War-weary after fourteen days of communal Combat Mission battle reports? Today’s competition and collection of news stories probably won’t help. Apart from a bit of Deadstick pre-alpha footage, and a poor-quality phone snap of two de Havilland beauties I encountered on a recent excursion, everything in today’s FP indirectly celebrates state-sanctioned murder.

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The Panzer Corps [official site] are showing their age. You can see it in the rust that is accumulating around their joints and hear it in the strained rumble of their engines. Even the hexes look a little worn around the edges these days. It’s no surprise really – the old stalwart has seen a lot of action. Five years in the field. Five years of branching campaigns and the kind of wargaming that even a genre novice can hope to learn. Well, it’s time for reinforcements to arrive so the old Corps can take some time for rest and recuperation, or perhaps be put out to pasture for good.

Slitherine send news that Panzer Corps 2 is in development and it’ll be all shiny and 3D thanks to Unreal Engine 4.

… [visit site to read more]

‘Tis the season to be jolly vigilant. With the six-week Matrix/Slitherine Christmas sale underway and Steam in the midst of a five-day autumnal tariff squeeze, several excruciatingly expensive wargames are currently just expensive, quite a few expensive wargames are now affordable, and a handful of cheap wargames are doing passable impersonations of gift horses. Prowling the various bargain basements like an extra-grumpy Philip Serrell, these are the deals that have caught my eye… … [visit site to read more]

Panzer Corps [official site], the heir to the Panzer General series of WWII strategy games, is free to play this weekend through Steam. The free weekend has already begun (unlike the actual weekend, I grumble into my third coffee of the morning) and “during that time there will be a 75% discount on the base game and a 50% discount on all the DLCs” say publishers Slitherine. That’s 3.74 for the base game and 30.49 for the gargantuan collection. A splendid opportunity to take these monstrous vehicles for a test drive.

… [visit site to read more]

(Next week in The Flare Path: How to Draw a PMD-6 Anti-Personnel Mine)>

Going by the number of sketches arriving in the FP inbox at the moment, this column’s recent foray into art tuition is going down extremely well. For every RPS reader keen to spend their Friday lunch hour reading about upcoming quadruplex transport sims, imminent Seven Years War strategy offerings, ill-conceived wargame patches, and my ongoing World of Warships dalliance, it seems there are three or four hungry for bite-sized drawing lessons. I’d make some comment about the pencil being mightier than the sword/Schmeisser if I wasn’t aware of the experiments conducted in the late 1940s by the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment that proved the exact opposite. … [visit site to read more]

An entirely objective ranking of the 50 best PC strategy games ever made. From intricate wargames to soothing peacegames, the broad expanse of the genre contains something for everyone, and we’ve gathered the best of the best. The vast majority are available to buy digitally, a few are free to download and play forever. They’re all brilliant.

… [visit site to read more]