Commander: The Great War Open Beta Patch 1.6.0 released!

[Lord Zimoa]

Commander: The Great War Open Beta Patch 1.6.0 is now available:

http://www.thelordzgamesstudio.com/site/2014/11/commander-the-great-war-open-beta-patch-1-6-0-released/

[Anguille]

Nice!

[Gusington]

Ooooh...

[Martok]

Sweet! 

[Shelldrake]

Preliminary Open Beta Patch 1.6.0 Changelog notes

Undo Move or Swap (only allowed if no FOW previous was uncovered!) is the Backspace hotkey.

New Technical:
- UNDO for move and swap!
- Various reported bug fixes.

Gameplay changes / balancing:

- Free Upkeep allowance is now zero,which means you now pay for each and
every unit on the map.

- Country PPs increased to offset the effects of the Free Upkeep allowance change.

- All Nations Man Power has been reduced, to a scale appropriate to
historic national forces levels per Country.

- Disband PP & MP returns have been altered,so that you now receive the
correct values.

- If a Capital city is captured a substantial national morale penalty
will be applied. (NOW A WAR CHANGING EVENT)

- Production & Research now shows time up to 50 turns.Allowing the a
player to keep track more easily off what new Tech will be available
in the future.

- Research Lab Upkeep cost reduced.

- Britain's starting land forces reduced to historical level.

- Britain now has a larger navy,twice the size of Germany for example. (RULE BRITANNIA )

- German navy now has research advantage,meaning her ships are
stronger,than any other fleet including Britain.

- The loss of a battlefleet in combat morale penalty has been
increased. (FOR BRITAIN NOW A WAR CHANGING EVENT)

- Battleships have now been renamed DREADNOUGHTS!

- Dreadnought production cost reduced from 120 to 80 PPs.

- Pre-Dreadnought & Armoured Cruisers added to unit types,these can't be
upgraded or purchased.

- Cruisers have been renamed LIGHT Cruisers!

- NAVAL AI has been enhanced,making it more of a challenge.

- All air units have been toned down,as to there effectiveness,this is
World War One after all.

- Garrison,Infantry,Cavalry & Artillery now all benefit from Anti-Air
research upgrade.

- Garrison & Infantry benefit from Entrenchment upgrade.

- Additional historical event messages,and City Captured event
messages,are now in game.

- Various Commander entry dates fixed.

- Various other stability and fixes.

Lots of changes. Looking forward to starting another game with this patch. :)

[Gusington]

I definitely like that the loss of capitals and fleets are now war changing events.

[Martok]

I like the sound of the naval balances too (German ships are individually stronger, but the Brits start with a much larger fleet now, etc.). 

[BanzaiCat]

I hadn't played it in a while. I might go back to it.

[Philippe]

I played a bit of the earlier versions and liked it well enough, but decided to move on to Strategic Command The Great War/Breakthrough when I realized Commander was still in shakedown mode.

Overall the game looks great, but it suffers from what seems to be an preference for pleasing the audience at the expense of historical realism.  This seems to be a feature of many Matrix games, viz. the unrealistic firearms ranges in Musket and Pike.  Air units simply couldn't do the things that Commander shows them doing in 1914, and they weren't present in sufficient numbers to do those things anyway.  I was also surprised to see several large Arab infantry units when I fired up the 1918 scenario.

My other reservation about the game is the scale.  I can appreciate that it's a strategic level game, but there simply aren't enough hexes between Switzerland and the Channel to give a proper sense for what the western front felt like.  I suppose that's a good thing if you don't like having a lot of units on the board at once (which also helps the AI give a better account of itself), but it gives a distorted picture of what was going on.  On the plus side, I really like the fact that there is a different scenario for each year of the war.

With all that in mind, I've decided to take a break from Commander until it's a bit more completed.

In the meantime I've been playing and modding the Strategic War games.

The graphics are a little quirky and there were problems with the flags (I had to make three mods to fix that), and the squares (as opposed to hexes) took a bit of getting used to, but overall I'm impressed and glad I took the time to get familiar with it (them, actually).  There are a few things in the interfaces that could be done better, but the game seems to have hit a sweet spot in terms of the number pieces on the board:  you can get a nice sense of the kind of choices that a high level war planner would have to make, and the AI can give you a pretty decent fight (disclaimer: I've spent far too much time playing Tiller games where the AI is somewhere between flaccid and non-existent, so it was refreshing to play a new game and not immediately start looking for a PBEM opponent).