For those of you who’ve been waiting for this (like, well, me), Flashpoint Campaigns Southern Storm is coming to Steam April 20th.
Me, too, absolutely. RtW3 sounds like it will push the start date back even earlier, too, as well as move the end date forward. I would not at all mind going from like the 1870s all the way until the adoption of air power. I think ship to ship stuff is what it’s about and should stay about, but I guess I can always just disable aircraft and set my own end date in the 1920s. :P
Btw my guess for release based on forum hints is early June.
Why stop there? Go back to 1850 and smash some old-timey wooden sailing ships with these newfangled “ironclads”.
Honestly I think RtW: Age of Sail would be rad as hell. I remember stumbling on a book on Amazon that was basically about the economics of the British navy, like how they funded and built and kept their ships afloat, but I can’t recall what it was called. Wanted to read it, though!
Matrix lets you convert their games to the Steam version if you already own it, right?
Yeah, but I’m also kind of hoping to get a better deal on it. GMG and others will usually have games at below-retail price on Steam, whereas if I get it from Matrix it’s $60, cash on the barrelhead.
Plus I can wait a week and just don’t want to deal with a standalone installer.
Plus plus it’d be nice to see some Steam reviews.
The devs have been working pretty steadily on Southern Storm since release. The last large update added the Canadian campaign, something I think was intended from the beginning but which didn’t make the cut initially. They’ve also been adjusting and fixing things the community has brought up. The game is in a very solid position right now.
Of course, there are issues, but many of them are inherent in the design decisions behind the game and are really hard to address and still please everyone. Behavior of units under SOPs, handling of spotting and intelligence, resolution of artillery strikes, that sort of thing hits right at the core assumptions of the game.
The game puts you in the position of someone commanding usually the equivalent of a brigade or regiment, sometimes a reinforced battalion, sometimes nearly a division. You are not expected, nor given the tools to, micromanage to the extent you would in a traditional game with unit counters representing platoons. Yet the game does give you the ability to micro far more than a real brigade commander ever would, for a variety of pretty logical reasons. The result is, sometimes, situations where you neither feel like you are ordering around intelligent subordinates in an effective manner, nor do you feel you have the ability to directly position and control your units for maximum effect.
The game does a great job of simulating the frustration of trying to make plans work, and I mean that in a good way.
My copy of Atlantic Chase just arrived. I haven’t been so excited about a board wargame, or a boardgame of any type, in years. What a beautiful set of components! I look forward to diving into the rules tomorrow.
I’m still waiting for my pre-order of whatever that NATO/WP Berlin game is called, the one I bought like two or three years ago. I bought it at the same time I got the NATO remake, and that arrived a year ago maybe. The joys of modern wargaming.
RtW: Age of Sail is also a dream of mine. Time-scale might need to be sped up from one-month-per-turn to at least a year per turn, but there’s plenty of progress in ship design, construction methods, weapons design, organizational structure (i.e. the shift from “gentlemen” officers to professionals), signalling, and fleet tactics to make an interesting game from the late 1500s (Lepanto/Spanish Armada to get some galley action in) or early 1600s (Anglo-Dutch wars and the advent of the state-owned battlefleet and line of battle tactics) to 18whenever.
Air & Armor? It should be worth it once it arrives, and it has been expanded into a series with at least 2 more games to follow. I’m not quite sure what the hold up is for the first one going to the printer. I’ll have to go take a look at consimworld.
No, not Air & Armor. Something called “At the Gates” or something like that? I think it’s another of the Starkweather designed games. I bought it because I lived in West Berlin a couple of times over the years and always had an interest in that particular “what if?”
Last update I had indicated it might slip into '24…
Folks, the Weasel is Wild! With a special guest!!
How are you liking it?
I got a first printing, then passed it on to a friend before playing it, then ordered the second printing which just arrived a couple of weeks ago. Currently on the Shelf of Opportunity.
13 posts were merged into an existing topic: Rule the Waves 3: technology, warfare, and the ocean, but this one goes up to 1970!
TacOps was a great idea, and would have been a good foundation for a bigger project. But it was pretty niche, and not terribly flashy. Also, IIRC, it originated on Macs in black and white didn’t it?
Yes, it started on Mac. At one point he was working on adding more elevation levels, but got to the point where he was retired and fishing, and spent less and less time on it as each year passed. IIRC he used some abstraction library that allowed him to use mostly the same code from the Mac project.
I played it on the Mac, actually; can’t even remember if I ever got the Windows version to run.
Nice online “postcard” game on Battle Card: Market Garden. Play for free. Nice, quick diversion.
How to play:
All true Grogards should have this scene memorized:
So far I like Atlantic Chase a lot! The quantum mechanics are pretty innovative. I like the idea that the blocks on the map represent intelligence about a fleet’s likely position. It’s sort of like Schrodinger’s wargame, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applied to wargaming. I’m still working through the tutorial “episodes,” though, so I can’t comment on the full monty yet.