Wargamer Weekly: Going Legit By Joe Robinson

There’s a surprising amount of news and information to parse today, and that’s on top of the stuff we’ve already talked about earlier in the week. How about Unity of Command 2, eh? An unspecified part of November is going to be great! I've been trying to do more original reporting during the week when I don't have a planned review or feature in, but it's a case of striking a balance so that I don't accidentally cannibalise the Friday round-up and leave myself with nothing to talk about.

In other news, we’re heading out to PDXCon again this year, so site updates towards the end of next week might be a bit sporadic. We’re expecting an announcement for Hearts of Iron 4 at least though, so there will be news and things to talk about over the weekend. It may mean there won’t be a Wargamer Weekly next Friday, though.

Meanwhile, in the world of war games...

Matrix Games/Slitherine

A couple of smaller items from Matrix & Slitherine this week (in addition to the Shadow Empire announcement):

Close Combat TBF has been updated to Version 1.01. Addresses many bugs and odd behaviours regarding tank battles.

WarPlan, The grand strategy WW2 war game, will be releasing on October 24th . We should have a review ready for launch.

. We should have a review ready for launch. It seems the beta test for Armored Brigade’s new stacking limit has been a success, and the new mechanic has been rolled out to the retail version of the game. You can read more about it here.

New Game, New Mystery

So a new game was spotted on Steam this week that’s due for release onto Steam Early Access on November 11th. It’s called Cold War Game (seriously) and is made by an indie studio called Room 301. We think they’re Russian.

The first impression you get is that this looks almost exactly like Wargame: European Escalation, just with much better graphics. It’s suspiciously similar, one might say, although you can’t really make a case for reused assets etc. on just screens alone. They’ve certainly taken inspiration, and a member of our discord who claims to have spoken to the devs has said that this is a bunch of gamers who were tired of waiting for Wargame 4, and decided to do it themselves. Which is great. I guess? But we'd be lying if we said there weren't alarm bells.

We will try and get some code to test this out ourselves but I would recommend caution. The Steam Page makes it very clear they are reliant on Early Access funds for continued development, and I’m not 100% clear on just what they’ve done so far. Some kind of USSR campaign and 50 units, but whether that translates into a playable build is anyone’s guess. Their list of things they want to add-into the game is quite long, and a lot of it quite fundamental. Make of it what you will.

Imperator: Rome is getting Legit

So if you didn’t know, Imperator: Rome dropped it’s long-awaited 1.2 Cicero Update a couple of weeks ago. In short, it’s good and is taking the game in the right direction - you can read more about that over on Strategy Gamer.

But we don’t care about Cicero - it’s all about 1.3 Livy now. Why? Because of this dev diary. That’s right folks, logistics and baggage trains are coming to Imperator: Rome! I love the smell of a well provisioned Army in the morning. It smells like victory.

Imperator has a surprising amount of tactical depth to its combat systems, and it’s great to see they’re improving that this early in the game’s lifespan. The dev team have shown an amazing willingness to take bold steps in addressing much of the negative feedback it’s had since launch, so this is very promising indeed.

New Game: Libertadores

The same guys who created the rather excellent Battles for Spain have announced they’re working on a new title - Libertadores. It covers the wars of Liberation of the Spanish colonies of America that started in 1810. Not much else is known at the moment, but have have shared a beta screenshot.

And the rest…

Hearts of Iron 4 is bringing Armored Cars to the game officially, along with new intel/recon mechanics.

Invasion Machine’s Early Access launch has been delayed till November 6th.

Games Workshop partnered with Bandai Namco to make a Space Marine action figure, and it’s already run out of the initial run of 9000 copies.

Eugen have been talking more about the upcoming Death on the Vistula DLC for Steel Division 2. The latest dev diary talks about some of the free content dropping at the same time as the expansion.

That's all we've got time for this week. Happy gaming, and enjoy your weekends!