Over the past few years I've traveled the WW2 landscape with the Order of Battle series from The Artistocrats, and seen some exotic locales. The series, which started in the Pacific, eventually visited such rarely gamed battlefields as Burma, China, and a hypothetical expanded Battle of the Atlantic. However, the biggest, most popular battlefields cannot be ignored forever. The series from kicked off a multi-part German grand campaign with the Blitzkrieg pack a few releases back, which featured the early war conflicts in Europe and ended at the gates of Moscow. Now with the latest DLC, Panzerkrieg, we rejoin the Germans as the bitter winter of '41 sets in.

Although one might expect to play Blitzkrieg before Panzerkrieg, it isn't required. You can customize your starting force to a certain extent, or take the default army. I went with the latter option, and quickly realized it might be best to come into Panzerkrieg with a top notch army formed during a successful play through of the Blitzkrieg campaign. Which is to say that Panzerkrieg is probably among the most difficult campaigns available for Order of Battle, at least for me. I haven't played all of them, but I have finished several and rarely had much difficulty on the default settings. The challenge of the game usually came more from trying to complete all of the bonus objectives rather than winning the scenario, which was a given.

Your forces in Panzerkrieg, much like their real-world counterparts, are up against the ropes as soon as things kick off. The first few missions have you fending off Soviet offensives from multiple directions while also attempting to achieve various objectives, usually trying to save isolated German forces. Attrition will become a key concern in your campaign, just as in the real battles. While your troops are deadly, they can only fight so many battles before needing repair, but the Soviets have a seemingly endless supply of fresh units to throw at your lines. You will also have to deal with their far more effective T-34 and KV-1 tank units. I found that as the campaign wore on I simply did not have enough resource points to keep all of my units topped off and fully upgraded, as I would expect based on past campaigns for Order of Battle. About half-way through the campaign I realized my forces were just too worn out to continue, there was no way I could win the scenario I was up against.

Surprisingly, I found this to be quite refreshing. I had always considered this series to be just a little too easy on the default setting, and it fell into that trap of similar games where things snowball and tend to get easier the better you perform. I know there are several higher difficulty settings, but I personally prefer to play most games at the default setting to get the experience that the developers intended for the average player.

I had to stop and ask myself what went wrong here. Why did I lose the campaign when I have played this game quite a bit and felt very confident going through each mission? (At first). I thought back on my play and realized that I had been sending my troops out to fight battles that were unnecessary. Instead of simply accomplishing the objectives set out for each scenario, I had rather impetuously sent units out looking for fights when they should have stayed put at their post. Many of the early scenarios include numerous Soviet units that are beyond your area of operations, and don't need to be engaged. Seeking to rack up kills, and not considering the long war ahead, I had sent full strength units off to find trouble by attacking these enemy forces. Sure, I crushed them, but then I needed to spend resources repairing those units, resources that should have been saved for other units fighting to win the scenario. I also raced to complete my objectives as fast as possible, to my own detriment. Given 30 turns to complete a scenario, I had put the pedal to the metal and tried to finish it off in 20. This usually led to far higher casualties from units getting overextended or ambushed.

This is a campaign that needs to be approached with a bit more forethought than most. You need to accomplish your objectives in the present scenario, but also be looking to build up your forces, or at least maintain them, rather than grind them down in reckless battles. My defeat actually made me want to go back and purchase the Blitzkrieg DLC so that I could control my core units from the very beginning of the war and have a greater familiarity with them heading into the harsher (for the Germans) years of the conflict. Carrying a single force through what will eventually be three linked campaigns, expanding and upgrading it with better units and leaders, should be quite the experience. I can only imagine how much more difficult the scenarios could potentially be towards the end of the war.

I haven't gone into the details of exactly how the game works in this review, since I've covered that ground in previous reviews and not much has changed here on a fundamental level. All the units you would expect to see on the Eastern Front are present, from Russian conscripts to Panzer III's and Flak 88's. You'll need a balanced force to deal with all of the threats you will face on the ground as well as in the air. Losing control of the skies can make your day that much harder. In my failed campaign I simply could not afford to keep more than a couple of fighter units in the air, and the Soviet bombers took full advantage of it.

Although Panzerkrieg covers more familiar ground than most of its fellow Order of Battle campaigns, it offers up a fresh challenge to even veteran players. Of course, many players may have been looking forward to fighting through some of the most iconic battles of the war, like Sevastopol, Kharkov, and Stalingrad within the Order of Battle system. The series continues to deliver one of the best, most polished versions of the tried and true Panzer General flavor of wargaming to date. I recommend this campaign DLC for anyone who enjoys the game, just be prepared for some stiff resistance from the Soviets!


Available directly from Matrix/Slitherine through this link or on Steam.


 - Joe Beard

The Operational Art of War IV

by

 Slitherine and Matrix Games 

 "It's here, it's here, let the bells ring out, and the banners fly; feast your eyes on it, it's too good to be true, but it's here." With a little help from Bugs Bunny's genie, I am pleased to announce the arrival of 'The Operational Art of War IV'. TOAW has been with us for almost twenty years. Originally designed by Norm Koger and released by Talonsoft in 1998, this is the fourth (actually more) in the series. The game is a throwback to the times when a gamer would buy the entire battles of Napoleon or Civil War instead of just one or a few. The game shipped with more than 200 scenarios, but the release of new and older ones ported over to the updated engine is growing each day. These scenarios have been released in just the last few days:

Franco-Prussian War
Bitter Victory Sicily PO version (AI)
Coral Sea 1942 PO version (AI)
Bocage Hell  - Normandy at 1 km a hex
Europa 1947

 To go into the reasons that a person who owns TOAW III would want to buy the new version, I will let Slitherine and Matrix games give us a short run down, and then post a link to a discussion. The store page has these items listed:

"New naval warfare features

• The modeling of ships has been improved. Instead of treating ships as a single piece of equipment, like a gun or a squad, they are now treated as complex systems that incur damage in combat. Ships have new armor, durability, accuracy, speed, and agility parameters.

• Embarked units no longer employ their own strengths in defense. Naval combat now evaluates attackers’ Anti-Naval strengths as individual shots/planes – employing their shell weights to determine armor penetration and resulting damage.

• Sea Interdiction can now be employed by aircraft, ships, and coastal guns. Ships subjected to sea interdiction fire counterbattery back (or, in the case of carriers, counterstrikes). 

New Supply system

• There is now an intermediate supply state that falls between “Supplied” and “Unsupplied”. It’s called “Overextended”. A new parameter called the Overextended Supply Threshold has been implemented. That is the location supply value below which locations are overextended. Units in such hexes will function somewhat between how supplied and unsupplied units function. The result will be that it will be much more difficult for units to press on at red-lined unit conditions from such locations.

• Motorized unit movement over improved roads can be set by the designer to be less than one MP per improved road hex (for example, ½ MP per hex). If optioned, this affects supply in that supply lines traced over improved roads will extend proportionately further than over other terrain, like regular roads. Note how this would especially affect desert scenarios.

• The limit of 50% unit supply recovery per turn has been lifted. 

Other game features

• Range Limits: Ranged units can have their nominal ranges player limited. This can be used to tailor bomber ranges to match fighter cover ranges or to make units with multiple range equipment operate within the range of the shortest-ranged equipment. The DBR will reflect the modified range.

• Deployment Recovery: Ranged units retain their deployment states after combat and ground assaulters can recover theirs if a planned combat is canceled.

• New Bridge Destruction Rules: There is an option to limit bridge hexes (for destruction purposes) to locations where the road feature graphically crosses the river feature.

• Combat Report Review. Combat reports are saved in the pbl/sal files for review by both players during their player turns.

• Adaptation of Matrix’s PBEM++ system."

   This link will take you to a post by 'Curtis Lemay' from the Matrix games forum that has a more in depth list of the game changes that are too numerous to list in this review:

http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3899655

  This is a post from one person who designed a scenario for the game 'Oberst_Klink':

"Well... $39 gets you... 72 cans (12fl.oz) of Milwaukee's Best in WV (at least when I was there), excluding the pills for reducing acid reflux. Now, seriously. The additional features (see Bob's reference) are more than worth it. As for me, I don't care about the UI; I want the inner works (under the hood?!) to be better than those of its predecessor. And they are. If I compare how the AI acted at my Tutorial '41 and now...woooo! The friggin' bugger even gave me a hard time! And I created the scenario to be a... walkover? As for me; I rather skip heartburn after 72 cans of MB's :)"

  To understand my take on the game, you have to know two things. I really have no interest in the North African WWII campaigns at all, and especially the later Tunisia campaign. I have read about both, but neither, especially the latter, has really caught my attention. For no particular reason, I fired up the 'Kasserine 43' scenario from the first screen. To be honest I was overwhelmed by the amount of the other scenarios to choose from. I fully expected to play one or two turns and then switch to a WWI scenario. The UI changes and the whole game presentation seems to be different in a new and exciting way for the better. I am now on the eighth turn of 'Kasserine 43' and I couldn't be more engrossed or happier. I have owned every iteration of the game that has been released. I have also played board wargames since the 1960s and computer ones starting in the very early 1980s. I have not been so engrossed by a pure wargame in many a year, and never by a scenario that I don't even enjoy reading about.

   

 I have taken Kasserine, and with four turns left I have an overwhelming victory, but the Free French and now the English are coming in as reinforcements. I think I have shot my bolt, and now I need to hang onto to the different victory point hexes I have. 

  Just as in history, the Kasserine attack was really just a spoiling one, and never had the forces needed to turn it into much more than that. I am pretty sure that my forces are now heavily outnumbered and even if I win this fourteen turn scenario, it will not really change the campaign one bit.

 I have no intention of wasting my troops with an attack, but I wanted to show the 'Combat Planner' screen. It is a godsend, and feels like having a chief of staff to turn to. 

 So my first fully played through game/scenario about the North Africa campaign is over. The Allies in the end did not have the overwhelming might I thought they would have, but still I was on the defensive. In this day and age where every minute of our lives count, it is still amazing to me that this game pulled me into a historical campaign that I never read about anymore. My gaming is almost always commanded by my reading. I read about a particular historical campaign, and then open up a game that deals with it. What might get the book publishers happy is that I am thinking of picking up a book about Kasserine. For a game to be able to have that impact, and not the other way around, is pretty amazing to me.

 This is a tiny scenario compared to the rest of the gaming goodness that is included with the game. Here is a screenshot of a much larger one that you can get lost in. This a shot of the 'Barbarossa 1941' scenario:

 This is a shot of the above scenario's bigger brother 'FITE II'. Fire in the East is the monster of monsters eastern front scenarios that comes with TOAW IV. Please, someone work on getting this beauty an AI.

  This is a screenshot of one of my favorite scenarios, the 1918 German offensives.

 


  This is a zoomed out shot of the Pacific War at 25 km per hex.

  This is the same scenario zoomed into New Guinea. 

 

   If you have never bought into the franchise, now is your time. For less than dinner with a friend, you will get enough gaming greatness to last a lifetime. For those of you like me who have every single one of the TOAW games and the old manuals it is well worth the money to invest again in the games future.

 I haven't even touched upon the new and vastly improved naval warfare. This part of the game has made Pacific Ocean scenarios and Mediterranean ones actually enjoyable. The AI in all of the scenarios I have tried seems to play much harder than I remember. The dedicated team that worked on updating this already great game to the level it is at now should be congratulated. I, for one, say thank you.

Robert 

Command: Shifting Sands is the latest stand alone expansion for the massively detailed naval and combat simulator that is Command: Modern Air/Naval Combat (CMANO). Developed by Warfare Sims and published by Matrix/Slitherine, CMANO is a powerful simulator that lets the player explore detailed scenarios depicting air and naval combat of every stripe since WW2 to the present and even a little beyond. Just about every ship, aircraft and submarine that has ever been built is in the game database. The primary drawback is that CMANO has a hefty price tag. There also isn't a demo, so to give curious players a chance to get their hands on the gameplay without too much of a hit to the wallet, the developers have put out several stand alone campaigns. The other two, Chains of War and Northern Inferno, featured hypothetical conflicts. Shifting Sands, on the other hand, features the numerous historical battles between Israel and its not so friendly neighbors over the course of several decades. While you won't have access to the full CMANO database, you do get to play with toys from a few different technological time periods. In several cases these scenarios depict the historical first use of some new weapon or tactic.

As mentioned, Command is a real-time simulation of air and naval combat, calculating for just about every variable you could imagine. Real time as in the game literally ticks by one real second at a time unless you speed it up. Direct ground combat is depicted to a much lesser degree, though there is no shortage of targets on the ground and things like anti-aircraft units shooting back at you. The game sacrifices a great deal in one area to make its extremely broad scope possible, the graphics. This is a game involving a lot of map staring, as simple icons representing units move around and fire little dots at each other. What the game lacks in cinematic visuals it more than makes up for with some serious number crunching going on under the hood. This game includes more details than I could possibly discuss here, but just to name a few: terrain, weather over a ground target, the temperature of the water at various depths, airspeed and weight with regards to fuel consumption, realistic time needed to rearm and refuel aircraft, and the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow all play a factor. Okay, maybe not that last one. The key point being that the developers have attempted to include just about every significant factor involved in the operations depicted. You very well may need to do some homework to fully understand what is happening in the game. Fortunately, Command makes it easy to at least get started.

Shifting Sands comes with several training scenarios, and a newbie player will be wise to go through them all more than once while keeping the manual open in another window. This will get you familiar with the core mechanics, however it won't teach you much about how to conduct a large scale complex operation on your own. There are a few great sets of videos on YouTube which can help in that regard. This is the mark of a truly great wargame: the game gives you all the tools you need to simulate a realistic battle scenario, but requires you to actually develop and employ realistic tactics to succeed. Simply launching every aircraft you have and throwing them at the enemy won't get you very far at all. You will need to analyze the situation and deploy your units with a degree of precision if you want to make a good showing. Learning all of these tactics and stratagems is part of the experience of playing the game, and shouldn't scare anyone away. I think most people buying a game like this do want to learn about those sorts of things, and the game will reward you for it.

The mechanics of the game might look overwhelming at first, but really you can get started without delving too deeply into the dozens of options and functions available. As the commander, your job isn't to micromanage every unit and weapon. The AI can do a decent enough job as long as you give it the right orders. This is done simply by choosing an area or target for a mission and then assigning units to it. There are default mission types set up for just about everything you might need, from anti-submarine warfare to air superiority ops. Within each mission, you can tweak all the finer points. Do you want aircraft to launch in flights of two or three aircraft each? Do you want your ships to investigate and potentially engage targets out side of their designated patrol zone or should they stay put? You can also set the rules of engagement and behavior for the AI at the unit and mission level, and also general orders for your entire side. These settings tell the AI how to act in various situations so that you don't have to manually intervene constantly. 

Once you have a grip on the basics, the game lets you go much deeper. For example, a ground strike mission can be built by the player selecting exactly which aircraft in a group will target which buildings and with what weapons down to the exact number of bombs dropped. You can also plot a course and set altitude and speed. Taking control like this will let you pull off much fancier maneuvers and likely see better success in the more complex scenarios. And Shifting Sands will give you more than a few complex scenarios to deal with. 

The campaign starts off with a little taste of naval action during the Suez Canal Crisis and then a solid air combat scenario that requires you to perform recon, attack, defense, and air superiority missions all at once but is still manageable. After that, it's off to the races with scenarios such as Operation Focus, the opening move of the Six Day War in which the Israelis historically destroyed almost the entire Egyptian air force. The naval scenarios tend to be much less complex, due to the smaller numbers of units involved, but are still made interesting because one major error could cost you the win. This is also an area of the world that has a ton of civilian shipping, making it tricky to pick out foes until they are either dangerously close or already firing at you. That said, the aircraft focused missions are the star of the show here. While you can play through the campaign in chronological order, you can also just pick out the scenarios you are most interested in from the list. The only difference when playing the campaign is that you must reach a certain score threshold to unlock the next mission. This should serve as a good challenge for even experienced players, since simply coming out ahead in a scenario is not enough to hit that score. You will need to accomplish all or most of your objectives while avoiding taking too many casualties.

There are also a few interesting "what-if" scenarios that round out this pack. One gives you a chance, as the Israelis, to use nuclear weapons in a last ditch effort to hold the line. Another puts you in command of the US 6th Fleet on the day the USS Liberty was attacked by the Israeli military, and in this scenario the United States responds very harshly. These are great examples of what can be done with Command system. not only can it simulate events that did happen historically, it can be used explore all sorts of hypothetical scenarios that might have played out. Of course, to access the hundreds of community scenarios that have been made over the past few years, you'll need to buy the full version CMANO. I think Shifting Sands serves as a great entry point for those curious. It's also a decent buy for veteran commanders. They get 17 well made scenarios to add to their collection, and can continue to support the develop of the system overall.

So, if you are looking for a detailed air and naval combat simulator, and don't mind the minimal graphics and sound, you really can't do better than Command. The game has been continuously updated since its release about three years ago, and Shifting Sands benefits from all of those updates. This is a great way to try out the system and see if it's for you, without plonking down $80 or waiting for a big sale. Though if you like Shifting Sands, I highly recommend getting CMANO, it's a game that you could spend years tinkering with and learning new things from. There are so many community scenarios available that the average gamer would take a lifetime to play them all. Definitely some serious bang for your buck.

Matrix Store: Link Here
Developer Website: http://www.warfaresims.com/
Command: Shifting Sands is also available on Steam.


- Joe Beard


P.S. I had to borrow my screenshots for this review from the official page, since my normal means of capturing them didn't seem to agree with Command and came out rather useless. I had some really good ones too!

Order of Battle: Burma Road is the latest campaign add-on for the ever expanding Order of Battle family developed by The Aristocrats. Earlier this year I reviewed OOB: Kriegsmarine, which saw the player take on another side of the war not seen too often in wargames. Although Kriegsmarine was forced by practicality to move from historical naval actions to fictional Nazi pipe-dreams rather quickly, this new DLC featuring the British Commonwealth forces is loaded to the brim with historical, yet often forgotten, battlefields. 

Although I consider myself a WW2 history buff, I must admit that this theater was one I knew almost nothing about going in. I knew the British had to fight throughout the region to defend India and other holdings, but I couldn't have named a single important battle. Imagine my surprise when halfway through the campaign I take a break from fighting off the Japanese to visit Bombay where I'm tasked with tracking down and arresting Ghandi! Not the kind of thing you expect to see in a wargame. However, I enjoyed the change of pace, and the history lesson attached.

Unlike some of the other campaigns, Burma Road doesn't seem to add many new features to the overall game structure. The only significant difference I noticed was a more extensive use of friendly AI units than I've seen in the other campaigns (though I haven't played them all just yet). This fits thematically, since the Commonwealth forces were made of units from many different nationalities. Your core of British regulars will often find themselves fighting alongside various colonial forces, sometimes under your direct control, and sometimes not.  You can also add some of the weaker colonial infantry to your core units at a cheap price, or get a nice splash of flavor by adding a unit of Gurkhas to your team. There are also SAS and SBS units to unlock, and all the British machines of war you know and love: Spitfires, Crusaders, and heavy artillery are all on tap.

While this campaign does not shake up the core gameplay much, the scenarios available should please any fans of previous OOB installments. The rough terrain of southeast Asia makes for a tricky battlefield where putting units in the right positions is key to making them useful. Jungles, swamps, and hills are prominent on many of the maps, which can make even a large battlefield feel rather cramped. Frontage becomes a critical issue and you will not always have the option to make a flanking maneuver, unless you are willing to send a unit through the jungle, which may reduce its cohesion. You can, and must, use this to your advantage as well. In many of the scenarios you facing an onslaught of Japanese units that outnumber your troops. Setting up a line of defense on tactically smart ground will keep your boys in the fight longer, and save resources for upgrades instead of replacements.

I found the actual objectives of the missions to be varied and interesting. Most missions will start you off with one objective, then throw some new twist at you midway through. Your decision will usually be to determine what share of your forces you want to dedicate to different sections of the battlefield. It's not uncommon to be defending in one area and attacking in another. Given the heavy amounts of jungle on most maps, you will also want to send out fighters and scout cars to do reconnaissance when you can spare them. Fighting every enemy unit is usually not necessary, and it can make more sense to maneuver around difficult spots to complete your goals with minimal losses.

This campaign is focused primarily on ground and air forces, with naval units only making occasional appearances. I found that ruling the skies was always very important, if not particularly challenging. The Japanese have some deadly tactical bombers that will inflict a lot of casualties on your forces if you don't take them down quickly. This is pretty easy to accomplish though, since your Spitfires and Hurricanes can make quick work of the Japanese fighters and then go after the bombers. You can also pick up some experienced squadrons by completing bonus objectives. One is the American Flying Tigers, which can be added to your force to make it even more culturally diverse. 

Overall, I found this to be a solid addition to the Order of Battle line up. While it doesn't shake things up too much, it takes a proven formula and uses it to explore a less well known section of the war. No one would have been shocked if The Aristocrats had visited the old standards like Normandy, Barbarossa, or Bastogne first, but I'm glad they are taking the road less traveled. This game play, if you are the type who enjoys it like me, is perfectly suited to tackling so many small and medium sized sections of the war. A North Africa and Mediterranean campaign would fit it like a glove, for example. Final verdict: keep the campaigns coming, I think this game still has a lot of room to grow.

Episode 2 of the podcast is up! This episode features a review of the movie Dunkirk, a look at what's been posted here on AWNT in the last few weeks, first impressions of Tokyo 42 and Space Tyrant, and finally a review of Legacy of the Weirdboy, the first DLC for Sanctus Reach. I hope you enjoy listening, and I am still very much open to feedback and suggestions. Thanks!

Joe Beard

I did a review of Carrier Deck last month when it released, but the game has had a solid patch applied since then, which fixed pretty much all of the issues I had with it. I wanted to do a video of the game in action, so you can see how it plays after being smoothed out a bit.

Enjoy!

- Joe Beard

Legacy of the Weirdboy is the first DLC available for Warhammer 40k: Sanctus Reach. If you aren't familiar with Sanctus Reach, please check out my review for the base game, which can be found here. In short, it is a turn based strategy game in which the Marines of the Space Wolves Chapter take on a horde of Orks while defending the Knight World of Alaric Prime. Legacy of the Weirdboy flips you over to the other side of this bloody conflict, putting you in the green skin of Big Redd da Warphead, a "Weirdboy," or mage type of character, for those who don't speak 40k. Big Redd is on a mission to build a "teleporta" that he will use to strike at the heart of the Space Marines. Standing in your way is a deadly army of said Marines, eager to turn your Orks into so many piles of body parts. 

Legacy of the Weirdboy offers you a vast array of unit types to play with, as your horde is made up of Orks of all shapes and sizes, carrying a variety of weaponry. I was eager to get my hands on some units in particular, like the massive Battle Wagon and various "Meks" which sport all sorts of nightmarish pointy appendages, rocket launchers, and flame throwers. These units gave me a lot of trouble in the base game campaigns, so it was quite the thrill to use them myself. The Orks have some new units to try out as well, including a very useful medic hero. The Space Marines have a few new toys of their own that you will discover throughout the campaign. If your Orks survive long enough to kill some Marines, they can gain experience and level up, unlocking a choice of various new special abilities. Some of these can turn decent units into really vicious killers. 

Exploring the ins and outs of your own personal Waaagh is the meat of this experience for veterans of the Space Marine campaigns. I found that the Ork units did not handle how I expected, but in a good way. While some of your units are just living shields to distract the enemy, this is not a campaign where you can simply charge forward without finesse, hoping to overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers. The Space Marines are heavily armed and armored, and will cut your Orks to ribbons if you charge at them recklessly. Even the most basic Space Marine squad will not go down easily, and must be dealt with in a deliberate manner. This contrasts with the Orks, who have a mixture of super-heavy units and glass cannons, with a large helping of marginally useful, but ultimately expendable, cheap units to round things out. A battle of attrition will go poorly for you, which was a lesson I quickly learned before rebooting the first mission.

The DLC improves a bit on the structure of the campaign itself, but still leaves room for improvement. Like in the base game, the campaign consists of a handful of set-piece battles separated by 3-4 skirmish battles each. These skirmishes are still rather unremarkable filler, but the story missions themselves have been improved with more detailed intros and some nice artwork to set the scene. There are only four of the story missions, but each one is a hefty scenario that will take a couple of hours to complete. The overall story is still thin compared to other Warhammer 40k games, but feels much more coherent than before. I hope for the next DLC the ratio of filler to story missions is improved, since they are quite good and varied in their gameplay.

Overall, this is a solid expansion for fans of Sanctus Reach, and is exactly what I like to see in add-on content. Every facet of the game has been improved in some way, while giving you a fresh new experience to enjoy. The price is a very reasonable $10. I expect we will be seeing several more DLC for Sanctus Reach, and I look forward to watching how the game evolves. Fingers crossed that we get to see the Imperial Guard join the fray!

Legacy of the Weirdboy can be purchased directly from Matrix/Slitherine, or found on Steam.

- Joe Beard

Legacy of the Weirdboy, the first DLC for Sanctus Reach, just came out. You can expect my full review in a few days, but in the meantime here is a gameplay video to give you a taste of what you can expect. For once I make a video and actually win the scenario!

Watch it on Youtube

- Joe Beard

Hello everyone, today I'm introducing my new podcast "Skirmish Line" This podcast will bring you more the great content you expect from A Wargamer's Needful Things, delivered in a new way. I listen to a ton of podcasts, and have wanted to try doing it for myself for a long time. This first episode is rather short and I'm sure my delivery could use some work, but I hope you enjoy it! 

More episodes to come in the weeks and months ahead!

Update: Some of the issues I brought up here, with regard to launching missions in a certain order, being forced to launch supply craft first, etc. were fixed via a patch about a month after release. You can see a video featuring the game and those changes using this link.

Carrier Deck tasks the player not with directly fighting the battles of a modern naval warfare scenario, but with managing the logistics of a very busy flight deck. Developed by Every Single Soldier and published by Slitherine/Matrix Games, Carrier Deck falls more on the lighter end of the gaming spectrum than what you might normally expect from those names. Unlike the turn-based Afghanistan '11, Every Single Soldier's other recent release, which focused on long term planning and carefully considered logistics, Carrier Deck requires the player to constantly shift their focus from moment to moment as each new threat pops up. 

Carrier Deck gives you a bird's eye view of the titular carrier deck, from which you click on the various aircraft to select them, then either click to send them to a different parking spot, or select what sort of mission you want the aircraft to be prepped for. You will be doing a lot of clicking, so make sure to warm up that clicker finger ahead of time. It's not quite Starcraft 2, but once a mission starts, don't expect to take a break until it ends. Each of the scenarios only lasts 10-15 minutes, but will demand your complete attention from beginning to end.

 The gameplay revolves around two areas of the screen. The actual flight deck and aircraft, rendered in modest but clear 3D graphics where you will be dealing with the units directly, and the bottom half of the screen where you will see everything that is happening out in the field. Threats will approach in four differently colored channels, representing air, surface, undersea, and land-based enemies. The enemy units approach from the right, and if they reach the left side, they will deal damage to your carrier. Your first problem is that the carrier group has a very short detection range into all the channels other than the land units. To extend your vision, thereby giving you more time to counter a threat, you will need to send aircraft out on reconnaissance missions. Dedicated recon units like the S-3 Viking offer better vision and longer loiter times, but are usually in short supply. In a pinch you can send out the workhorse F-18 Hornets as scouts, but will want to send something better as soon as it becomes available. Helicopters also occupy parts of your deck, specifically Seahawks and Chinooks.

Once a threat appears in one of the channels, you will need to ready an appropriate aircraft to deal with it, queue up the mission, then launch the unit. The actual combat is not your concern, and will always be successful. That all sounds simple enough, if you only needed to deal with one thing at a time. In reality, you will be dealing with many things at once, all the time. Carrier Deck is a bit like learning to juggle, and just as you get a handle on juggling three balls, someone throws in a fourth, then a fifth, a sixth, and so on. As you are sending units out on missions, others are coming back in to land. These returning craft need to be moved out of the way, then re-armed for another go. To complicate matters, units can sometimes return with damage, necessitating a trip below deck on one of the elevators, then back up. In addition to that, new units and supply transports often arrive mid-mission and must be worked into your current rotation. Tougher enemies must be hit by multiple aircraft, and occasionally a really tough enemy will require two different mission types to be flown in sequence.  Needless to say, there are a lot of plates spinning all the time. 

One thing I'm not crazy about is how the missions which are queued up must be launch in the order you created them, even if you have aircraft ready to launch for the second or third mission in line. This often seems pointless, since you can just cancel a less pressing mission then recreate it an instant later. To add to this frustration, the supply craft, which arrive periodically, take absolute precedence over all other missions by default. Even if an enemy destroyer is about to strike in a matter of seconds, and you have fighters primed and waiting on the catapults, you have to wait for that cargo plane to refuel, waltz over to the runway, and then take off before you can launch any other aircraft. I don't really understand the logic of this, other than making things more difficult.

To assist you with sorting through this multi-tasking challenge is the well thought out UI. The bottom half of the screen, with the various channels and sections showing queued missions and returning aircraft, tells you everything you need to know about the situation at a glance. To make mission tasking clear, everything is color coded. Air missions are red, surface is blue, submarine is yellow, etc. The aircraft themselves are highlighted in bright colors to indicate what mission they have been equipped for, matching the icons on the information screen below. Clicking on an aircraft shows all of the locations on the deck it can be moved to, holding down the mouse displays a radial menu with all of the missions it can be equipped for, again with clear color coding.

The game comes with a linear campaign consisting of a few dozen missions of increasing difficulty and complexity. Each outing throws a different combination of enemy and friendly forces at you, though the core gameplay loop remains mostly the same. You are scored based on how much damage the carrier takes and how many aircraft are lost (usually due to collisions on the deck). Simply surviving the mission will unlock the next one, but you can get some replayability out of returning to try for a perfect score when you fall short. Playing through the entire campaign will only take a few hours, as each mission can be completed in a matter of minutes. Perfectionists will need more time though, as getting five stars on every mission will inevitably require multiple attempts at the more difficult scenarios.

Additionally, there is a quick play mode which is basically more of the same at your chosen difficulty level, and a survival mode where the game will keep getting more and more difficult until you are overwhelmed. Whether you play these modes will depend on just how much more of the game you want after finishing the campaign. 

As mentioned, the graphics in Carrier Deck are not that spectacular, but it looks decent enough considering the price point. The various aircraft are nicely modeled and easy to distinguish from one another. The camera can be moved around to get a closer look at everything, but you will rarely have time to be ogling those Super Hornets. The radio chatter was done particularly well, with the aircraft reporting in using all sorts of squadron names. Between aircraft launching, requesting clearance to land, and enemy units being spotted, the radio keeps you informed and adds a bit to the immersion factor.

I didn't experience any major bugs while playing Carrier Deck, though I did have a couple of minor happenings such as an aircraft not changing to the correct color a few times, linked to changing its mission assignment multiple types in rapid succession. More annoyingly, I had to unplug my joystick and throttle from the computer, because the game was apparently pulling input data from one of them, which caused the camera to slide to one side and stick there. The game has already received a couple of patches, so I'm sure any other minor issues will be buffed out in short order.

I enjoyed my time with Carrier Deck, and appreciate it for being something completely different. This is not a detailed simulation of carrier operations, or really a wargame. It is a fast-paced management game with a war theme. Priced at only $10, you will easily get your money's worth of entertainment with one trip through the campaign.

- Joe Beard


Carrier Deck is available directly from Matrix/Slitherine and is also on Steam.

The English Civil War

by

 Ageod/Matrix/Slitherine

 Before the Second Battle of Newbury, the Parliamentary General the Earl of Manchester said "The King need not care how oft he fights... if we fight 100 times and beat him 99 he will still be king, but if he beats us but once, or the last time, we shall be hanged, we shall lose our estates, and our posterities be undone".

 The game 'The English Civil War' also has another title: 'A War Without An Enemy'. As in most civil wars, the word 'civil' was dropped pretty much at the start of hostilities.

 The English Civil War was actually a series of three conflicts. The first was fought from 1642 to 1646. The second was fought between 1648 and 1649. Both of these were fought between Parliament and King Charles I and his followers. The third part of the civil war was fought between the adherents of King Charles II, and the 'Rump' Parliament, King Charles I having been beheaded on January 30th 1649.

 This game is about the first part of the conflict, July 1642 to December 1646. The game comes with three tutorials and three campaigns, The tutorials are:

Basic Rules

Recruitment, Production, and Decisions

Advanced Concepts and Tips 

The three campaigns are:

Marston Moor

Naseby

The Great Civil War

 Just like 'Bonnie Prince Charlie', Charles I lost his best chance to end the war by swiftly moving on London. In Charles I's case this was after the battle of Edgehill in 1642.

 As in real war most Ageod games show that controlling land and cities is the key to winning wars. Without a proper amount of area under your control, you will die a slow death. As an army commander you need a population large enough to to recruit soldiers from, and also tax, and grow crops etc. to keep your army intact.

 The system used in the game is 'WEGO', meaning that both sides plan their moves, and the computer shows the outcome of your decisions.  The 'Athena' engine of most Ageod games works best with a smaller number of units in play. So the 'English Civil War' and its older brother the 'Thirty Years War' are a perfect fit for the engine. The turns are fifteen days long. This game, again like TYW, has regional event cards that the player can utilize to influence the war.

 In the campaign game, the king starts with slightly better forces and controls the north of England. The Parliament controls the south and London. The Parliament also gained control of most of the English naval forces at the beginning of the war. As keeping control of areas and gaining new ones is so important, sieges play a large part of the game. This really puts us budding generals on the horns of a dilemma. Do you parcel out your forces over a large area to keep control all of your cities, or do you keep a large army intact for use in both offense or defense? Remembering that, keeping a large army supplied is not easy. This is 1642, not 1942, and there are no trucks or railways.  So everything you need moves by wagon, with the horses that are carrying your supplies probably needing more than your army does. So warfare in this era is a lot like the later rounds of a boxing match. Both opponents have to try and rest, and then pick and choose when to attack. So there is usually a flurry of activity followed by both sides resupplying etc. 

 The Marston Moor campaign is pretty much a toss up between the King and Parliament. The Naseby campaign is, as it should be, tilted heavily in Parliament's favor. I have learned the hard way not to attempt battle early on playing as the Royalists.

 The Ageod 'Athena' engine has always had its detractors and its fan base. The area movement and lack of player input during battles has left some of the micro-management players out in the cold. To me and most others, the 'Athena' engine does a great job of showing how pre-20th century warfare really worked. The system is a bit hard for brand new players. Now however, there are plenty of 'how to' videos for Ageod games, and the tutorials have only gotten better.

 Now we have to move on to one item. For those of you with small children or grand kids, Dora can help us out "It's the map, it's the map, it's the map". Some parts of the map are not correct. From what I understand it is where some cities are compared to the counties or areas on the map. In reading the various posts and then looking at the map I understand these peoples' chagrin. The good news is that it really does not affect the game play at all.

 In May a patch (version 1.02) was posted about. It was supposed to include the following:


-- Some text Issues fixed.
-- Logbatch consumes a lot of memory issue fixed.
-- Leaders dont recover their stats after forming a group fixed.
-- Patch number does not show up fixed.
-- Issue regarding the construction of troops. Fixed, now you can build in the regions you have loyalty over 51% and if you have the assets needed.
-- Reg Southminster tooltip now shows ‘Clear’.
-- More WS for the Parliamentarian. Some structures generates more WS each turn. 

 Per the forum, it looks like it is taking longer than expected to release it because more fixes were going to be added to it. I was trying to hold off until the new patch was released to start playing, but time waits for no man.

 On another note, I love the movie Cromwell. Here are some quotes from people about him that I found:

Robert Leckie in 'A few Acres of Snow' called him a "hymn singing swine".

Clarendon called him a "Brave Bad Man".

An Irish Prime Minister in London is supposed to have said "I am not going to talk until you take that picture of that murdering bastard down"




Robert

The latest DLC campaign for the ever expanding Order of Battle is, as the name suggests, entirely focused on the German navy in WW2.  This is an interseting choice for the series, which began with Pacific theater campaigns that had a few naval combat scenarios, but has mostly focused on land battles since then. This is a great advantage of the modular nature of the game, which since its original release as Order of Battle: Pacific has morphed into Order of Battle: World War II. The game serves as a platform for campaigns ranging from wargame standbys such as the Blitzkrieg, to less well trod ground like Finland and China. In the case of Kriegsmarine, we are looking at something perhaps even rarer, nine missions focused from beginning to end on German warships, seaplanes, and, of course, the infamous U-Boats

For those unfamiliar with the base game, a quick overview. Order of Battle, in my mind, plays much like a more tactical rendition of Panzer Corps/General. The mechanics are much the same, combat takes place on a hex-based grid over a series of turns. Click a unit and you will see how far it can move, hover next to an enemy unit and you will see the combat odds. Every unit has an overall "health" number that starts at ten and gets whittled down (or blasted away) over the course of a battle. Units have a dozen or so other stats that effect how it will perform in combat against other unit types. There are numerous historical units available, including different types of tanks, infantry, aircraft, and naval vessels. In Kriegsmarine the focus is of course on various types of U-Boats, destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. 

If you want to see exactly how the game looks in motion, here is a video of me playing through the second scenario.

One of the best features of Order of Battle is that you, the player, get to pick and choose most of the units which make up a "core" force that carries forward through the campaign. Other auxiliary units will be available to round out your roster in most scenarios, but this core force will make up the meat of your firepower. These units can gain experience over time, and even be upgraded to better versions as the war progresses. You will be tasked with deciding how to spend a limited amount of resources on purchasing new units, upgrading existing ones, or reinforcing those that inevitably take damage.

In Kriegsmarine, you will spend most of your points on naval vessels, with a smattering of aircraft to support them. Ground forces are not even available for purchase, only appearing occasionally in certain scenarios.  However, there is still a lot of room for decision making. There are various models of destroyers, subs, cruisers, and battleships available. Will you put numerous sneaky subs into the sea, or load up on the big heavies? As you might imagine, a good mix of everything will serve you well. You also have a limited number of slots for aircraft in each mission. I greatly preferred to dedicate these towards reconnaissance aircraft early on, but you can take fighters or bombers if you so choose.

A wolf pack prepares to strike.

Another way you can shape your force is by choosing specializations, which are permanent perks that you can invest in between missions. The points you have to invest here are very limited, and even if you get extra ones from completing secondary objectives, you won't have enough to get everything. This is a relatively new feature for the series, which was added in the Blitzkrieg campaign and now plays into the other campaigns as well. It adds a nice extra wrinkle to your strategy, letting you improve certain types of units or reinforcing your preferred tactics. In Kriegsmarine, you have a significant choice to make, do you dump almost all of your points into a single line that will unlock a few big and powerful warships, or do you spread those points around on lots of smaller improvements to your existing fleet. 

So, I've talked about the units that will make up your fleet and how you can customize it, but what sort of missions will you take on with them? The campaign spans nine scenarios, which each task you with a handful of mandatory and optional objectives. Completing the primary objectives is usually pretty straightforward and not that difficult on the default difficulty. However, the secondary objectives give you plenty of interesting challenges to chase after. Each success will earn you some type of reward, be it officers to assign to you ships for stat bonuses, additional specialization points, a free unit, or some kind of advantage in future scenarios. In many scenarios you will be hard pressed to complete all of these extra objectives in one go, but for those seeking some replayability, the challenge is there. 

Every scenario tasks you with a different sort of goal and circumstance. Direct naval combat is of course the order of the day, but your priorities are ever shifting and sometimes shaped by the geography. In several missions you will be hunting down merchant ships, but the situation will vary. For example, in one mission you are limited to only submarines, while in another you must avoid a powerful Royal Navy fleet while tracking down a few transports at a time. Some early missions have you assisting with amphibious invasions, but the actual fighting on the ground is limited. After these early historically grounded scenarios, and in order for the campaign to cover the entire war while being fun for the player, it quickly goes off the rails in historical terms. The German fleet in Kriegsmarine will not spend the war bottled up. It will win a string of victories and go on the offensive, taking out Allied warships by the dozen. I'll let you play the game and see for yourself, since these later levels tend to be the more elaborate missions. The highest praise I can give to the campaign itself is that I played through the whole thing in a matter of days, without ever losing interest or being bored. It definitely gave me that "just one more turn" feeling more than a few times.

There are several changes in mechanics from previous Order of Battle campaigns that were made to create a fuller experience here. Mastering these mechanics is key to keeping your fleet in good shape through the many large scale battles. The tutorial pop-ups explain them well for the most part, but I glossed over some while getting started and had to learn those the hard way. The balance between keeping your ships moving, to avoid being hit, while keeping the range to the enemy fixed, for better accuracy, turns the battles into a sort of a dance of death. The further a ship moves on its turn, the harder it will be to hit on the enemy's turn. Leaving any ship sitting still while enemies are about is nigh on suicidal, and even when you think you are safe, a torpedo armed aircraft or submarine might pop in to deal serious damage. The more cramped conditions of a few battles will have you pulling back your ships just to get some room to maneuver.  Other new mechanics include submarines with limited battery time under water before they must recharge, battleships having the ability to fire the "big guns" only on every other turn, and seaplanes, which are more flexible than other aircraft in this environment.

Most missions are on the open sea, but some are more cramped.

The only negatives I had with this campaign was the balancing of a few unit types. The single battleship I carried through my campaign never felt all that powerful, even after being upgraded and gaining experience. It seemed to be far more vulnerable to torpedoes and drew enemy fire like a magnet. Its special ability was only at times worth using, as it would sometimes do less damage than a regular attack. At the other end of the spectrum, I kept wishing the U-Boats were a bit more deadly, and thought maybe having a bonus to stealthy attacks would give them more bite. As it stands, they are there to pester the enemy at best, being slow, fragile when caught, and having only a mild capacity to deal damage. Even when used in a wolf pack, they could rarely take down an enemy ship before needing to run and hide from sonar equipped destroyers. Also, the U-Boats only get one scenario that really puts them in the spotlight.

My late game fleet, ready to set sail.

Overall, this campaign was much more enjoyable than I initially expected it to be. The naval focused scenarios from the Pacific campaigns in the original Order of Battle were not my favorite part of the game, so I thought it was a pretty bold move for The Artistocrats to make an entire campaign exclusively on naval warfare. That said, I was won over by the improved combat mechanics, the interesting setting, and the solid scenario design. If you don't want to take my word for it, you can actually play the first scenario for free in the Order of Battle: WW2 base game, which includes the original tutorial campaign and the first mission from every DLC campaign. Clocking in at only $10, Kriegsmarine is a fun excursion to a rarely portrayed theater of World War II and will give you some good bang for your buck.

- Joe Beard

Order of Battle: Kriegsmarine is available directly from Matrix Games here or on Steam.

Developer: The Artistocrats
Publisher: Matrix Games/Slitherine