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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 to 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
