Anything in the pipeline?

[Tony]

Dear WDS team,

I have probably told you and the entire digital grognards a million times how wonderful the welcome has been to me for our hobby. This is the thing i'll be doing as i push 100 years. But one million thank yous is not enough. Thank you everyone who is reading this.

I've chatted with devs and played some of the giants in these past 2 to 3 years as i moved to digital from cardboard. I understand that everyone and their momma wants WDS to develop this game and develop that game. We got a thousand armchair generals/armchair business development men and women!

People want this covered, and that covered. Like, it seems i'm the only one who likes feudal Japan. I wish WDS would make a Sengoku Jidai: Shadow of the Shogun game about 16th century East Asia, with Japan, China, and Korea at war with themselves and others (Japan).

Quick aside, Sengoku Jidai: Shadow of the Shogun is -70% off at only $8.99 and -62% off for the Gold Bundle which i bought for $18.48. A steal.

Anyway, i'm asking a pipeline question re: modern warfare. I think most of us would like to relive the Battle of Kyiv. And since it's an ongoing war, scenarios can be made and created as the years go on. Let us hope and pray that the war ends tomorrow and the need for updates will be a need for the past, but even when peace is finally found, there will still be what if? scenarios to contend with.

And i don't know how much i can share here, but methinks that folks reading this are more informed than the general public. I know that one of the modern games that people have wanted is the Panamanian war against Noriega. I only bring that up because, as many of you know, around or on April 2nd, US versus Panama warfare should become a very on-the-nose subject and what the world is talking about, if you catch my drift.

Great to see and hear about the direction towards ancients. Bring HPS here! But are there any plans for modern warfare considering how prevalent it is and will become?

Thanks!

th

[Dion]

I wish WDS would make a new title for this series too. There's only five titles, well only four and a 1/2, since one is a demo. I think Danube Front has a few good campaigns to choose from, but those ain't seperate titles. I think Kyiv would be great too, if I'm right in assuming the whole country of Ukraine would be included. It would be ultra modern and great for scenario designers as its hypotheticals would be awesome. Though, I wish the war would never had happened, even though it peaked my interest.

[unonimus]

Making wargames of ongoing wars are a bit problematic, I should say.

Turkey and USSR '85, maybe? Or, would their soldiers play contract bridge against each other in WWIII ?

[Tony]

I wish WDS would make a new title for this series too. There's only five titles, well only four and a 1/2, since one is a demo. I think Danube Front has a few good campaigns to choose from, but those ain't seperate titles. I think Kyiv would be great too, if I'm right in assuming the whole country of Ukraine would be included. It would be ultra modern and great for scenario designers as its hypotheticals would be awesome. Though, I wish the war would never had happened, even though it peaked my interest.

Yeah. Of course, none of want the Russo-Ukrainian War. I'm a pacifist so i don't like any war. Yet i'm addicted to the study of war.

Diplomacy is boring. But when diplomacy ends, and we revert to primates and hurt each other, i find it fascinating.

There are YouTube videos and countless articles about the moral dilemma about wargaming. Is it insensitive to gamify the worst day of people's lives? I don't think so.

dude in clouds.jpg (40.83 KiB) Viewed 2439 times

We all learn history differently. One of the reasons i love these games so much is because i learn so much.

And like you said, this war is ultra modern. People are calling this the Drone Wars. I would love to see how WDS or some other designer would take on the task of the current Russo-Ukrainian War.

And a current conflict has the plus of being created during the fact, not after it. So much of history gets seen through a Team A lost Team B won lens, that it doesn't give the correct story. Creating a game, a simulation, of what is happening as it happened within three or less years does history a service.

Currently watching this video of Mark Herman's and D.B. Dockter's upcoming game Defiance: 2nd Russo-Ukrainian War 2022-? Wish there was something like this in digital format.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJekD32Xwmg

[TANSTAAFL]

I think a lot of folks would like some new Modern Campaigns, but it's probably harder than one might think to find conflicts that fit the system, have enough information to justify/support a game, and would appeal to enough people to make a profit.

Part of the problem is that we humans kind of suck, and keep fighting wars, so there's a lot of conflict out there to choose from. At the same time, there haven't been very many at the scale that would work well with this system. And some of those may well suffer from a paucity of sufficiently detailed/reliable sources, or might not be of broad interest for a variety of reasons.

And then there's technology. The existing Modern Campaigns system really works only up through the 1980s IMO. After that, the sheer complexity and extent of electronic/C3I, space, missile, and drone technologies starts to stretch the WWII-derived game models past their limits. And modern conflicts are very heavily air and in some cases (China/Taiwan, for instance) also heavily naval-focused, areas where the game system is pretty much out of its league.

Still, I could see maybe a game with a selection of historical and hypothetical India/Pakistan (and maybe China) conflicts, or a historical Iran/Iraq game. I'm not sure a game on the current Russia-Ukraine war would fit the game system very well however, above and beyond the other issues that would attend such an effort.

[GMcClellan]

I'd still like to see games set through the decades in Europe to see the development of the force mix. Base the hypotheticals off of existing events

1948- Berlin Blockade goes full bore.
1956- Between the intervention in Hungary and the Suez Crisis, things were quite testy...
1967- The 6 Days War goes global (Note, you could also do something off the Cuban Missile Crisis, though that's getting closer to 56...)
1973- Yom Kippur War spreads (More reason to go with Bay of Pigs, to keep from reusing the same Mid-East contexts...)

With that, you could see the changes is force levels and weaponry. (For that matter, go with 1979 when NATO was at its absolute nadir and the Red Army hadn't broken its fangs in Afghanistan)

[warhero88]

Iran '79. Soviets invade, exploit chaos by the social unrest. The West responds (well, sort of,...remember the RDF anybody?). Pre- and/or post-Ayatollah.
Could use maps to do Iran-Iraq War scenarios.
I'd buy it.

[Dion]

There's a number of possibilities. Whatever they choose, I just hope it involves US troops, that way I, and a lot of potential US customers would appreciate it more, "closer to home" as they say. Though, if it's ultra modern we would probably learn to appreciate that too, even with if involves non-US troops. I think the game system could handle any technological level. Game designers would just have to get used thinking out of the box. The computer as game platform can handle just about anything you can throw at it, even outer space and drones technologies, so If the approach wasn't too scientific, I don't think it wouldn't be a hindrance to players at all.

[warhero88]

South Africa '89.
1) The "Sixth Battle" Scenario (great book by Barrett Tillman), Superpower involvement
2) The "Vortex" Scenario (book by Larry Bond), Cuban involvement.
3) Various Boer war battles with the same map.
I'd buy it.

[TANSTAAFL]

A lot of interesting ideas for sure. I still think though that most if not all of them would require a different game engine. The underlying bones of this engine date back to the late 1990s. There is so much that is impossible to really alter without a full rewrite, at least, it sure appears that way. And the money most certainly isn't there for that.

Now, if we took the Panzer Battles engine, which admittedly is pretty similar in most ways, but which operates on a smaller scale, a lot of modern stuff starts to become a bit more feasible I think. Still, none of these land warfare game systems handles air and naval conflict very well, and no one yet knows how to simulate the modern EW battlefield, drones, etc. at least not in consumer-grade simulations. Maybe Command Ops but that game is more like a CIC simulator than a traditional wargame.