Last week saw Richard Borg’s latest Commands & Colors title, The Great War, make its way to Steam for PC/Mac. We had rumors from GMT Games that more Commands & Colors titles, specifically Ancients and Napoleonics, were on the way but had little evidence to back up those claims. That ended yesterday when GMT released their January update. Not only are both Ancients and Napoleonics on the way, both of them should be in our hands by the end of 2017.
C&C: Ancients and Napoleonics are similar to the other C&C titles in that the board is separated into sections and you use cards to order troops of specific types or located in different regions of the board. Thus, to paraphrase Mick Jagger, you can’t always get what you want but sometimes you get the right card allowing you to finally push through the enemy’s left flank. Of course, focusing on different eras of warfare changes up gameplay somewhat, but the core C&C mechanism remains the same.
The games are being jointly developed by our friends at HexWar and also by The Lordz Game Studio who you might remember for making a little war game that Owen kind of liked, Panzer Corps. Both titles have been in development for quite a bit now, and GMT expects to see Ancients this summer and Napoleonics in late 2017. Both will be supported with additional content and expansions–and both games have tons of expansions–via IAP over the next several years. Here’s GMT’s blurb:
We are pleased to announce that we have entered into an agreement with HexWar Games Ltd., of Elgin, Scotland, to develop digital versions of Command & Colors: Ancients and Command & Colors: Napoleonics. HexWar Games Ltd. is a 12-man games studio with a long history of converting board games to digital games. Their most recent releases have been The Great War, from PSC Games, and 1775 from Academy Games. Their recent The Great War release uses the Command & Colors game engine by Richard Borg.
Because this is quite a major project for HexWar, they have also partnered with Lordz Games Studio of Belgium, for them to develop a world class user interface and superb game graphics. Lordz Games Studios recent success include Panzer Corps and Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon.
Development for the digital Commands & Colors Ancients has already been underway for some months. According to our last word from our friends at Hexwar, they plan to release the base game of Command & Colors: Ancients for the summer 2017, and the base game for Command & Colors: Napoleonics for the end of 2017. All the additional expansions, for both games, will be released as add-on packs over the next couple of years.
The initial target platform will be for PC and Mac, and then for iPad, a couple of months after the PC release. The intention is to eventually release for Android and possibly for iPhone. Other features in development are cross-platform multiplayer and a scenario builder.
I’m in touch with Andrew Mulholland of HexWar concerning the C&C ports and will hopefully have some pretty pictures to show soon. We’ll keep you up to date on both titles as they progress towards launch.
Of course, we have no video of the game in action, yet. If you want a taste of what to expect, give the following overview and review of the cardboard (and wood!) version a look. It’s by Marco Arnaudo, one of the best war game (and board game) reviewers out there.
Memoir 44 is still the elephant in the room, though. And I really don’t think it’s coming to mobile anytime soon.
As to why, the only thing I can think of is that DoW doesn’t want to cannibalize its longstanding Memoir 44 Online. “Well, why not just make them compatible?” would be a reasonable response to that … and I don’t know the answer.
Yeah would be so good to play M44 on tablet. Now is the time. I think DoW had said it was “too hard” to port over but that was some time ago and with there usually being only around 30 users online, it’d give the whole community a shot in the arm to expand across platforms. But I’m not holding my breath on this front.