Wargamer Weekly: Jaggy Irregular Weather Patterns By Joe Robinson

Sadly, my time has been taken up with mainly non-wargaming topics this week. Surviving Mars was released by Paradox Interactive yesterday, and you can read our review over at Strategy Gamer if you’re interested. What really piqued my interest was the brief mention of a story line that involved fraying relations with Earth, and I was instantly reminded of Alex’s review of Phobos Rising! Insurgency on Mars. Perhaps through mods or future DLC there’s a wargame waiting to make itself heard.

Also, Fortnite is a pretty big deal apparently. It’s ok, you don’t need to know what it is.

Meanwhile, in the world of wargaming…

Panzer Campaigns Gold – The Future

Wargames Design Studio has recently been remastering all of John Tiller’s classic Panzer Campaign Series games. We say ‘all’ they’ve only done the Eastern Front titles so far. Earlier in the week they posted a blog about what their plans are going forward.

There are 10 games left in the PCS, 5 on the western front and 5 in the Mediterranean. While work has started on these titles WDS are actually going to be prioritising another one of their projects – Panzer Battles 3.

They do expect all ten games to be finished by the end of 2018, but it will just be at a slower pace than before. These aren’t simply remasters though – additional content and some mod stuff does get included to give a more complete experience. If you go to the bottom of the diary, you can see an example of this in the work they’re doing with France ’40.

Matrix Games/Slitherine

A quieter week for our former masters – they had a big released in the form of Check Your 6!, a digital turn-based dogfighting skirmish game set in the skies over Britain during WW2. It’s based on the table-top skirmish game of the same name and being developed by The Lordz Studio.

Prior to release they put out another dev diary talking about things like control and movement/speed, and they’ve also put out a couple of tutorial videos to help people jump in the game.

Keep an eye out for our review which will probably land early next week. Our review of Desert War should be on time though – very much looking forward to that one!

The only other thing worth highlighting is the Scenario Creation Guide that’s been created for Field of Glory II. ‘Guide’ doesn’t quite do it justice though: it’s an entire forum, composed of 17 different articles each with step-by-step instructions (backed by screens) showing you how to apply different aspects of creating a scenario.

I was briefly inspired by the idea of creating my own (or maybe asking someone to do it for me) after the release of the Legions Triumphant DLC. Having reminded myself of Wallace Breem’s excellent Eagles in the Snow, I’d love to see a custom scenario covering the XX’s failed defence of the Rhine.

Unity of Command 2

After roughly three months of silence, we’ve finally got a new development diary for Unity of Command 2. Seems they’ve finally completed their work porting the game into their own custom 3D engine, and the game itself finally has all of the elements within it to begin testing.

Along with things like the weather system and UI, this dev diary talks about Headquarters and supply hubs. These exist on the map as their own elements but can stack with combat units as well as each other. The screen that was supplied with this diary is gorgeous, and reveals a lot about how the game is shaping up. Also, as a final note – Unity of Command 2 is now 64-bit, which means you’ll need a 64-bit OS to run it.

Kill Team Returns

A token bit of table-top news to round the diary off: Games Workshop went to the recent GAMA trade show and dropped some reveals. Most of it is minor stuff, but it appears they’re bringing back Kill Team in full force as a new tactical skirmish game, with a brand-new edition. We’ve written about it before, but this new rulebook will probably shake things up a bit.

That’s all for this week’s round-up – let us know if you spot anything else of interest, otherwise enjoy your weekend and happy gaming!