the latest from army numbers of divisions to all the airfield/airlift features.

Okinawa lands at version 5.5 with all the latest updates rolled in.

Leningrad at version 4.2.0.3, adding few hills and cavalry units

Market Garden patched to version 6.3.1 (max supply route range).

Sicily lands on version 5.4, with a settings patch.

If you're a regular reader, you know that some time ago I began tackling the excess processing during the last turns as one side runs out of supply sources, and that parsing through the dead-end supply routes can end up causing a massive amount of processing. Good news: there are now fewer issues with last turns. Bad news: I might have over-cut the max supply route length in specific situations in a couple of scenarios where the area control is not the main driving factor. Readjustments are arriving as fast as I can type.

Brits in WW1: Why don't we just tunnel under the huge German fortification and implode the whole thing? It worked great, except, well, the attackers were also kind of stuck because the crater blocked advance.

Rolling out: I'm bulletproofing keeping the icons in memory and reloading them if necessary, as Google has an annoying habit of releasing megalomaniacally huge basic apps that eat up all the resources, and then instead of optimizing their apps, Google's Android OS violently unloads in-use resources like images from other apps. Argh. Anyway, at the same time as doing this, I'm also expanding some of the icons and increasing the gradient. The end result of having several icon-related processes brewing is that I have, comically enough, managed to fail to load a couple of icons myself. And yes, I have a system to alert me about this happening, but that system is also going through changes, and it seems to struggle to react to the new stuff rolling out. Apologies, simply too many settings and changes in the fire at the same time.

Japan in WW2 holding steady at version 1.3.1

Anzio-Cassino at version 5.2. Marks the first roll-out of Airfield/Recon feature. Tap an empty player-held airfield to recon nearby area, favoring the area visible on map, so scroll a bit north of an airfield to scout northwards. Cost 1 AirLift point.

Baku at 1.8.1

Stalingrad at 5.3.1

Sea Lion at 5.1.2

Poland between Germany & USSR at version 1.7

So many smaller updates that they would clog up this log.

Since I'm rolling out dozens of wider underlying changes at the same time, a couple of games will have an empty "NEW GAME, SCENARIO SPECIFIC" sub-menu in the in-game settings view for a while. No need to get alarmed; those settings are still on the MAIN-HOF-GUIDE settings view, waiting for a transfer.

It's hard to say which is more painful: getting your teeth pulled out or trying to understand what somebody is angrily and urgently trying to explain in their bug report when English is their fourth language and even all the translator services are throwing their hands in the air as a sign of giving up trying to understand what is being said... And then after three days it finally dawns on you what the point has been, and you can rush to update the app.

Last round of working on finishing the documentation regrouping that began two years ago. Individual TERMS pages will be removed (redirect to generic terms page), and per-game CONCEPT pages will just list exceptions and unit types. In the future, scenario notes can be found under WELCOME in the app and on the coming app-specific INTRO page on the web. Since I'm reworking hundreds of pages and thousands of links, there might be some breaks here and there, especially if you're using an old version of a game. This should reduce 95% of the repetition and make keeping everything up-to-date much easier in the future.

Not every album by your favorite musician is a great one, and not every film by your favorite director is worth rewatching... But it's extra painful when a historian you have looked up to for his ability to see the core facts from all the noise finally drops a new book, and after reading the first 1/3, you realize that the entire serious premise is built on make-believe nonsense. Dangers of drifting too far away from your core expertise, I guess, or getting too old and loopy--hard to say. As I listen to a lot of history podcasts in the background, I'm disappointed how many view ChatGPT and other AI tools as "science". Like, hello, AI tools learn your point of view and adjust their output to agree to get more engagement out of you. If you feel that magical fairies built the Roman Colosseum, the AI will eventually begin to agree with you. It troubles me how many nonfiction authors are EXCITED that "the science of AI tools now proves that I'm right." Nope, AI, the greatest yes-man in history, is just agreeing with you to be pleasant. That is the opposite of science. The trouble of using AI as a research assistant is that you don't ask about things you know well; you tend to ask about topics you don't know much about, meaning you have a limited ability to know whether the information you are getting is gold or fantasy. I get it: it's great to get an answer instantly instead of first using a month to identify a top expert in a field and then spending another month to contact him/her to get a point of view. Authors need AI that is unpleasant and critical and questions the foundations of their thinking. We need a peer-review AI that shreds our work into pieces at any sign of weakness; that will make books great, not AI that agrees with us to the point of misleading us. I guess it's time to brace for a period of nonfiction books going astray.

Sometimes you try something and it fails and ends up looking like an oil spill

Union patched to version 1.8.3

After all these years, it is still mesmerizing to me that I can wake up and my brain goes: "Good morning, by the way, there is a bug in line 702,641 of the game X that will cause a crash in the future if these three conditions all happen to be true at once."

Guadalcanal steps ashore at version 4.7, and adds an ability to drop small supply depot with air strikes and starting out a change that will allow selecting the supply depot just like any other unit, moving the Split-action into the third button.

Cobra at version 1.2

American Civil War: South marches to version 7.4 -- more highlights and options for riverboats and trains. Patching the never-ending quagmire of the rare BLUE opponent color getting replaced by the game engine default RED.

Paris: Liberation cruises to version 1.3.3

Sealion at version 5.1.1

Rommel & Afrika Korps patched to 6.5.1. Sadly, there was a big mishap (when trying to prevent the last turn hang-up as AI runs out of supply sources), and the British missed several reinforcement units, so HOF will be wiped out in the future to reflect this. Stronger contender for the bug of the year :-(

Baku patched to version 1.8

Japan in WW2 marches to version 1.3.0.1 bringing out control ALL VPs to win setting, generals can loot iron-coal, new industry location in east Australia, industry can now produce Troopship resource which gives ground units +1 MP while in water, slower replacements from disband action, new MP dot options, etc.

Falaise Pocket maneuvers at version 2.6, relocating the Resource Depots a bit further away from the front line.

Eastern Front at version 7.5.2.2, adding an option to produce MOTORIZE resource (takes 9 turns), which permanently turns one infantry unit into a motorized type. I'm starting to roll out a setting to alter MP dots: draw MP dots vertically, horizontally, or horizontally for units with HPs and vertically for support units (no HPs), although the air force always stays horizontal due to the bombardment-readiness bar. Also, from now on, some of the thinnest lines will be reinforced for better visibility.

"When Fourth Panzer Army advanced into the battle of Kursk on 5 July 1943, German planners were optimistic that they would succeed in cracking the first two Soviet defensive lines in short order... Most divisions had been assigned Psel River bridges 45 kilometers distant as their first-day objectives. Based on the experiences of 1939-1942 these expectations did not appear to be excessive... To suggest that the day turned out far differently than Erich von Manstein, Hermann Hoth, or Werner Kempf planned does not begin to capture the shock that permeated command posts from colonels leading the assault regiments all the way up to the HQ of Army Group South. The deepest penetration scored by XLVIII Panzer Corps was a 5-kilometer advance by 3rd Panzer Division... Grossdeutschland's main-effort attack stalled in embarrassing fashion ... the attack in front of 6th Panzer Division made so little headway that the division could not be committed. Almost universally overlooked aspect of Hoth's attack plan was the complete absence of tactical reserves... placing all of the panzer divisions in the front line on Day One placed Hoth in a long-term operational straight-jacket from which he never escaped."
-- Kursk: The German View (Eyewitness Reports of Operation Citadel by the German Commanders) by Steven H. Newton

If you have experienced trouble with the BACK key/gesture, please try out the latest version of Saipan (v3904), Barbarossa (v7104), or Invasion of France (v6302) for a possible fix.

There is a strange phenomenon in the Amazon App Store that I have run into twice or thrice: I update an app, the status says everything went fine and the process is finalized, and the updates are submitted. Then, 2 months later, when I go to submit the next update for that app, I notice that the previous update is nowhere to be found. This seems to happen when I'm in a hurry, so it's almost like there are still some processes ongoing under the hood when I get the "DONE" screen, and I should wait for some more instead of closing the browser. Anywho, my point is, if you notice that I listed an app update and you see nothing on Amazon after few days, maybe nudge me about it. It's disheartening if it was an update that fixed something and was never delivered.

Still working on the issues currently messing the games up on some devices. It does not help that everything works superbly on every device I have or can borrow, so it's a bit blind-folded fix, I'm afraid.

Paris rolls on to the version 1.3.2 (now already to 1.3.2.2)

Weekly history links (Patreon)
-- Including stuff like scientific analysis indicates Vikings in Greenland received wood from North America for centuries, how Abwehr was filled with double spies, International Olympic Committee somehow got itself in a WW2 controversy, and how CIA/MI6 found out about the invasion of Ukraine and why nobody believed them...

Since nobody likes instant magical troop transfer across the game board, a new change will start to roll out, making it so that disbanding a unit MIGHT give you one replacement (+1 HP) now, and the rest will be available in the coming turns.

When I began studying tech, I quickly realized that either I was interested in the topic and knew more about it than the teacher, or I had zero interest in the class and I walked out, because why waste your one life in meaningless stuff? After a few weeks, I was, unsurprisingly, summoned in front of the head of the entire tech department. Instead of kicking me out, he recognized the talent and put me into a special group for students who had studied hard for 5 years and had excelled. Except, you know, I was in the group after zero years of studying -- happily writing real-world software for government and big local firms. Yes, I was an impossible pupil to have; apologies to all my teachers: how do you even grade a student who rarely pops in for a minute to half-ass some silly school task because he works on serious real-life projects already as his very first initial step in the field? I have always believed in the principle of the cumulative 1% improvement. If you simply get a mere 1% better cumulatively each day for a year, you'll end up (1.0.1^365) being almost 38X better or more knowledgeable in just one short year. You can outwork and outknow people at the 10X or 100X level if you are relentlessly steady as heck in a multi-year arc.

Okay, it's official, I'm collapsing under the load of trying to maintain almost 70 projects and meet the 9843577489 useless-for-everybody industry doohickeys Google keeps flooding out and forcing every last app to work in every hyper-rare $3,000 prototype device. As per industry standard, usually this amount of code is handled by 2,000 engineers, so at this point I'm a cartoon rabbit comically bouncing around, breaking at the seams as I break the laws of time and space trying to get to 19 places in one go, and lacking time to do anything properly, which just compounds the need to react in even more dimensions. Mood: moby: extreme ways live

Dieppe at version 2.2

Leyte at version 4.2

Union patched to 1.8.2 (patched to 1.8.2.1)

A flurry of immersive mode patches. Might be the fourth time I say this, but... knocking on wood... maybe the underlying system is now finally handling all the modern display contraptions properly. You can basically throw the game on any-sized window, and everything should behave and scale well.

Iwo Jima patched to 6.5.0.2 fixing immersive mode issues (once again), plus adding dotted circle to highlight discovered caves.

Stalingrad tries to hold out at version 5.3.0.1 (make it 5.3.0.3), adding Italians as their own replacement type (so more replacements), plus a bit more panzer replacements.

Luzon at version 2.8

Sealion patched to version 5.1.0.3 -- bringing on the new settings system, plus trying to prevent issues when loading old saved games.

Peleliu at version 3.3

Saipan patched to 3.9.0.2

Iwo Jima wades ashore at version 6.5. Trying a new way to draw the three higher layers of altitude. If there are no protests, I'll be using this system in all the scenarios that include several layers of elevation.

From book: Tank Warfare on Iwo Jima by by David E. Harper

Here is a service I need: some way to create simple topography maps with basically two steps/settings: select area and choose into how many layers the topography data is split into.

France 1940 at version 6.3, adding settings to force British scrape more divisions to France and turn off WSS units (few and arrive later).

Market Garden lands on version 6.3

Operation Barbarossa at version 7.1.0.1

Revolutionary War patching to 6.3.5.1

Luttich at version 2.6.0.1 - trying to figure out a bug.

Bulge holding at version 6.6.7

Sealion crash patch to 5.1.0.1

Google: If your apps don't have one unified look to build trust, we will heavily penalize you!!! Also, Google: If your apps look like each other at all, we will heavily penalize you!!! Yeah, case number 9879987987987 of Google policies violently clashing with each other. Killing everyone caught in the crossfire of insanity and impossible requirements. Also, Google, cluelessly: Why are all the developers abandoning zero-support Android platform and going iOS only?

Saipan at version 3.9 (let's make it 3.9.0.1) - I would greatly appreciate it if you could play a few turns. I just could not resist starting another fundamental-level rework, and I would much rather hear of any issues now than after rolling out the update to 10 games.

"Despite the chaos, Lieutenant General Thomas E. Watson, commander of the 2nd Marines, came ashore and set up a command post in a captured ammunition dump. Not to be outdone, Lieutenant General Harry Schmidt, head of the 4th Division, also established a command post ashore, despite the fact that the division had given up part of the ridgeline in its area and fallen back to safer quarters to prevent a possible counterattack in the dark. Sure enough, at 0330 a tank-led major Japanese attack hit the 6th Marines, overrunning a 60-millimeter mortar position. But as the tanks passed, they were struck in the rear by mortars, bazookas, machine guns, and grenades. A pair of young Marines, Privates First Class Charles D. Merritt and Herbert J. Hodges, fired repeatedly with bazookas at 7 tanks, disabling them all."
-- The Backs Against the Sea, The Battle of Saipan and the Largest Banzai Attack of WWII by Bill Sloan

Balkan Campaign at version 3.6.0.1

Luttich reaches version 2.6, this will remain one of the few newer games without player-side airfields due to the scale of the map and the total Allied aerial superiority.

I was reading a WW2 book and found a solid OOB for a particularly messy front line. So, I stopped reading and slowly but happily updated the OOB for one game. I purred like a kitten. Then I continued to read, very pleased with myself, and KABOOM! Two pages later, the author explained that Germans reshuffled their entire OOB a week later, and here is the different one! Nooo! That is actually closer to the date I need. LOL. F Me. Talk about working hard to mess things up. Then it took me triple the time to update to the OOB the second time and then double-check that I didn't shuffle too many things incorrectly with the first OOB update. Tip for any history writers: If you write an OOB, but it gets superseded soon, WARN the reader that this OOB will be obsolete instantly.

Rommel & Afrika Korpsat version 6.5

WW1: West updated to version 6.4.2.1 (patch)

As a person who strives to improve each year, nothing is quite so humbling as running into a code I wrote almost 20 years ago.

Union (American Civil War) patched to veresion 1.8.0.1

I'm unifying the resource listing methods, that have gotten a bit wild over the decades as most games have gathered exceptions. So, if you notice resources suddenly not showing in the listings, definitely drop me a message.

Case Blue at 3.3

Paris: Liberation at version 1.3 minor tweaks to OOB and terrain.

Logo colors: I'll start a redesign so that WW2 eastern front games will be red, pacific (light)blue, northern Europe will be green, southern Europe/North Africa will be yellow, Allied Western Europe (darker) blue, etc.

American Revolutionary Warmarches into version 6.3.5, smoother assining of the rarer resources to a stack

Juno & Sword comes ashore at version 2.3, adding the minor hills in the south-west corner of the map. I have also updated from the old road-network code to a newer one, so let me know if roads misbehave.

Sealion sails to version 5.1 adding faster destroyers and supply ships, air strikes can drop small supply depots on own area, and the airfield system switches to the standard model used in the series.

Eastern Front crash fix to version 7.5.0.1

Kursk at version 7.6

No, I do not know how Jazzbo gets his scores, which in some cases are dozens of turns faster than anybody else. Either he has figured out a cheat none of us can think of (super concentration of generals for rapid movement, distracting AI by sacrificing support units, etc.), or he uses an Android system tool that allows him to create a checkpoint/restore before every battle so he can attempt each battle repeatedly until he wins all but the most hopeless face-offs. If you look at some of his turn counts, they would seem to match playing the game without losing too many times. However, some players have showed me their combat stats, and they truly maneuver in a way, that they very rarely lost battles, because there is always enough support from adjacent troops, generals, terrain, and resources. Sadly, there isn't an easy and tolerable fix for either case. Penalizing players for being smart and winning most of the time is outright silly. And any real way to block use of system-level tools would consist of absolutely requiring an internet connection (this would screw anyone with poor/unstable connection) and storing a wide array of pre-combat check values to the server and then seeing if the same exact battle repeats before allowing any combat to occur (big slowdown). That's a heavy-duty process to block only a few overly quick scores. In addition, I'm reluctant to go down the rabbit hole of starting to manually ban scores, as that is a never-ending slippery slope.

Eastern Front at version 7.5, reordered the OOB to be more historically accurate (but there still is variation) with the addition of the setting to show the unit's parent army number.

The Hall of Fame will show a bigger alarm text if the version you're using is significantly out of date.

Patriotic War at version 2.3.5, only on the Amazon App Store, thanks to random flippant removals by the Play Store. Oh, you used the word "and" - YOU'RE OUT FOR LIFE, MATE! The unfairness makes me scream every time I even vaguely think about it. Imagine you work for a year on a project, and then some random outsourced kid with zero context or cultural consideration zeroes your income for that year, and the appeal system does not work at all. Would you be angry for a lifetime or two?

On the plus side, I haven't seen crashes in the logs in a few days, other than those I have caused myself with testing. So maybe the series is starting to be over the worst hiccups from all the fundamental-level changes that have been rolling out for the last 15 months. Knocking on anything wood-appearing.

In case you're wondering what's going on with the age restriction laws and their implementation. The first US state law that was supposed to kick in in January 2026 was blocked at the federal level at the last second, after the big tech lobbying got in full gear. So, many companies and developers did a ton of frantic work for nothing. There are other laws in other US states supposed to go into effect in May and July, so we'll see how they will play out. Nobody denies that some restrictions would be good, but the solution needs to be reasonable and at the OS level (and big tech obviously do not want that burden on themselves), and smaller actors can't be expected to meet the separate, wildly varying laws of 600 countries, states, and regions.

Sunbathing at -24--C (-11--F). I don't mind the cold, but the lack of colors sometimes gets to me; it's like being locked in a sensory deprivation tank.

Defending Spanish Republic lands on version 1.7. Starting to roll out: Setting: Filter out consecutive duplicate player entries from the high score list in the Hall of Fame

Weekly History links that I ran into, including article on "How a Royal Navy admiral was forced to sacrifice 900 drowning men to save the Norwegian royal family"

Korean War updates to version 4.2, including one crash fix (Amazon App Store only).

Finnish Defense holds at version 4.4. Setting: Allow Finnish regiments to withdraw more during the first 20 turns of the Red Army onslaught (alternative strategy). Campaign: Added few Finnish regiments operating in the northeast corner of the map late in the scenario, reduced the initial chance of unit scattering, a bit less Soviet replacements and strafing.

Brits at Alamein at version 3.2

Operation Spring Awakening at version 3.1

[After the fall of German Army Group Center] ... "Model--s counterattack in front of Warsaw has barely entered the historic consciousness, and even the most diehard WW2 aficionado might be hard-pressed to identify it. Nevertheless, the victory was crucial on many levels. Model had saved the integrity of the German line of communications, averting what looked like an inevitable logistical catastrophe. He had saved Army Group North Ukraine from almost certain destruction, and that, too, seemed impossible just a few weeks ago. He had brought Army Group Center back to life. It is no exaggeration to say that he saved the Eastern Front... Model--s successes even emboldened the High Command, especially the new Chief of the General Staff, Guderian, to launch Army Group Center into a counterattack... The main blow on August 16 by the two Panzer corps misfired, foundering on lack of surprise, Soviet numbers, and the significant antitank defenses that the Red Army had already rushed into the gap between the two German army groups. But a thrust by General Hyazinth Graf von Strachwitz (also known as Armored Count) along the coast toward Tukums on August 20 (with just 60 tanks in all) apparently took the Soviets in this sector completely by surprise. The Armored Count was a supremely confident commander whom Guderian once labeled --the last cavalryman in the world,-- a man of --completely unorthodox tactics, always with new ideas, each crazier than the last.-- Strachwitz had once told a subordinate, --If I say that an antitank ditch doesn--t exist for me, then it doesn--t for you either.--
-- The Wehrmacht's Last Stand, German Campaigns of 1944-1945 by Robert M Citino

Baku rolls on to the version 1.7

Spanish Civil War (Nat-side) steps into version 3.7

Article: AI-induced cultural stagnation is no longer speculation
-- Regardless of how diverse the starting prompts were, and regardless of how much randomness the systems were allowed, the outputs quickly converged onto a narrow set of generic, familiar visual themes... The new study shows something fundamental: Homogenization happens before retraining even enters the picture. The content that generative AI systems naturally produce is already compressed and generic... The risk is not only that future models might train on AI-generated content, but that AI-mediated culture is already being filtered in ways that favor the familiar, the describable and the conventional.

Fall of Army Group Center defense at version 2.9

Sicily at version 5.3, which switches this scenario away from the special airfields that provided aerial strikes to regular airfields that can be used by air force units, generals, or low HP units to evacuate. Aerial strikes will from now on arrive automatically.

Battle of Suomussalmi at version 4.5.0.1

Invasion of Poland rolls on to version 6.4

Japan in WW2 patched to version 1.2.4.4

Third Battle of Kharkov fighting at version 4.1

If you want to feel frustrated, might I recommend researching German OOBs when their front line collapses? 2/3 of the structure is just a temporary kampfgruppe this or that, and sometimes a group is 40 soldiers and sometimes 40,000. And occasionally, a group has 5 divisions: of which one scattered three months earlier, one is entirely in the wrong place for the group, one has been designed for every corps and army in the nearby area, one is tied down in combat, and half of the sources claim the fifth division is 2,500 km away. And obviously most of these can be eventually solved with enough time, but is it really smart to use weeks solving every dusty unit?

Axis Crimean Campaign at version 3.1

Guadalcanal sails to version 4.6 adding two Marine Raider battalions into the OOB.

Over 4400 old films freely available at WikiFlix

Ships operating in the eastern part of Finland's seas began a switch away from GPS to hybrid navigation since GPS is regularly so thoroughly attacked and obstructed.

Panzers to Leningrad at version 4.1, OOB refinements.

Allied Invasion of Japan comes ashore at version 4.4

Tinian: Seizing the Runways at version 1.7.

Cobra: US Breakthrough Strike updated to version 1.1. NOTE: Oops: New way to draw tactical routes seem to be faint on some devices if cliffs are OFF, fix coming with 1.1.0.1. The Hall of Fame cleared of the oldest scores. I'll be switching to marking tactical routes with yellow-green arrows instead of yellow-yellow-green arrow between hexagons.

PSA: If you're recommending this game series to somebody, Cobra is an entirely free scenario without ads, in-app purchases, or turn limits to do a proper test run via app stores.

I would love to standardize things for easier maintenance and a coherent game-series style, but Google's mindless AI bots heavily penalize for stating the same text twice in two different apps, so that's not possible. I miss common sense and human thought; I miss them so much. Every day I'm forced to wake up to make things more random and chaotic just to avoid false bot hits.

Japan in WW2 double patch to version 1.2.4.3. Refining the selection edge cases after introducing the try-to-favor-carriers-in-stacks change. And congratulations to whoever managed to crash it, that particular piece of code has been around for 8 years in every single game and has never crashed before. So, well done, I guess.

WW1 West patched to version 6.4.1.1 -- Hurrah! I finally nailed down that pesky bug that popped up highly irregularly and somehow mysteriously caused crash logs that pointed to 30 different things.

Japan in WW2 patched to 1.2.4.1 fixing the Carrier stack selection issue if other unit types than carriers/planes are present at the hexagon. While waiting for this, you can either keep carrier/plane stacks free of other units types, or flip ON the LIST UNITS HERE option from SETTINGS / UNIT SELECTION and its the first listing under unit-selection header.

"The origins of the word blitzkrieg are as debatable as the concept itself. Germany never adopted it as a term to describe lightning-like campaigns until the British press first mentioned it in a Time magazine article on 25 September 1939 that described the fall of Poland. In German literature of the interwar period, the word Blitzkrieg first appeared during 1935 in a military service journal, Deutsche Wehr. In 1938, Oberstleutnant Braun titled an article --Blitzkrieg,-- and discussed the concept of Stosstruppen, or a combined arms unit, capable of tactical shock. The term did not become part of the regular German vocabulary until the Time article appeared. Subsequently, Germany used the term as a propaganda tool until the stalled Russian campaign in 1941...

During the summer of 1932, the German military conducted a F--nkubung, a technical exercise centered on radio communications, command and control with operational significance. This exercise encompassed 2,500 soldiers, 450 vehicles, and 100 radios. The most important conclusion was reported by General von Bonin, inspector of signal troops, who realized that not all messages were equally important. His recommendation was to keep radio conversations to a minimum: --There was no time in a rapidly changing situation for long winded reports or detailed orders. The new form of warfare would require decisions on the part of all ranks.--

Arguably the most significant achievement of the1920s-1930s maneuvers and exercises was the evolution of the panzer division, which became the cornerstone of blitzkrieg. This was no small organizational feat, considering that the German army at the beginning of its transformation was the least mechanized of all major armies."
-- Operational Art of Blitzkrieg: Its Strengths and Weaknesses in Systems Perspective

Weekly History Links (Patreon)

Demyansk Pocket at version 6.7.2

Japan in WW2 sails to version 1.2.4 -- wrestling with the AI handling of carriers/dive-bombers, fixing few and trying to choose the carrier first in carrier/plane-only stacks.

PRICING DROP!

The latest game, Leros: Last German Para Drop, is now priced at the same level as the other games.

Norway at version 5.2.0.1

Crete lands on version 5.3

New typo unlocked: I'm increasingly writing "Crete" as "Create", which doesn't even always trigger spell-checker.

It continues to flabbergast me how many people are still using versions that were pushed out three or more years ago. And then I have to explain to them that the Hall of Fame is working perfectly, but your scores were made with such a massively out-of-date version that those scores won't be shown since they are not in any way comparable to the recent scores. There have been like 20 noteworthy updates, all free, and if you enable automatic updates, you don't even ever need to do anything.

WW1 West at version 6.4.1, continuing the refinements to make the initial German swing more historically accurate.

Tarawa wades ashore at version 2.7. Renaming the game to Tarawa: Assault on the Atoll 1943, although obviously can't use numbers in the names on the Play Store.

Ardennes Offensive hurries to version 5.7.2 and adds a new setting to alter how unit stacks are handled. Selecting a unit from a stack of units: Either show a list of units at the selected hexagon or continue to tap the same hexagon to cycle through all the units at the selected location one by one (tap 1: first unit selected, tap 2: first unit deselected, tap 3: second unit selected, tap 4: second unit deselected, etc.) until all units at the target hexagon have been selected once, then starting the loop again.

YouTube just removed the option to filter videos by date, so farewell to reliably seeing what's new by keyword/topic. From now on, you only see what the algorithms are paid to show you. Don't you miss the days when tech got better?

Allied Italian Campaign to version 5.8 adding for the first time a feature to airlift zero or one HP unit via airfields.

Google removes some of its AI summaries after users-- health put at risk
-- Some of the summaries served up inaccurate health information, putting users at risk of harm. In one case that experts described as --dangerous--, Google provided bogus information about crucial liver function tests that could leave people with serious liver disease wrongly thinking they were healthy.

D-Day at version 7.6.6. Expanded map southwards 2 hexagons: added 2 small towns on the southern edge and tweaked southern road network. Fixed conflicting fail-saves relocating units to wrong landing beach.

Weekly History links (Patreon) covers everything from the first-ever boar's head flag standard found in Britain and the German WW2 film rising on charts to the oldest US Marine and how the US purchased the Danish West Indies in 1917 (history might not repeat, but it does rhyme).

US Retakes Guam patched to version 2.7.7

Panzer Missions at version 6.5.2, a minor Hall of Fame update.

Berlin 1945 at version 5.6, giving some TLC to the ancient game by adding locomotives and railways.

I'm shuffling some settings around because one of the setting listings is getting too big.

Battle of Moscow updated to version 6.4 adding the army numbers to divisions (setting).

Fall of Normandy steps into version 6.3.5.1 (+ later patch) adding the latest "uphill" features and settings.

Players stating "just follow the OOB" have obviously never been involved in military action in the real world or done a deeper research. Just because the HQ 1000 km away in the comfy sofas grandiosely planned a division to be somewhere at a given time is meaningless, since in the real world: One regiment might still be at the barracks, one in transit, and one actually on the front; the divisional artillery might be assigned to the focus point, and divisional HQ is stuck at the railway junction, when the operation starts. Where do you put that division? Do you just triangulate an average coordinate, or? Wikipedia stating that a division is somewhere is a fairly meaningless data point.

Post episode: The Rise, Fall and Rise of the Taliban
-- The BBC's Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet, who was actually in the country, followed the events in Afghanistan for decades and explains the rise of the movement from the chaos of the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, through their brutal rule in the 1990s, the impact of American and British intervention and explains how the movement returned to Kabul in 2021.

Utah-Omaha lands on version 2.2.0.1 adding a setting to show unit's parent/assigned division number as a marker on the unit (new games only). Version 2.2.0.3 fixes the river issue.

Bougainville at version 1.4

Bulletproofing the game over dialog flow with more failsafes, for example, if the player ends up tapping a black screen, it will try to re-trigger and/or resume the process.

When I did the final research for the Leros game, the low number of books and other sources about the campaign tempted me to see what the top 5 chat AIs could tell me about the battle. It was horrible. Since there is an almost non-existent amount of English material about the event, all the AIs simply began making up units, ships, commanders, and what happened on the battlefield. Had I not done so much research into the campaign over the years, I would have been fooled into thinking I'm getting solid information, not wild AI hallucinations. Sure, the AIs might be useful if there are ten thousand English books written about the popular topic you're asking about, but dear lord, they are outright harmful if you ask about a topic outside the mainstream English-speaking world. The problem is, people are publishing books, articles, and blogs based on these AI fantasies, and then future AIs are trained on those fantastical made-up facts, and a loop of ever-strengthening trash information is ready. Since the current AIs simply guess the next syllable, it creates a fundamental flaw that they do not know that they don't know something, since they always have plenty of data about the next syllable guess. We humans still have the ability to say, "I don't know." There are a million topics in the world; if you work crazy hard, you can master maybe 3 topics. There is no shame in stating you don't know.

Patreon: Should zero HP combat units be able to airlift to safety via airfields?

Pz Army Africa at Alamein at version 3.1.5

Rommel's operations chief, Friedrich Wilhelm von Mellenthin:
"In the end Rommel accepted Kesselring--s assurance that he could fly in 90,000 gallons of gasoline a day, and we relied on a large tanker due in Tobruk at the end of August. Kesselring did in fact fulfil his promise but most of the gasoline was consumed on the long journey to the front--"
-- El Alamein, The Battle That Turned the Tide of the Second World War by Bryn Hammond

Leros parachutes on version 1.0.1.2 bringing fixes (some disband actions generated wrong replacements) and clarifications (Stuka Strike can also drop few supplies).

Anzio-Cassino climbs to version 5.1.5, adding a confirmation dialog when attacking uphill (on/off setting is available, naturally).

Kiev advances to version 1.5.5

Patreon: Weekly History Links
-- Covering everything from German Space Shuttle and Mafia Boss helping the Allies, to fuel canisters of different WWII sides and when Me-163s fought P-51s en masse

I would have dozens more games out by now if I didn't need to spend months on utterly Kafka-like back-and-forth with Google about official certificates. It's currently month 3 of me, every morning, waking up to Google rejecting my official Finnish government tax residency certificate, then Google admitting it is the proper, correct certificate, and asking me to resubmit the very same certificate. And every single morning I spend hours explaining this very same issue to the various levels of Google Help support case expert specialists, and when they finally realize what's going on, they advise me to resubmit the same exact certificate. Every morning, every day, every week, every month, month after month. HOW can Google still exist as a company if they can't handle even the tiniest bit of data entry? HOWWWWWW? The same certificate has been scrutinized and approved by every last tech company on the planet, except Google. This is why most Android apps are abandoned and developers either leave tech or go Apple-only or just simply commit su***de because nobody's mental health can take this level of absurd abuse, going through the same legal requirement 98759847987987 times each month and failing every time. This is soul-destroying nonsense torture that never ends; it just keeps on going minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. My email is running out of capacity to hold all the support case threads I have had in the past years about this one single issue. Oh wait a second: But have I tried re-submitting the same exact certificate for the 96879878967986798679th time? Oh wait, should I re-submit the same exact certificate? What if I re-submit the same certificate? At what stage do I just buy apple gear and abandon Android. Google is un-liveable tech. I outright refuse to waste my only life on this never-ending never-changing loop.

Okinawa to version 5.4.2

Happy New Year and easy Victories for the 2026!

American Civil War: South updated to 7.3.4 adding a grey-yellow-green arrow over the unit if it facing an uphill penalty for attacking another unit (similar line that is drawn over units in case of a river or cliff).

A good video summary of the ad avalanche (from ads on fridges to AI adding ads to flat surfaces on old films): The ad invasion is about to get a lot worse

A judge strips a Stanford professor of his "expert" status after he used fake AI hallucinations in his expert declaration during a court case. As an ultimate irony, this particular professor is a credentialed expert on the dangers of AI and misinformation. source

Student demands tuition fee refund after spotting AI hallucinations like extra limbs in professor--s notes instead of the expected premium education. source

Two federal judges apologize for issuing opinions with obvious made-up AI hallucinations. source

Following history-related keywords on YouTube used to be easy; every once in a while a new long-format video about keyword X would be available, and you could take a peek at it for a few minutes to see if it was worth watching. NOW, that's a semi-hopendertaking. Try sorting new long videos by release date, and you will get hundreds of zero-view, automatically written, filled with fake and real pics, "footage" that makes up these "documentaries." There are so many new WW2 videos flooding in every day, by the hour at this point, that we would need to hire a person to curate that nonstop stream as his full-time job to get anything of value out of it. I feel bad for any history buff trying to get his new human-content channel discovered in the middle of that tsunami. And since algorithms mostly promote the popular content, well, any newcomer is screwed unless he plans to throw a fortune into ads to promote his casual, relaxing passion-hobby. Let's project a decade forward: most real, human-made, popular channels likely quit after getting a burnout or mining their niche empty. To what new channels do we switch to watching if the entry has been semi-impossible for a decade? When the discovery of websites collapsed, they had to convert into pleasing the search index bots to be discovered, ruining the sites for us humans and killing most of the (text/blog) Internet in the process. How are we not facing the same with long-term video that is also squeezed by platforms offering shorter videos? AI is useless as it is already favoring products/sites/etc that pay for promotion in its answers. Like in the case of the websites and search, AI will be targeted and bought until it is just as unreliable as modern search and websites. If you think finding new human-made content is hard now, envision the situation in the future. Human curation will be a superpower. If you are passionate about a topic and have an extra hour each day, maybe you could curate a list of good human content about your passion. Slowly but surely you would gain a loyal following. And if after a few years you have just 15,000 fans, out of which 1,500 would donate a dollar each, well, you can modestly live in a low-cost country with 1,500 per month. And if not, well, at least in this worst case you spent time doing what you're passionate about and made the world a better place by helping with discovery.

Axis Endgame in Tunisia at version 2.1.2

Poland between Germany & USSR updated to version 1.6.4

Age verification saga continues: Well, after countless hours across the planet went into preparing for the age check law in Texas to kick in in January, that law has now faced a federal preliminary injunction as per the First Amendment.

Merry Xmas!

Dieppe at version 2.1.4 --- this moves to a newer underlying version of Java programming language that should be fully backwards compatible... but if you're playing on a really old device and see any strangeness on updates from now on, let me know.

Leros update to version 1.0.0.3 as one HOF setting handling ancient scores was incorrect system-default and in the worst possible combination of events it might have filtered out local scores. In addition, the supply ship reward from seizing major coastal cities should now in most cases emerge closer to the city.

Luzon slides to version 2.7.4.

Patreon: Weekly History links including one of the last Pearl Harbor survivors passing away, several links about Japan's WW2 misbehavior, and how Egyptians began looting the tombs of pharaohs themselves pretty much from the get-go.

Leyte gets to version 4.1.4.

Leros : It had been the intention of Generalleutnant M--ller to land each group simultaneously and to seize control of central Leros before defending forces could recover from their initial surprise. Instead, only part of the invasion force had been put ashore and not necessarily at the designated points. Until he was sure of the situation, M--ller would not risk deploying paratroopers. Therefore (airborne) Kampfgruppe K--hne was en route from mainland Greece when the drop was aborted. No sooner had the Ju 52 transports returned to Greece, however, than they were ordered to take off again and return to Leros... At 1430hrs, an air armada began its approach from the west at wave-top height: three dozen transports in line ahead escorted by Arado floatplanes, Ju 87s and Ju 88s. A number of low-flying aircraft appeared over central Leros to strafe and scatter anti-personnel bombs. The slower transports followed. As parachutes descended south of their position, British forces atop Clidi opened fire with everything they had...
-- Kos and Leros 1943 by Anthony Rogers

Peleliu at version 3.2.4 fixing the stuck Waypoint setting and adding all the latest features on the roll-out list.

NEW GAME: LEROS: LAST GERMAN PARACHUTE DROP

German commandos and their last airborne formations fight British--Italian forces and Allied elites like LRDG, SBS, and MAS for a key island port.

After the Italians flipped sides in late 1943, the British rushed everyone from regular troops to their most experienced special forces (the Long Range Desert Group and the SAS/Special Boat Service) to the island of Leros to secure its key deep-water port and huge Italian naval and aerial facilities. This British move threatened both the oilfields of Romania and tempted Turkey to join the war.

Germans had to seize control of this key stronghold, now held by both the Brits and the Italian garrison, and launched Operation Leopard. The only chance for victory was to audaciously parachute in the last battle-hardened Fallschirmj--ger (German airborne troops) in the middle of the narrowest spot of the island while also carrying out several amphibious landings with the help of Brandenburg special forces and German Marine commandos.

Several of the planned landings fully or partially failed, but Germans managed to create two beachheads... and so the parachute drop that was already once canceled, was instantly re-ordered in an attempt to gain more momentum.

The battle of Leros included an unprecedented number of different WW2 special forces fighting in such a contained place. Italians had their famous MAS, the British threw in their most experienced members of the Long Range Desert Group and SAS/SBS (Special Boat Service), while the Germans deployed Marine Commandos, the remaining parachute veterans, and various Brandenburg companies, infamous for their multi-language, multi-uniform tactics that confused their opponents.

Thanks to the irregular shape of the rugged islands (including nine bays), paratroop drops, and multiple landings, a chaotic, cutthroat battle soon blazed between mountains and fortifications as various elite forces wrestled for the control of every foothold. As the hours passed and turned into days without a break in the fierce fighting, both sides realized that this particular battle was going to be a very close call.

Do you have the nerves and wits to turn this thriller scenario into the last major German triumph of WW2?

Fall of Stalingrad at version 5.2.4. Slowly inching the campaign into the direction of being easier.

"From 2010 to the present, Chinese researchers have published 2,723 research papers, most never translate into English, on the subject of vulnerabilities in the United States power grid. At least 225 of those papers explicitly explore potential attacks on the US power grid." PDF source

Iwo Jima lands on version 6.4.2

Random history bit: The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 was the largest volcanic event in recorded human history. It injected colossal amounts of ash and sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which diffused globally to block sunlight and cause a major, temporary cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, leading to the infamous "Year Without a Summer" in 1816. New England, USA/Atlantic Canada: Killing frosts occurred in June, July, and August. In some areas, lakes and rivers froze in July. Farmers called it "Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death." The price of oats rose dramatically. Oats were the primary fuel for horses, the era's main mode of transport, making travel and the movement of goods prohibitively expensive. The high price and scarcity of oats for horses prompted German inventor Karl Drais to seek an alternative means of transportation. In 1817, he debuted his "running machine", an early version of the bicycle.

Case Blue to version 3.2.4

France blitzes to version 6.2.2 (the previous version number might have been shown as 6.3 on the HOF listing).

Falaise Pocket steps to version 2.5.2 with a crash fix. Just when I began to get happy that I had not seen a crash in a while.

If Bougainville HOF did not show you Hall Of Fame listings correctly, it should be now working properly.

Operation Barbarossa at version 7.0.4 bringing on a big HOF clearout.

Patreon: Photo gallery of the 1933 prototype submarine Germans made in Finland

Patreon: Weekly more or less history related news links

Operation Market Garden lands at version 6.2.6

Battle of Bulge version 6.6.4 out, fixes few OOB data points.

Saipan lands on version 3.8

AGE VERIFICATION The year 2026 will see several US states introduce their own funky age verification laws for apps. And countless other regions and countries are following them. I'm currently testing the current rapid-fire-made solutions that the various app stores have come up with on their side. Let me tell you, it will be a mess, at least for us developers. For 99.9% of the users, it's just useless code bloating up the size of the apps, all the checks slowing down everything, and creating compatibility mayhem. Plus, some of the silliest legal requirements literally cannot be precisely met with modern technology, but a factor like reality has never stopped politicians and bureaucrats from coming up with new laws. The challenge right now is that the test options are limited since the foundations for the new age verification system have not even been properly laid, so it's hard to get a true sense of this all until the codes, servers, and APIs truly kick in as the year flips to 2026. My guess: If apps try to follow the shiny new laws strictly, there will be many errors and issues plus a ton of overhead. We might be okay if everyone just does the bare minimum and reacts to the "obviously a kid" from "affected US state" accounts.

Here is what you can expect from my games. If you are located in an affected region AND you are under 18 AND you fail to get permission from your parents to use the game (all of this is handled by the app store), then the PLAY button of my game will be locked and the 'play' text changed to say something about age verification. If you are 70 years old and the child lock kicks in for you, then either your state has failed with their ID laws, or the app store has failed with your ID data, or my game is reading the app store's age-limit-ID feedback incorrectly, in which case contact me.

Bad news: as a mega corporation, Google can't be bothered to support the oldest devices, so I'm forced to drop support for the two oldest APIs I'm currently supporting. And this cross-requirement will also make it too cumbersome to support the early Kindle devices. So if you have a 10-year-old device, like the early Fire Tablet, it might be time to spend a few bucks for a newer model.

I really do hope that the switch to the year 2026 goes smoothly, and we don't start the new year with all the apps locked as the whole shiny age verification dream crumbles to dust right out of the gates.

Balkan patches to version 3.5.4.2

D-Day lands on version 7.6.4.1

News: Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads
-- Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day.

AI: Japanese studio asks job seekers to draw live because they have already hired people who were secretly submitting AI-generated art as their own
-- The studio's chief graphic designer says it's a "huge hassle" and feels like going backwards, says other companies are doing the same. It--s about trust collapsing: studios don--t know who to trust, candidates don--t know how much AI they--re --allowed-- to use, and everyone is losing time doing in-person tests that used to be reserved for final rounds, not the basic filter. The story came out of a wider piece on how generative AI is messing with Japanese businesses, including a 20-year tourism art contest that was cancelled because judges couldn--t tell human-made work from AI output.

WW1: West marches into version 6.4.0.2 which adds the neutral Netherlands region, splits Paris into three cities, and rewrites British and Belgian OOBs. I have tried my best to make this compatible so that currently ongoing games are not affected by these fundamental changes, but if you want to "play it safe", finish the current ongoing game before updating to version 6.4.

Operation Luttich patched to version 2.5.2.2

Paris 44 updates to version 1.2

Patreon post: Weekly history links

Every year I need to provide an official government certificate of my tax country to big tech companies. Every year it takes only a few seconds to do that with Amazon and other companies, except one... Google. Every year it takes at least 2 months of nonstop screaming with Google's representatives to get their malfunctioning automated system to accept the exact, precise, correct official government document they are asking for. Every year. EVERY YEAR! Basic data entry is just completely out of Google's skillset. They never fix anything. They never learn anything. At least now I know to get EU authorities involved early on, and they get to fine Google an ungodly amount of money for failing to handle official EU documents properly. The amount of brainrot I get from having this below conversation every day for months every year is jarring.
-- Me: Here is the exact official government certificate you asked for. It very clearly states every last private ID, number, name, business info, and year that is needed.
-- Google automation: FAILURE because this is the exact official government certificate we asked for with all the info.
-- Me, filing a support case: The system rejects the exact official government certificate it asks for.
-- Google specialist: Yes, you provided the exact official government certificate we asked for, but you need to provide that very same exact official government certificate we asked for and that you already provided and which failed every time. Your previous 984576945876 times failed, but this is Google, and we changed nothing, so surely it will work this time.
-- Me, asking to speak to the higher-ups, which does not help at all, since at every level up it is just never-ending mindless repetition of the same phrases, again and again and again. If Google went bankrupt tomorrow, I would not be surprised in the slightest. For the last almost 10 years, so many data-related features just simply have not worked. Every other tech/data company manages all this just fine, but this one doorknob company can't.

Rommel & Afrika Korps at version 6.4.6.2

Article: Smartphone Lifespan Report 2025: How Long Do Americans Really Keep Their Phones?
-- The average American keeps their phone for nearly two years and five months. Americans pay $634.35 for their phone.

Japan in WW2 cruises to version 1.2.2.3, relocates repair action of the carrier from the third to the fourth button to avoid overlap with take fuel action.

NOTICE: Change in turn limited demo versions that are available as local APK downloads on this site. Nothing changes with games in the stores. To avoid clashes with previous Play Store application IDs of turn-limited demo versions, I'll be switching to a slightly different application-ID to avoid Google bots overreacting, as they are getting more and more sensitive, and I'd much rather play it safe. What does this mean in practical terms? If you have downloaded and installed a local turn-limited demo version, the next time you download and install the next version of that turn-limited free game, it will be installed as a different app. Therefore, unless you uninstall the previous one, you will have two similar-looking turn-limited games with the same name on your device. I repeat: This ONLY applies to the turn-limited LOCAL APK demo version available for download via this very site.

Revolutionary War to version 6.3.3 fixing the issue that when assigning a resource to a stack of units, the bottom option did not work on some devices.

Sad face. Two trustworthy players separately report that it is possible for a score to not be saved on the device. I can't replicate that and data flows into HOF steadily, but I'll be taking big action, since everyone can imagine the frustration if a score is lost. Step 1: In the next round of updates, I'll relocate all the score-alias-entering processes into a segment where the OS/manufacturer-UI has much less chance to interfere. Step 2: The nanosecond enough VPs have been reached, a ghost copy of the score will be made in case something goes wrong as the various victory-summary/HOF-alias dialogs are handled. If this is your first playthrough, this backup data might lack your HOF alias but has everything else to enable recovery. So, in the future, even if there is a failure, at least one local copy of the core score data should be made and moved to the online database, unless, of course, you have the online-HOF disabled from settings.

If your score failed to register, I'm so sorry, I truly am! I had a simple HOF-system that ran almost perfectly for 15 years, and then Google's mindless AI bots began false-positive rejecting it when I tried to update games, and here we are: trying to make a 10X more complex system work for every last contradictory hardware, manufacturer's unique software versions, and style of use. A third of my 2025 has gone into zero-pay rewriting stuff that worked, but big tech wants new, shiny, more complex stuff. The horror is that modern software chain consists of dozens of layers from dev to app store, and if every one of those layers requires changes for the sake of new and shiny, then the developer gets drowned by the never-ending flood of must-make rewrites so that the chain still works.

EDIT: Okay, after running simulations and getting excellent feedback, I'm thinking the ultimate root cause is this: if the player maneuvers brilliantly to seize the supply cities shockingly early, there can be a massive number of out-of-supply AI units during the last turn. Think of it like this: You move the unit differently whether it is out of supply or not. The same applies to the AI; being cut off causes a diabolical number of supply route checks as AI moves units, and the (future) supply status of units can change all the time, as in, if they reach an in-supply-hexagon, no need to seek for more in-supply-hexagons (= these statuses cannot be just once pre-calculated). Just to put these numbers in perspective: Let's say you have a 50x40 map, 2,000 hexagons, with various controls and terrains that might or might not allow the flow of the supply. That is 10,000 checks for a quick single yes-no operation. But you must check for nearby cities, hospitals, units, etc, and ponder how things would CHANGE after potentially moving one way, so that's 100X. Now let's multiply that by various tactical and strategic checks, say 10X. Maybe there are 60 units, but some have multiple MPs, and some seemingly good theoretical moves are not sensible when you crunch in what AI knows about players's units; that's 100X, easily. Only doing the most superficial stuff, we are at 1,000,000,000 checks. And since this is the end-time chaos for the AI and the game engine, many values will be at their extremes, causing issues or triggering safety checks. And this is not moving forward in one logical, step-after-another march: modern processes run in various layers and frameworks with smart "delays." Then other elements like the OS queries to see if the app is stuck and various victory dialogs kick in, and the mess upscales in a hundred directions, and in extreme cases actions might fall out of intended order. Two takeaways: 1) If the game shows a black screen during the last turn, WAIT; it's crunching an unfathomable amount of data. 2) Clearly I need to be more aggressive limiting and turning off AI "thinking" if the game is very close to ending very early on when there are still a lot of units in play.

Weekly history links

Japan in WW2 patches to version 1.2.1

Juno & Sword at version 2.2.4 with a patch plus latest features that are being rolled out.

Well, I finally caved in and removed a line of code that Google Code Check kept relentlessly claiming was "useless". Now, a week later, I'm seeing two separate crashes because of the lack of that very line. The old Google might have known something about computer programming, but the modern Google does not. Just because something happens to work for an ultra-rich kid working on a hyper-elitist, state-of-the-art computer with trillions of terabytes of disk space using the world's fastest internet connection does not mean it will work in real life for people using their beaten-down, out-of-storage device on a spotty online connection.

Sea Lion version 5.0.4.1 should finally stop the phenomena where some settings flip back to default.

Video: How keeping the Royal Navy at sea kickstarted the Industrial Revolution

Several US states are rolling out new laws; the most outrageous one of them requires you (the user) to prove in a legally binding way you have your mother's permission to use the calculator app, weather app, etc... Every 60 minutes! Or, alternatively, have derivatives of your most crucial personal ID floated to millions of developers who have no time, resources, know-how, or interest to handle them properly. Plus, obviously, this will create a massive amount of bloated code, needlessly doing these checks nonstop, draining the battery. But according to politicians, this is, like, totally, you know, reasonable, or whatnot. So, if you wonder why all the developers are quiet, we are just trying to scramble a response to all this nonsense by all the countries and states on top of all the useless nonsense we are already required to do.

Android has a neat feature that automatically tries to drag along apps' data when you upgrade to a new phone. The downside for me is that it allows players to drag along saved games that were started 10 years ago, and those are not compatible with anything on this planet. The amount of time spent sorting messes and confusion those cases cause is infuriating.

Sea Lion add a handful of smaller features with version 5.0.4

Article: Plaques commemorating African American soldiers fighting against Germany removed from a U.S. military cemetery in the Netherlands
-- More than 8,200 Americans are buried at the Netherlands American Cemetery in the village of Margraten. Families could chose whether to leave the remains of their loved ones there or have them returned to U.S. soil. The cemetery itself is symbolic of U.S. participation along with Dutch fighters toward the end of the war.

Kursk at version 7.5.0.1 (Fire devices via Amazon App Store).

Pateron post: Weekly history/military news links

Patriotic War at version 2.3, speeding up the industry production of the slowest-to-make units. Only on Fire devices via Amazon App Store.

Free Patreon post: Challenges with list of coming reinforcement units feature

Defending Spanish Republic patches itself to version 1.6.0.1.

Podcast:episode: Renault F17 Tanks
-- Robby Houben from the Belgian Royal Military Museum talks about the Renault FT. This small but revolutionary French tank changed armoured warfare, and how it was still seeing action when the Second World War began..

Korean War at version 4.1 (only on Fire devices via Amazon App Store).

Video: Why did France get so much of Africa? (Short Animated Documentary)
-- When Africa was Scrambled by the European powers (and Belgium) in the late 19th century, France got a massive chunk of it all to itself. But given that France was seen as the great enemy of Europe and went through long periods of imposed Isolationism, why did it get so much?

Finnish Defense 1944 holding at 4.3.0.2

Brits at El Alamein at version 3.1

"There was greater misfortune for 8th Armoured Brigade on its way forward. Arthur Reddish: As we marshalled our column in the pitch-darkness with lorries in the centre and tanks on the outer, a German plane dropped flares over our positions. Within minutes, the bombers arrived. The first bomb landed on a lorry containing petrol and blazing fuel spewed over a wide area. Our other lorries caught fire and some exploded. The desert was lit up for kilometres around. The conflagration attracted enemy artillery, mortar and machine-gun fire and more bombers. We lost our entire transport section and many of its drivers; and some tanks were disabled.
...
Trooper Ian King of 3rd Hussars, was bringing up fuel for the tanks of 9th Armoured Brigade: shells were falling in the surrounding minefields which were erupting with numerous explosions. I felt vulnerable in a vehicle containing hundreds of gallons of high octane fuel. To our left were the burning remains of the Notts Sherwood Rangers convoy. There were some 15 vehicle wrecks, some still in flames and others smoking, each vehicle having held either fuel or ammunition. They had been caught on a minefield and shelled.
...
This devastation and disorganization prompted Brigadier Custance to ask Gatehouse, who also had grave doubts about the second night--s operations, to call off the attack. As a consequence, whilst the infantry, engineers and armour continued struggling forward at Miteirya, a crisis conference was held at 0230hrs at Eighth Army--s Tactical Headquarters."
-- El Alamein, The Battle That Turned the Tide of the Second World War by Bryn Hammond

Eastern Front OMG! I think I finally found the ultimate reason for the recent imbalances. Now the question is, does fixing this tilt the game too much in the other direction because of all the earlier misguided attempts to balance elements? Version 7.4.4 rolling out.

Suomussalmi (Wanter War) frozen at version 4.4, adds frozen-forest background pattern as the default.

Okinawa at version 5.4.0.1

This new AI fighter jet doesn't need pilots, runways, or GPS
-- Remember the AI-controlled F16 jet that the US Air Force tested in a dogfight last year? The same AI pilot has debuted in a fully autonomous stealth drone, though it is being referred to as a fighter jet. The vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) craft can operate not just without humans, but also without runways.

Tech idea: The world needs a compression algorithm that is smart enough to realize that the folder it is packing has 200 pictures all taken in the same room, and therefore, the wall is the major part of every single photo. Why not just save one high-quality sample of the wall pattern and use that for all the 200 pics?

Defending Spanish Republic at version 1.6, mainly tweaking the early turns: slower movement of early Nationalist units, AI artillery attempts to be more cautious, more initial minefields for the player. Plus obviously all the latest features that are being rolled out, like generals' ability to fly from airfield to airfield.

Patreon: List of history/military news I stumbled on this week

Operation Spring Awakening at version 3.0 adding Panzerfausts to help with the very challenging scenario.

US Breakthrough Strike Cobra steps into version 1.0.4

Panzers to Baku at version 1.6. The Hall of Fame now shows whether the fuel system was ON or OFF (might still be unknown for some of the early scores).

WW1 soldiers' messages in a bottle found on Australian beach more than 100 years later
-- Messages in a bottle written by two Australian soldiers a few days into their voyage to the WW1 battlefields of France have been found more than a century later on Australia--s coast.

Spanish Civil War (Rebels) steps into version 3.6.0.2

Fall of German Army Group Center at version 2.8.0.1. A handful of small tweaks that make the scenario a bit easier.

"The most striking illustration of the catastrophe of the fall of the German Army Group Center was the fact that out of 47 generals employed at the front as corps commanders or division commanders, 10 perished in action or went missing, and 21 ended up in captivity...

No scroll of honour records the struggle waged by the last survivors of Ninth and Fourth Armies trying to make their way back to the German front. Not many of them got through. 800 altogether. They made their way back to the German front on the Vistula in East Prussia and it took them 7-8 weeks of foot-slogging.

One such group on a hopeless trek was Corporal Johannes Diercks' group of the 20th Panzer Division, that suddenly found itself cut off in the midst of the Bobruysk disaster. During the day they hid out in the swamps. They had skirmishes with Russian patrols and search commandos. They met other German groups. They came across the crew of a shot-down He-111. They joined up. They parted again. A platoon of 52nd Nebelwerfer Regiment joined Diercks. Its lieutenant placed himself under the corporal. Leadership now went with personality, not with rank...
-- Scorched Earth by Paul Carell

Axis Crimean Campaign advances to 3.0.0.1 bringing many noteworthy changes that make the scenario easier: adding the Italian Special Forces unit; some Soviet landing units will have lost HPs during the landing approach; adding back the Romanian general, which at some stage was accidentally disabled, included few Axis defenses along the northern coast.

Video: Inside An Upcoming Restoration of| Rare Japanese Type 95 Ha-Go Light Tank
-- The Australian Armour & Artillery Museum: Captured at the end of WWII and long forgotten, this tank still carries original paint, fractured plates, and even remnants of its past life in the Pacific. Daz explores its current condition, points out the unique Japanese design features, and explains how it differs from the German and Soviet armour we--ve worked on before.

Sicily quick patch to 5.2.0.1 as Settings file error might cause crash.

Demyansk Pocket at version 6.7 adding initial minefields, so the top spot should be easier to seize.

Guadalcanal patches to 4.5.0.1

Patreon blog post: Why I Like the Cliff Element and How It Fits into Bigger Future Plans

Allied Invasion of Japan 1945 gets a patch update to 4.2.2

Article: Meta brought AI to rural Colombia. Now students are failing exams
-- Teachers report a surge in AI-generated homework and essays, while student performance on exams declines. Students --simply copy what comes up in the chat, but they--re not capable of analyzing what they--re replicating.-- Some even graduate without mastering how to read and write.

Study: More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans
-- We find that in November 2024, the quantity of AI-generated articles being published on the web surpassed the quantity of human-written articles.

And in news that surprises absolutely nobody, SEVERAL consecutive updates to the Union are all in the state of eternal stuck at the Play Store. Grrr...

Leningrad at version 4.0 adding few newly raised local units as their own separate weaker unit type and the Hall of Fame now includes whether FUEL element is ON or OFF.

After a month-long back and forth about the text color used in the logo, I'll yield and from now on start to switch from basic red to orange-yellow for better visibility at a tiny size.

Tinian cruises to version 1.6

Almost seeing the end with the current frantic roll-out, just 10 games to go; sadly, they are the most out-of-date ones, so slow going before the finish line.

Article: King Tiger tank's --1m restoration starts
-- The King Tiger tank has been in the collection at The Tank Museum, in Bovington, since the 1950s. But it was incomplete when it arrived, and was stripped of its parts during the 1980s to facilitate another restoration. It will take 4 years to completely rebuild the German tank.

Union marches to version 1.7.0.3 with a bit more color in the menus for easier grouping of various items.

Video: First Disaster Caught on Camera: How the Launch of a British Battleship Turned Deadly - HMS Albion

Third Battle of Kharkov rolls on to version 4.0.0.1 adding more initial minefields, dugouts, visibility. Plus, Generals can now fly from airport to airport. So the initial Soviet offensive should be a bit easier to take on, and the door to top 10 spots in the Hall of Fame open.

Feature starting to roll out: General can take a flight from airport to another nearby airport, MP cost 1-5 favoring lower costs.

Crete at version 5.2

Four WW1 soldiers found during hospital build
-- The remains of four privates of 1/5 Bn Lincolnshire Regiment and part of a Lewis gun team, were found during work to construct a hospital near Lens. Ministry of Defence "war detectives" said it was rare to have been able to identify four soldiers and track down each of their families.

Tarawa at version 2.6

Amazon updates are lagging behind today because somebody at Amazon messed up name-server settings and many services are down globally, including the system that allows updating apps on the Amazon App Store.

"In 1940 the Wehrmacht as a whole, the airborne corps in particular, enjoyed one significant intelligence advantage over their opponents. Lufthansa operated flights to all European capitals, and for several years before the war started, the airline's crews had been accumulating photos of the terrain over which the Wehrmacht might have to operate. They also had detailed layout plans of every airfield capable of handling Ju 52s and, by analogy, Luftwaffe bombers and fighters. Abwehr agents masquerading as tourists provided further information. Even after England and France declared war in Sept 1939, Lufthansa maintained scheduled flights to neutral Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway, enabling the Abwehr to build up enormous portfolios on targets that would be assigned to the Luftlandekorps. Not all objectives were equally accessible, especially the key Belgian fortress of Eben Emael. However, the Abwehr still succeeded in providing the paratroopers with highly detailed information culled from disaffected laborers who had been involved in its construction."
-- German Airborne Divisions; Blitzkrieg 1940-41 by Bruce Quarrie

Panzer Missions at version 6.5.0.2 -- fixes hangup issue.

German Ardennes Offensive updates to version 5.7 adding few German antitank gun units.

Video: 15 Forgotten 70s War Films That Are Still Incredible Today
-- Many of these films flopped on release but later earned cult followings for their authenticity and daring direction.

Japan in WW2 straggles to version 1.2.0.2, bringing forth a ton of tweaks and fixes, not to mention all the latest features. By far the most troublesome issue is trying to explain to the AI the foreplanning required for decent usage of carriers and planes, while the AI also loses carriers from battles but also from earlier damage when they are otherwise safe. Add on top of this all the moving and escaping and limited space in narrow straits, and the soup of "why does this carrier have 8 planes when rules forbid it" is ready.

Eastern Front, okay, let's try version 7.4.3.2 to catch all the current bugs.

I have been laboring on updating the Japan-in-WW2 for a while now. When I started, my to-do list had 1687 items on it (exact number), some of them were simple checks or changes, and some were hour-long tasks. It's just simply NOT fun working on something this complex, as the chance of screwing something up if you fail to consider all the dimensions and implications is so stressful, as proven by the two-month relentpdate cycle after the release. The good news is that I'm finally starting to see the end of the vast task ocean I have crawled through.

Rolling out: on top of scenario specific changes & dozens of small tweaks not worth listing individually:
-- Cliffs behind the ON/OFF switch
-- Limiting Dump Fuel/Ammo or Rout special actions to once per turn per unit (enforcement has been lax)
-- Various styles to draw the red over enemy-held area (and as always: red shading can be turned off, and there is a lever to control its intensity)
-- Grouping and relocating setting-items like fuel/skills together into Options (gear) settings lists to be more organized and because Settings (main menu) has an excessive number of elements
-- Disbanding the dugout mostly gives dugout replacements
-- Option to control color shading of dialogs
-- Four styles to draw water/sea hexagons,
-- A switch to leave extra black space at the bottom of the gameplay screen
-- Extra Immersive Mode level to force it persistently
-- New hexagon-based logo
-- Ability to animate an AI unit only if the player controls over N percent of the nearby area,
-- Unit Tally lists cities that have changed hands the most times
-- Hasten action now works out of supply too
-- Show/hide Victory/Start images
-- ON/OFF switch for the Fallen Units popup.

Operation Luttich pushes into version 2.5

Video: Rome's Exploration of Sub-Saharan Africa: How Far Did They Reach?

Eastern Front at 7.4.3 fixes the issue of Soviet Rifle formations arriving too close to the front in the south during the first phase of play.

Allied Italian Campaign at 5.7

Article with pics: Inside the new 4-star hotel in Germany that used to be a WW2 bunker
-- One of the two 'flak towers' in Hamburg, the St. Pauli Bunker was built in 1942 in just 300 days. The bunker, which was also known as Flakturm IV Hochbunker (literally 'high bunker'), was one of the largest to be built in Hamburg.

Battle of Berlin trying to hold defense lines at version 5.4

Well, the update to Guadalcanal was rejected by the Play Store. Why? Because the server holding the privacy policy HTML file was rebooting just at the moment Google checked its existence, and you know, instead of trying again later or using the knowledge that the file has been there for decades, EVERYTHING in the process was fully and brutally stopped. Kids at coding camp understand how to write code that does multiple checks in case of failure and use prior data to skip over tiny details that are momentarily failing from derailing the whole process. But can a tech company with a market cap of $2,130,000,000,000.00 do that kind of very rudimentary coding? Of course not!

Invasion of Norway scuttles to version 5.1

Video: The biplane with a jet engine... in 1910

Guadalcanal to version 4.5

Fall in Finland

Bougainville lands on version 1.3.0.1

Article: Ultra rare German cipher machine comes to light in 'untouched' condition
--An ultra rare German cipher machine which was salvaged by a British intelligence officer at the end of WW2 has emerged for sale for --35,000. The Lorenz SZ42 machine was introduced in 1942 after the Bletchley Park codebreakers led by Alan Turing cracked the Enigma.

Utah & Omaha wades ashore with version 2.1.0.2 (fix: unit icons not drawn on some devices)

Falaise Pocket version 2.5 adds a new option to change the texture of the red that marks the enemy-held area.

Invasion of Poland at 6.3

Battle of Moscow 1941 crawls to version 6.3.

Video: Inside the WW1 Sturmpanzerwagen A7V tank
-- A 20-man beastie this replica is to be found at the German Panzermuseum.

Fall of Normandy surfs to version 6.3

Panzer Army Africa at El Alamein digs in at 3.1.0.2 -- more replacements (both types and quantitiy).

Patreon: What should we rename Panzer Army Africa's defense at the Second battle of El Alamein to?

Anzio - Monte Cassino climbs to version 5.1. Reorganizing the colors of units and reducing flags on unit icons.

Article: Backyard fireworks of WWII bombs still litter Solomon Islands
-- Japanese and Allied forces waged a savage campaign across the Solomon Islands 1942-1945, leaving behind bombs now buried under homes, schools, businesses, football fields and vegetable garden. Bernadette Miller Wale remembers playing with bombs when she was young .She and her friends would even set them off on purpose: they called them "backyard fireworks".

American Revolutionary War updates to version 6.3

Oh dear lord, even more bureaucracy: even the simplest "hello world" app now needs a clunky system of 900 lawyers/bureaucrats to meet all the billion legal requirements.

"The Texas App Store Accountability Act (Senate Bill 2420) was signed in May 2025, and will be effective January 1, 2026. Any app store that serves users in Texas must verify the age of every user who creates an account. The app store must share with the app developer the user--s assigned age bracket and whether consent has been obtained... It applies to all apps."

Invasion of Japan at version 4.2, including many fixes, draws Americal Division's units with the Americal symbol, but the units function as Army Infantry, plus all the latest hoobla that is rolling out.

Kiev thunders to version 1.5.0.2

American Civil War: South critical fix version 7.3.3 also adds few initial forts that the US had constructed along the coast.

ALERT! Do not finish an ongoing game with American Civil War SOUTH version 7.3.2. Working on an update right now. Sadly, the turn count of some scores was messed up beyond repair. That's the price of trying to frantically update 60+ apps after manufacturers add some funky new navigation bar code. Sigh.

Axis Endgame in Tunisia steps into version 2.1

Article: WWII German Bunker Found Beneath Couple--s Home on Guernsey, in the Channel Islands
-- "After living there for a while, we became even more aware from our neighbors that normally it--s not just a massive concrete base for a flak gun. Many seem to have rooms underneath, so the hunt was on."

Poland between Germany & USSR at version 1.6.2.1

Juno & Sword steps ashore with version 2.2.3

Stalingrad at 5.2.2

Luzon to version 2.7.2

Dieppe at version 2.1.2

Sealion sails to version 5.0.2

Article: WW2 Guernsey podcast victorious at awards
-- A podcast telling the first-hand stories of Guernsey's last surviving WW2 deportees to the Biberach internment camp in wartime Germany has won two trophies at the British Podcast Awards.

I'll be adding one more "anti-cheat" mechanism, so if the top scores fail to renew over the coming months, we know it was being used.

As I grind out updates, here is a longer explanation of the Navigation bar issue (simple blog post here)

Balkan at version 3.5.1

Patreon blog post (public): The challenges of making Sealion but defending Britain
-- Views on why this fairly regularly asked scenario is so tricky to construct well.

Case Blue critical midnight bug fix (version 3.2.1), as certain combo of settings and passage of time could collapse supply for both sides.

Leyte comes ashore with 4.1.2

Peleliu at version 3.2.2

Starting to roll out: Disbanding a dugout will mostly give +1 HP replacements for dugouts. Removing brackets from the names of units as they can be troublesome when trying to parse data later.

Iwo Jima to version 6.4 adds a better flamethrower tank icon and initial bombardments plus a handful of fixes. There is also a fundamental problem with trying to visually showcase how the hills are on three layers: if I make that prominent enough to stand out, other visual cues start to fade out.

Patreon now open!
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For over 15 years, I--ve kept 60+ strategy games alive and running, even on the most battle-worn budget phones. Divide the price by all those years, and you--re down to pennies. Honestly, you don--t get that kind of support even for your car or house. If you could toss a few pieces of silver into the supply wagon, your support would mean a lot and help keep the frontlines running.

Invasion of France crumbles to version 6.2. This turned out to be a much bigger update than anticipated, as I added French heavy tanks (Char B1), plus an option to multiply them (what-if French had used them in modern manner.

Video: Germany's Forgotten Ally That Bled More Men Than Anyone During WWII
-- This is the untold story of Germany--s most underrated ally in World War II a nation that sent over half a million men to the Eastern Front, Romania fought in Odessa, Sevastopol, and Stalingrad, and paid a devastating price.

Babarossa to version 7.0.3.1 and a patch makes it a dot one.

American Civil War: South gallops to version 7.3.2

Video: The Axis Top 5 Mistakes Video Edition with The Warrior Next Door Podcast
-- History of WWII Podcast joined by Ryan Fairfield and Tony Lupo from The Warrior Next Door Podcast, each gives their Top 5 reasons why the Axis lost the war.

Market Garden parachutes onto version 6.2.4

Battle of the Bulge fires into version 6.6.2

Saipan takes a small step to version 3.7.1.1. There are four options to draw water hexagons. Thanks for the help, the bug was successfully located.

Road struggles on GUAM:
"The chief problem facing Geiger's troops at this point was supply. The Army and Marine Corps divisions had both moved so rapidly that supply dumps were left far in the rear.... After the 77th Division landed, 302d Engineer Combat Battalion began working on the new road. Te engineers found nature on Guam to be their worst enemy. The soft clay proved an insufficient foundatio, and torrential rains and heavy traffic made it a quagmire. Because of the consistency of the ground and the need for speed, the engineers could not follow good road-building practice. It was impossible to build roads on a higher level than the surrounding ground, since the soft clay would not support such a route. Instead, after culverts of coconut logs or oil drums had been emplaced, a 2-lane road was bulldozed out, excess dirt being pushed to either side. This road was BELOW the surrounding ground, and water drained onto rather than off of it. As heavy traffic rutted the road, the bulldozers pushed off the mud until a firm base was reached farther down... Eventually, the 302d Engineers was ordered to abandon its attempt to construct a main supply route across the island. "
-- Campaign in the Marianas by Philip A Crowl

Pointless Play Store bureaucracy strikes again! This time I'm forced to fill out a ton of forms for EVERY SINGLE app attempt tried a decade ago, abandoned apps, unpublished apps, and pseudo-removed apps. If the Play Store allowed me to actually remove apps and never ever hear from them again, I would do it in a second. SECOND! On what planet does it make sense that every week you have to visit every place you have lived in your life and do a major proper cleanup of the place? Because that is what this is equivalent to. Why do I have to do maintenance like fill out forms for projects that have not existed anywhere for decades except in the Play Store's demented system?

Article: Ex--Google CEO Eric Schmidt: tech workers must do grueling 12-hour workdays and 72-hour weeks
-- --If you--re going to be in tech and you--re going to win, you--re going to have to make some tradeoffs. We--re up against the Chinese; the Chinese work-life balance consists of 996, which is 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.-- This work obsession is making its way to Silicon Valley: An increasing number of startups in the Bay Area now expect employees to put in 72-hour weeks.

Rommel & Afrika Korps dusts itself off at version 7.4.4

Well, Amazon has decided to "modernize" the app submission process, and by that I mean that things that I could previously easily do with a single quick click on a huge target, now require several clicks, conveniently located at the opposite edge of the display, and those are tiny 4-letter links.

Case Blue advances to version 3.2 The Hall of Fame now uses "F" marker to show whether the FUEL system was enabled or not.

Article: Lt. Col. George E. Hardy, youngest Tuskegee Airman, passes at 100
-- Hardy was commissioned as a second lieutenant at 19 and flew his first combat mission before he had ever driven a car. He ultimately completed 21 WWII missions and also served in the Korean War and Vietnam War.

Article: F-Droid Warns Google--s Strict New Rules Could Kill Third-Party Android App Stores
-- Google's upcoming requirements to verify app developers who have nothing to do with Play Store threaten to "end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution. We do not believe that developer registration is motivated by security. We believe it is about consolidating power and tightening control over a formerly open ecosystem."

Post by Ex-Android team member Jean-Baptiste "Qu--ru: Open Android ecosystem seems to have all died
-- I used to be part of the Android team. All the tidbits of news about Android make me sad. When I worked there, making the application ecosystem as open as the web was a goal. Releasing the Android source code as soon as something hit end-user devices was a goal. Being able to run your own build on actual consumer hardware was a goal... But, now this seems to have all died [as Google continues to close down Android].

OS-News: Google takes next big leap in killing Android Open Source Project (AOSP) significantly scales back AOSP contributions
-- AOSP has been gutted by Google over the years, with the company moving more and more parts of the operating system into closed-source, non-AOSP components, like Google Play Services. While you can technically still run bare AOSP if you--re really hardcore, it--s simply unusable for 99% of smartphone users out there.

Paris 44: Uprising and Liberation sneaks into version 1.1

Eastern Front grinds to version 7.4.2. Hunting down a persistent hard-to-find bug, giving some attention to the old railway building system, plus all the latest features being rolled out.

Cobra: US Breakthrough Strike drives on to version 1.0.2. If you want to test all the latest settings and graphics changes, this full game is available for free (no ads, no in-app purchases, no nothing).

Video: U-530: The U-Boat That Escaped to Argentina
-- In July 1945, two months after Germany--s surrender, submarine U-530 appeared in Argentina. Its long, mysterious voyage across the Atlantic sparked rumours of secret missions...

D-Day steps to version 7.6.2.

Good news, I finally have two confirmed fixes for the taskbar/navigation bar excessively covering elements at the bottom of the display.
-- Firstly, the improved Immersive Mode setting offers a special option number 2, which basically regularly forces the desired hide-bars choices in place.
-- Secondly, there will be a setting below Immersive Mode to add a chosen amount of extra void black space at the bottom of the gameplay screen that can be safely covered by various system bars. This option is in case you don't want to alter the immersive mode.

Guam updated to version 2.7.1.1 and renamed to US Retakes GUAM.

Changes starting to roll out from now on: New hexagon-shaped logo, status line extended to two lines if there is too much stuff to show, relieve action renamed to revive, slight color shading on dialogs to indice things like won/lost battles, Unit Tally lists cities which have changed hands most times, setting: animate AI unit only if player controls over N percent of area within range of two, initial bombardments (marked with sabotage marker, which is now expanded to cover both...

Thinking and tinkering about completely changing the design of the logo used in the Play Store. The key point is that the first impression of the icon is shown at a very small scale, and discovery being the core challenge, it only makes sense to sacrifice everything else for trying to show critical aspects clearly on the logo. So, in my case, I'm thinking of making the shape of the icon a hexagon, for obvious tabletop board game reasons. Then using two elements, the NATO infantry marker on top and a very short, brutally short, text below it to identify the campaign/scenario. Some longer names need to be, err, dealt with. Everything else, the campaign graphic, my name, etc. will be included in a much smaller, much more toned-down manner, with the idea that these lesser components fade out when a smaller-scale version of the logo is used. For unification, it would make sense to make app icons look the same, but I'm still hesitant about that. The current design works, and it's a helluva lot of work to redo the handful of required graphics per project and optimize them with the large number of apps I'm trying to manage.

Axis Balkan Campaign stumbles on version 3.5.0.3. Redid the color grouping to separate Yugoslav/Greek/British units better.

Eastern Front patches v7.4.1.0

SeaLion version 5.0.0.7 fixes a crash case plus supply ships can now land on bombardment/sabotage hexagon.

Dieppe Raid lands on version 2.1. Adds a new setting to only animate any AI unit if the player controls over N percent of map within the range of two. So, it gives a way to only animate the frontline AI units.

Video: Germans Stunned by Eisenhower--s --Weapon of Victory-- -- The Bazooka: from improvised beginnings at Aberdeen Proving Ground to mass production
-- When American troops landed in North Africa in 1942, few knew that the simple steel tube in their crates would soon rewrite the rules of armored warfare. Cheap, portable, and devastating against tanks, the bazooka transformed U.S. infantry from victims into tank hunters.

Argh! I just realized the new font that I like to use does NOT survive well in the YCbCr/Trellis/Optimize process I prefer to put things through. So, if you see a super fuzzy text in a few rare places, those will be redone with the next round of updates.

American Civil War (South) marches to version 7.3. Alright, make it 7.3.0.1 that restores the original grey-blue color theme that has been slowly lost as the defaults of the underlying game engine override old exceptions.

Hurrah! Sealion made it through the long review. I was mentally preparing for yet another random ban for something like using the color red or word combo "the United Kingdom." This is precisely what kills developers' motivation to update their apps. We don't need the nonstop relentless fear for doing something good like keeping apps up-to-date.

Article: Google will restore Youtube channels banned in mass censorship, blames the administration
-- I don't care on what side of what view you are: you should be able to defend your view with facts and in an open equal debate. Using censorship to force your view, whatever it is, always heavily implies "losing the argument due to lack of truth" to me. For me, a good week is when I change my mind, because it means I have learned something new. Is it always a pleasant experience to go through? Heck no. But that's growth: you have to put in the effort and struggle, whether studying or going to the gym.

Article: Search begins in Dorset for --the Mother of all tanks--
-- Lost for over a century, discovery of wartime letter has rekindled interest in unlocking the secret of the world--s first prototype tank. Mother was the prototype for the world--s first battlefield tank, the Mark 1, surrendered to the scrappers to be melted down and recycled. Or was she? One letter reveals that: Maj Bill Brannon organised a towing tank and pulled four of the oldest tanks and buried them in the driving area.

Peleliu small update to v3.2.1.0... I swear these Pacific island names use the exact opposite syllable logic than that on which the Finnish language is built. Trying to type several of these names makes my brain scream, "THAT'S INCORRECT ORDER OF LETTERS!" And you might think that my brain will adjust over time, but NOPE, I have been researching and typing some of these names for well over a decade, and I'm still regularly shocked out of my flow-state whenever I actually have to type one out. Pelileu? Peliliu? Pel...

Nothing is quite as "pleasant" as when a 5-minute quick fix turns into 5 hours of hard thinking. As much as I love coding, this was a horrid day, nothing went smoothly or as planned. One "I have never seen this problem before" might be refreshing, but when they do pile up, argh, you know you just lost all the hours in that day. Plus Sealion is still stuck in review.

I follow a lot of history news, and it has been a little bit sad to see how comprehensively the First World War has dropped from the major news coverage once the last living veterans passed away. Sure if you actively follow WW1, it is a different story, but I can't remember when was the last time I saw a new exciting Great War headline without looking for them.

Operation Sea Lion gets a MASSIVE update to version 5.0.0.6. New harbor, new Canadian unit type, rewritten British naval logic, separate replacements for panzers and antitank units, British naval strafing depends on who controls the closest city and its size, half of the supply depot can be re-embarked, destroyers can dump gear to gain fuel, supply ships can dump supplies to gain MPs, destroyers have names, ships spawn in safe locations only, and dozens and dozens of other additions. Check it out and let me know if something fundamentally breaks.

Leyte airdrops into version 4.1.0.2, adding few bridges. And yes, one of them seems to be on a dry land after I typed the extra river data directly into the ocean of bits.

As one battalion historian fighting on Leyte later wrote:
"The greatest single factor that hampered employment of tanks in this operation was terrain. In nearly every instance of tank employment, because of impassable terrain on both sides of the road, the tanks were road bound, and their front limited to the width of the road..."

"Colonel May planned to send his First Battalion up the southern end of the hill mass while the Second and Third Battalions would attack along the northern axis. A battalion of tanks, under Lieutenant Colonel Harmon L. Edmonson, would support the attack. When the 763rd Tank Battalion became mired in the swamp a key part of the plan was already discarded. There were no roads leading into the interior and not only the tanks, but every other vehicle was stopped cold by the swamps. The infantry had to carry what they needed on their backs through the hip deep swamps to simply approach their first objective..."
-- Leyte 1944, The Soldiers' Battle by Nathan N Prefer

Luzon lands on the beaches with version 2.7.0.1. A handful of fixes.

Article: Inside the remote Alaskan town where almost all residents live in one ex-military building
-- The town of Whittier, located on the edge of Prince William Sound near Anchorage, may finally no longer be so cut off from the rest of the world. Currently the only way into the town is a 2.5-mile single-lane tunnel or a single dock, but the plan is to to add another cruise ship dock. Almost all of its 275 residents live in Begich Towers, a military structure that was converted into housing. The Begich Towers is made from former military barracks (Camp Sullivan) that served as a 'secret' military facility for the US Army during and after WWII.

Eastern Front v7.4.0.6 settles the dugout issue. Also, game series wide note: It seems that if a general or air force does not move during the first turn, it will be considered a new unit when the selection priorities are set for the next turn. This minor flaw will be corrected in the next round of updates across the series.

Saipan updates to version 3.7.

Video: Historical Artefacts We Still Haven't Found

Rommel & Afrika Korps small crash patch.

Guam fights on to reach version 2.7 and brings with it more U.S. replacements. For those saying the start of the scenario is too hard: That's precisely the point, if you want to follow military history. This was one of the toughest landings the U.S. carried out in WWII. Prolonged other U.S. campaigns had reduced logistic support to this one, and reefs wrecked what limited supplies were available. The Japanese commanders knew the landing was coming, and there weren't that many places to land, and thanks to the small size of the island, Imperial forces could react quickly. This was the one U.S. landing the Japanese troops had a chance to push Americans back into the ocean.

Starting to roll out a new feature: initial bombardments of the campaign marked on the map (sabotage graphics). Gives brief control of those revealed hexagons to model the crush of the beginning of the planned offensive.

Luzon lands on the beaches with version 2.7.

Video: Most Spectacular Warship Design Fails
-- Throughout history there have been some truly incredible warships - but there has also been a pretty decent share of awful warship designs too.

Article: Thousands evacuated in Berlin over 2 WWII bombs
-- 10,000 people in central Berlin were ordered to evacuate after an unexploded WWII bomb was discovered in the Spree River. A security perimeter of 500 meters was set up in a densely populated area in the center of the German capital.

Eastern Front stumbles to version 7.4.0.5. Knocking on the steel that this finally settles all the current issues: one of the latest ones was just a foolish paste-error in the middle of the night, and mysteriously one player seems to be missing a core image (might be a system totally out of space).

Rommel & Afrika Korps zigzags into version 6.4.2: fewer flags on unit icons, better unit highlighting when assigning resources, and the option to disable the Fallen dialog and Victory Graphic.

Video: Top "Drill Sergeant Monologue" Reactions
-- How various people experienced this classic scene.

Kursk parades into version 7.4. Only on the Amazon App Store due to random bans by over-automated Google.

Article: Michelangelo--s sketches for fortifications
-- Michelangelo served as --Governor General of Fortifications-- for this massive military project, undertaken in the late 1520s to protect the city of Florence from an eventual 11-month siege.

How to reach quicker scores: Here is a fun little exercise to do with Operation Barbarossa. The next time you play it, see how many turns you can play it without moving a unit back (west, northwest, or southwest). And when you are in the unfavorable position of having to waste such a huge amount of movement and momentum by going backwards, ask yourself, what did you do wrong to end up in this regrettable situation, and how can you prevent it the next time? With clever enough forethought, you can avoid backwards movement for a shockingly long time. Which means that every single unit is either gaining new ground or holding its own. This is highly effective. Every single gained hex is less space for the opponent and more operating space for the bad times.

Well, this is turning into a "let's fix all the issues in the recently updated games" day. Surely there must be an acronym for that?

Stalingrad gets a support package with version 5.2.1.1: more withdrawal under pressure (there was an overactive system that blocked endless retreat), few bunkers with varied HP in the Stalingrad area, railway bridge blocks river crossing cost (I was so sure I had already handled this, but noooo).

Juno & Sword small patches pushing version to 2.2.1.1. Option to disable Fallen-dialog (list of units lost in the previous turn).

Fallen dialog (list of fallen units). Sorry for the uncharacteristically messy back and forth on this one. I rolled the first version (separate pop-up per unit) out to some devices, then restructured all those dialogs into one page with more options and continued to roll that change out, partly overlapping the previous effort. Then I realized that the whole underlying system will be rewritten soon as the game engine progresses, allowing much easier and organized access to lost unit info, so all this recent "Fallen" scrimmage was half-pointless. Anyway, the new List-of-Fallen-Units dialog version, starting to roll out now, will have an option to turn it ON/OFF (located at the bottom of Settings page), remove repeating words, and offer more info per unit and includes more unit types (some support units were previously excluded). Fingers crossed that this is the one.

Since this strategy game series supports closer to 20,000 different Android devices and offers countless settings and strategies, it is impossible to test every combination after changes. If you spot anything off, just simgly tap my pic on the main screen to send me an email (it should open your default email app with pre-filled headline).

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