For those that know of the company and its systems, what would be your top three or four games that you'd like to see come out next? I imagine it could be an entirely new system or another installment of an existing one.
Mine, in order:
1. AoS re-boot...with MP as it exists in the other titles. I get faint-y thinking about 10-player ship scrums.
2: The completion of the War in Europe series with the postulated meta-map.
3: Renaissance: Thirty Years' War
4: PzC for Vietnam. It exists for the bloody iPad, so why not the PC?
Best,
Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)
Anything non-WW2. :P
The Age of Sail idea is nice but I'd imagine that it would require a huge amount of changes to their current system. Not sure if they'd be willing to spend that much effort on it. :-\
I have the Matrix digital version of the original AOS that comes with Battleground Napoleonic Wars. There is a missing color issues with some of the flags in the ship UI but it works okay. The Zoom is terrible on that old game, though. On higher modern resolutions, anyway. Either the ships are too small to properly see when at a good map-level zoom to take in the situation, or the ships are about right but the edge of the map doesn't even reach maximum gun range. So I found myself having to constantly zoom in and out .. without being able to use the mouse wheel to do so. Or requiring numerous hotkeys depending on the level you want IIRC. So there are definitely some tweaks it could use.
I'd really like to see more in the Musket & Pike series, either TYW or ECW - or both.
After that I'd like to see the War in Europe Series not only completed but fixed. There are game breaking bugs in it now, like the fact that you can't see combat results when in 2x 2D view.
A further expansion of the WWI series, either covering subsequent years in the war or one covering the Balkan Wars. Gallipoli or Palestine would be interesting.
I'd like to see further games in the First World War series. Panzerde's suggestions in that regard are excellent. Premzyl/Lemberg would be nice.
Further expansion of the Panzer Battles series and please....something other than the eastern front. France '40 offers lots of battles.
More Modern War Squad Battles, esp. hypothetical cold war scenarios tied in with their Modern Campaigns story arc.
#3, although technically speaking 'Renaissance' is the name of a title in the 'Musket and Pike' series, it is not the series name itself.
I'd also like to see more in the Panzer Battles series. A Western Front game would be particularly welcome.
Might have to play some of that series today...I do like company scale games...
Quote from: panzerde on November 09, 2014, 10:58:44 AM
I'd also like to see more in the Panzer Battles series. A Western Front game would be particularly welcome.
Might have to play some of that series today...I do like company scale games...
The next Panzer Battles will be in the West and the one following will be considerably warmer....
Quote from: Strela on November 10, 2014, 06:57:03 AM
...and the one following will be considerably warmer....
If we're talking Date Palms rather than Coconut Palms then...
Yesss!
Dammit, you guys...
Like I have the mental bandwidth to take on another game system.
*looks up Panzer Battles site and prepares to download*
Bastards!
Best,
Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)
Quote from: Strela on November 10, 2014, 06:57:03 AM
The next Panzer Battles will be in the West and the one following will be considerably warmer....
That is GREAT news. If the designer's notes are as good with those as they are with the Kursk title, I can stop buy WW2 Osprey titles!
Quote from: Cyrano on November 10, 2014, 01:55:25 PM
Dammit, you guys...
Like I have the mental bandwidth to take on another game system.
*looks up Panzer Battles site and prepares to download*
Bastards!
Come on Jim, we can get a turn or two of Kursk in between turns of Leipzig and Pavia. It's not like you're governing a major city or anything.
I would like to see a new JTS game engine. :coolsmiley:
@bbmike: I hear that comment made a fair amount in the vicinity of JTS offerings, but it usually comes without suggestions to make the engine better. I make no secret that I find the system just fine as it is, but it's certainly evolved over the years and has now even made significant strides in the area of graphics. So, if it were in your hands (or anyone else hereabout for the matter) what would you change/add/remove, &c.? Folks near to JTS visit here so you never know. Strikes me as all together better to light a candle, you know?
@doug: Mine, as most cities, is ultimately ungovernable in the medieval sense. I like to think of myself as the pale, sweaty guy in the U-boat engine room that periodically gets the call from the commander looking for "Ahead Full" while standing in waist-deep water.
Best,
Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)
Quote from: bbmike on November 10, 2014, 07:44:20 PM
I would like to see a new JTS game engine. :coolsmiley:
bbmike,
That's a hard one. The reason John can get out the volume of games that he has over the last 15 - 20 years is the solidity of the engine. John has consciously used the same engine to ensure compatibility and ease of patching etc.
The engine is actually very flexible when you consider it can handle tactical to strategic and land, naval & air etc. It's usually the 'Windows 98' interface that gets most criticism, but many people like the fact that the interface is consistent across the various series and makes the learning phase much simpler. I can almost guarantee any change in the engine will get the 'purists' offside...
Finally, you can see there is a concerted effort to improve the look of the game and that is helping to change the perception of the games being 'old school'. This is the beauty of John's engine, there is a lot of customisation that can be done at a designer/user level and we are starting to leverage that more and more.
Well said. As for me, the engine changes I'd most like to see are:
- 2X 2D zoom in all the games
- Map graphics a la the WWI Campaigns series
- Formation-level morale, particularly in the early modern period games. It's tough to reproduce historical routing behaviors with the current system
- Improved single player AI. I need all the practice I can get against a decent bot for when I play hoomins.
- An option for order delays that's reflective of historical messaging technologies - again, primarily of use in early modern games but would still have some impact in WW2 and post-WW2.
- More options to issue orders to formations and have those orders carried out intelligently versus having to (mostly) move every single counter. This is possible now for moving formations in column and formation movement when not in contact, but could use some tweaking.
- Either clean up the 3D representation of the game to something approaching modern graphics standards or just get rid of it. I know there are some people who like playing these games in 3D mode, and that JTS doesn't really have the resources to dramatically improve them, so I'm reconciled to this - but since you were asking...
If I were to pick one and only one, I should have mentioned, it would be Doug's #3. Drives me absolutely buggy sometimes, particularly in the Napoleonic games.
I think they're taking an honest shot at 1 and 2 (y'all saw that HPS Waterloo got the 1.07 patch that includes #1, right?) and I will likely die wondering why the obsession with the 3D. It worked with the Battleground titles because of the sizeable art budget that was to hand, but the flame hasn't been worth the candle since.
Best,
Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)
Yeah, it's mainly the graphics that need updating. The latest release is an improvement but it needs even more. I agree that if the 3D graphics can't be improved on the just get rid of them. 2D works just fine as long as it looks good and you can zoom in and out.
I will say that I think the counter art in the Panzer Battles series is a very nice improvement. Very nice for a company scale wargame. The map is also an improvement over the traditional Tiller map art, which is no doubt why we're seeing variants of it show up in the other games. It is still too pixelated in zoomed views.
Another thing I'd love to have more of are keyboard shortcuts. I tend to use the ones available, but most are of limited use to a 2D player. WASD to scroll the map would at least placate my map scrolling muscle memory. Shortcuts for "move to top of stack" and "move to bottom of stack" would make playing gunpowder era games much nicer. The shortcuts for moving units seem mostly useless to me, but I would guess someone makes use of them.
@bbmike. The 3D graphics are moddable. No one seems to have done it for some reason. We did cut the 3D out of Panzer Battles once we got the improved 2D graphics as well as the 'hill side' contours to allow depth perception. So they are fixable if someone has the time.
@panzerde I'm going to go back to John re. shortcuts. That seems to be the most asked for feature of late (now that graphics are improved!). In an ideal world they would be totally user mappable with the ability to share and load maps. I'll find out what is possible. You do realise the arrow keys scroll the map like your suggesting for WASD?
QuoteNew development recently has ported some of our games to mobile devices such as iPad and Android. This effort is opening up new possibilities as it is based on C# programming. Once we have that game engine, then other ports are possible and other platform development becomes an option. For example, I have been experimenting with the Unity 3D platform in support of our game engines and there are some interesting possibilities associated with that.
Does this mean that the engine is actually being ported and we could some day see a Panzer Campaigns 2 engine built with Unity? That would be really interesting.
And as for what I think should be next? More Panzer Battles! I absolutely love Battles of Kursk.
Quote from: panzerde on November 10, 2014, 08:40:17 PM
Well said. As for me, the engine changes I'd most like to see are:
- 2X 2D zoom in all the games
- Map graphics a la the WWI Campaigns series
- Formation-level morale, particularly in the early modern period games. It's tough to reproduce historical routing behaviors with the current system
- Improved single player AI. I need all the practice I can get against a decent bot for when I play hoomins.
- An option for order delays that's reflective of historical messaging technologies - again, primarily of use in early modern games but would still have some impact in WW2 and post-WW2.
- More options to issue orders to formations and have those orders carried out intelligently versus having to (mostly) move every single counter. This is possible now for moving formations in column and formation movement when not in contact, but could use some tweaking.
- Either clean up the 3D representation of the game to something approaching modern graphics standards or just get rid of it. I know there are some people who like playing these games in 3D mode, and that JTS doesn't really have the resources to dramatically improve them, so I'm reconciled to this - but since you were asking...
I think those are pretty good choices.
As for a new game I'd love to see Modern Air Wars come to WW1, perhaps with some campaign elements. A Bloody April 1917 would be a good one, but so too some of the 1918 stuff, oh, and Zeppelins! Gotta have Zeppelin raids! ;)
Quote from: Boggit on November 11, 2014, 05:33:18 PM
As for a new game I'd love to see Modern Air Wars come to WW1, perhaps with some campaign elements. A Bloody April 1917 would be a good one, but so too some of the 1918 stuff, oh, and Zeppelins! Gotta have Zeppelin raids! ;)
Zeppelin raids? BRILLIANT!
Quote from: Strela on November 10, 2014, 11:58:09 PM
@panzerde I'm going to go back to John re. shortcuts. That seems to be the most asked for feature of late (now that graphics are improved!). In an ideal world they would be totally user mappable with the ability to share and load maps. I'll find out what is possible. You do realise the arrow keys scroll the map like your suggesting for WASD?
Strela - yes, I've used the arrow keys in the past but my fingers know WASD from so many other games. I frequently play turns from CM and a JTS game in sequence of an evening, so there's some cognitive dissonance when I try and scroll the map in a Tiller game and it doesn't move!