Pre-Orders and Pre-Registrations – #TuesdayNewsday 10/4/22

Every week, #TuesdayNewsday is here to keep you abreast of what matters in the strategy gaming world

There’s a bunch of pre-orders this week that we’ve been watching/tracking and waiting for them to finally launch, so scroll down for links to Captaincy, and Iron Thunder, and Heroscape and see what’s up

THIS WEEK’S OTHER HEADLINE

Registration is open for the Connections Online Showcase

October 19th will be a one-day, all-day Connections Online project showcase for professional/practitioner game design.  Each presentation will run 90-120 minutes and focus on a single use case of a game designed or adapted to professional military/natsec usage, including deep dives into the objectives/purposes, designs, mechanics, execution, and lessons learned from both the prep and conduct of the games.

Details This event is currently projected to run over 12 hours, as it’ll all be single-threaded (ie, no sessions overlapping with each other) Registration is open! Sessions will be broadcast through YouTube live for registered participants to interact with the presenters Sessions will be made public for viewing after the completion of the showcase and an editorial review by the staff

Confirmed Presentations Brian Train’s urban Kriegspiel for the 40th ID Urban Warfare Planners’ Course GUWS member Matt Kirchman on A Splendid Failure (Reconstruction in post-ACW US) GUWS member Andrew Olson on the Competition AI wargame design SAMS Student Dan Warner on Decisive Operations and incorporating that into the curriculum there SAMS instructor Eric Price on integrating ROOT into professional military curricula UKFC’s Take That Hill There are more presenters planned, but not yet hard-&-fast ‘confirmed’ so stay tuned!

 

• Compass Games has moved American Tank Ace: Europe 1944-45 to the “released” column on their site but still has the pre-order price on it, so grab it quick
• Lock ‘n Load Publishing has released the Day of Heroes Battlepack 1 for their digital LNLT game, on Steam, timed for the anniversary of the battle made famous in the book/movie Black Hawk Down
• Revolution Games released A Greater Victory – South Mountain and has it on a launch sale for both the boxed and ziploc editions
• Panzer Grenadier: Marianas 1944 is out there, and yes, you need another game to play it all
• Modiphius has a new Fallout RPG starter set
• Want a whole box of UrbanMechs?  Of course you do

 

• Hey look, Chiswick Games – we’re perfectly happy to help promote the launch of your Iron Thunder Kickstarter campaign, both here and on our Twitter feed, among other places.  But guys, help yourselves out a bit here and update your own damned website with the Kickstarter info!  Seriously, y’all, this is basic stuff….
• Here comes the second edition of Captaincy, an age of sail minis game with a bunch of player flexibility, and some upcoming content from us about it; it’s already hit its funding mark, too
• Hasbro has “brought back” Heroscape in a new crowdfunded project and those air quotes are intentional: (1) Hasbro is sitting on more cash than Tuvalu; they can fund this without resorting to soaking the backers (2) garish single-color minis that are neither pre-painted nor particularly designed to be painted (3) an insane price tag that’s going to screen out all your casual players and combined with the inability to paint the new minis, will likely also screen out the hardcore hobbyists who would normally pay that much for their own arts & crafts project, and (4) an obvious exercise in IP-creation that eschews the previous ‘mix-&-match-across-history’ model for factions and characters that are copyrightable but that players have no prior investment in
  Tough to say anything w/ Hasbro behind it is “doomed to fail” but if you’re diverging so far from the previous material then why retain the branding at all¹
• The next Flames of War expansion focus is the Bulge: British line, and there’s both a book and a starter box that you can pre-order now, along with the Firestorm: Market-Garden book
• Temple of Horrors 2.0 is on Gamefound and it definitely falls into the “minis porn” category that Cyrano discussed on our last podcast
• Warlord dropped a whole bunch of Black Powder Epic Battles – American Civil War pre-orders on us this week
  • Union Cavalry & Zouaves Brigade
  • Confederate Cavalry & Zouaves Brigade
  • Guts & Glory Pre-Order Bundle
  • Rebel Cavalry & Zouaves Division
  • Yankee Cavalry & Zouaves Division
  • Rebel Infantry Division
  • Yankee Infantry Division
  • Gettysburg Battle Set
  • Guts & Glory Starter Set
  • Casualty Markers

 

• It’s Cold War Week at Matrix Games² and they’ve got a bunch of games up to 75% off right now
• Easy Roller Dice Company is offering 30% of a random pound of dice grab bag with coupon code POUND30
• Alternate Armies’ monthly freebie is company-mascot-turned-witch Alternia in 28mm, shipped free w/ any order this month
• Humble Bundle has Foxhole at 25% off
• MMP ran a sale last weekend, that started after last week’s TN, and finished before this week’s TN, and we just wanted to mention it because we think they did it just to be mean to us!
• Noble Knight has an oddball Von Manstein’s Triumph on sale right now, with an MSRP of over $200 and no we’re not missing a decimal, just the punctuation to ask “WTF?!”

 

• Saturday Night Fights ~ The Battle of Chickamauga for “Altar of Freedom”
• My Own Worst Enemy ~ Assault- Red Horizon 41 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts
• This week’s classic article ~ Tiny Epic Kingdoms
• Mentioned in Dispatches talked about Crowdfunding
• This week in our forums
  • The kids put together some of their loot from Southern Front
  • A game with one set of kids
  • And a first game with another
• Upcoming Dragoons Events (and don’t forget to check the event calendar for everything else)
  • Next #UnboxingDay is 20 October, and we’re already stacking up some neat games to show you
  • Next Virtual Convention is The ACDC in January; on 19 October, we’ll have a 1-day showcase of professional wargaming projects under the Connections Online banner with details coming soon
  • Next Real-World Convention is definitely ForJeffCon (The Last MACE) in November as we’ve got our events submitted now

 

• “An Encounter at Le Valtru” for “Chain of Command”
• “Attack This!” for “Spearhead”
• Continuing the Terra Invicta AAR

 

• EssenSpiel is THIS WEEK over in Germany
• Not a convention; still a pretty cool-looking event: “The UK’s first exhibition to explore what video games can tell us about conflict.”  9/30/22 – 5/28/23 in London, England
• If you’re headed to ASLOK in Cleveland, we’ve got a thread to chat about it
• Bounding First Fire ASL weekend in the UK, 16-20 November

 

• Rocky looks at the Japanese Navy’s Indian Ocean campaign through some books/games
• Harold talks to Mark Miklos
• Moe is channeling his inner lieutenant and getting lost in the woods
• Our buddy Cyrano made an appearance on the Little Wars FM podcast to talk about virtual tabletop gaming (scroll down to ep 33)
• Ardwulf’s counter clipping stream talked about strategic level WW2 games

 

We’ve also got a 4X-specific area in the forums to discuss any of these, too.

• In what might be the biggest 4x news of the year so far, publisher Stardock and developer Ironclad announced that Sins of a Solar Empire II is in development.  (You can watch the trailer here.)  Coming a good fourteen years after the first game was released, the long-awaited sequel will be entering Early Access as an Epic Games exclusive October 27.
• After ten months in Steam Early Access, Silver Lemur Games has released Stellar Monarch 2.  A sequel to the first Stellar Monarch title (which released back in 2016), the new game features  better macro-management tools, revamped combat and logistics systems, a more genuine feudal system (where you as the Emperor/Empress must deal with other nobles, great houses, etc.), and more.
• In contrast/comparison, we have Terra Invicta, a 4x/grand-strategy game that has just entered Steam Early Access — and one that is already making a bit of a splash.  (Watch the trailer here.)  Coming from developer Pavonis Interactive and rising indie publisher Hooded Horse, Terra Invicta tasks the player with somehow uniting the disparate factions of Earth, explore & expand across the Sol System, and ultimately defeat a hostile alien invasion.
• Paradox has released the Toxoids species pack for Stellaris (watch the trailer here).  Also dropping alongside the DLC is the free 3.5 “Fornax” update, which includes new customizable difficulty settings, new story content, and a major rebalance to Relics, to name but a few changes & improvements.
• Also released by Paradox is By Blood Alone (watch the trailer here), the newest expansion for Hearts of Iron IV, with the accompanying free 1.12.1 “Avalanche” update dropping alongside it.  However, it appears the community’s reception is (at best) mixed so far, with the reworked peace conference system and the new plane-designer feature receiving particularly heavy criticism.
• In an announcement that appears to have caught nearly everyone by surprise, developer League of Geeks announced they’re working on a remake to Solium Infernum, the political grand-strategy game where the player must employ Machiavellian tactics on their way to becoming the new ruler of Hell.  (Watch the trailer for the remake here.)  The new version of the game is set to release onto Steam in 2023.
• Another piece of news that came as a bit of a surprise to some — albeit for different reasons — was Battlegoat’s announcement that Supreme Ruler 2030 was in development.  (You can watch the announcement here.)  Not only that, the game is apparently on track to still come out by the end of this year (though it’s not yet clear if this will be as a full release or an Early Access title).  Given that Battlegoat’s most recent project, Galactic Ruler, was released only two months ago (and has received only two small patches so far), there appears to be a perception among some in the community that the game is already being abandoned in favor of the new Supreme Ruler title.
• Stardock put out a small patch (v3.01) for Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, their continually underrated fantasy 4x title.  The only thing the patch does is fix a bug that was adversely affecting AI players’ abilities to summon creatures, but it’s nice to see a company still supporting a game they released nine years ago (even when that game probably isn’t making them much money at this point).

 

• Warlord Games has bought the IP to the Konflict ’47 alt-WW2 line from Clockwork Goblin
• Meanwhile, Warlord Games is looking for some new people, but you gotta work in Nottingham
• A lot of updates this week from Wargame Design Studio, specifically the Napoleonic Battles series and Naval Campaigns series
• The latest Compass Games livestream

 

Don’t forget we’ve got a dedicated area of our forums for the professional wargamers.

• What does the Ukrainian operational plan look like?
• Everything the US is willing to admit to having given Ukraine
• The next GUWS webinar is  Naval War College: Educational Wargaming coming up on October 4th and then Back to the Future: The 1980s Global War Games as a Campaign of Learning on the 27th.
  In between there’s a special one-off with Dr Peter Perla, among others, talking about Military Exercises and Wargaming in Professional Military Education on Monday 10/10 at noon US EDT
• PaxSims has announced the next Connections North will be in June of 2023

 

That’s all for this week!
Be sure to drop by our forums and join the fun, and next Tuesday we’ll drop some more news on you.

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