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.
I’m going to try something different. Well…kind of different. Here, I’d thought that unboxing videos were the way to go, but perhaps the written medium is the best way to go. I think finding the happy medium between the two is going to mean a bit of back and forth, not just in our forums, but also in discussions of these articles. Hopefully, you will spend a moment or two to let us know what you think.
That said, it seems that there’s several companies vying for the solo bomber-missions-in-Europe mantle. DVG has B-17 Leader, Legion Wargames has Target For Today (not to mention B-29 Superfortress and Hell Over Korea), and here, Lock ‘n Load Publishing has A Wing and a Prayer.
Designed by Erik von Rossing, whom has quite a few solitaire game titles to his name, this one has been received by the wargaming community with positive vibes, as far as I’ve been able to tell. I’ve checked out multiple first impression pieces and articles on this game as they’ve trickled in over the last few months as I’ve waited to receive this copy, and there’s nothing really that I’m thinking is going to surprise me in a bad way. We shall see once I get it to the table, though. Continue reading