News Shorts – Aug 2024

Hello everyone,

Not every bit of news can fill a blog post, so today we thought we would group some of the more noteworthy (small) items to share with you.

We hope you explore some of the links and information that follows.

 

If you don’t know Tim from Tally-Ho Corner – where have you been? Tim (formerly of the Flare Path) covers a range of interesting topics such as wargames, sims and foxers. If you don’t know what a foxer is, it’s worth visiting to learn and partake. Tally-Ho Corner is right in the middle of a run of ‘daily shorts’ that are the perfect complement to our News Shorts. Two recent WDS releases, were featured as part of the daily news, Musket & Pike – Thirty Years War & Panzer Campaigns – Spring Awakening ‘45. Get on over and give Tim some support, he would love to see the traffic and commentary.

Interesting WDS Forum Posts

If you haven’t been on the WDS forum of late there is a ton of content and conversations. Following are some that you may want to peruse and even participate in.

Recent After-Action Reports

ComradeP and Elxaime have just played the campaign game from the recently released Panzer Campaigns – Spring Awakening ‘45 and documented it all in this forum thread. ComradeP’s writing is a great example for players to see how to analyse and methodically play one of these titles. It is interesting also as the forces were relatively even in both size and quality. This is something not normally seen in our Eastern Front titles where German quality must offset Soviet quantity. This thread also guided Indragnir (scenario designer) on potential changes that could be implemented in the upcoming 4.05 patch.

If you enjoyed ComradeP’s above AAR, then move on to his next challenge with Elxaime: tackling Panzer Campaigns – Rumyantsev ’43. Rumyantsev '43 has proven to be a very popular title with some very mobile forces and challenging situations for both sides. Follow along with this latest AAR.

User FalseBlackBear is trying out a scenario from a mod for Squad Battles – Eagle Strike. The scenario covers the fighting around Wiltz in the Ardennes and the after action report does a good job of conveying the various considerations when playing Squad Battles, you can read the forum post here.

We posted about the upcoming Modern Campaigns – Danube Front ’85 campaign scenario, Certain Strike ’87. One of the play testers has started to post his experience and thoughts. Follow along as BlackPanther shares more observations.

Mods

Rickdenic has been providing a range of new graphic mods for both the Napoleonic and Civil War Battles titles. They cover primarily the unit and leader images. Some recent examples are Napoleonic Battles – Austerlitz and Civil War Battles – Antietam. You can see all of Rickdenic’s mods in this search of his posts.

 

Warhorse has probably single handedly added more content to Squad Battles than all other modders combined. His latest package is focused on the Western front, using Squad Battles – Eagles Strike as the base. You can read more on Mike’s mod here. Also, look out for his Eastern Front mods as well.

Geyerfalck has been building ‘all graphics and sound’ mods for Panzer Campaigns. The graphic changes include maps, counters, unit images (in the extended versions) and more. All are very impressive and cover twenty-six titles to date. The only titles not yet provided are the three Pacific titles and the latest release Spring Awakening ‘45. You can see the full list of mods and links in Geyerfalck’s thread here.

Click below, to see the full-size unit images.

Jmartin has created some map and unit graphics for both Musket & Pike as well as Napoleonic Battles. Ferraris maps were period maps that documented the Austrian Netherlands provinces for Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa in the mid 18th century and the style has been beautifully carried across into this mod. You can see the supported Musket & Pike titles here, and the Napoleonic titles here. There are also dedicated Autumn, Frozen and Snow terrain as well.

Further on the Napoleonic front, Jim Owczarski who writes over at the Armchair Dragoons site has just published a new article on his experiences with our Campaign Waterloo title at Quatre Bras. Check it out here.

And that is certainly a popular battlefield, as not long ago we published another AAR from Alex in one of our weekly blog posts about that same field.

 

FilipSK is working on some additional scenarios for Panzer Campaigns – Stalingrad '42. You can read more about them in this thread.

There are a lot more threads with various modifications from the community, check out the dedicated Design & Modding forums under each game series.

General conversations

There has been quite a bit of discussion around the upcoming Panzer Campaigns 4.05 updates that were documented in these two blog posts: 2024 Quarter Two Update and 4.05 Deep Dive. It’s been a worthwhile discussion to help explain in more depth how some of these changes will work. If you want to contribute the thread is here.

There is great technical thread for Running WDS games on Mac OS (or Linux). This shows that with emulation software you can run on a range of hardware. In a similar vein there was post over on Facebook confirming that our products work on Steam Decks.

Steel God posed: A question about Solo Play versus PBEM. Have a read and see what others are thinking.

Panzer Campaigns – Smolensk ’43

This upcoming title was announced recently, and we are just finishing up play testing and a plethora of other activities. Keep a few shekels spare as it won’t be long, and this is another interesting and challenging title.

Finally, a reminder, Squad Battles - Advance of the Reich is our current Game of the Week and if you don’t have it, what are you waiting for? If nothing else, have a look at the various downloads and other information provided (for free) and look at some of the recommended books, they are fantastic.

Thanks to all, please keep sharing and posting, we appreciate all feedback, good or bad!