Wargamer Weekly: By Sea, By Land By Joe Robinson

Unsurprisingly, I’ve been playing a lot of Hearts of Iron 4 recently. I didn’t do our review of Man the Guns, but I’ve always been a fan of the series since reviewing Hearts of Iron 3 early on in my career and wanted to keep up with the changes.

The game’s in the pretty good place right now, but I worry what the future holds as there’s clearly been a change in the focus of the design, a focus which is rendering large parts of the game dangerously irrelevant. Hopefully we won’t have to wait so long for the next expansion. The dev team have already put out a patch taking care of some important bugs that have cropped up, as well as sharing some telemetry as to how people have been playing the game.

Meanwhile, in the world of wargaming…

Matrix Games & Slitherine

The week started off with a bang as the wargames developer held a live stream that announced a few items, namely:

Order of Battle is coming to console, as well as more DLC for the game being developed.

Showed off some new information regarding Panzer Corps 2.

Bits and bobs covering Close Combat, CMANO and more.

They also announced a brand new Slitherine-brand game which we covered on our sister website. The only other announcement of note this week was a community spotlight focus on a user-made CMANO scenario, titled Sakura Blue. If covers a fictional joint-forces exercise between Taiwan and Japan, and you can read more about it here.

Armoured Commander II Alpha 3

There’s now a third version of the Amoured Commander II Alpha that you can download and try at your leisure. The changelog is pretty extensive, but some general additions include:

ADD: Soviet nation, campaign, and player tanks

ADD: Non-combat truck units to both German and Polish orders of battle

ADD: Start of Commander and Crew menus

ADD: Keyboard options plus a space for custom keymapping in keyboard_mapping.json

ADD: Player crew wounds and status changes

ADD: Options menu to in-game menu tab

ADD: 76.2mm obr. 00/02P gun for Soviet artillery support

This will be the last update in a while we’re told, as the developer has to focus on some real-life projects in the short-term - we'll let you know as soon as he's resumed development.

New Graviteam Tactics DLC

At the start of the month hardcore military sim developer Graviteam release a new piece of DLC for their popular title, Graviteam Tactics: Mius Front. Called Against the Tide, it deals with the final liberation of Kharkov at the end of the Battle of Kursk in 1943.

The DLC features two operations south-west of Kharkov of 10 turns for each side, in an area covering 64 sq.km. This engagement is reported to be the first combat deployment of the Pz V Panther tank ausf.D.

Ultimate Admiral on the horizon

The developers of one of our favourite American Civil War games has put up an official website for their next game, Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail. We were hoping for some kind of Napoleonic-era war game personally, but I suppose this will have to do.

To be fair, the game page does mention naval landings and more ‘conventional’ land battles as being features. No other news to share on this front – there’s no pre-order links live yet, but we imagine they’ll be coming soon.

That's all for this week's update - let us know if you spot anything else, and we'll see you Monday!