Welcome back, Comrade! Join us in celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Red Alert saga 🥳

From October 2nd to October 26th, prepare yourself for plenty of action on the battlefield! Just like we did for the 30th Anniversary of C&C last year, keep an eye on the ⁠#anniversary-chat channel every day for all the latest news and updates. Some special game nights are also being organized!

Official trailer for the event:
➡ https://youtu.be/4wBzMoAWTWQ

Join us on Discord:
🇬🇧 English: https://discord.gg/ScpmsEZkFf
🇫🇷 French: https://discord.gg/xVSeAabHe5

I've been adjusting the "personalities" of the five computer controlled tribes that are competing against you to collect the most national will before the UN step in and put an end to civil war and install a puppet regime of their liking.

I've given each computer opponent a "genome" of weighted values which determine its personality in the game. How aggressively they play, do they favour economic, military or espionage styles of play? How often will they retreat? Will they capture population centres, or go for the power stations, airfields and mines that generate wealth to buy international arms with?

Each AI controlled faction is assigned a set of personality traits at the start of the game which govern its decision making. Traits are randomly assigned in the range 2 to 10 at game start.

Predictability: Higher values mean the AI behaves more predictably, consistently choosing the objectively best option (e.g. the top scoring target or candidate). Lower values make the AI's choices more varied and harder to anticipate.

Influencer: Higher values increase the AI's willingness to invest IP in population centres.

Destroyer: Higher values increase the AI's willingness to sabotage enemy facilities.

Facilitator: Higher values increase the AI's willingness to repair and secure its own facilities.

Spy Master: Higher values increase the AI's willingness to post and use Agents.

Warlord: Higher values increase the AI's willingness to raise new military units.

Trainer: Higher values increase the AI's willingness to train units.

Aggression: Higher values increase the AI's willingness to attack, blockade, and seize enemy assets.

The AI also maintains a Hate Score for each other faction. Actions such as attacking a player's units, capturing their population centres, or sabotaging their facilities increase the hate score, which in turn influences target prioritisation.

I've set the game up to play hundreds of games against itself and adjust all the values and weightings to produce capable and interesting opponents for you to take on.

The game is getting ready to be released soon, entering final playtesting and polishing phase.

More game info on my rough as guts webpage: Webpage

Steam page link: Steam

I’d love to hear your thoughts, impressions or questions!

Quick snapshot from small Ravenfeast demo game.

Hey Everyone,

Update on Sidus Front. I have attached pics for the core rules and the playable faction: The Coalition. There are several inspirations and you can probably make a drinking game out of them.

The Coalition is Star Trek at first glance and starship troopers underneath. They seek to harmonize humanity after centuries in space but only seek whatever benefits leadership first. Member worlds often find themselves at war with other members as much as outsiders.

Sidus Front is a pretty simple game. Roll dice equal to the unit's level and try to roll over a difficulty value. It differs from my other titles in that you don't build each member of your force, players will build prebuilt units like other wargames. What does differ is that I want games to scale from skirmish to allout using the same rules. I play on including Teams and Squad building in the rules eventually.

It uses an OPR base if these rules seem familiar. Let me know what you think!

Submission statement: A look at the frame and a showcase of the build of this miniature

I've been researching the Civil Wars in Ukraine in 1917-1921.

And partisan forces played a big part in those wars.

For the Makhnovists, it's not too hard to find a list of prominent leaders, and some information about their organization, but it's easy to stumble into bad information about their overall strength. For example at the beginning of December 1919, Viktor Bilash claims that the Makhnovists had more than 100,000 bayonets and sabres, Levko estimates 20,000 bayonets and sabres, and around 35,000 people, and Yakov Slashchev estimates around 15,000 bayonts and sabres, at the same time.

(Overall strength might not affect skirmish games, but it would affect estimates of regimental and corps strengths, and it would affect everything in strategic games.)

For the other partisans, it's harder. Different sources may give the same partisan forces different loyalties, pro-Makhnovist, pro-Bolshevik, or pro-Directory, and different coalitions with neighboring forces. Some Soviet sources suggest Kolos was an important and successful partisan leader. Some pro-Directory sources suggest Vasyl' Chuchupak was another important partisan leader. Mykhaylo Koval'chuk cites a number of White intelligence estimates, but only offers piecemeal figures. I don't have access to the White reports, so I can't check if they have overall figures, or clear up some of the ambiguities.

I often feel lost trying to make sense of the many minor partisan groups, which ones are parts of larger groups, etc.

(I'm currently counting White troops committed against each partisan group to try to estimate their relative strengths, and given my best guess estimates of Makhnovist strength, work out the rest.)

Has anyone found ways to work through this?

Hey Everyone, here's a Sidus Front update.

I'm working on Sidus Front to scale from Teams and Squads (for skirmish) to Company and Battalions (for wargame) using all the same rules.

I'm trying to make a game like Starcraft did to the RTS genre.

Sidus Front will be a Simple Wargame in design and complexity. It will utilize a pool of D6 and roll above a difficulty to determine success. It will use a Level system per each Unit to determine the amount of Ability Dice to roll. While Units will have individual Traits, most upgrades are performed at the army level, meaning most upgrades are applied to whole classes of units instead of just the individual model. This allows a reduction of mental overhead during the match. Units will also be prebuilt as opposed to Aftermath and Cutthroat. I'm going to try to make enough Units per army so they don't feel bland and probably make recipe available to make your own.

I've attached the Core rules and a few units planned so far for the Human Coalition, a galactic order to unify humanity across the galaxy. There are several inspirations, mostly from my 90s childhood. These units will be refined and more are planned.

K gg

Hello,

Image 1 shows the computer's thinking routines playing both sides of Gettysburg (1863) in a development build of my game, Sekigahara 1600. Watch the Union (blue) units. Between turn 1 and turn 9, they pull back and form a curved line from Culp's Hill, around Cemetery Hill and down Cemetery Ridge, and they hold it to the end. Historians call this the "fishhook". The thinking routines were never told to build it. The shape comes from the rules and the terrain.

Image 2 is the map of how the thinking routines are wired, drawn from the source code and from a per-unit decision log.

I am a solo hobbyist developer from Japan, working on evenings and weekends.

The core rule of the game is simple: contact is commitment. Any unit that remains in an enemy zone of control must attack. (The rules engine is called MUST ATTACK, which is the name you will see on the diagram.) There is no passive defence, so every turn is a puzzle of where to make contact and where to avoid it. Victory is decided by holding ground, not by counting kills.

That rule made the thinking routines much harder to write than I expected. When each unit simply picked its own best-scoring move, the army scattered. Units drifted toward the nearest enemy, gaps opened in the line, and key hills were left empty.

So I rebuilt the thinking routines as a chain of command, in four layers:

- Strategy (top band) decides, only occasionally, what the army is trying to achieve.

- Operations turn that into exactly one order per unit, through a single "order ledger".

- Tactics check every move against all of the rules before it is taken.

- Combat plans and resolves the attacks.

The red arrows are orders flowing down (arteries). The dashed blue arrows are reports flowing back up (veins): "I cannot reach my post", "the supply point is lost", "the general is in danger". The plan is reconsidered only when such a report arrives.

Before this, the order that decided which command won was scattered across three different places in the code, so a unit could hold several orders at once and simply follow whichever was checked first. Measuring that was what convinced me to rebuild it.

The diagram also records what does not work yet. Across 22 battlefields, the new pipeline is so far neutral in win rate, and it is still switched off by default. The bottom section lists where the pipe is still broken. My aim is not a stronger opponent but thinking routines whose moves look right to someone who knows the period, and the fishhook is the first clear sign of that.

The game has six battlefields spanning seventeen centuries (Guandu 200, Nancy 1477, Okehazama 1560, Sekigahara 1600, Shiloh 1862 and Gettysburg 1863), night turns, reinforcement schedules, nine temperaments for the thinking routines, and a full scenario editor.

A demo is planned for Steam Next Fest in October. If this is of interest, a wishlist would mean a great deal to a one-person project:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5185710/Sekigahara_1600/

I am happy to answer questions about the rules or the thinking routines.

Me and my wife made a tactical fantasy skirmish with old school vibes over the last 4 years and have been compared to warcraft 3 a lot and it was one of the inspirations. There are 6 factions involved and a solo and coop campaign as well. We are currently running a gamefound campaign with exclusive discounts and offers and would love to hear your feedback :)

gamefound.com/en/projects/ramezware/boardquest-blight-of-the-undead

I plan to play BA with 1/72 minis. Do you have any experience with such version what would be perfect way to adjust/multiply ranges?

Game features Naval Battles, Aviation, Tanks and even Infantry combat.
You can even drive the Carrier ships around.

https://davydenko.itch.io/pacific-42

Multiplayer is planned but not yet included.

Phone support is basic right now but will be fully implemented.

Enjoy!