Wargamer Weekly: The Bloody Second By Joe Robinson

It’s been a bit of a slower week than I’d like to see, although we did spot a new indie project in the works, and took a look at Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail. The end of the week was of course all about Close Combat’s new title finally releasing. You can read our review of that here, and don’t forget to check out the free giveaway!

Meanwhile, in the world of wargaming...

Steel Division 2 DLC

Steel Division 2 has had its first premium DLC revealed this week, with a release scheduled for October 17th. Called ‘Death on the Vistula’, it’s themed around the last major Tank-battle on the Eastern front, towards the end of Operation Bagration on July 28th, 1944.

The DLC will feature a brand new campaign, four new historical battles and 200+ new units, mainly spread across the four new divisions coming to the game:

5. SS-Panzerdivision “Wiking”

Fallschirm-Panzerdivision “Hermann Göring”

Armia Krajowa

1st Polish “Tadeusza Kościuszki” Infantry Division

Not only that, but there will be a free content drop that will deploy at the same time, which will include improvements we spoken about before like ‘Smart’ Orders and better strategy map behaviour.

Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts

This is fitting after we just took an in-depth look at Age of Sail, but it seems like Game-Labs are also still working on their other naval war game, Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts. It’s now available for pre-order, with two editions.

The more expensive edition nets you access to the early Alpha which you can start playing immediately. It’s still early days for this game, though, and it’s not due to hit general Early Access until next year.

Hearts of Iron 4

We dropped a little note about this last week, but Paradox have finished revealing their plans for the overhaul of Spain in the upcoming new DLC (which we will find out about at PDXCon in a couple of weeks). The main goal of the re-work was to improve the Spanish Civil War and make it more relevant not only for players wanting to play as Spain, but actors on the periphery as well. Over two huge dev diaries one for the Republican side and one for the Nationalist side, the dev team laid out how they’re going to inject more content into this area and what challenges a player will need to navigate.

It’s one of the biggest Focus Tree overhauls to date, and while its impressive it does little to dissuade me from the view that Focus Trees are both the best and worst things about Hearts of Iron 4 right now, and a bit problematic for the ‘natural’ flow of any given game. Looking forward to finding out more regarding this expansion and the free update that’ll drop with it.

That’s all we have for you today. Enjoy your weekends and we’ll see you next week!