Open Letter to the Flashpoint Campaigns Community by Rob Crandall and Team

[Roby7979]

Open Letter to the Flashpoint Campaigns Community

Huzzah! It has been a long time coming but we can finally say we are ready. Many wargamers are latent perfectionists, and, well, that applies to us too. The marvelous support we have received from the Flashpoint Campaigns community over the years sustained us, and we are confident that those who enjoyed our Red Storm game will feel right at home in the new Southern Storm. We worked hard to preserve the unique qualities of that earlier game while rebuilding it to a whole new standard.

Cold War high-intensity ground combat is complex and has many nuances. Starting from first principles, we rewrote the engine to address this at a deeper level than before. New to the game are key features like unit Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), battle planning, and off-map units. Further, we dramatically improved the graphics and UI, the computer player, the underlying data models, most combat mechanics, command and control, maps, weather, and general information presentation.

This all took time to do. Our weekly meetings were all about new ideas and potential improvements. We listed the requests, prioritized them, assigned them, and did them. Inevitably, each completed task triggered requests for further work, and those all fed back in to be considered in turn. We tested and gathered feedback throughout. Over 4,000 items ended up in our tracking system as a result.

Our guiding principle during all this was to reward good military tactics. As a player, you need to use all the forces at your command and think seriously about things like winning the recon battle, using artillery to suppress defenses as an assault goes in, and combining arms wherever possible. This game rewards both careful pre-game planning and the ability to quickly see and react to turning points as the battle unfolds. You will find that different scenarios need different approaches to win - there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution.

Game documentation gets finalized when everything else is in final form, which led to a bit of a crunch for us. The PDF version of the game manuals in both EBOOK and printer-friendly formats ship with the game. Due to some last-minute updates and the vagaries of the holiday season, the printed manual will ship at the beginning of January 2023.
Our goal is to make the documentation as complete as possible. After release, we’ll be providing an additional tutorial and several PDF documents to explain the game in more detail. These will be living manuals and help content creators, grognards, and others understand more of the underlying work that has gone into the game.

There is a lot of potential in the game for content creators do with mods, new scenarios, and campaigns. We are focusing on content creation in the future and are eager to cover more nations and eras.
Finally, as always, have fun!

Rob Crandall and the entire On Target Simulations team

[GlassHoppa]

Huzzah indeed! Well worth the loooong wait, and thank you for communicating so openly with the Grognard Community along the way. Here we are at last and I can't wait for some "me" time tomorrow to start exploring the new simulation.

I'm showing my age here, but I played SPI's old cardboard-counter "Nato Division Commander" back in 1980. Great Game/Sim and Southern Storm looks like everything that Jim Dunnigan & crew were trying to do, pulled up into the digital era + tons of technical information + gamecraft that we didn't have back then. Among other things, "NDC" implemented a form of WEGO with an umpire (Controller), so much better doing it with your software. More importantly, NDC's marketing tag was "Leadership under Fire," and you've perfectly expressed it in Southern Storm. Thank you!

[mfort175]

Thank you for your hard work, I'm really enjoying the game. The map and all the variables with displaying it are fantastic. The amount of information and detail available to the player is staggering. It is exactly what I was hoping for from this series. I look forward to what ever you plan to add to the game in the future, thank you again.

Matt

[DerGrenadier89]

It was an instant buy for me and I have not been disappointed. Thx for this great Sim, well worth the waiting!

[JPV511]

Congratulations on the release and thank you!

Cold War NATO vs WP hypothetical is absolutely my cup of tea and this series takes the "what-if" out if it and looks and sounds great to boot. Loving the much improved look and feel of SS so far. Gonna get some turns in now...bye.

[MasterGunner309]

I've just purchased and downloaded the sim. I haven't even launched it yet. I just wanted to drop in and say thank you for all of the hard work. Red Storm is one of my all-time favorite games, and I'm sure with the passion you and the team have put into Southern Storm, this title will exceed all expectations.

Thank you again

Brandon Pye
USA (Ret)

[Rosseau]

Because I grew up during the early Cold War era in the U.S. - although I never did ship out to Germany - this potential conflict of epic proportions was to overshadow me during much of my young adult life, like a dark and malignant cloud. In 1987, there were 2.5 million men under arms facing NATO in East Germany alone.

Therefor, when the Berlin Wall went down on November 9, 1989, it was the most joyous day of my life.

When the original Flashpoint Campaigns game was introduced long after the Wall went down, I bought it but could not play it comfortably. Yes, it was only a game, but the reality was still too much with me. And now there is the horror of the Ukraine. This conflict can only be a shadow of what a full-blown conventional war in Europe would have been like in the late 1980s.

Now, more than 30 years later, the new game (FCSS) can be viewed as a tribute to a war that never happened for a generation that served in that era. There is no "game" that comes close to simulating the scope of that potentially deadly conflict. But it's a good reminder to all of us of what "could have" occurred, and a fitting eulogy for a world war that thankfully was never set in motion.

[Phantom453]

I've been eagerly waiting for FCSS and managed to pick it up yesterday with my annual Matrix discount (thanks Matrix!). So I just wanted to stop by and say thank you for all the hard work and dedication that had obviously gone into this latest iteration. I'm a huge fan of WEGO wargame systems over turn based.

Perhaps the biggest gripe I has with FCRS was the way combat/ bridging engineer units were abstracted (particularly with regard to bridging), so when I read in the manual today that engineer units are now a thing, I was over the moon!! Lots of other great stuff in there too. Thanks.

[Joselillo]

Great job! congratulations! Long live Flashpoint Campaigns!