FWW & F'14

[Volcano Man]

Good questions.

From your point of view, which title was more difficult to work on? Was F'14 easier to work on since you could have an easier time concentrating on just that particular time frame of the war, whereas in FWW, you had to try and cover a alot larger time frame that saw several advancements in weapons and tactics used?

Difficult to say. Both games were very difficult and time consuming to make, but in different ways. France '14 was difficult in finding all of the order of battle information that really did not exist at the level that I was creating the game at (at least not at the time in a readily available source), so I had to dig very deep beyond what any one book could provide. I had to piece together many sources to get just the right information from it, and piece it together like a puzzle. Then of course came the issue of just about every battle map just not going below division level, so for that (again) much more research was required. I think I got about half way into it thinking that it was impossible to do, but I just kept going one day at a time.

As for FWW, the difference there is that Squad Battles is much easier in the sense that you have a deal of freedom as far as scenario design goes at that scale. I mean, I doubt you will find any information in a book or on a historical map on what platoon/company was where exactly, so you can use your best judgement there. Of course I did do some tactical level research so it was pretty easy to figure out how to place units in an intelligent way. The problem with FWW though the tactical evolution. As mentioned in the notes I must of reworked the game from top to bottom at least three times and maybe more, because finding information at battalion level was hard enough, but finding it at platoon and squad level for five years of the war, and for all the major nationalities involved. Here again, I just took it one step at a time and low crawled right through it. ;)

I noticed that most of the files are dated early to late 2011 and even your
cool writeup is dated 06 July 2011. Also a lot the battle files are dated 2011 and then mid to late 2012.

Was the game shelved till Tiller did the split or was it held for France 1914's
release?

Actually, work started on FWW back in 2002(!). It first began as a project that John himself was working on, but it didn't go very far. I proposed the idea for France '14 a few years after that, and he asked if I would also be interested in FWW too. I said yes, and soon realized how over ambitious it was to try to develop both games at the same time. So really what happened is, since I started F14 first, it was priority and I worked on FWW where I could. I would say I got it to about 50% or so by the time F14 was finished, then diverted all my attention to it.