Wargamer Weekly: The World at War By Joe Robinson

Nothing much of interest to report on the personal enrichment front this week – I’ve actually been playing a lot of Space 4X titles recently as part of my semi-regular “I feel like binging a certain game/type of game” cycle. Polaris Sector has been my main poison, mainly because I haven’t played it before and I’ll probably end up reviewing the upcoming Lumens expansion.

It’s pretty interesting in the sense that it some really cool individual systems – combat is especially satisfying, as is the ship designer and tech tree. The wider game isn’t that interesting though, and mainly devolves into a land-rush at-all-cost. It still holds its own compared to, say, Distant Worlds Universe, which has its own strengths (tech/ship design not being one of them) and Stellaris (which has a great early game and tech/ship design, but mediocre combat and mid game), but it definitely as the standards for the genre continue to rise.

On the news front, not a large amount to report, but wargaming continues to tick over…

Matrix/Slitherine

Let’s kick off with a new game announcement – Burma Road is barely out the door before Matrix & the Artistocrats are ready to announce their next expansion for Order of Battle, which will be called Panzerkrieg.

This new add-on will focus on the Eastern Front during the 1942 & 1943 campaigns as you try and lead the Wehrmacht to victory against Soviet Russia. New units & specialisations comes as standard, although owners of Blitzkrieg will be able to integrate this new DLC to form a mega-campaign, much like with the Japanese and American themed expansions. You can sign up to the Beta here.

Those interested in the upcoming The Operational Art of War IV might be interested in reading this FAQ that the developers have put together based on all the questions they’ve received so far since the announcement. We won’t re-post all the info here, but an easy one to highlight is the key differences from TOAW III:

a) Naval warfare has been radically improved.

b) Battlefield Time Stamps have radically altered the “turn burn” issue.

c) The User Interface has been extensively revised and improved.

CMANO fans, the Community Scenario pack has been updated to include twenty new scenarios. You can see a full list over on Grogheads, and the pack can be downloaded directly from WarfareSims.

Last, but certainly not least, Battlestar Galactica Deadlock will be receiving its first major update soon! The Armory update gives a much needed boost to capital ship armour – not only will the damage distribution be more clear, but there will also be a visual representation of what parts of the ship fall into which hull zone.

In addition to this, you’ll be able to re-name officers in the solo campaign, Cylon AI logic has been given a boost, and there is now a formal ‘Area of Operation’ in multiplayer maps to prevent people from wondering too far.

Making History: The Second World War

Factus Games have announced that the next title in their Making History series, The Second World War, has been approved for release on Steam and should be hitting Steam Early Access within the next two weeks. Judging from what Factus have said in their recent newsletter, it will be a short Early Access stint to get some pre-release feedback, with a full release expected in a month or so, but we’ll confirm that as soon as we can.

In the meantime, check out this Q&A with Ralph Gerth, founder of Factus Games, as well as this great collection of pre-release screenshots.

Unity of Command 2

Tomislav Uzelac has released his 12th Developer Diary for Unity of Command 2. It gives insights to where they’re at with things like hex rendering; the problems with making units stand out. Data validation and, bizarrely, the eternal struggle with how to colour-code units:

The Allied faction gets its own color, which is green, unsurprisingly. Our original idea was to keep it blue vs. red, but that puts us in problems for future Axis campaigns. Axis would be blue when playing against Soviets, but red against the Allies. There are no good solutions here (don’t even get me started on making the Allies red) so we simply gave the Allies a jacked up green. A bonus is that we can now use yet another color for when we want to be historically precise. For example, Finland in a 1939 scenario would be classified as Neutral (faction), rather than Axis. Feel free to propose a color for the neutrals… finding enough distinct colors for all the things we want color-coded is our daily nightmare, and we gladly welcome you to it.

That’s all for this week’s round-up – enjoy your weekends, and good hunting! This article discusses games developed and published by members of the Slitherine Group. For more information, please consult the About Us page.