Matrix Games Forums

I so hope this time your innovative creation brings your the financial reward you so deserve.

With the ground breaking DCB and now this, you deserve it.

Maybe this will make you a millionaire and then you can go back and do a follow on from DCB:)

Dude needs a multi-million dollar budget and he will create a wargame that will change the world. :p

Seriously though, one of the biggest criticisms I've always had with wargaming devs is the lack of experimentation and fear of going sci-fi. Prior to Shadow Empire there was nothing close to an actual sci-fi wargame with this much depth. If devs want to reach a bigger crowd and newer people, they need to be willing to explore themes other than WW2 that has been done to death already by every other wargaming dev. Vic's stepping foot in the right direction as always and pushing the boundaries, and my only suggestion to him would be to explore the possibilities of competitive wargaming in the future. The $$$ potential in Esports is no joke, and it would certainly help boost wargaming from being a niche genre to something much more popular.

I'd love to see a future in wargaming where teams/clans/guilds of people can participate in long persistent wars together, with players managing different aspects of the war effort. If esports scenes develop, find a way to assign ELO/MMR ratings to players, open teams to sponsorship, and watch businesses recruit talent and go toe to toe with others in a struggle for glory (and brand marketing). I could probably write a book on this subject matter, but I'll leave it at that. Definitely a lot of unexplored potential in wargaming esports as it currently stands though.

he could have easy got more funding due to kickstarter, right?
it feels like already a lot of ppl have bought the game and with the steam release a lot more will do so.
btw, what is dcb?

dcb = Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa

ORIGINAL: Falke

dcb = Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa

..and if you don't know it, please check it out. It is brilliant and I mean it.

..and it also comes with 300+ pages manual. (If you are into this...)

I couldn't agree more! Both this and DCB are some of the best wargames I've ever played. DCB in particular blew me away because it was one of the few wargames to actually consider complicity in a genre that otherwise doesn't like to think too much about the fact that we're all quite happy to keep playing the Nazis. I actually used it in quite some detail in one of the pieces of work I did for my degree.

I'm enjoying how SE has taken the ideas from DCB and run with them. The political system is excellent (though not without it's bugs and quirks). It actually shows how warfare can impact a society at the political level. For instance, I'm currently playing a game where I started off as little more than a corporation that had survived the apocalypse, with high Meritocracy, Commerce and Mind stats. Over the course of the game my country has morphed a couple of times, first towards becoming an autocratic regime in order to cope with the first war with a theocratic major regime I had, just to survive. Later I was able to push it to being a liberal capitalist democracy over the course of an extremely long cold war with the other largest faction in the game, as both the people and my cabinet were getting quite unhappy. Now I'm finally in a limited war with said largest faction, and it's raising all sorts of issues over M.A.D.

I also love how the game causes the military to change over time, based on the quirks of the planet. The feeling of progressing from mad max at the start with all the wacky militias, through to a world war 1 equivalent with continent-spanning trench networks (those capitals are really hard to take), to ww2 era wars of movement provided the terrain and industrial base allows it. In my current game, the proc-gen planet gave me massive jungles across the south of the planet and deserts and steppe across the north, so running simultaneous campaigns of tank & grenadier armies in one part of the map with infantry and massed artillery in the south has been quite a thrill.

I've been playing mostly Siwa and terraformed Limos games, but I'm looking forward to actually playing on some hell world where everything is domed and the population is miniscule. Each new playthrough gives something fresh.

So yeah, Vic's done a good job I reckon.

I own both Advanced Tactics Gold and DCB and I really like both of those games. But now that Shadow Empires is out I can't believe how quickly I have forgotten about those two older gems.

Thank you Vic for all of your work. You make excellent games!

Ya other then my play by mail game of ATG I have been non stop playing this of course only one game has gotten past 30 turns as I keep restarting for better stats and starts )

I'm a huge ATG fanboy, but after playing Shadow Empire I can't help but love some of the changes he made to ground warfare and logistics. Hoping to see them applied to ATG or Advanced Tactics 2 in the future.

I switch a lot with the games I play but since this one has come out I play it everyday and it is the one that occupies 90% of my game time. That is a testament to how unique and special this game is. Like I said from day one this game will years from now be fondly remembered when people wax nostalgic about this masterpiece and like the other greats it will still get booted up decades from now.

Agree with everything said above..

ORIGINAL: kosmoface

ORIGINAL: Falke

dcb = Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa

..and if you don't know it, please check it out. It is brilliant and I mean it.

Well, to me Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa still need some polish.
Unfortunately the designer Cameron is not willing to do it. [:(]

Why should the Decisive campaigns series get a new game, instead of ATG? ATG has been around since the first Decisive Campaigns, and seems like it has been ripe for an upgraded version for a very long time...