Slitherine’s Home of Wargamers Live stream provides updates on future games By Ian Boudreau

Slitherine held its first Home of Wargamers Live stream today, which featured some updates across the company’s upcoming titles and expansions. While there wasn’t a lot of big news on the wargaming front, we did get to hear some encouraging things about titles we’ve been watching for a while.

Panzer Corps 2

Slitherine had originally projected a 2018 release date for Panzer Corps 2, and obviously that has come and gone. The good news, though, is that they’re confident it’ll be coming out some time this year, “unless something extremely negative happens,” according to marketing director Marco Minoli.

Along with senior producer Adam Grace, Minoli briefly outlined some of the game types that will be available in Panzer Corps 2’s skirmish mode. You’ll have traditional attack and defend modes, but also a free-for-all versus several other players or AIs and a ‘survival’ mode that has you defending a single city and expanding out from there.

“It’s quite tense, it’s aimed toward people who felt the AI [in the first Panzer Corps] was a little bit easy, so you’re sort of up against it in that mode,” Grace explained.

A new dev diary is due out this week, so hopefully we’ll learn more about what they’re adding to Skirmish Mode then.

Close Combat: The Bloody First

Nothing new to report on this front - Slitherine reminded us all that beta signups are still open, so if you haven’t put your name in the hat for that, check out our story on how. The rest of the segment on The Bloody First was more or less a rehash of what we’ve already learned about this “refresh” of the classic series.

Again, not a lot of news to report back on this front. Slitherine has published a new developer diary on the game’s buildings system, which explains the categories you’ll have available and how they’ll influence production and populations in the game, as well as how they’re constrained by the regions you control.

Minoli said the development team is going over the game with a fine-toothed comb, conscious of the fact that they’ll be competing with Paradox’s Imperator: Rome when it finally launches.

Order of Battle

The major announcement for Order of Battle today is that the game is coming to consoles is May. OoB is on the more traditional end of the wargaming spectrum, but it’s also fairly simple to control, so the jump to a controller-based interface may work out well and introduce an entirely new audience to the series. The console launch will have all the DLC published to date available.

Minoli said there’s more DLC in the work for Order of Battle, including new campaigns for the Soviets and Allies. Those are very early in development at this point though, so there’s likely going to be a bit of a wait before we see them in any detail.

The pair went through some additional announcements, including a brief section on the upcoming expand-alone for Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations (CMANO), Command: Desert Storm. You can watch the full stream here:

Watch Home of Wargamers Live: New game announcement and more! from SlitherineGroup on www.twitch.tv

You can also read about the upcoming cyberpunk-flavored 4X/tactics game Neverdark over at our sister site Strategy Gamer.