Sea actions, bombing raids and land battles in Operation Sea Lion

Fight it, or let it resolve

When a big moment comes, the game stops and asks. Every prompt has the same two buttons:

• Take command (or Fly the raid) to fight it yourself in real time.
• Auto-resolve to settle it on the map. It uses the same odds, without you.

Each prompt also has an Offer setting, so you can choose to be asked about every one or only the big ones.

Battle	Fought	About how long	Offer setting
Sea action	On the plot	3 to 5 minutes	Every sea action, or only the big actions
Bombing raid	From the bombsight or dive sight	2 minutes	Every raid, or only big raids
Land battle	In 3D	5 to 10 minutes	Every land battle, or only big battles

Night actions in the Channel

A destroyer flotilla out of Dover finds a barge train mid-Channel. As Britain you have starshell, searchlights, 4.7-inch salvos, torpedoes and ramming. As Germany you have torpedo boats and E-boats screening, smoke, scatter orders, and the Stukas you'll want at first light.

Destroyers on night patrol stay clear of the Stukas by day. On the German side, minefields on the flanks keep the destroyers out of the barge lanes.

Bombing raids

The air battle is 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 station bombed blunts the defence.

You can fly the big raids yourself: Stukas diving on a radar station, or Blenheims over the barge basins at Boulogne under flares. The prompt shows the flak, the fighters to expect and the likely losses before you choose. As Britain, plan raids on the barge basins from the Cabinet War Rooms (press P): the forecast shows the expected barges sunk and losses.

Land battles

Kent and Sussex are built from real elevation data. The land battles cover the beach assaults on the planned beaches B to E, paratroops near Lympne and Hawkinge, counter-attacks, and the GHQ Line's ditches and pillboxes in front of London.

Before you choose, the prompt shows both sides' forces, what's on call to support you and a forecast of your chances. On a phone the 3D view is lighter.

If the land battles can't load on your device, they're auto-resolved instead.

The radio net

Sector controllers, squadron leaders, destroyer captains and the operations rooms talk on your side of the net, with the German R/T's own brevity words on the other. The voices are recordings played through a narrow valve-radio circuit. 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 the game doesn't fake one.

See How to play for how the battles feed the tonnage scoreboard.