Well my Polish campaign in Medieval 2: Total War (with the Stainless Steel mod) looks to be wrapping up in a way I didn’t really want…Hungary, Novgorod and now Venice have all found savory bits to lop off my increasingly small empire and I fear I may be knocked out of the campaign soon. Witness some of the below shots.
click most images to enlarge
The folks who follow this site know about (and many of us are quite excited by) the approach of General Staff. What have you been working on since last we talked?
We’ve been busy getting all the modules necessary for users to create their own scenarios (the Army Design module, the Map Design Module and the Scenario Design module) ready for beta testing. In the process we decided to make some major changes to the underlying file structures and rewrote a lot of code to make the entire General Staff project behave properly in future versions of Windows. We’ve also conducted a survey to select the thirty free scenarios that will be sent to early supporters of the General Staff Kickstarter campaign and researched the maps and Order of Battle tables for the scenarios. And then we’ve been busy trying to get the word out about the General Staff project in general.
As soon as I learned that the Pike & Shot: Campaigns engine was the same one used by the Battle Academy games, I knew I would be drawn in. I love those games for their simplicity and also for the sense of urgency their turn-based structure creates. In some ways they create a sense of tension usually reserved for playing against other humans, either digitally or in person in a board game. Pike & Shot is exactly the same, with the added bonus of covering European conflicts that are generally lacking in game coverage from the late 1400s to the late 1600s. If you include fan made scenarios and campaigns, Pike & Shot Campaigns covers warfare all the way up to the American Revolution and the American Civil War.
It had been a while since I had fired up Pike & Shot: Campaigns to look around, but I quickly downloaded literally dozens of fan made scenarios, including ones based on the 16th century Italian Wars, the early 18th century Great Northern War, a Gustavus Adolphus campaign and many more. I then started the first tutorial mission. It was one of four in the the tutorial campaign portraying the struggle of 17th century Transylvanian Boyars against the forces of the Holy Roman Empire. Digest that for a moment, I’ll wait… Continue reading
On the evening of October 13, 1806, Napoleon I, emperor of the French, made his headquarters here at the site of what is now the Jena Battlefield Museum.
When I began traveling to Europe a lot of years ago my photographic weapon of choice was an old warhorse of a Konica 35mm SLR. Built to last and weighing nearly enough to deny it modern carry-on status, its film had to be changed dexterously and in the dark. I can recall having to do it more than once with my hands inside an empty duffle bag. One never knew if a particular photograph had turned out until developed weeks later — remember Fotomat? — and, more than anything else, the cost of film and developing set a hard limit on the number of pictures one was prepared to take.
Things are different now. I’ve spent the weeks since returning from my journey to Germany going over the thousands – yes thousands – of photographs I took of Jena-Auerstedt and other battlefields on my iPhone trying to figure out which ones tell this story best; or, honestly, even how to begin telling it.