Hello, and a new product announcment

Hi All,

First post, so Ill intro myself briefly. Ive been wargaming on and off for years, and probably do a lot more painting and planning than I ever do with gaming.

Been a solid member of other wargaming / miniatures forums for years, and blogged a fair bit in the past when Ive had the time.  Pretty much all of my miniatures stuff & long winded rants can be found on 15mm-madness.blogspot.com.

Prior to that, Ive done all the usual things that life tends to put between you and your gaming time .. including spending a few years in uniform, as well as lots of "defence contractor" stuff to pay the bills.  



Anyway, after yet another break, Im back, with some serious Kriegsspiel toys that I would like to share with you all.

Been working on this idea for years, and have decided to finally polish it up and get it out there.  Its an adaption of the original Reisswitz Kriegsspiel to the miniatures table, with the aide of modern "cloud based" systems, some multi-user networking magic,  a good dash of old school period chrome straight out of Empire V, and some (hopefully) user-friendly presentation to bring it all together.

Its not another RTS computer game - SOW does a fine job of that already.  What it is - is a command management tool for running stupidly detailed tabletop battles, with miniatures, and  rulers, and scenic effects, and smoke / fire markers, and even a few dice.  First and foremost, I want it to simulate the command experience as best as I can, whilst still being immersive, accessible, and entertaining.




https://wargaming.io

The system is "browser based", so it runs on ipads, phones, macs, linux boxes, etc .. without needing to install or maintain any software. All data is stored "in the cloud", and can be easily shared with other users, or cloned as needed:

Multiple users participate in the same tabletop game, using their own equipment to order units around and interact with the tabletop action. The role of the traditional Kriegsspeil "Umpire" is handled entirely by the backend in this case.

Here is a quick overview in pictures of what it does in terms of the tabletop command managment .. looking at an overview of a Division Command and its status from a smartphone.



Diving into the Division, looking at the Roles assigned to each Brigade, flank security orders, and a general pool of reserve units to be kept on call outside of the line of battle.



At each point in the system, as the Kriegsspiel game progresses, all currently avaliable options are presented simply, in the context of the unit that you are looking at :



As units engage in certain areas of the table, you as a commander need to commit sub-units to each engagement.  As the opposing player also commits forces, the leading elements of those forces are revealed to you on your screen. (and the leading elements or your forces are displayed on their screens)

Exactly how much of each other's is shared is managed by the backend.

This screen shows the Div HQ activity happening around a contact at "The Orchard".  Each table can have dozens of contacts all happening in parallel, across multiple players.



In this case, we can see the enemy building strength in this area, so we look at ordering up the 12th Regt of Line to advance forward and test the enemy resolve.

Clicking on the 12th, there is a list of currently available options, which changes based on the situation.



We advance a half-battalion from the 12th up to Schimonsky's Bde, and hit it with a fresh volley at 200p



Meanwhile, a few moves later, we have advanced a number of Bns from the 25th Regt of Line up the Right Flank, and are ready to assault into the Orchard



Things continue to escalate in this area, as fresh units are committed to the engagement by both sides, and more and more figures are placed on the table.


Meanwhile on the larger map, we have 5 other players on our team on this same table, who are all busy moving their Corps towards their objectives, and dealing with a number of engagements along the way (such as "The Battle of the Orchard" above)



... etc, etc

I would really like to grow this, so I encourage anyone that is interested to get involved, and make this happen.
https://wargaming.io

Cheers.

Steve

Hi again,

Just a quick note - I greatly appreciate the encouraging messages Im getting from people on this, but just a note that I cant PM reply you back until I get some more posts up on this site. Still under newbie restrictions here.

Will sort that out soon enough.

Anyway, feel free to hammer the link above - its still early days yet, and Id like to find out all my mistakes early, where possible. Many hands make light work in this case.

Thanks again,
Steve

Welcome to the Forum, and what a good looking and fascinating post you have begun with!

I for one shall be looking into this, and following its development with interest, and I am sure others on the Forum will be very interested too.

Thank you, King Rufus. My pleasure.

Looking forward to getting some more done on this ... at the moment, it looks like the next big thing to add would be a simple AI to enable solo play, at least to be able to validate how well balanced your scenarios are before throwing players at it.

Cheers

Ok then, had a problem with a couple of registrations ... when the connection drops out during the rego process (after entering the rego details, but before confirming your email), the computer cleans up the "orphaned" unverified account details pretty much immediately. Fixed that so that its a lot more tolerant of drop outs, and waits a lot longer before "cleaning" the account.

Unfortunately, and web-hosted thing needs to jump through these sorts of hoops these days, to prevent unwanted people joining up just for the purpose of advertising un-related products. Its dumb, but thats the world we currently live in

Anyway, that last patch should fix up the current rego problems.

In all cases, Ive been manually fixing each abandoned rego, and contacting the victims directly. No probs.

Thanks again.

Is this project still ongoing or has it died? HTML link seems to go to an "unsafe" site, so I didn't proceed. Sounds like an interesting project.

I've played this game and it's pretty good. I'd recommend you try it out. The warning is just saying that the site doesn't use the more secure https protocol, (neither does this forum). If you are not doing financial transactions on the site, there is not much to worry about.

I'm curious to know if this would be of use to the Southern California Kriegsspiel Society. We run games three times per year in Los Angeles.

Do you have screenshots, or a video of how it works?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/165505263888494/

LOL Nevermind! You do. They did not load for me at first!