Looking forward...

Today we're going to address a topic that has been asked about regularly in the last 24 months or so. What about updates for the Early American Wars (EAW) series? This series is one I (Rich) have spent a considerable amount of time in, especially in the early days.

Campaign 1776 was the first pre-twentieth century game John Tiller published with HPS Simulations after he left Talonsoft (Smolensk '41 was the first title overall). I still remember getting my first look at it back in ~'99 in a pre-release version... it was very exciting! Being a pre-twentieth century fanatic, I was jazzed to have a whole new topic to game with beyond the ACW & Nap titles that had gone before. So much so that when it was released I was one of the founding members of a new club to support the game, the CCC, which by the way is still in operation today. 

War of 1812 was my first game done in partnership with John, followed by French & Indian War (with Al Amos) and, a couple years later, Mexican-American War (with John Ferry). I can safely say I have "in the thousands" of hours racked up in those games alone between play and development time.

As time passed though, the EAW series took a back seat to larger series that had more content to offer. These included the Napoleonic & Civil War-period games for sure, but also World War II in the form of the Panzer Campaigns and the Squad Battles engines. Couple that with John beginning his government contracting work in 2003, and the EAW series was eventually put on the shelf. The code is the oldest (read lacking the most enhancements) of all the games we acquired with the John Tiller Software purchase, and the road map for "new" content is extremely limited. So, it makes no economic sense for us to pour a bunch of resources in to try and bring the series up to our standards. We'd just never see a return on that investment.

As we progress through this post I am greatly bending my own rules. I usually guard any discussion about future projects very tightly if it will take longer than six months for them to see the light of day. However, in this case I need to make an exception. To be clear: we are talking longer than six months until the results mentioned in this post will be released.

So, what does that all mean? Well, it means that we have decided to completely Replace the games in the EAW series. First up we will be bringing out "American Revolutionary War", or ARW as I'll refer to it going forward.

This is a complete redo of the subject matter. Not a port of the old content, but rather completely new maps, new OOBs, new scenarios, new campaigns... the whole kit and caboodle! Additionally, this is a far more complete handling of the subject than Campaign 1776 ever was. While there are many free "custom" scenarios included with Campaign 1776 now, the vast majority of them are just rough approximations of the actions with most of the maps being tiny and inaccurate (again, referring to the custom add-ons). ARW will have none of that, but rather will present a detailed handling of all the actions of the war.

This new game is being built as part of the Musket & Pike series of games. This allows us to bring it to you with all of our latest enhancements and will then allow for it to be maintained for the long run. The M&P engine allows us to cover topics in both Battalion Level (100 meter hexes) and Company Level (40 meter hexes) - so you will have some battles covered in one or the other format and some covered in both!

To get an idea of the extensive amount of coding work that has gone into the Musket & Pike series, you can check out this Changelog from Seven Years War – this is for the 4.05.1 version that will be releasing soon now that War of the Austrian Succession (WAS) has been out a while. Some of the changes rolled into WAS that are being implemented for ARW are Open Order, Combined Commands, Shallow Water and more versatile Ships.

Another aspect of the EAW games which was sorely lacking was the artwork. While we were able to get some updated terrain graphics in there for the 4.00 release upon the announcement of WDS taking over the games, it was not a comprehensive handling of those elements. And frankly, the Unit artwork is just barely serviceable. As part of this new game we will be featuring the unit art of the world-famous artist Don Troiani - https://dontroiani.com/ - we have secured rights to use his "Soldier Study" series of images from the American Revolution and they look wonderful in our game setting. Below is a sampling of some of what you will see:

Note: Unit values are just working numbers – again, these are very early shots, all subject to revision.

But wait, there's more! This is not just going to be another WDS/Tiller title using all the same elements... instead this is going to be leading the charge in a new "generation" of games from WDS. We are building upon the solid framework of calculations and data handling, etc. that Dr. Tiller created over the years, but we will be introducing a new user interface, graphics rendering engine, AI engine, multi-player enhancements and more. Only "tipping our hand" a bit to mention this work is coming... still too early to share screen shots or specific details, but we are confident it will make playing the game a true pleasure, both to operate and look at. And ARW is just the first game in the planned pipeline...

So, this brings us to the question many of you are probably asking... does that mean no free upgrades? That is correct. For ARW there is no free upgrade path. However, we are extending to customers who have purchased Campaign 1776 from WDS (between November 19th, 2021 through the ARW release date) a 25% discount voucher if you wish to move to the new game. Again, this is a completely new product, but we do acknowledge that despite being a fully functional game, when you purchased Campaign 1776 from WDS it was not up to our normal standards – so we are offering the discount to those customers. Once purchased, ARW will then go back to the free update regime that you are accustomed to.

What happens to Campaign 1776 then? C1776 will be pulled from the WDS Store and will no longer be available for sale on the release date of ARW. It WILL remain in your Store Account however... so you can download and install it at will in the old format as long as you wish.

And what about the rest of the games in this series? The plan is a similar approach with each of the others... specific details on those have yet to be hashed out, but eventually the other three full games will be replaced. It is also planned/hoped to make a full game around the content in the Little Big Horn demo (and related content), though that is panning out to be a lengthy undertaking.

Ok, we will wrap up this post today with a few more screen shots from the in-process work. Most everything you see here will likely change between now and publication...