Wargamer Weekly: Force Commander By Joe Robinson

Today is Star Wars Day, although that won’t mean much as far as Wargamer Weekly is concerned, since there aren’t any decent Star Wars wargames out at the moment. You can pick up Empire at War and Star Wars: Rebellion quite cheap though, which are some of the better examples, not including mods.

Meanwhile, in the world of wargaming…

Grand Tactician: The Civil War

You may remember Charles interviewed developers behind Grand Tactician, an ambitious real-time wargaming project that looked to model all levels of operational warfare in way that mixes the visual impact of games like Total War, but the realism and depth of Scourge of War.

Well, they’ve finally revealed what the first title in their series will be:

Grand Tactician: The Civil War (1861-1865) is a real time strategy game, where you will run your nation, muster, manage and support great armies, and manoeuvre them to defeat the enemy. Once the opposing armies meet, command your troops to victory in battles fought on historical battlefields.

There’s a lot more information on the game’s shiny new official website, but Grand Tacitian will span the whole war, including many variables and what-if scenarios. We need another ACW game like we need an actual civil war to break-out, but the screenshots make it look very cool indeed. It actually reminds me of the Hegemony series, especially with its attention to logistics. As much as we would have wished for a different theme, we can’t wait for it to hit Steam later this year.

Matrix Games & Slitherine

After a couple of weeks of not much, Matrix now have three announcements for us this week. At the very tail end of last week (too late to be caught by last Friday’s WW), they announced a new Command LIVE scenario.

Commonwealth Collision showcases a ‘what if’ scenario that features a conflict between India and Pakistan, which ends up drawing in Ol’ Man Britain and China in on opposing sides. It’s good to know they’re still making these, although I imagine a lot of their time was spent working on the Silent Service expansion.

There’s no release date for it, but we do have a date for Order of Battle: Sandstorm. You can fight the North African campaign all over again come Wednesday, May 16th. Matrix have also teased another OOB announcement that will drop sometime before then.

Finally, Warhammer 40,000: Sanctus Reach is getting another expansion! Horrors of the Warp adds in the Chaos Demons as a new faction, along with a 16-scenario single player campaign. The campaign will be from the POV of the Space Wolves again, but you can pick the Demons as a playable faction in skirmish, with units coming from all four main Chaos Gods.

We don’t know much else at this point (it doesn’t seem like any Traitor Legions will be included), but you can watch an hour’s worth of gameplay here.

Battle Fleet Ground Assault Released

Mythical City has released a new entry in its Battle Fleet series. Battle Fleet: Ground Assault takes the game’s traditionally naval-focused gameplay to the European theatre and the Normandy invasions.

You’ll be commanding squadrons of tanks through various scenarios and battlefields, fighting out a version of WW2 that pretends infantry aren’t a thing. I haven’t played the previous games myself, but it’ll be interesting to see how the mechanics have adapted to ground combat.

Steel Division Anniversary Teaser

Eugen have teased some new content coming for Steel Division’s first anniversary. All we have is a semi-cryptic tweet and the name ‘First Blood’. It seems this update will involve the ‘Bloody First’ 1st Infantry Division, as well as the First SS-Panzerdivision. It will be a free update and will drop on May 17th.

Armoured Commander II

Another week, another weekly build for WW2 Tank/Rogue-like Armoured Commander 2. It’s recently just released the first official alpha build for the game, and this is the first patch since that milestone. You can check the full change-log on the official website.

That’s all for this week’s round-up, have a good weekend and happy gaming!