2025 Quarter One Update

Hi all,

It’s fitting that our 300^th blog post is our first quarterly update for 2025.

It has been a huge quarter of news and updates over the previous three months.

If you haven’t read our 2024 End of Year Update, you can find it here.

The latest title for the Musket & Pike series, War of the Austrian Succession, was released in January.

In mid-March we released Crusades – Book I, the inaugural title in our first original WDS series, Sword and Siege. The reception, both for this game and its gameplay features, has been universally positive. We see a very bright future for Sword and Siege, and we have new titles in the pipeline next to a long list of potential titles. Oh, and the first two videos in a new series on the Crusades game were released on the WDS YouTube channel during March. The first is an introduction to the game, and the second one, seen below, describes how to conduct a siege.

Both War of the Austrian Succession and Crusades – Book I have been positively received and we are very happy with how many of you have chosen to purchase them.

Our ‘Game of the Week’ promotion has gone from strength to strength. We have seen very solid interest and traffic when each title is highlighted on Monday, with people calling out the book recommendations as especially useful. Game of the Week resumed on January 6^th after a hiatus during the winter sale.

To make certain that all can check all the linked information, here are the Quarter One, Game of the Week blog posts and titles chronologically.

We have continued with the update cycle across multiple series.

Napoleonic Battles was updated to version 4.09 during the quarter. Rich Hamilton went through the changes here, and both Campaign Waterloo & The Final Struggle demo were the lead updates. Subsequently all the Napoleonic Battles titles were upgraded to version 4.09.1.

Civil War Battles was also moved to version 4.05.2. Rich, again listed all the changes here, and both Campaign Overland & the Civil War Battles Demo were the lead updates. Subsequently all the series were upgraded to version 4.05.3.

The Musket & Pike series were also updated following the release of War of the Austrian Succession. All titles in the series were patched and you can read about the various changes in version 4.05.1 here.

Beyond Game of the Week posts and game updates, we also shared a range of other articles.

Gary McClellan published two blog posts covering the historical era of musket and pike. He included the changes in warfare, technology and nationalities, and the impact and considerations in designing the various games. You can read the blog posts on the following links: first Installment and second installment. These are a must read for any devotee of the series and highlight the depth of research and thought that goes into a WDS title.

Mike Prucha, lead designer on the upcoming Panzer Campaigns: Poland ’39 game, shared two blog posts. The first goes into the role and impact that armored trains had in the Polish campaign. This is a fascinating piece on a technology that was moving towards obsolescence just as the war started. Mike’s second blog post was an after-action report from play testing the First Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski scenario. This article showcases one of the more unusual battles covered in this upcoming title.

Rich Hamilton provided an update on the future of the Early American War series and the current titles. This post also shared some highlights on the American Revolutionary War title that is currently under development, definitely worth a read for anyone interested in this conflict.

We provided a preview of the upcoming content in the 4.05.2 patches for First World War Campaigns / Panzer Campaigns / Modern Campaigns. Panzer Campaigns: Poland ’39 will be the lead title for this upcoming version, and you can expect another large patch cycle as we update all forty odd titles across the series. Included in the preview post was another look at the new maps currently being created, allowing our developers to cover more of the titanic battles in the Russo-German war.

Looking Forward

We continue to have several titles nearing the end of internal testing. With the release of War of the Austrian Succession and Crusades – Book  I, we are focused on Panzer Campaigns: Poland ’39 and a number of unannounced titles.  We are still committed to getting Panzer Campaigns: Poland ’39 released in the first half of the year as mentioned in our 2024 End of Year Update.

Beyond this hoped-for release, we continue to have very full schedules.

You can expect an update to Crusades – Book I based upon the play and feedback received from you all post-release. Work has continued on Strategic War and with a revision of the AI, we are hoping to move onto updating the scenarios in the two existing titles to use all the new features that have been mentioned in previous posts. We have big plans for this series, including new titles. We are looking to schedule an update for Panzer Battles. Many of the improvements in Panzer Campaigns can be carried across to Panzer Battles, including AI, user interface and other items. Our current challenge is the demands on our programming resources. The team are stretched very thin keeping up with the current requests and we continue to prioritise new titles over existing updates. It is a real juggle.

There have also been questions over where are the Panzer Battle Moscow titles? They are not dead or vaporware! To be honest, under our current regime these titles would never have been announced, but when we started sharing information in the 2020 End of Year Update, and the First After Action report, this was the only title I was working on. We were planning on a late-2021/mid-2022 completion. Little did I know that we would have the opportunity to acquire the John Tiller catalogue in 2021, with the mountain of work required to refresh and upgrade one-hundred odd games. All the estimations on the time to complete Moscow were based on the North Africa 1941 title, that took nearly two years of full-time work—without other distractions. The Panzer Battles titles probably take more resources to complete than the equivalent Panzer Campaigns or Squad Battles due to the scale modelled and the number of in-game components needed (for example, five different graphics per unit, compared to one in Panzer Campaigns). Unfortunately, there has not been a sufficient, contiguous period of time available to get a Moscow title completed to date, but there is work ongoing, and many of the major components needed are available such as the map, order of battle, graphics and some scenarios. We are certainly not trying to take shortcuts with this game, as all our playtests to date show how well the existing scenarios work. It’s now a case of completing the scenarios we had planned for each title and finalising testing. Please understand that resource constraints are very real currently, particularly for the modern (twentieth century and later) game series, and we are trying to satisfy a lot of internal and external requirements. We will share more as we make progress, as we know there is real anticipation for both the Panzer Battles series and the Moscow titles.

In more positive news, we are hoping to release the 4.03.3 update for Squad Battles: Proud and the Few before the end of April. We shared a preview of this title last December. We have spent the extra time adding some additional features that hopefully will enhance gameplay. Please note, all the features that follow are still work-in-progress.

First off are improvements to unit information in the unit boxes.

Enhanced fonts

We have addressed the common complaint of the small white fonts being hard to read. In Proud and the Few, this is particularly noticeable against the yellow background of the Japanese unit boxes.

There have been two actions—first an added outline to all the white text, and then an increase in the font size. We also increased the size of the stacking indicator in the terrain box and applied outlines to the hex sides’ names.

Weapon strengths to lower bottom

You will see in the picture below that the weapon strengths (x1, x14, etc) are much more visible and shifted to the right. This is because the graphics for most "thin" weapons run from top to bottom of the weapon box, and this meant that usually the bottom of the weapon graphic would make the strength indicator very hard to see. The numbers were outlined as well.

See the Before/After comparison below:

Armor values at the front for vehicles

One of the most essential stats to know about a vehicle in Squad Battles is its armor rating, yet this value is displayed on the back of the vehicle box instead of on the front (that prime real estate is instead assigned to a much less useful "Crew" stat). Moreover, when playing against an opponent under FOW, you are denied this piece of data on enemy vehicles, even when the names of the vehicle and its weapons are public and displayed in full—this means a player must resort to the Weapons & Data dialog or the Equipment PDF and look for the name of the vehicle to learn its Armor value.

Company indicators on unit boxes:

Considering the importance of keeping companies and platoons together in SqB (given the Disruption/Pinned rules) the current Company markers display is usually insufficient due to the limitations inherent to the counters themselves. A single hex can hold a variety of units from different orgs, but only the one at the top of the stack is identified with a color. This limitation means that an additional visual indicator in the "detail" area (Hex Info) is a must. Below you can see how the unit’s name plate has a border colored to match the company colors when selected.

Senior Leader Highlights

In the Musket & Pike series, when you select Org highlight the game will highlight the units as usual, but it will also seek out the org's "parent" leaders and highlight them with the "Alt Highlight" color. This addresses a common complaint related to Leader location on the map.

In the second screenshot below, the leaders highlighted in red on the left belong to the parent organization of the leader highlighted on the right:

As will be evident from the screenshots that follow, we have changed and enhanced many of the game graphics.

The first is counters. We have moved to a cleaner counter design. This was pioneered in the Musket & Pike series and included in the recently released Crusades – Book I. The new counters are ‘cleaner’ in that there is less of the ‘bubble’ look and less internal lines. We have used a ‘glow’ effect in two different colors for highlighted units rather than the more traditional external outline. Never fear, a version of the original counter graphics is included, so you can swap out the new for the old if required.

The second enhancement is dedicated 2D & 3D graphics for different geographical locations. The geographies are Pacific islands (‘Jungle’), Iwo Jima (‘Moderate’) and Okinawa and mainland Japan (‘Default’). The jungle terrain was particularly important as it will be used in the Pacific War, Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, and Tour of Duty titles. Moderate/Iwo Jima graphics will probably work well in the Falklands as well.

Following are some screenshots from both in-game and in the map editor. We have included a larger screen size (3440 x 1440) so you can see more of the various maps and graphics. All images can be clicked for full-size.

The first series of screenshots are from the map editor. The following five images cover the three 2D, and two 3D zoom levels on the Guadalcanal East map. This is a river and swamp area.

The following two images are from the Alligator River area on Guadalcanal.

The next five images are from the Tulagi area, across Ironbottom Sound from Guadalcanal. Our new campaign is on Tulagi as are a number of standalone scenarios.

The next group of screenshots from the map editor are of Iwo Jima. We have tried to emulate the colours from this image from the movie, Letters from Iwo Jima.

This is Mount Suribachi at all zoom levels.

Here are a number of other shots from Iwo Jima.

Following are some in-game examples.

We expect that once the update for The Proud and the Few is released, we will bring the previously updated Squad Battles titles up to the 4.03.3 standard. Hopefully all will be done before the end of Quarter Two.

Work is also ongoing on the other unpatched titles, and we hope to speed up the delivery. Our new art lead, Mark has just shared some examples of a new 2D/3D vehicle, and infantry, as we work through a new process to deliver graphical assets. We hope you like them!

Thank you again for the ongoing support, we will continue to try and keep communicating and interacting via our forum, Facebook, and other platforms.

We are already off and running in Quarter Two!