Wargamer Weekly: Winding Down For Winter By Joe Robinson

Nothing much to report this week - all is quiet on the Wargamer front, and we're currently thinking about what we want to do for the end-of-year 'Year in Review' season. Watch this space!

Meanwhile, in the world of wargaming...

Matrix Games/Slitherine

It’s actually been a good week of releases for the munificent wargames company:

Field of Glory II’s first DLC – Immortal Fire, has now been released. This ‘faction pack’ of sorts focuses on the Achaemenid Persian Empire. The DLC contains 8 new factions, 10 new units, 30 Army Lists, 10 new epic battles and 5 new campaigns.

Matrix has acquired the sole publishing rights to some of the older Strategic Command games and are re-releasing them on the Matrix store. First up is Strategic Command: WW1 which has been renamed Strategic Command Classic: WW1. This re-release also includes the Breakthrough! expansion.

If you already own the Battlefront version of the game, it may be worth reading this post to see if you are eligible to get the new ‘Classic’ version for free to save you accidentally re-buying. It’s also worth noting that no development work has been done on this title, it’s just been converted for sale via the Matrix Store and using the Matrix Installer.

Finally, the Reinforcement Pack for Battlestar Galactica Deadlock has been released. We suggest heading over to Strategy Gamer to find out more about it.

Paradox Interactive

Hearts of Iron IV gets its regular dev diary this week, focusing on the new acclimatisation mechanics and special forces. Divisions will now slowly get used to the climate which they’re operating in, which will reduce attrition and other penalties. If they switch to the other extreme though, they must first shed what they accumulated in the previous climate before they can then acclimatise themselves to the new one. Further to this, the amount of Special Forces regiments you can recruit is now being limited.

Meanwhile, Steel Division just announced their plans for the next free update. Titled ‘Santa Claus', this patch will shake up the meta quite a fair bit:

Vehicles will be able to go through forests & hedgerows (at your own risk, the penatly will be quite severe)

Vehicles' critical hits will be repairable by supply units

Light AT units (up to 57mm) will now be able to enter buildings

Reworked global damage & critical hit systems

Decreased plane resistance (especially on bigger planes like J88 or B26)

Adjusted vehicle off-road speed (concerns about 80% of the vehicles)

Increased Short/Mid range precision

The patch is due to go into beta next week, so it’ll be interesting to see what the final version of the update looks like, but it could bring about a fundamental shift in how certain parts of the game works.

Unity of Command 2

Mr. Uzelac makes a welcome return to Wargamer Weekly thanks to a recent update he’s done for the upcoming Unity of Command 2.

This week’s update, he talks about Fog of War and how it is modelled in the game. There are several different scenarios he envisions for Fog of War in terms of who sees what & when, so UoC2 will have a dedicated ‘visibility layer’ that will sit on top of the game state.

You should read the full post to get an idea of that they’re thinking, but it all sounds good so far. We can’t wait to get our hands on this game!

That’s all for this week’s new update: enjoy your weekends and happy gaming! This article discusses games developed and published by members of the Slitherine Group with which we share an affiliation. For more information, please see the About Us page.