Back In Action

[Sgt_Rock]

After a month of being in limbo in San Diego I finally moved back to Idaho and am staying with friends at their home on their rental property in the country. Its lovely here. I am using their camper for now. Its got power and I have set up my PC and am back to working on the games and also hunting work.

Should finish up with the campaign file for CEF this month. After that I have some new work I will get busy with and also I need to hunt a job outside the home and also get a vehicle and a place of my own.

I live in the country and its lovely out here. I hope to find a place outside town. Boise-Meridian is the fastest growing city in the US and its really grown since I left in 2014. When I lived here there were about 230,000 in the general area in 2006. By next year they are predicting that it will grow to 400,000. Lots of Californians moved up here again.

[phoenix]

Good luck there, Bill. Fresh mountain air and all that.....

Having great fun with RBR, by the way. A really excellent title. Fantastic work, I think. Thanks again!

[Sgt_Rock]

Your welcome. RBR was a title that almost didnt happen. I just thought, "why not propose it to Rich and John and see where it goes." It went alright! ROFL

This next game - CEF - has been a fun ride. I just finished up updating a large map that includes Eylau, Friedland, Heilsberg and Bartenstein. Its the largest in the game I believe. Players will want to read the Designer Notes once the game is out to fully understand the maps that are in the game. They were done before I took over the project and there are some duplicates in the group. Its the only game I have worked on where I didn't do the maps.

For the future work I wont be doing maps nearly as much. I will be concentrating mainly on finishing up the OB and PDT files and then do the scenario work. In a way its nice because I am sort of burning out on doing most of the work. This way I can get into more projects without getting bogged down with too much to do. I also like that the new projects I work on do not have large campaign files to work on. Its going to be a nice change of pace for sure.

[Grengel]

This year will release the CEF?

[Sgt_Rock]

I never know when a game will release. If I made a guess it would be February of next year as Mark Adams usually gets super busy during the holidays. The Units.bmp file artwork is not even done yet and there is the 3D artwork for Joe Amoral to do after that along with Mark doing the Leaders.bmp file and the game screen artwork along with anything else.

I have learned through long experience to not expect the artwork to be done anywhere near what I think it will finish. Usually I have to add in like four months to my estimate.

So my guess is that it wont come out this year. And that's ok as it will come out eventually - which is more than can be said of its status in October 2017. ;)

[phoenix]

Shame you're not doing the maps though. Will they be up to the standard you've set in Marengo and RBR?

[Sgt_Rock]

The Polish countryside was pretty barren of farmland in 1807. While there were farms they were small lots as compared to the Po River Valley or the Danube River Valley. One of my playtesters, Cezary Pluskwa, is from Poland and he touched up the maps for the Silesian battlefields. He did the same for the maps for this game.

Thus where as you would see vast fields on the maps in the RBR and Marengo games it will be more like the older style of map I have done in the past and not because I just didnt add in the fields but because they were not there. There also is not a lot of walls. There were fences for sure but these were not a great impediment to movement like the hedges or walls of N. Italy.

Cezary says that there was a lot of livestock in Poland in those days that the most of the open ground was for grazing. He added in orchards near the towns and along the rivers. I am doing the same for one big map that still needs some touching up.

So no, the maps will not look like the ones from RBR or Marengo because Poland does not have the lush green countryside of Northern Italy. Along with that during the Winter campaign of 1806-07 the men tore down barns and buildings for firewood to stay warm. Don't expect to see a lot of buildings on the map outside of the villages. A lot of them were torn down. I imagine that the winter of 1808 must have been very hard on the people in Poland that lived in the countryside.

Where I probably contributed the most on the maps is to add in the Embankment hexsides to make the maps look a little more rugged. The map elevations are 5 meters per contour. While this is much less than my standard 10 or 20 meter elevations it still is a significant change if you are talking about going from a level 5 (25 meters) to level 7 hex (35 meters). That would be a 10 meter climb (about 30 feet ...) from one hex to the other. So I had a LOT and I mean a LOT of work to do in that regard. I also added in Pikes to facilitate a more enjoyable experience. Whereas the Polish roads were terrible I was finding that in our Nap series movement rate system the battles could not possibly have been fought out in the historical timeline using the Roads. The troops never would have arrived in time for the battle.

So I added in Pikes for the major road connections such as from Eylau to Domnau to Friedland or Eylau to Bartenstein and other major roads on the other maps such as the Allenstein road to Jankowo and further north to Guttstadt. There are not many of them but they ensure that the troops will arrive.

One of the big things about these battles/engagements for the Winter campaign is that a lot of them end at night fall. Thus the French would get up and out of camp by say 8am but the engagement would not begin until 2pm. That only left them 3 hours of light. So some of the rearguard actions are short for that reason.

Another thing I noticed was that in the past Napoleon could usually bring more men to the battlefield than the Allies but not in CEF. Usually the French are marching on to the battlefield with less men than the Allies until you get to the Battle of Friedland where by the end of the battle the Russians are very much outnumbered.