The German invasion planned for September 1940 never sailed. Here it can. Command the Wehrmacht and get nine divisions across the Channel in towed river barges, or command Britain and sink them before they reach the beach. One number keeps the score: the tonnage that gets ashore.
A division ashore eats about 300 tonnes a day sitting still and two or three times that in a fight. Every barge, tug, port, minefield and storm shows up in one figure: tonnes landed each day against what the beachhead needs.
The Germans need it high. The British need it low. A gale that swamps one night's barge trains can matter more than a won battle.
The simulation runs both sides in full. Whichever one you don't pick is played by an AI that gives the same orders you can.
The Luftwaffe has to hold the air or the Royal Navy owns the Channel. The navy has to be kept out or the barges sink. The barges have to keep coming or the army ashore runs dry. The big moments can be fought yourself in real time, or left to resolve on the map.
Spitfire and Hurricane squadrons against Bf 109, Bf 110, Ju 87, Ju 88, He 111 and Do 17 Gruppen. Chain Home warns, sector stations control, and every one bombed blunts the defence. Fly the big raids yourself: Stukas diving on a radar station, or Blenheims over the barge basins at Boulogne under flares.
A destroyer flotilla out of Dover finds a barge train mid-Channel. Starshell, searchlights, 4.7-inch salvos, torpedoes, ramming. Or take the German side: torpedo boats and E-boats screening, smoke, scatter orders, and the Stukas you'll want at first light.
Kent and Sussex built from real elevation data. Barges grounding at Hythe under pillbox fire. Fallschirmjäger landing around Lympne and Hawkinge. Matildas and Home Guard counter-attacking the beachhead, and the GHQ Line's ditches and pillboxes in front of London.
Rhine barges swamp above sea state 2. The crossing wants a calm night, a moon to keep station by and a rising tide at dawn on the beaches. After about mid-October the weather mostly shuts the Channel. Picking S-day, or guessing it from the other side, is the biggest decision in the game.
Sector controllers, squadron leaders, destroyer captains and the operations rooms on your side of the net, with the German R/T's own brevity words on the other. Recorded with neural voices and played through a narrow, crackling valve-radio circuit.
Sector controlHello Gannic leader, Sapper calling. Scramble. Vector one-two-zero, angels one-five, buster.
Ops roomHostile raid, seventy plus, approaching Dungeness.
SquadronTally-ho! Many, many bandits. Going in. Line astern.
LuftwaffeAchtung, Spitfire! Pauke, Pauke! … Horrido!
DestroyerEnemy in sight, bearing one-four-zero. Starshell, spread! Open fire!
Home ForcesCromwell. Cromwell. Invasion imminent. All units to immediate readiness.
The German stations speak English with the real German words for attacking, a kill, enemy fighters and height. The voice models have no German voice, so we didn't fake one.
Thirty days from a seeded S-day: a date in September or October 1940, its weather and tides, the air situation, the barges gathered and Britain's readiness. Everyone gets the same one on the same UTC date. Each side has its own leaderboard, ranked by days held, then tonnage (the Germans want it high, the British low), then losses inflicted.
Real divisions, squadrons, ships, aircraft and places, as planned for Sea Lion and as they stood in 1940. Churchill, Dowding, Park, Brooke, Raeder, Halder, Göring and the rest appear on decision cards. The cards paraphrase. Nobody is given lines they didn't say.
German units carry the Balkenkreuz and British ones the RAF roundel and the White Ensign. No swastikas anywhere, tail fins and flags included, and no party symbols or slogans. Waffen-SS formations are left out of the order of battle.
Mustard gas is in, because both sides planned for it. Brooke meant to spray it on the beaches. Using it is powerful and costly: opinion abroad, splits at home, civilian casualties and retaliation in kind. Casualties are reported as numbers, never shown.
The full campaign as Germany or Britain and the Daily S-day cost nothing, with no ads. Later, optional packs will add variety, not power:
None of them exists yet, so the store is closed. Sign in with an Earth Ablaze account if you want a campaign to follow you between devices; you don't need one to play.