Welp, time to use that anniversary coupon.
And yeah plenty of games were delisted after the dev folded. Starshatter and Starships Unlimited, for example.
Okay so if anyone buys Waterloo via Slitherine and wants to get Steam keys, it’s a bit wierd. They give you a serial for the collector’s edition and one steam key, but that steam key doesn’t work on its own. You have to register the serial on the site for each of the four products (base game and 3 DLCs) separately, THEN you’ll see them separately in your library and you can then get a Steam key for each. It’s weird, but it works.
I’m interested in WarPlan Pacific. With the 50% coupon, I guess it’s about $18? Does Matrix offer better deals during its sales? Also, do I get a Steam key?
And, more importantly, has anyone here played the game? Do you recommend it? I’m a big fan of Grigsby’s War in the Pacific, so I’m pretty tempted.
I don’t think I’ve seen that better than 50% - it’s still relatively new. You do get a Steam key from Matrix.
It’s very different to WITP - mainly because it’s IGOUGO with 2 week turns which kind of kills it for me.
Thanks for that readout. Yeah, WiTP got it right: WEGO, daily, 2- or 3-day turns. WEGO works well for the Pacific War.
Well, I caved and bought WarPlan Pacific anyway. It’s … okay. For a one-man dev team, making only his second game, it certainly reflects a lot of good hard work. But it is neither as easy to play as the IGOUGO Strategic Command World at War, nor as detailed as Grigsby’s WEGO WiTP. It’s neither fish nor foul – not beer-and-pretzels, not pure grog either.
The UI isn’t wonderful either. E.g., it’s awful hard to tell what’s happening when the AI takes its turn. The game tells me how many units are left to operate, but it doesn’t tell me what’s happening as they operate. I saw Japan move to attack Singapore and Rangoon, but I couldn’t tell what happened until the turn processing was complete.
So it’s hard for me to recommend this to others. That said, I don’t regret the purchase, as I’ve long wanted to make my own wargame about this theater. From that standpoint, I am learning a lot from this game – what works, and what doesn’t.
I found the UI pretty fiddly. Even running the simple Guadalcanal scenario it took me several tries to work out how amphibious landings work - and that was following the manual instructions example of play.
It does some things well. I do like that it removes Strat Commands 1UPT restriction. The intelligence system is also abstracted. The dev is responsive and will take community comments on board.
But yeah, it’s a game where whenever I’m playing I’m thinking I should just go play WitP instead.
I had the same feeling. You’re right that WPP supports more than 1UPT, insofar as ships stack, but it’s still only 1 land + 1 air unit per tile. I moved infantry and aircraft to Pearl Harbor but couldn’t disembark because there was already an infantry and air unit there. Somehow that didn’t bug me as much in Strategic Command. It’s not an issue at all in WITP.
I do appreciate that the war moves faster. It’s nice to be into 1942 after just a few minutes of play. And the production and “advancements” systems are interesting.
I’ll keep fussing with it.
Rumours of Scourge of War’s demise have been greatly exaggerated…
Oh good!
Sounds similar to a few other cases where the developer gets some renewed energy (or the contract with Matrix/Slitherine runs out?) and they start distributing the game elsewhere.
I knew there was a new release coming, but I did not expect the move to Matrix/Slitherine:
That is pretty cool. A very good game with more resources to make it a bit prettier.
Nice, got my copy yesterday, not quite sure what to do with it. I think the diameter of the round map makes it too big for any table I own.
Just looked this up on BGG…that big ass map looks so cool. For some reason reminded me of the old PC game “Command HQ”.
That circular map looks fun! WEGO is cool but might make it tough to solo. In any case, I missed the boat on pre-ordering.
Nice! I’ve heard that is tremendous fun in groups.
A game takes quite a while, right?
Yeah. Although 2nd Ed claims to speed up some aspects.
Someone is bringing a digital version of the boardgame War and Peace to Steam: