Command HQ Download (1990 Strategy Game)

A one-on-one, real time strategy war game. Conquer the world or fight smaller battles. Choose your time period/scenario (1918, 1942, 1986, 2023, or ????); the later the date the more advanced the game. The 1918 games provide only land and sea units. 1942 adds air units and carriers. 1986 and beyond add nukes, satellites, oil considerations, and foreign aid.

You can create custom layouts (scenarios). Games can also be saved to "film" so you can watch them again. You can even watch the game up to a certain point and then start playing it.

As for opponents, you can play five different levels of computer opponent or a friend on another computer. Two person play requires a modem or serial link.

Command H.Q. is a wonderful strategy game that simulates the historical World War I and II, the theoretical World War III, the fictionally randomized World War IV, and ????, which is a very distant futuristic war.

The game starts out with the player's army (except in WWIV and ????), cities, and oilfields (WWIII+). The bulk of most armies are soldiers, which you use to fight the enemy, capture cities & oilfields, and protect the cities you own. There is an improved version of the soldiers (these are tanks) which are basically the combined forces of two soldier units. There are also sea units (which soldiers & tanks can transform into) which include destroyers (which are the bulk of sea armies), subs (stealthy transport killers), transports (what soldiers & tanks transform into), and air carriers (they have an air unit as well). There's the air units which can transport other units, harm enemy land units, assault cities, and also destroy other air units (if they're in your attack zone).

There is also foreign aid, which allows a neutral country (or one that is non-aligned with the enemy) to join your forces or leave the enemy. There are satellites which allow you to see anything in their field of vision. There are also satellite killers which, unsurprisingly, kill satellites. There are Intel scans, which allow you to see all units during cease-fires. And then there's the last item in the game, nukes (that can't be used against capitals because they have ABMs), which kills everything in its radius, and makes people mad at you (making them either leave you or join the enemy), and turns all terrain in its radius into a wasteland. The only resources in the game are money (in billions) and oil (WWIII and later), which makes things easy to manage. The AI has a few difficulty settings, which tend to be the exact name versions of what their skill level is.

The sounds are just standard PC speaker quality, nothing special. Everything looks fine in the graphics department, and generally quite nice. Altogether, Command H.Q. is an unendingly replayable game, and I give it a 4/5.

From Brian Moriarty's tribute to Dani Bunten: "Microprose took up the cause of modem-based wargaming in a big way with the 1990 [Dani Bunten] release, Command HQ, which boasted a simple, clean user interface that made historical strategy more accessible than ever, and racked up impressive sales." The game features many hypothetical scenarios, good graphics, and competent AI for when you can't find a live human opponent. The modem play is also excellent - making the game one of the first truly playable multiplayer wargames. Recommended!

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

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