A really big day for Wargame Design Studio

[Strela]

This is freakin' awesome! Gorgeous website, congratulations! All titles updated, just skimming through some of the changes, kind of blowing my mind! Christmas in November indeed! Thanks guys! 

Glad you like the website. A LOT of effort has gone into this and the updates etc you are seeing.

We want everyone to realise that we believe the future is bright! 

[Kilo]

Great news!

Will ongoing pbem's work with the new updates?

[Mowgli]

Thanks a lot! :) Just in time for lockdown here in Austria.

[Ricky B]

Hi David,

This is fantastic news that WDS is going to carry JTS legacy forward into the future!

Can you provide any more flesh on the changes to the Alternate Assault Rule in PzC/PzB?

I am assuming the change will address the issue that if you select this rule with the intention of making amour more difficult to assault with infantry it doesn't have the unintended consequence of making a bunker/pillbox hex's very difficult/impossible to take?

Hi,

The rule change for AAR is that units in bunkers are not considered hard targets, as it was previously - only vehicles are hard targets  for AAR. This means that units will always use their assault values when attacking a bunker and it brings engineers/infantry back to where they should be when assaulting fortifications. It had got ludicrous where tanks were the unit type of choice for assaulting fortifications, to the detriment of infantry.

I can tell you that the assault code is some of the most labyrinth you can ever imagine and we did also resolve some pretty significant 'bugs' when reviewing it. There is three weeks of my life that I will never get back 

David

You may not get the three weeks back, David, but we the players will enjoy the fruits of the team's labor 

[ComradeP]

I was a bit worried about the future of JTS/WDS, even after early reassurances that there would be one, when no WDS blog posts were made after the release of Kiev '43.

This most certainly is the best news of the last few months on the wargaming front. All JTS/WDS design teams concentrated under the WDS banner. Hopefully without any of the teams deciding the move wasn't for them.

Though I'm not yet sure how I feel about the John Tiller name no longer being used, consolidation is a good move from a business perspective.

Porting the blog posts on the previous WDS website over might be a good idea prior to having the old website redirect to the new website.

The same goes for information on upcoming titles, such as Panzer Battles: Moscow.

To support the endeavour, I purchased Forgotten Campaigns even though I'm not a pre-20th century wargamer on this scale.

The order confirmation ended up in the junk folder, maybe there's something in the message that somehow seems fishy to the mail client algorithms. Aside from the download being surprisingly large, much larger than PzC games usually are, it's going well.

The PzC update files are also quite big. The downloads still seem to be on the "old" website (wargamedesignstudio in full), though they were never there before as far as I know. That is: we always downloaded them from JTS previously, but maybe this is the developer file storage you used internally.

The change to alt assault, attacks on vehicles and attacks other hard targets being treated differently, was discussed on the forum a while ago as one of the options to solve the issues with alt assault, and I think it's a good solution. It also restores the value of low hard attack/high assault value units including vehicles such as flamethrower-equipped tanks.

I'm looking forward to what the future brings. Thank you for moving the hobby forward David and team!

[Crapgame]

This is fantastic I've been waiting in hope for the strategic War games to be updated.

Unfortunately my next to worthless third world currency curtails me from indulging beyond a purchase or two a year but if I may be so greedy then I can hope for the introduction of regional pricing for the store.

[Mr Grumpy]

Hi David,

This is fantastic news that WDS is going to carry JTS legacy forward into the future!

Can you provide any more flesh on the changes to the Alternate Assault Rule in PzC/PzB?

I am assuming the change will address the issue that if you select this rule with the intention of making amour more difficult to assault with infantry it doesn't have the unintended consequence of making a bunker/pillbox hex's very difficult/impossible to take?

Hi,

The rule change for AAR is that units in bunkers are not considered hard targets, as it was previously - only vehicles are hard targets  for AAR. This means that units will always use their assault values when attacking a bunker and it brings engineers/infantry back to where they should be when assaulting fortifications. It had got ludicrous where tanks were the unit type of choice for assaulting fortifications, to the detriment of infantry.

I can tell you that the assault code is some of the most labyrinth you can ever imagine and we did also resolve some pretty significant 'bugs' when reviewing it. There is three weeks of my life that I will never get back 

David

I can only echo Rick's comments that you will have to remind yourself that there are a lot of guys out there who were desperate for this fix, so you will not get the time back but it was far from wasted!  

[Al]

Count me as another who appreciates the change to the assault rules.

Thanks again for all your work on this - especially the Strategic Campaign games

[Strela]

I was a bit worried about the future of JTS/WDS, even after early reassurances that there would be one, when no WDS blog posts were made after the release of Kiev '43.

This most certainly is the best news of the last few months on the wargaming front. All JTS/WDS design teams concentrated under the WDS banner. Hopefully without any of the teams deciding the move wasn't for them.

Though I'm not yet sure how I feel about the John Tiller name no longer being used, consolidation is a good move from a business perspective.

Porting the blog posts on the previous WDS website over might be a good idea prior to having the old website redirect to the new website.

The same goes for information on upcoming titles, such as Panzer Battles: Moscow.

To support the endeavour, I purchased Forgotten Campaigns even though I'm not a pre-20th century wargamer on this scale.

The order confirmation ended up in the junk folder, maybe there's something in the message that somehow seems fishy to the mail client algorithms. Aside from the download being surprisingly large, much larger than PzC games usually are, it's going well.

The PzC update files are also quite big. The downloads still seem to be on the "old" website (wargamedesignstudio in full), though they were never there before as far as I know. That is: we always downloaded them from JTS previously, but maybe this is the developer file storage you used internally.

The change to alt assault, attacks on vehicles and attacks other hard targets being treated differently, was discussed on the forum a while ago as one of the options to solve the issues with alt assault, and I think it's a good solution. It also restores the value of low hard attack/high assault value units including vehicles such as flamethrower-equipped tanks.

I'm looking forward to what the future brings. Thank you for moving the hobby forward David and team!

Firstly, thank you for the purchase - we are putting it towards our server plans! 

To tackle a few points, yes, we have been quiet, but that is because we had to be. We wanted to reassure you all, but until we closed the deal, we could not proactively share the work we had underway.

The last two to three months have been manic and until today we had no bandwidth for outreach, that will be improving from today on.

We have a plan to migrate all the blog posts across from the old WDS website. That was all staged to happen, but the non-renewal of the security certificate killed that today as all the images that were being served from their ended up as broken links. So none of that content will be lost - there are 87 blog posts there from memory and it is interesting to revisit them.

As far as John Tiller's name. It is very much in use, but not as John Tiller Software - at least currently. We have continued to use 'A John Tiller Game' on the game covers wherever they existed and won't be removing that. Think of these games as WDS games using the 'John Tiller Wargame system'. We will flesh that all out over time, but John Tiller's name is very important to us.

Cheers,

David

[budd]

Wonderful news, have the day off and noticed all the email notifications coming in regarding my products, thank you. the site looks great and will be exploring that today, and probably picking something out to celebrate.

With having the day off i started right off downloading the new patches, but so far mostly what i get is time outs. i have managed to download the PB Kursk patch, but that was after 4 timeouts. Can seem to download anything else and i've tried 3 different browsers, Chrome, Edge, and Brave. i have a very fast connection, the message says internal server error. Thought you'd like to know.