Germany 1944 was not a pleasant place. The Allied armies are exerting relentless pressure to the East, West, and South, while overhead the seemingly endless waves of Allied bombers are trying to turn Germany into a wasteland. Can your leadership hold things together until the Allies tire and sue for peace?

Crisis of the Luftwaffe is a turn-based strategic game on developing the industry and technology of the Third Reich, while making the tactical decisions necessary to protect the country.

Complexity is about as simple as grand strategy gets, with a typical completion within 2 hours. Replayability is encouraged with numerous historical what-if's.

This was updated 09/04/22, added Battle of the Bulge and various fixes.

Tour of the Game

A new game can be started at different difficulty levels. A Random game picks advantages and disadvantages for you, which can be quite interesting - for instance, Germans are too dull to build advanced aircraft, D-Day comes early, but don't worry, a Strong Italy will save us!

A Selected game allows you to pick your own combination of advantages and disadvantages according to difficulty level.

Each turn, the current situation is presented to you. Here the boxes with tank pictures are tank factories, the ones with airfield symbols are aircraft factories and the I's are influence (money) production. The incoming Allied bombing raids are shown with the crosshairs. The Western, Eastern, and Southern fronts are represented by the commanders, with the red eyes of our Eastern commander indicating the Soviets are about to attack.

The various sites can be clicked on to build or improve industry. Likewise the display can be adjusted by the menu options at the top. Research can also be adjusted by the top menu.

The Luftwaffe can be deployed each turn to defend against any air raids that turn, backed up by the AA guns present at the site. The slider bars can be adjusted to send different amounts of each level of aircraft - basic, intermediate, advanced, and jet - to a given raid. These orders can be changed as many times as needed before end of turn.

After the end turn button is clicked, air raids are resolved and a result screen shows a summary of the turn's raids. Every few turns or so, an Allied ground offensive will occur on a given front. Each round, tactics can be adjusted, and then a summary of the kills and retreats are shown. If 100% of a given region is lost, it will change ownership on the main map.

If Central Germany is not breached by a few months after the historical end of the war, the German player has won. What "victory" means is determined by the difficulty level chosen, with a result screen showing anything from putting off surrender to forcing the Allies to sue for peace. Maybe you will even get to hear the nice victory tune.

Additional Download information

Crisis uses .NET 4. You normally can download and run the game without it (chances are already installed), so try just install and download. As always, do a virus check when downloading any executable from the internet.

If the operating system complains, you can download .NET 4 from the Microsoft site:

When presented a choice of Save or Run, choose Run. If the installers ask questions, pick the positive choice: Accept, Yes, etc.