La Forge du Code doesn’t seem to have profited greatly from a week-long advertising stint on the Corner (After an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign the French dev behind the unusually foggy Kriegsspiel ~ 7 Years’ War is now considering his options). Hopefully, the site’s latest advertiser, Kudos Games, will see some benefits. The $20 Cold War Battles launches on Thursday, and, like Kriegsspiel, has numerous endearing qualities.
Chris Dixon, its designer, grew up playing PC wargames such as Steel Panthers and Panzer General. Those formative influences manifest in intimacy (500m hexes and platoon/troop-sized units), nicely judged complexity, and nippy turns. Real-life military experience (Chris spent fifteen years in the British Army) explains why the game’s old-fashioned playability doesn’t come at the expense of plausibility.
Having fought around half-a-dozen battles over the weekend, I’m pleased to report that CWB’s engagements ring true, the AI is lively and competent, and the scenario selection colourful.
During my introductory sessions, amongst other activities, I successfully repulsed a Chinese crossing of the Imjin River in 1951, trashed T-34s on the Golan Heights in 1973, and watched Chieftains swapping APDS rounds with T-64s in Lower Saxony in 1983.
Purchasers will get four linear campaigns (USSR, UK, USA, and Poland), a rag-bag of single scenarios, and a rudimentary random scrap generator equipped with seventeen OoBs. What they won’t get – initially at least – is air assets (Chris tells me helis may eventually be added) and attractive art. While chits and unit portraits please, I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the current terrain sprites.
I forgot to ask Chris about modding possibilities, but I did put the following questions to him during a recent email exchange:
THC: Do you remember your first brush with wargaming?
Chris: The very first would have been Theatre Europe on a ZX Spectrum but I was too young to properly understand it. Super Conflict on SNES was my first hex based game but Steel Panthers on PC was really where my love began.
THC: How has your time in the Army influenced CWB?
Chris: My Army experiences plus some time spent doing adjacent work has influenced CWB a little. War is not fair and can be extremely random. I have seen things happen which if they were to happen in a game, players would be screaming on forums declaring it impossible or imbalanced. The biggest influence will have been the time I spent in later years wargaming scenarios and also red-teaming the intentions of adversaries. This really helped me when it came to making the computer player behave in a more rational way.
THC: Would you recommend GameMaker* to a first-time game dev?
* CWB was coded in GML.
Chris: Yes. I am only really a hobbyist and have tried things like Godot which I liked and Unity which I did not, but I keep coming back to GameMaker as I have messed with different versions of it for years. It is accessible and actually very powerful, people should not think it is only good for Mario clones. There is a wealth of documentation and community resources available for it and working with external files like JSON or CSV is easy.
THC: What was the trickiest part of the game to code?
Chris: The hex grid. GameMaker does not have any built in things to make hex grids easy and I wanted to store information in each hex too. Nor was their much evidence of other folk trying it so there was a lot of trial and error at the start. Even quite far in I was realising things like LOS could go a bit wonky and was having to make changes.
THC: When you’re not coding or playtesting, which PC games do you tend to reach for?
Chris: All sorts. I set aside time to game with friends and over the last few years we have played Diablo 4, Total Warhammer and currently WARNO co-op. We also had a very active World of Warships clan for a number of years. For solo play, wargames on the rare occasion I have time to commit, and roguelites if I don’t.
THC: Name a game, either released or in development, that, in your opinion, deserves more attention.
Chris: Decisive Campaigns: Ardennes Offensive. I prefer the scale compared to the older games but like many wargames only the die-hards seem to be aware of it. A Cold War game on that scale and engine would really be something.