Wargamer Weekly: Fog of War By Joe Robinson

Early January is always a bit of a slow time, even by wargaming standards, but we’ve made do. It was good to finally have a proper look at Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, which seems to be coming along very nicely.

We’re expecting some Panzer Corps 2 news to drop at some point, if this tweet is anything to go by. I'm hoping it’s not today as typically the news will drop after I’ve already written this up, but we’ll see. Maybe they’ll be utter barbarians and drop news on a weekend.

Meanwhile, in the world of war games…

Libertadores Enters Beta

We got an email from Headquarter Wargames late last week that their new game Libertadores has now entered beta. They’ve got some veteran AGEOD players helping them put everything through its paces, and it seems to be going well so far. If you’ve forgotten what Libertadores is, it will be an area-based game that will cover the wars of Liberation of the Spanish colonies of America starting at the start of the 19th century.

New Command: Modern Operations Beta Patch

A new patch has been released into beta for Command: Modern Operations. Version 1121.4 (makes no sense to me either) adds in a pretty important feature for anyone using it with TacView - Fog of War.

Now, so long as you have ‘God’s Eye’ view disabled, the Tacview window will now display only own- and friendly-side units plus any detected contacts. Check out the full patch notes to see what else has been changed in this build as well as the download link for the beta patch. Steam users can use the manual download option if they want, but it will soon be added to a beta branch before being added to the game properly after testing.

Days of War Confirms Release Date

Multiplayer FPS Days of War has confirmed that it will be leaving Early Access on January 30th, 2020. The WW2 shooter has gone through a difficult development journey, with them having to take a few steps back and try again before returning to Early Access last year.

Days of War will leave Early Access with a full game overhaul and massive content update, including a bevy of new weapons, maps, and more. Users can also build their own maps with the Map Editor and can play offline with bots. They’ve also signed a publisher - Graffiti Games although they haven’t worked on anything we’d know about here.

Personally I feel the time for these kinds of games has kind of passed. Battlefield returning to World War 2 hasn’t really been the hit EA thought it would be, and then you have other projects like Post Scriptum that try to follow the ArmA-esque ‘sim’ route to be more realistic. Games like Days of War, which are essentially just action-shooters (like CS:GO) with a WW2 skin, don’t really have the same kind of appeal as they used to.

New Armoured Commander 2 Development Build

There’s been a couple of updates to Armoured Commander 2 since we last checked in - yesterday was a more significant development build update that added in smoke ammo for late-war tanks, and the early version of a close combat system. At the moment only the player can initiate a close combat, but the AI will be given the ability further down the line.

If you fancy checking it out for yourself, you can download the build here.

More X-Wing models announced

Fantasy Flight Games continue to eek out what they can from their Star Wars space dogfighting, X-Wing. Makes me kind-of mad because that game is getting a lot of interesting innovations and releases, where-as my boyo, Armada(oh) gets relatively little.

The former studio head of FFG has said publicly that the company has less material to work with in terms of new capital ships they think will sell, but I wonder if the game in general just doesn’t sell well enough for them to even try and plug the gap with other content. I really like the ‘campaign box’ idea they’ve dabbled with recently.

Coming back to X-Wing, it seems like they’re kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one. The ‘Imperial Shuttle’ (or Lambda-class shuttle, for those in the know) from Return of the Jedi has been in the game since the beginning, but now they’re including more non-starfighter type craft in the latest wave of new expansions:

Xi-class Light Shuttle Expansion Pack

LAAT/i Gunship Expansion Pack

HMP Droid Gunship Expansion Pack

These kinds of ships have always taken on more of a support role in games of X-Wing (and Armada), so I guess this is rounding out the roster of such vessels for the other factions as well. If any X-Wing players have any thoughts on these upcoming new ships, let us know!

That's all for this week - enjoy your weekends!