Kriegsspiel spiel: Franzoar interviewed

The Frenchman behind Kriegsspiel – 7 Years War, a work-in-progress wargame in which fresh intel is almost as important as feisty infantry, talks formative years and future plans in THC’s latest Q&A.

THC: Was your interest in wargaming kindled on a tabletop or on a screen?

Franzoar: When I was a teenager, twenty-five years ago :-(, I played medieval Warhammer with real figurines, and some more realistic tabletop wargames (I am French, and played the games offered in VaeVictis magazine). It was great fun!

Afterwards, I played more and more on screen, and became rather fond of real-time strategy games. So, not exactly wargames, but I have spent a lot of hours playing the likes of Dune 2, the Warcraft series, Warhammer: Dark Omen, the Dawn of Wars, then Company of Heroes. I really enjoyed the Total War titles, R.U.S.E, and Ultimate General: Civil War.

More recently, I played Fields of Glory 2 and Unity of Command. I like RTS games because they move quickly, however their mechanisms, allowing the player to communicate with every unit instantly, and wherever they are on the map, is unrealistic. They reward the player who can make the best and quickest orders. I believe good strategy games should reward something different. On the contrary, wargames do not have these flaws, but for me, many of them require a lot of time and investment before being fun, and I found I had less and less of this time available.

Over the years, I have continued reading historical and military books. My understanding of a lot of battles in the first half of WW2 is that great victories were achieved by cutting enemy supply lines, and especially by attacking headquarters or cutting communications lines. A force without orders, however strong on paper, is seriously disadvantaged. I might be wrong in my analysis – I am not a war professional – but I began thinking that a game implementing communication lines would mean that the player could use these strategies for winning, and that ‘Clicks Per Minute’ would become unimportant.

So, almost three years ago, I looked for a fun wargame that offered these things and found nothing. I must admit now that the Take Command series could have been a good choice, but it did not interest me – I don’t know why.

I turned to the history of wargames (there is a good book in french about it – Jouer la guerre, Histoire du wargame), and realised that one of the very first recognisable wargames provided the functionality I sought. There are three battlefields in Kriegsspiel, one for each player, with dense fog of war, and one for the umpire, who sees everything, and interprets and distributes orders. So, in order to play a wargame that pleased me, I ‘just’ had to develop a Kriegsspiel implementation in real-time. I decided I could do it in 6 months – an estimate that turned-out to be a little optimistic!

THC: Had you coded a wargame prior to Kriegsspiel?

Franzoar: No, I work as a developer using the Java language to code enterprise applications. I tried to make some little games for fun, but have never developed a real wargame. This inexperience may explain while I take sooo long to work on my project. But, one of my life goals was to create a videogame, so I tried, and am still trying, to develop this one.

THC: Which aspects of Kriegsspiel are you currently working on, and what features are you planning to add in the coming year?

Franzoar: In your article, you rightly wrote that the maps are simple, the sound effects are scant, and the GUI is basic. Graphics are not that attractive too. However, I found your screen captures quite pretty, so that pleased me a lot. Until last year, a lot of my coding time was devoted to game mechanics. I was thinking that I needed to do this in order to hook people. Unfortunately, although I’ve gained some very useful feedback from individuals who’ve tried my game, not all that many people seem interested so far, so either my gameplay is uninteresting (a serious possibility) or my graphics are not eye-catching enough*. So, for the past six months, I have been working on better visuals, especially in regard to landscape, and unit animations. The next release – hopefully ready by the end of the summer – will include these improvements, as well as infantry charges.

* (THC: Another possibility is that many potential players simply haven’t noticed Kriegsspiel yet.)

My goals for the the final release of Kriegsspiel – 7 Years Wars:

• An abstracted hinterland. Supplies arrive in your camp via roads that go outside the battlefield to your territories. Of course, your opponent could attack these roads.
• The management of mercenaries, prisoners and wounded people. This was historically important, and could be fun to play.
• Prussian and Austrian campaigns. These would consist of sequenced battles with army management between the engagements.
• Better sound and, possibly, music too. For the latter, it would be period pieces from the era of the Seven Years’ War. As, thus far I have not found a lot of baroque music that suits the battlefield, I may end up simply copying the choices made for the Barry Lyndon soundtrack 🙂 .

I must admit I won’t be adding dozens of unit types. I want the game to reward good plans, not perfect knowledge of hundreds of different units. So, for every faction, there will only be light infantry, heavy infantry, dragoons, heavy cavalry, and field and siege artillery to play with. Ok, maybe I might add one special unit, or general ability per faction. It is difficult to choose between realism and fun (I am not the first developer to face this conundrum 🙂 ). Ideally, though, there should be a good variety of uniforms and sounds.

THC: Do you intend to self-publish, or are you in the market for a publisher?

Franzoar: I do not know. I am ready to self-publish. At least that way, if my game doesn’t sell, I will be the only one affected. In this case, I must improve my PR, and upgrade the game until it is sellable. But if a publisher finds my work interesting, and is foolish enou…. and is willing to work with me 😀 , I will consider it with interest. Ideally, working with a publisher would help me with promotion, maybe bring me money to work full-time on the game, and inject other ideas too.

THC: Name a game, either released or in production, that you feel deserves more attention?

Franzoar: It is not a wargame, but Line War is a recent RTS that rewards strategy rather than fast clicking.

For a genuine wargame, Task Force Admiral seems quite original to me, and is very, very pretty. I am particularly jealous of the ship and airplane models. Ah, and the sky, the sea, and the islands! But you know it as you’ve written about it. Ok, my opinion is a little biased, because I sometimes exchange messages with Admiral Crapaud, who works on it. But, yes, it could be very good!

Lastly, I find Ultimate General: American Revolution very beautiful and promising. I have had a lot of fun with the Civil War episode, and I hope this one will be a great game too.

THC: Thank you for your time