Updates for Civil War Battles & Napoleonic Battles
Greetings fellow wargamers,
We are once again bringing you updates for the CWB & Nap series of games. These are "incremental" updates due to the relatively small number of changes included in each - but we wanted to get them out to you as soon as we could. Some problems were discovered with the AI routines while we refined the Musket & Pike engine for the recent Thirty Years War release, that were fixed and in turn warranted getting out into production for these games. It is our intention that we won't be releasing updates for these series again for a good amount of time (6+ months?), so we didn't want to wait for the next major release cycle.
The Musket & Pike games are due to receive their updates in approximately two weeks which will bring all titles up to the level that Thirty Years War released at. We are also aiming to release a Demo for the series then - Vienna 1683.
This won't be a long blog post, but want to highlight a few things:
We were contacted about the recent change to the engine regarding artillery, specifically preventing them unlimbering in Forest terrain. Info was shared which illustrated the difficulties this presented specifically for the Western Theater titles which tend to have large amounts of forest to fight in, so we agreed to make this feature an optional rule.
Some additional changes have been implemented relating to Optional Rules. Now when you hover your mouse over an entry a pop-up Tooltip will be displayed, showing the notes relating to that rule. Additionally a "Default" button was added, if you want to reset the rules.
With 28 OR's now available it can be quite challenging from a development and testing point of view to ensure all facets are properly tested before making changes public. For this reason we are seriously considering removing several of these OR's in the next major release, making them default behavior. Precisely which changes we will implement have not been nailed down just yet. If you have an opinion on the subject please go over to the CWB section of the forum and make a post about it. I have started a thread for that purpose here.
Some more adjustments were made to the Toolbar and Highlight commands. And further refinements to AI routines to continue our efforts to make the AI a more challenging opponent.
Next we have the Napoleonic Battles updates:
Here we also had AI adjustments as previously mentioned. The Tooltips functionality for the Optional Rules Dialog was also added. Similar Toolbar and Highlight changes were also implemented.
And, as an extra bonus for Campaign Waterloo owners, three new scenarios have been added in that update. They can be found in the main list, starting at 017a. We inserted them at this point as they are small scenarios and grouping them near the Plancenoit ones seemed reasonable.
Ok, like I said, not a long post for this one. In addition to the Updates being posted on our site, all Installers have been refreshed as well and are accessible through your Store Account if you wish to do a clean install.
And don't miss out on the fifth and final installment of the article series on Napoleonic Battles, also posted today.
We'll leave you with a couple of screen shots from the Vienna 1683 Demo coming in the near future...
Enjoy!
A demo of 1683? Winged Hussars v. Turks! What a Christmas present!
I very much appreciate these newsletters on game updates. I would, however, strongly urge WDS to consider updates of games besides the Napoleon and Civil War series. It has been a year since the Naval Campaigns series has been updated (2022 most of them). The Airpower games probably need updating (no dates at all) and most of the Squad Battles games date from 2021. Other series were updated in 2023, but they have not received the multiple updates afforded to the Civil War and Napoleonic series.
Thanks for the updates. Perhaps this is in WDS plans or just can’t be done with the current engine. But in SSI’s Battles of Napoleon, the game had reaction options for cavalry in the non-phasing part of the turn. I.e. the non-phasing player could set their cav units to reaction charge or not to reaction charge. Thanks.
Thanks for keeping all us gamers in mind with respect to getting these updates out now, rather than later. I sure appreciate it!
As for not being able to unlimber artillery in a forest hex, I understand how that rule would impact the scenarios for the Western Theatre, but is there evidence that this was common practice? Seems like you’d need to clear trees first in order to create the space to deploy a battery. In a forest, unless there’s an nearby infantry unit with skirmishers deployed, you wouldn’t detect approaching enemy units until they were right in front of your battery. When I play (only vs AI), if I do unlimber in a forest hex, it’s usually at an edge hex, looking out, for maximum LOS.
Thanks for the upcoming Vienna 1683 demo. I am looking forward to playing it to see whether or not I’d like that series.
Glad to see canon can be placed in forests again. Never made much sense why they couldn’t. I guess it makes sense in some cases, like if the forest was to dense to unlimber, or if the smoke from cannon shot wasn’t able to dissipate properly in dense forests or some such rarity, but otherwise I think it’s a real good idea that it has become an optional rule, especially for them western scenarios where there’s a lot of forests.
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