Wargamer Weekly: Gotta Panzer that Strategy By Joe Robinson

Another action-packed week of wargaming news in this update, so I won’t take up too much time. I’ve mainly been playing Pendragon still in my spare time, while putting Heart’s of Iron IV’s Waking the Tiger through its paces. You can read most of my early impressions here, and I’m working on doing a more formal review.

Meanwhile, in the world of wargaming…

Matrix Games/Slitherine

It’s been a big week for Wargamer’s wargame makers. You’ll have noticed that Field of Glory II got a new piece of DLC yesterday focusing on the Imperial Roman Army. Bill reviewed it and found it fantastic, so get on that if you haven’t already.

In terms of new announcements, Order of Battle is getting a new expansion focusing on the campaign for North Africa. It’s titled Sandstorm – which is kind of boring when you stack it up against some of the other expansion names– but at least its thematic.

Sandstorm will come with a vastly expanded Italian roster and new specialisations, a new terrain type as well as new terrain rules as you fight across 14 scenarios. The announcement makes it sound like you’re only fighting the campaign from the Axis side of things right now. If you want to sign up to be a beta tester, you can do so here.

Warhammer 40,000: Sanctus Reach got updated to Version 1.18 this week. The big change involves morale and melee combat. They’ve also tweaked ability selection and made swathe of balance changes across weapons and missions. You can read the full change-log here.

If your excitement levels for Check Your 6! Were somehow waning, Slitherine have also released a new infographic showcasing the German aircraft you’ll be facing when the game releases next week. Again, these images offer zero insights as to how the vehicles perform in the game, but they’re nice to look at, I guess.

Last but not least, there’s a bit of business related news. Matrix Games have long been dabbling in the professional wargaming scene via their work on Command. If you weren’t aware, there’s actually a ‘Professional Edition’ of that game that’s marketed at national and private military bodies to help them in their wargaming. This week, we got word that Matrix has now officially partnered with the University of Dayton Research Institute on a long-term professional training project.

The crux of this news is that the two bodies are hosting an International Users Group session using Command: Professional Edition at the UDRI in Ohio. Apparently, it will be attended by delegates from the various US military arms, as well as NATO and other military contractors. The event will take place March 22nd-23rd.

ARMA III’s Final DLC?

Even though we weren’t that impressed with the recent Tac-Ops Mission Pack DLC for ArmA III, it’s still nice to see the military combat sim get more updates. Interestingly, the newly announced Tanks DLC may be the game’s last; All we’ve got to go on is this line from the press release, “…Tanks DLC will conclude Arma 3's current development roadmap…”

As well as the new vehicles themselves (a new MBT, a TD and a single-player mini-campaign amongst other things), the DLC will also be accompanied by a free major platform update, which:

…implements a range of new gameplay features and bonus content related to armored vehicles, such as fully-modeled 3D interiors, more targeting options, new launchers and additional vehicle variants, decorative objects for scenario creators, a competitive multiplayer mode, and more.

If this is ArmA 3’s final expansion, it seems to be going out with a bang. Tanks is already available for pre-order at a 10% discount. Along with the video we’ve embeded, there’s a more complete overview of the DLC and the free update available on Bohemia’s website.

Lock’m’Load Publishing

We’ve been wanting to talk more about what Lock’n’Load have been up to on a weekly basis to make up for our earlier lack of coverage but by God, they don’t make it easy.

From what we can tell, they’ve been rather active with VASSAL this week, with modules for Heroes of the Pacific, Heroes of the Nam, Heroes of the Motherland and Heroes of North Africa (as well as a few others) all getting updated modules for the digital wargame platform. It seems this is part of a general initiative to update everything to Version 2.2.

They communicate via their forums, so we’ve using this page to try and keep track of new posts, so give it a look if you want to see what else the company have been up to recently.

Panzer Strategy

There’s been a couple of projects that seem to be trying to emulate Panzer Corps crop up recently. The first one we noticed was Panzer Strategy, which has now launched into Early Access on Steam. We’ve secured code for this ourselves, so we’ll play around with it for a bit, but its still a bit early. EA period is due to last around 3 months.

That’s all for this week’s round-up – if you’ve spotted anything else you’d like to share, please post in the comments below. Otherwise, have a great weekend!