Hex based wargames, Military Book Reviews, and Modeling
Coming late 2020
The Fall of France was one of the most surprising events of the war in Europe. Even with the example of Poland the previous September, no one on either side expected that Nazi Germany could almost simultaneously conquer France, Belgium and Holland and evict Britain from the European mainland, all in only six weeks.
It was, in many ways, a string of miracles at key points from
the German point of view and debacles from the Allied.
The Germans responded quickly to this threat, hurrying reinforcements from other sectors. Their relief drive made good initial progress, but stalled in the face of stiff Soviet resistance and both sides antagonist, “General Mud”. In the end, the trapped Germans made a desperate breakout attempt from the pocket. Less than half of the encircled forces escaped the trap, with none of their heavy weapons or equipment.
Battle For Korsun is a simulation of these battles in January and February 1944. Players control the various German and Soviet forces which took part in these struggles. The Soviet player must coordinate the offensives of his Fronts to encircle the Germans quickly before the Germans powerful reinforcements arrive. The German player must form a pocket perimeter, then orchestrate his relief drive with his Panzer divisions to rescue their trapped comrades
Buy from Matrixgames at https://www.matrixgames.com/game/kursk-battle-at-prochorovka
Valor & Victory is a fast-playing, easy-to-learn World War II squad-level game system. Based on the original Valor & Victory board game, the digital edition provides you with an accessible and deep challenge, developed for classic tabletop game lovers.
With 19 scenarios based around real events shortly after the Normandy Landings in 1944, the game challenges you to achieve different objectives: eliminate the enemy, capture objectives, or exit certain units off of the map.
Valor & Victory is a complete WWII wargaming system, covering infantry and armored combat, close assaults, armored overruns, fortifications, and much more.
Just like the original board game, each turn is divided into phases:• Command: Automatically rally your troops, split or merge your squads, and exchange weapons. In the command phase, you lay the foundations for a successful turn.
• Fire: Check your line of sight and firepower, and prepare to set the battlefield on fire. If you have any eligible weapon, you can fire smoke instead of attacking and gain extra protection for your units.
• Move: Move any of your units that did not attack during the previous phase, and try not to be taken by surprise: hostile opportunity fire may be just around the corner.
• Enemy Defense: Be ready to defend your squad. Enemies that did not opportunity fire will have their last chance to harm your units.
• Advance: Advance any of your units by one hex, or conduct a close assault with your infantry forces.
You will roll the dice to determine the combat results, but your luck is in your hands: wise use of terrain, covers, leaders, hindrance, and many more modifiers will greatly improve your chances of success.
Valor & Victory comes with full multiplayer support: challenge your friends in 1v1 multiplayer matches over PBEM and hot seat. If you’re looking to test your skills, sign up for official tournaments and climb the leaderboard as well.
An extremely intuitive built-in scenario editor allows you to build and play your own scenarios either against the AI or against your friends. Pick a map, set the objective, choose the factions, and place units and defenses where you prefer. Add details and customize your rules: decide the number of turns, the weather conditions, and the starting team. The scenario editor gives you all the tools to create custom, unlimited different challenges.
Random Scenario Generator – endless random battles based on player preferences
Choose AI difficulty levels
Game turn lengths
Fog of War
Steam Workshop functionality
AFV wrecks
A fan of the old Avalon Hill/SPI WW2 strategy war games? Like to think about your next move rather than having quick reaction times? Battle Series Eastern Front – Kursk – Battle at Prochorovka is the game for you.
Battle Series Eastern Front – Kursk – Battle at Prochorovka, covers one of the largest single tank battles in the history of warfare. Approximately 1400 tanks and assault guns met head to head near the town of Prochorovka, in a battle that became a desperate close-range shoot-out which would decide the ultimate success or failure of Operation Zitadelle.
The 2nd SS Panzer Korps began its attack on July 3rd and spent the next 8 days breaking through the dense Russian defensive positions. During the late afternoon and evening of the 11th, they broke through and repulsed a counterattack by the Russian 31st Tank Corps. Reorganizing during the night, the panzers struck northward before dawn on the 12th. As dawn broke, the lead German elements ran head-on into the lead elements of the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army and the battle was on. It was to last all day, in confused and savage fighting at close ranges.
This game recreates that day with the player being able to play both as the Russians and Germans. Go to yobowargames.com for the latest updates as the game develops
A fan of the old Avalon Hill board WW2 strategy wargames? Like to move counters around a hex printed wargame board? Then this is the wargame for you!
The Battle for Moscow – the Germans code-named it ‘Operation Typhoon’ – started on October 2nd 1941.
The capture of Moscow, Russia’s capital, was seen as vital to the success of Operation Barbarossa. Hitler believed that once the heart, Moscow, had been cut out of Russia, the whole nation would collapse.
This is a solo player wargame in which you get to play both as the Russians desperately defending their capital and as the Germans equally desperate to capture it. Whoever holds Moscow at the end of the wargame wins.
FEATURES
✔ Turn-based strategy action in WW2
✔ Hot-Hand multiplayer battles
✔ Historical German and Soviet units
✔ Beautiful hand-drawn map
✔ Detailed graphics
This weekend I allowed myself to get distracted. It started when I was sketching up some ideas in photoshop for Invaders from Dimension X for my graphics artist. Earlier in the week, I was wondering how to use google maps to accurately map a battlefield to a game.
After a little investigation, I found a couple of plugins for photoshop that could take an image from Google Maps and convert it into something pretty reasonably without the need for an expert artist.
So knowledge in hand I went at it…
I really want to write a Pacific War game so this might be the start.
I also purchased a couple of Samsung 500GB SSD’s this weekend. One I put into my wife’s Laptop and the other into my PC. I was a little disappointed with the resultant speed increase. While there is definitely some increased speed with disk related activities it was nothing like I expected. Maybe I am just being too greedy.
I did do some work on Battle for Korsun! Fixed some small bugs and worked on saving and loading games. Early in the week I wrote up a large part of the game manual. I have yet to start work on the AI.
Finally
The Steam Halloween sale is now over. I had a small but nice increase in sales. I might actually end the year just a few dollars down compared to game development expenditure. Good job I am not relying on this to feed the family!
Things have been very slow on the wargame front for the last few weeks due to personal circumstances, making it hard to focus on yobowargames.
Anyway, time for an update on how things are progressing.
The Steam Halloween sale has now started. This is my first experience of a Steam sale so I was a little unsure what effect it would have on sales. I was notified a couple of weeks ago by Steam that the sale was happening and decided I would offer a 25% discount. Kursk has only been out for a few months and I don’t feel that a larger discount was needed at this stage.
I have definitely seen a spike in sales so what I had read about Steam sales being a good time for games sales seems to be true.
I finally have all the graphics I need and have been working on improving the menu and getting it into shape for localization.
Below is pretty much the final version. It’s a little cluttered but I think it does the job.
Next up is playtesting and making sure there are no obvious bugs in the two players hotseat game, writing the manual and getting translations for everything. Then I will move onto the AI for the game.
I am still very undecided about beta testing as I found it to be a two-edged sword when running one with Kursk. It was great to get feedback on the game but I felt added pressure to finish the game quickly.
I was hoping to have the game finished by the end of November but I am beginning to think that early 2018 is more likely.
I have been waiting for my graphics artist to finish the artwork for the Alien actions. I now have them all and they look really great. Next up is the UI for the game. I need to sit down and think about some ideas for how this should look and then discuss with my graphics artist.
Google Wifi
Since moving to our new place back in August we have suffered from poor wifi. We have a Comcast router and while it was just about adequate in our old place it struggles to provide a strong enough signal everywhere in the new one.
So I invested in Google Wifi, buying their 3 pack solution (a bit of an overkill but I was not sure if one unit would be enough). I have to say I am very impressed. Wifi speed went from 10 – 20mb to 150mb everywhere in the house. Everyone is very happy!
I had not realized until very recently, after reading a blog on gamasutra.com, that you could publish your Steam store page live before actually having the game ready to go live. A rookie mistake by me, but means my constant reading of other developers blogs pays off sometimes!
So here is it – Battle for Korsun store page live on Steam.
It still needs some work, like the store descriptions being translated into the languages I am going to support, but I hope it will help generate interest in the game prior to launch.
This weekend I focused on putting the framework in place to localize Kursk – Battle at Prochorovka into French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.
When I first wrote the game I just focused on getting it finished and published with no thought to localizing it. With Battle for Korsun, I have planned to localize right from the start. The work I have put into Korsun can now be backported into Kursk.
There are still some problems to be resolved. All the buttons are images including any wording on them. I need to redo those graphics and add in the code to localize the text on them. I may have to resize some of them as well if the text is longer than below.
In addition, I have expanded the help guide for Kursk and decided to remove the in-game help. This was again totally graphics and would have required a fair amount of work to localize.
Why am I bothering to localize Kursk now after it has been published and out for a few months? Well, my thinking is that with the Steam Winter sale coming up there will be renewed interest in the game and more chance of sales if I have supported several languages. In addition, some of the localized text can be used in Korsun.
Time will tell if the investment is worthwhile.
