About the Game
Command the war, forge history...
Immerse yourself in Hex of Steel, a fresh and innovative WWII wargame that spans all major fronts. Command your forces across Europe, Africa, and the Pacific in a game that marries deep strategic gameplay with cutting-edge mechanics.
Born from passion.
What started as a Kickstarter dream with just €53 has evolved into a deeply engaging strategy game, a testament to the determination and passion of its creators. Hex of Steel is more than just another war game—it's a labor of love crafted with the input of a dedicated community.
Why Hex of Steel Stands Out?
Constant Evolution: Over 400 updates and counting. Hex of Steel is continuously refined and improved, ensuring a fresh and balanced experience with every playthrough.
Dynamic AI: Engage with an AI that reacts to your every move, providing a challenging and fair experience without ever resorting to cheats.
Expansive Scenarios: Command your units across massive, meticulously crafted maps that cover Europe, North Africa, the Pacific, and beyond.
Playthrough Customization: Tailor your strategy with over 50 policies and doctrines, from military tactics to occupation strategies. Toggle optional settings like zone of control, realistic supplies, and fog of war to suit your style.
Epic Campaigns: Lead your core units through branching, dynamic campaigns that allow you to rewrite military history.
Cross-Platform Play: Seamlessly battle friends across PC and mobile platforms with cross-platform multiplayer (Yes! The game also is available on iOS and Android).
Limitless Creativity: Design your own scenarios, units, and maps using a suite of editors, or dive into infinite replayability with the random scenario generator.
Strategic Depth: Employ diplomacy, forge alliances, declare wars, and negotiate truces. Your strategic choices will shape the course of the game.
Vast Replayability: With 45 playable nations—from Germany to Mongolia to Iraq—Hex of Steel offers an unprecedented variety of strategies and challenges.
Dynamic Environment: Experience dynamic weather and seasonal transitions, complete with realistic visual and sound effects that bring the battlefield to life.
No Hidden Costs: Enjoy the full game with no in-game purchases or paid content—what you see is what you get.
Join a Thriving Community
With an active and growing Discord community of 2000+ members, you'll find plenty of support, tips, and camaraderie as you dive into the rich world of Hex of Steel. The server also is a place where you can get in touch with the devs directly.
Whether you're a seasoned strategist or new to the genre, Hex of Steel offers a deeply immersive and customizable wargaming experience that will challenge your strategic prowess.
The battlefield awaits—are you ready to command?
Screenshots
14 images
Version Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
On the site: Build 26024408
Up to date
ADDITIONS
- New ‘GetRedeploymentTime()’ function in Unit.cs (Harmony modders).
CHANGES
- Rebalanced the Campaign of Poland (first German campaign scenario) so that it is more forgiving to new players.
- Improved replayability by randomizing the available players to be invited to join the AI’s faction instead of running the list of players in the same order every time, giving the same alliances all the time (historical focus OFF).
- Winter War Soviet campaign scenario routing now offers Operation Barbarossa North or Operation Barbarossa South instead of Kiev ’41 or Leningrad ’41 as next scenarios.
- Hardened unlocking of the ‘Retreat’ achievement.
FIXES
- Amphibious trait modification (added or removed from/to a unit) was never taken into account.
- Fixed super rare and specific bug where scenario would end because of your unit retreating into a major VP from the enemy, and by doing so, the counter of major VP would reach the max.
- AI most likely could not deploy launch sites, which as a result, made it impossible to deploy ‘missile’ units (V1s/V2s or any modded ‘missile’ unit).
- AI was not properly sending its units far from the frontline back to the reserve for redeployment to a closer point on the front.
- Map/hexes wrapping on ‘circular’ map (set from map editor) would not work on ‘odd’ width maps, it only worked on ‘even’ width maps.
- Toggling ON or OFF the ‘circular’ property of a map in the editor would not rebuild the tiles neighbors list.
- Distance calculations were wrong on circular maps near the edge of the map.
- Belgian Modele 1931 47mm had wrong movement points and ammunition value.
- French Canon de 194 GPF had the wrong type (artillery instead of Tank).
- Wrong tooltip on the 'Auto supplies' button in the reserve menu.
- On circular maps, units would slowly lerp from one side to the other taking up to 60 seconds on the biggest world map to move from one side to the other. Now they teleport automatically from one side to the other, and resume smooth movement from there.
ADDITIONS
- New German unit: Sd. Kfz. 10-4 FlaK 2.0 cm.
CHANGES
- Bumped multiplayer compatibility version.
- Repair/resupply buttons are now disabled when you don’t have enough money/manpower to perform the action.
- Units must now be disembarked first before being allowed to be upgraded/downgraded.
- Land units in transport ships will no longer apply a supply penalty to regular land units on land next to them.
- Aircrafts will now retaliate during bad weather if attacked by another aircraft owned by a player using the ‘All Weather’ policy.
- Converting a save file into a playable scenario will no longer overwrite the save file itself, but create a new dedicated file instead.
- Rebalanced Iwo Jima campaign scenarios (not enough income and negative manpower).
- Fortifications have been added around the Kursk salient on the Eastern Front 1943 standalone scenario.
FIXES
- Invalid/weird mod name could make the whole mods menu listing fail and not list any mod.
- Railway guns had their armour upped from 10 to 30 by mistake.
- Objectives window would display the ‘capture all major VPs’ objective/requirement even though all of the major VPs were non capturable tiles (reinforcement tiles, for example).
- AI could/would land on land/islands without exits (harbors/VPs) and would remain stranded there forever.
Typo in the introduction text of the Poland 1945 standalone scenario. - Volume of sound effects played from the Units Editor was not using the proper volume setting for units SFXs.
- One lone victory point was under Dutch control instead of Japan control in the Pacific 1942 standalone scenario.
- Hills damage modifier was not applied to mountain tiles.
- Units on mountain tiles did not get the ‘high ground’ visibility bonus.
- Unit names were wrongly capitalized when playing without the realistic naming setting.
- Wrong text label shown on the scenario start description window when the scenario description was empty.
- Some islands/VPs were wrongly placed in the Coral Sea campaign scenario.
- Yet another attempt to fix auto move after attack on mobile.
CHANGES
- Reworked flamethrower tanks stats (nerfed).
- Modded units are now excluded from the naming auto-update on scenario opening (fix for modders that got some of their units renamed by the game on scenario opening, only one case I’m aware of).
- ‘Low health’ unit notification were not destroyed when a ‘unit was destroyed’ notification takes over (to reduce notifications clutter).
FIXES
- Playing a PBEM game/turn before using the random scenario generator or the scenario editor would lead to PBEM data leaking into the newly generated scenario and making it impossible to edit it in the scenario editor because it was considered a PBEM game.
- Unit purchase limit shown in store was displayed beneath the unit representation image and could be hidden by it if the unit image was large enough to cover it.
- Upkeep value calculated was wrong for tanks/artillery units in transport ships/planes (they counted as ships and used ship upkeep value instead of their own).
- Adding/removing a loadout on a unit through the upgrade/downgrade menu could be used to get free supplies (an upgrade/downgrade action reset the ammo/fuel amount on the unit free of charge).
- AA units attacking nearby land units were not triggering artillery supportive fire.
- Simplified Chinese characters were broken in the font asset.
FIXED
- Historical accuracy issues in the Europe 1940 standalone scenario.
- Historical accuracy issues in the Battle of Anzio standalone scenario.
FIXES
- Buildings could be upgraded in the reserve and trigger an infinite money exploit through there.
- Buildings (factories, refineries, airfields etc) could be built on rivers (where there was a bridge).
- One rare and super specific occurence of AI game lag (several seconds) in a very specific case:
- In a very specific case, you could be prompted with the overrun confirmation window during the AI’s turn.
- If you had the ‘All Weather’ policy and had the ‘plane can move one extra tile after attack’ optional setting and your plane started above an enemy unit and you attacked that unit, your plane would not be allowed to move more than a single tile.
- Some AI controlled nations would not perform landings when historical focus was ON in custom scenarios.
- Mobile users: the amount of available units in the reserve would not display more than 2 characters, instead of 100+, it would display 10.
- Mobile users: One more attempt to prevent auto overrun on attack.
ADDED
- Players blacklist (bans) is now automatically fetched from the servers in real time to refresh the chat instead of being baked into the game files and requiring a game update to update the ban player list.
CHANGES
- Improved localization quality for Simplified Chinese.
- Europe 1941 units in villages have been replaced by garrisons.
- Europe 1942 units in villages have been replaced by garrisons.
- Europe 1943 units in villages have been replaced by garrisons.
- AI ships will now move and target low damage potential land target if there is nothing else for them to do (they would stay idle before).
FIXES
- Localization entries missing.
- Secondary/Major victory point could go out of sync from regular victory points in the map editor when setting the points (really rarely, and that would create freeze during the game so it would not go unnoticed. Did not happen on base game scenarios).
- Custom campaign scenarios could have issues when finishing the first and second scenarios of the tree and would fail to load more.
- Not all diplomatic options were disabled in campaign scenarios.
- AI ships should no longer move into harbour tiles (if that were still the case, please send me the autosave file from the previous turn to the support email).
- Player.log file was not automatically picked up when trying to contact the support from the main menu on Linux and MacOS.
- On MacOS, if the game was installed on an external drive, and if that drive was not built for MacOS journaling system, scenarios could fail to load and would be duplicated (jeez).
ADDITIONS
- Harmony: new CanGetEntrenched() function under Unit.cs to replace all of the hardcoded checks throughout the codebase (to decide whether a unit can get entrenchment > 0).
- Harmony: new GetEntrenchmentRemoval(unit) function under Unit.cs to easily tweak the amount of entrenchment level to remove during an attack.
CHANGES
- Armoured trains stats: armour reduced from 50 to 30. Fuel reduced from 200 to 150 (5 turns worth of movement).
- Strategic bombers will now remove 2 entrenchment instead of 1 during an attack (at the exception of strategic bombers carrying a torpedo, or a recon strategic bomber).
FIXES
- Supply route making stupid decisions and providing suboptimal supply paths.
- Light bombers did not have their damage bonus (x2) vs naval transports.
- Armoured trains would get entrenchment level 3 on scenario start even though their entrenchment amount could never go up.
- Minsk 1941 Axis (campaign) very unbalanced.
- Scenario introduction text was not selectable/glitchy when selected.
- Bug in the visual result of the damage calculation from the hero damage bonus, it was applied once in the damage calculation (correct) but displayed in the damage breakdown (bug).
- Bug on the damage shown on the counter, hero damage bonus was counted twice.
- Bug on devices that have Turkish as device language (not game language, device language) where mobility options would not be available in the store menu.
CHANGES
- Unit names are now properly localized when using the ‘realistic naming’ setting.
- Engineers can now build/place down tile units (fortifications, factories…) on tiles that are non-empty from unit (as long as they are allies), changing the tile under an existing unit will however reset its entrenchment value (down to zero).
- Updated manual.
FIXED
- A retreating unit moving across an enemy landmine and dying as a result of it would keep the tile as ‘busy’.
- Artillery damage could become positive and heal enemy units when playing with ‘damage reduction over attack frequency’ setting in very specific cases.
- Fixes to unit names capitalization (all words are now capitalized).
- Several Panzer III L were present on the Sevastopol 41 scenario, even though they were not available at that time.
- Mobile issue where overrun happens instantly during the attack
- Minor localization typo.
FIXED
- Start button being greyed out even though everything was ready to play in the standalone scenarios menu.
- Capitalization in unit naming inconsistencies when playing with realistic names option.
- Attempt to fix game settings unproperly being restored after playing an online game with different game settings than the client's.
ADDED
- Store categories icons for Antiquity and Medieval era/time period.
CHANGED
- First player in the list when setting up a game will now be set as 'playing first' by default.
FIXED
- Battle of the Bulge campaign scenario had no reinforcement tiles to deploy heavy units.
- Japan 1945 balance issues.
- Japanese Kawanishi H6K had 3 vision range instead of 2.
ADDED
- Localization of all hardcoded units names, for example: Heavy infantry => Infanterie lourde, etc.
CHANGED
- Very bad morale (red) now applies a penalty of 15% (+5% damage penalty vs prior).
- Strategic bombers no longer ignore terrain modifier and entrenchment. This change was made to go against the strategic bombers spam and overuse over CAS bombers.
- Repeated attack modifier now applies on final damage dealt, not on raw/base damage (will lead to less 0 damage attacks, as it was too punitive).
- Minor balance changes on Poland campaign scenario on the Axis side.
- Manual has been updated to reflect the latest changes from this update.
- German Kavallerie unit has been renamed into Cavalry.
- Soviet Desantniki have been renamed into Paratroopers.
- Italian Paracadutisti have been renamed into Paratroopers.
- German Panzergrenadier have been renamed into Panzergrenadiers.
FIXED
- Blitzkrieg policy was applied when it was not picked in some cases.
- AI commanders would never leave harbours and would keep alternate between transport and land state.
- Vichy France would be created twice even if the country already existed if you played on a modded Europe scenario (like from the Europe+ mod).
- Croatia would not be formed on Europe 1939/1940 standalone scenarios.
- Molotov-Ribbentrop pact would not enter into effect on Europe 1939 standalone scenario.
- Operation Citadel campaign scenario on the Allies side was missing a victory point to be held to achieve victory in 45 turns.
- Research issues linked to the renaming of units.
- Tutorial tasks text had wrong scale on SteamDeck.
ADDED
- Sd. Kfz. 7-1 flakvierling 38 to: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.
CHANGED
- Capturing a victory point will now trigger a refresh of borders + land ownership (without full FOW clearing however).
- Rommel’s Offensive campaign scenario balance and tweaks.
- Australia has been added in the El Alamein 2 campaign scenario.
- Supplies path will now prioritize safer routes instead of maximizing supplies input (better to have at least a little than nothing at all because route goes through enemy territory into the FOW).
- M10 Wolverine and M18 Hellcat stats.
FIXED
- Vichy France would no longer appear after France capitulation on the Europe scenarios (1939 and 1940).
- Many instances of guns in several scenarios that were missing transport options.
- Germany performing landings in some campaign scenarios where it was not supposed to.
- Italy was present on the Battle of Montecassino campaign scenarios when it should not have.
- Money production was not disabled on victory points captured and owned for less than 3 turns if the original owner had the Scorched Earth policy.
- Unit stepping on a naval/land mine could uncover another enemy unit further down its path even though its movement stopped on the mine.
- Land mines would prevent paratroopers from being dropped on the tiles they are on (you could therefore deduce there are landmines on the tile).
- Sherman II graphics.
Current Release
Build 26024408
Uploaded Oct 28, 2026
System Requirements
OS
N/A
CPU
Intel Core i3-2100 / AMD FX-4300
RAM
4 GB RAM
GPU
Intel HD 4000 / AMD Radeon R5 230 / NVIDIA GeForce GT 710
How to Install
1
Download all files
2
Extract the .ZIP file to a folder (use WinRAR or 7-Zip)
3
Run Hex of Steel.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
Archive password
Needed when extracting (WinRAR / 7-Zip) — not a site login.
CRC32
F1485D04
SHA-256
4deb463ad0fd7b1a63c429857421d427d1ccf97876fefd9929f0a0e43b5da819
How: Right-click the downloaded file → 7-Zip / WinRAR → CRC SHA → compare with the values above.
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Download Hex of Steel for PC with a direct link or via torrent. Get the full version of Hex of Steel for free. Hex of Steel is a Indie released by War Frogs Studio.