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July 26th, 2004 - WITP has finally been released . . (Pg 1/6)

War in the Pacific

Much to the surprise of some and the relief of many, War in the Pacific has finally been released to the public. When Gary started on this great crusade back in 1999, I don't think he had any idea what we were all in for. None of us planned on a five year development process, but given the size and scope of the Pacific War, it's only fitting that it has taken longer to finish the game than it did for the military personnel to fight the war.

Of course, some of this time was spent producing Uncommon Valor, which allowed us to refine the basic system before we tried it out on the entire war. Many of the new features, especially those involving Task Force and Air Unit orders, were a direct result of user feedback on UV. We've been pleased so far by the positive reaction to the game in the Matrix Games WitP forum. I'm especially pleased by the number of non-UV players that have given WitP a try.

A lot has happened in the past 2 months since the last development update. We've met a major milestone on War in the Pacific by reaching what we call Gameplay Beta, and we've started outside Alpha testing on Gary Grigsby's World at War.

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July 26th, 2004 - WITP has finally been released . . (Pg 2/6)

As with any project, several last minute changes led to problems in getting WitP out to the public. The worst seem to be:

1) Failure to update the tutorial's ship data to account for the final ship art update.

2) Issues with certain sound files on some computers. This came about due to a late decision to both improve the sound quality and shrink the size of the sound files to speed download time.

Both of these problems can cause crashes on a small percentage of computers, but workarounds are already posted in the WitP forum at Matrixgames.com. In addition, some sound files were incorrectly labeled, occasionally causing the wrong sounds to play.

PBEM play was affected by a late change to fix an unrelated bug. This has caused some difficulties for PBEM users. We regret the inconvenience that users have experienced as a result of these problems. Mike Wood, Rick Porter, David Heath and the beta test group have been hard at work preparing the first full patch to resolve these issues. This patch will most likely be available from Matrix Games by the time you read this. Thanks to all those that have purchased WitP and have had faith in us that the game will live up to your expectations.

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July 26th, 2004 - WITP has finally been released . . (Pg 3/6)

I want to say a word about the work of Rick Porter and the beta testers. These guys devoted many hundreds, if not thousands of hours of their time, to ensure WitP was as good as we could make it.
Now that the game has been published, they have devoted themselves to helping countless customers on the WitP forum (an excellent place to go to find out about WitP or to ask questions and get help with gameplay or technical support issues). They have done an outstanding job of keeping up with the thousands of user posts in the forum. Along with other helpful early WitP customers, they have shown that WitP has a great community of players.
This community seems to be devoted to helping each other explore this "sandbox of the Pacific Theater" (I took this from my favorite user quote on the forum). Rick Porter even took it upon himself to write the 60-page tutorial that so many have found to be a great gateway to WitP. So our thanks go out to Rick and the beta testers. With their help and Mike's continued dedication to WitP, I'm sure you'll see continued improvement in the game.

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July 26th, 2004 - WITP has finally been released . . (Pg 4/6)

Now I have one request for the WitP community:

If you like creating scenarios, please take a look at the editors and consider spending time to create some smaller scenarios. I think there are a lot of WitP players that would be very interested in shorter, smaller scenarios, along the scale of those in UV. With WitP you have all the tools to create scenarios covering every major campaign in the Pacific in WWII.
For example, I'd personally like to see a scenario covering the Burma campaign in 1942. A hypothetical scenario that assumes the Japanese won both Coral Sea and Midway, and had them preparing an invasion of Australia in late 1942, would also be fun to play.

We've set up a forum at Matrix just to cover editor questions. Those of you interested in creating scenarios now have a place to discuss issues with each other, and with some of the experienced designers of the official scenarios.
So let's see some new scenarios.

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July 26th, 2004 - WITP has finally been released . . (Pg 5/6)

Gary Grigsby's World at War

With WitP done, work has heated up on GGWaW.
We recently made two major design changes to make the game play more realistically. First, we found that it was too easy for fleets to sail by enemy land regions. We felt that we needed a rule to cut down on these long-range excursions, especially in the Pacific. Although air units can Op fire at units moving past them, there aren't always enough air units on the board to account for the effect of land based airpower on fleets.

The answer was adding a rule that tracks how many hostile enemy land regions a unit has moved past. For each region, the unit suffers a penalty in combat. In effect, we assume that there are small amounts of land based airpower in all of the regions owned by players, even if there are not enough aircraft to warrant the display of a unit on the map. This rule should have the effect of forcing players to slow down and capture enemy islands and land regions that would, in real life, be a deterrent against fleets sailing past to fight in waters behind enemy lines.

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July 26th, 2004 - WITP has finally been released . . (Pg 6/6)

The second change resulted from the sense that the Soviet Union did not have enough space to trade when fighting against Germany. We elected to add 5 new regions to the western half of the Soviet Union.
While we were at it, we split Persia in half to allow it to be split between the SU and the Western Allies, as it was historically.

We also added a new ferry rule that will allow movement between certain land regions, as long as both regions are controlled by the same player.

Our goal is still to keep this game relatively simple and easy to play for the casual wargamer. However, as you can see, we definitely want to add features to the game to ensure that it also has a "realistic" feel to it. We're confident that this game will be both simple and deep. This is our attempt at a wargame that will grow the audience for wargames without losing the grognard customers.

Wish us luck!

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