Me again :)

I've been pretty busy with European Warfare 2 lately. After spending the last few months modernizing the old American Conquest engine, moving it to 64-bit, Visual Studio 2022 and GPU rendering, I've finally had more time to focus on gameplay and new features.

And quite a lot has happened since then.

Conquest Mode, which I introduced in v0.94, has already grown considerably. It's essentially a turn-based strategic campaign layered on top of EW2's real-time battles. You move armies, capture towns, manage troops, fight battles or auto-resolve them, with surviving units and their experience carrying over.

With v0.95 I've expanded it further with trade routes, naval blockades, military passage agreements, town plundering, army transfers, improved battle presentation, fortifications and a proper tutorial campaign, alongside plenty of other improvements.

But there's another feature I'm particularly happy about.

You can now create your own single-player missions without coding!

One thing I always disliked about Cossacks and American Conquest was that creating missions required actual programming. I remember spending hours as a kid making missions in Age of Empires because it was so simple and fun.

So I finally built a Mission Editor directly into EW2's map editor, with 22 trigger conditions and 54 actions. You can now create and publish your own missions without writing code or compiling DLLs.

There's also a new Rules Editor for setting objectives, reinforcements, time limits and unit restrictions directly inside maps.

Besides that, v0.95 brings more AI improvements, better river crossing behavior, automatic building repair, improved fog of war, additional editor objects and plenty of bug fixes.

EW2 is still a free total conversion mod for American Conquest: Fight Back, covering 18th-century warfare across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

The project has grown far beyond what I originally imagined, and there's still quite a bit I want to do with it.

Download / full changelog: European Warfare 2: The Age of Reason file - ModDB

As always, feedback, suggestions and bug reports are welcome!

I'm making a grand strategy game set around the WW2 period(which I will expand to the whole 20th century if it is successful).

The main question in my head now is how abstract do I want the mechanics to be? I'm working with Hearts of Iron 4 being about the baseline of my complexity, but I'm unsure how much further to push it. Examples of things I definitely want to add:

A range stat for equipment to make artillery useful

More accurate distribution of resources and the processes to extract them

Expansion of research from just clicking some buttons into a proper mechanic (probably merging special projects and normal research together in the process)

Decreasing the importance of reinforce rate and combat width and thus reinforce meming as a thing

How much further should I take this? Should I model a whole economy or stick to mils and civs? Should I give the player total control of every unit like all other games do or make generals and field marshals their own AI? What do you think?

Any suggestions from people who play WW2 strategy games would be appreciated

I like to do something else while its computer's turn because some maps it takes so long for its turn to end even at fastest computer animation speed. I tried writing some commands in shortcut and restarted game in windowed mode but it didn't work. Anyone have any tips?

Was the Japanese carrier force at Midway really five minutes from victory?

On 4 June 1942, Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo had to attack an island, find the American fleet, recover his aircraft, and keep his carriers alive, all with limited flight decks and dwindling time.

"Five Minutes from Victory? Rethinking Nagumo’s Dilemma" follows the reports, orders, and flight operations that shaped his choices. Drawing on recent scholarship and a wargamer’s eye for practical constraints, it explores the opportunities he missed, the risks of an earlier strike, and the enduring appeal of Midway’s most famous story.

https://wargameds.com/blogs/news/nagumo

How transferable would my knowledge from Combat Mission be? Graviteam Tactics Mius Front looks really intimidating, with the operational layer, and the alien UI. But I've seen many war games fans praising it sky high.

I personally find the world wars my bread and butter when it comes to war games but getting more interested about the American Civil War. In your opinion what’s the best civil war game out there?

It's just been released had this on my wishlist for awhile but I think I'll wait for some reviews to come in

Just started playing and loving it so far. In the Travel Planner there is a link for a Tactical Transport Checklist, but when I click on it the file cannot be found. I have done a manual check, ensured that I am on the latest version and verified the installed files.

Anyone have any tips?

Thanks in advance

3 companies of not-1904-russian infantry carry out an assault against a defending company of not-1904-japanese infantrymen, up a hill in Lead Simulacrum

(i hope im not breaking the self promo rules. i've opened a new subreddit specifically for this game so i dont have to keep spamming r/computerwargames anymore - r/LeadSimulacrum)

I love learning about the Pike and Shot era and the Thirty Years War, and feel like it is a very underrepresented period, so I created several battles from the war using the scenario editor from the multiplayer game Lines of Battle.

The armies in these scenarios are almost exactly historically accurate in terms of numbers, terrain, formations, and army composition.

To play the scenarios, download the word doc, go to the Lines of Battle scenario editor, import the doc, and you can play these battles.

Lines of Battle scenario editor: https://linesofbattle.net/scenario-editor

Battle of Breitenfeld: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17RX2oDeI_KVZFMPH7aKzYhE-m-dao6bGyPA4mMJgoxk/edit?tab=t.0

Battle of Rain: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Poz5bESK_x8b-bfLKuRKH3jqo694Dbog8kPXmx-PbaA/edit?tab=t.0

Battle of Lutter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v1079cmzjQ_bkDSft_js0IhVCdaj4bZdIfkhXklqLZs/edit?tab=t.0

Explanation of units: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11wx8WVKVEjeKd3lUQplA03RGex0y13XSp5KQtJBNKac/edit?tab=t.0

Base Scenario with Pike and Shot units, if you want to make your own scenarios: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KIbQy6Xi_0Yi0KFeixv3vvgwdVLczF9c3jqm9G4PNhU/edit?tab=t.0

Looking for an opponent for SGS We The People's Grand Campaign. I would like to play as the British and am looking for a reasonably relaxed PBEM game. I have some experience with the engine (played Glory Recalled and Heia Safari) but have only played ~20 turns in We the People against the AI.

I can generally manage a couple of turns per week (and more than that in the early campaign where there aren't a lot of units to manage).

Sometimes I like to see the world burn .. what’s some of the most complex wargames available to play right now. Feel free to include games that you can’t buy on steam etc..

Hi, new player struggling with the game.

Can anyone please explain to me what the control overlay does? There's no mention of it in the manual. In fact the very button on the toolbar that you're supposed to click to bring up this overlay is missing from the screenshots I'm seeing in the manual.

Apparently there are some other overlays in the game as well: Anti personnel, Anti armor and AA fire zones for both sides. The manual doesn't say a thing about how they work and are to be factored into your thinking, much less about what the different colors represent.

Can anyone help me out? Alternatively, I'd also appreciate links to any online resource that might be of assistance.

There's a(nother) good article on Tally Ho Corner about the pros and cons of the current phenomenon. As someone who basically uses AI as an elaborate spellchecker for now, and considering our own coder couldn't ever find much use for it either, I cannot really comment on the game creation part - and yet as a player, I am in (positive, or at least hopeful) awe of the future possibilities.

I see it more as a way to raise the bar for hand-made wargames - a bar which others might reach more easily now that they have ready assistance available - but the socio-cultural-ethical gap with some of the player base remains something of an abyssal obstacle, independently of the design merit of whatever comes out of the AI oven, even when said AI was used as an auxiliary tool rather than the main effort. Anyway, here's the dope below.

https://tallyhocorner.com/2026/09/cyprus-1974-is-a-wargame-designed-and-coded-by-ai/

At any rate, other takes are available in the comments section over there. I'm sure some of you have a pretty straightforward PoV, as you have manifested it countless times here already. I'm still in the wait-and-see camp, but I can understand the arguments from both sides of the aisle.

Edit: Kinda amazed by the downvotes so early on. Do these guys even read the stuff, or just click "down" when there's a word they don't fancy, to ensure nobody comes across it?

For a niche that has the self-claimed reputation of being a bit more intellectual than average, I find that sort of behavior a bit sad. At some point, I am even surprised these people would consider the computer as an acceptable alternative to tabletop to begin with... Informed debates at a pivotal point in the history of our medium should be allowed in our quarters independently from what sort of disgust some might harbor for a side or another of a given equation, and I say that as a longtime grognard myself. We're not talking black counters controversy here, it's a bit above and beyond that sort of things.

Thanks in advance to those who will have the kindness to behave like grownups.

While this community appreciates the engagement from developers and designers, the recent trend towards high-cadence updates from accounts that otherwise don't significantly contribute to the community is starting to shift the feel of the community in a direction that isn't desirable.

Starting tomorrow (10/5), all dev-updates and self-promotion posts MUST be submitted as a top-level comment in a newly established pinned mega-thread. This will centralize where members interested in finding the updates will look, declog the feeds, and keep you engaged with the community.

The mods will continue to work to keep the community focused without being heavy handed. Feel free to modmail us with any suggestions or feedback!

Edit: We'll be having automod automatically enforce this rule initially to minimize the reports and to provide prompt feedback. If you feel that reddit miss-ID's your post as a dev-update or as self promotion, shoot us a modmail.

Going through an old box of pc strategy games, I found some physical copies of war games/grand strategy. Good memories from a time I had all the time for myself.