Tag Archives: Academy Games

Video: Conflict of Heroes Guadalcanal – First Look!

Cracking the shrink on Academy’s PTO wargame ~

Michael Eckenfels, 21 September 2017

Michael takes a look inside the COH box from the gang over at Academy Games.

More coming on this one in the future…


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Origins – Breaking News with Academy Games

We’re bringing you a fresh scoop from #Origins2017 ~

Michelle Owczarski, 16 June 2017

Breaking News – Uwe Eickhart reveals Academy Games’ Agents of Mayhem Tie-In Board Game

During an interview with GeogHeads, Uwe Eickert explained that Academy had been working for three years with video game publisher Volition on a board game based on their Saints’ Row IP. The game is meant to expand on story and characters from the videogame.

The Agents of Mayhem videogame will be an open-world game in third-person perspective available on Playstation4, Xbox One and PC, and was announced at E3 to release in August 2017, but this is the first time Academy Games has spoken about it publicly. The board game, Agents of Mayhem – Pride of Babylon, from Academy Games is slated to launch at the same time.

Eickert said that working with the Saints’ Row IP was easier than historical games because there was less research to do. “Their writers were involved,” and were enthusiastic about the additional content the board game will include.

See www.academygames.com/aom for more information on the Academy Games Agents of Mayhem board game. Additional content from the Eickert interview to come.


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GrogHeads Reviews 1775: Rebellion, Digital Version

Ardwulf makes a guest appearance with his review of HexWar’s new adaptation of Academy Games’ 1775: Rebellion.  How does the boardgame translate to the computer? ~

Gary Mengle, 28 October 2016

1775: Rebellion, from boardgame publisher Academy Games and PC developer HexWar and now available through Steam for Windows, Mac and Linux, sits uncomfortably between the kindred worlds of board and PC strategy gaming. An adaptation of Academy’s well-regarded Euro-style board game on the American Revolution, it translates the source material very faithfully but will leave PC-focused strategy gamers unsatisfied.

1775 tells the story of America’s revolution against the British Empire. There are seats for two teams of four players each, but the game can just as easily accommodate two players taking both sides of their team. French and Hessian units can enter play on the sides of the Americans and British, respectively, while Native American units can enter play or become controlled by one or both sides.

1775-2_1

Mare Nostrum Empires (Academy Games) – First Look!

Picked up over the summer at Origins ~

Brant Guillory, 30 August 2016

Following a massively successful Kickstarter, and some shipping delays as the manufacture of components needed some tweaking, Academy’s reprint of Mare Nostrum, along with the expansions, finally started to get delivered.  Folks who attended Origins were able to pick them up there.  Hot damn!

MN-unbox-01

This gallery includes both the base game Empires (on the right) and the Atlas expansion (left)

GrogHeads Interviews Uwe Eickert of Academy Games

Grogheads’ Corinne Mahaffey sat down to talk with Academy Games’ Uwe Eickert at Origins.  In person, Uwe radiates a cheerful enthusiastic intensity; game design is clearly one of his passions!

Grogheads:  What new games do you have coming up?

Academy Games:  The Conflict of Heroes Solo Expansion, and Conflict of Heroes – Guadalcanal are shipping soon.  We will have a Kickstarter for Conflict of Heroes: D-Day Airborne Battles this fall!

Academy Games

Academy Games

In addition, in 2015 we expect to publish the first game in our Civil War/Napoleonics series: Gettysburg – Day 1 Bloody Crossroads. This will be the first game in a 2 or 3 volume set based on this battle. The map boards and counters are big and incredibly beautiful! (Check our website for pictures [http://academygames.com/games/fight-for-the-colours/bloody-crossroads-gettysburg-day-1])  This is a new system that implements some of our newest and most advanced design mechanisms; there will be no dice, no numbers on the counters, and no charts to look up.  You will be able to see the detailed state of each Regiment by quickly looking at its Brigade Command board. This will tell you its fatigue, morale, and current capabilities.  The game can be played with 1 to 8 players and the decision cycle for each player is constant, with little to no down time.

We have been doing a great deal of research on the US Civil War, concentrating on the soldier’s fatigue and mental aspects of combat. We have factored these aspects into the game mechanism, so that brigades act more like they did in battle, often flowing forward and back towards the enemy.  We’ve been working on this for 4 years and hope to publish it in 2015.

 

Grogheads:  Could you compare how you build computer games versus board games?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of each medium?

Academy Games:  We always start with the board game because we find we have more subtlety when we design the board game.  If we have no computing power, then we build a better, more intuitive, more streamlined game to begin with, which we can then move to the computer.

When we create board game mechanics, the results are transparent; we know why we came to the in-game result that we did, and we learn the strategy of the game.

Computer war game AIs are often designed with a biased advantage.  They are often given limited, hard coded orders.  However, human thought patterns are not limited in this way.  The Artificial Intelligence (AI) that we have developed for Conflict of Heroes utilizes a unique Emergent Behavior and Agent Based Logic that evaluates Battlefield Situational Conditions. The AI then implements the best Tactical Response based on its available unit assets and resources. If the forces and logistics are available, the order is executed by the best available AI unit.  If not, the secondary procedure order is implemented.

We think people will be surprised by the intuitiveness of our board game AI.  Our AI does not “smooth” results or have arbitrary advantages.  No matter which side you take, the AI will kick most players’ butts 60% of the time. This system has gone through several development cycles and we have had help from some of the most cutting edge computer programmers, active duty Army officers, and game designers.