Hello there, fellow word wanderer, avid reader and History-afficionado! Welcome to my humble inn! Here, at Strategy and Wargaming, we serve only the very best of wargaming weekly news, carefully curated by your dear word pundit. This week, Strategyngton Street saw very little traffic, with relatevely minor headlines.

Stellaris is only 1 dollar at Humble Bundle

Stellaris is a great game in it’s own right, with raving reviews and countless expansions, this is the title that launched Paradox’s formula into the universe beyond. And that’s okay. What’s even better, is that Stellaris best thing is actually a mod called Star Wars: Fallen Republic. As to what that is, if you remember the GoT mod for CK2, SW: FR is the same but for the SW Universe, described as “a total conversion mod designed to bring the Star Wars experience to Stellaris complete with ancient secrets, epic space battles, and political intrigue. With numerous potential starting maps and over forty playable empires to pick from, you will take the reigns of your empire of choice and lead them from the very start of the Galactic Civil War to the Battle of Endor and beyond.”

You can buy Stellaris for one simple quid and, if you’re anything like me when it comes to Star Wars, this is probably the cheapest way to get into it. Check out this amazing deal here.

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IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad devs working on new Dynamic Visual Damage Tech

Fans of the much beloved IL-2 series will be delighted to read that the dev team is working in a new Dynamic Visual Damage Tech system that attempts to portray shell impacts as realistic as possible.

"Among the many neat possibilities this tech brings, the size of the mark corresponds to the caliber of the projectile and/or explosive power of the shell if it was of the HE variety. They also look different depending on the material the projectile hit - whether it was armor, thin metal, or not a metal at all. There are also separate marks for ricochets of high caliber armor-piercing rounds. The look of these marks is thoroughly prepared by our partners at Digital Forms and is based on real-world photos of combat damage on different objects. The marks placed by this tech are not simple 2D textures - thanks to modern graphical techniques they have visual depth. Even the penetrations can look different such as near penetrations when the armor (barely) stopped a projectile. We concentrated on making these marks as realistic looking as possible."

Read the whole thing here.

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Stronghold: Warlords came out this week

It trully boggles the mind how Stronghold: Warlords has been into production for so long and nobody thought this might be a bad idea. It’s trully fascinating how FireFly Studios has been churning out shitty games for more than a decade and a half, with their last decent game being Stronghold Cruzader and they still manage to be in business. Who looks at the first two games, the ones that lay the series into the pedestal of Instant Classics and thinks: “Hummm. What you think about turning a franchise that is loved because of how detailed, gritty, beautiful, challenging and complex the first two were and let’s turn this into a cartoony, asian version of Age of Mithology but without the interesting mythical creatures?”. I’ve actually got the game but you would rather see me shoving fortune cookies… Oh my! You know what? Wanna play an eastern theme city-builder? Here, try Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. Even better, the perfect Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is now 90% off in Steam. Or read my article bellow about a real life Stronghold Castle.

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Ancestors Legacy Peasant Edition now available for free

There’s just something so funny about naming a free version of your game “Peasant Edition” that’s trowing my thinking off-track. Anyway, Ancestors Legacy is a nice game that I’ve reviewed in the past. In my wise words:

“Vikings+Norse loving fans rejoice! After the release of Thrones of Britannia and Northgard, a new Viking clan named Destructive Creations has arrived at your village, ready to raid hours of your life with the deep tactical goodness of Ancestors Legacy!  They’ve spent the last years working in the fjords to put together a really delightful real time tactics game based in the Dark Ages of medieval European History mixed with a mechanical pinch of Company of Heroes and powered up in great graphical detail by the Unreal Engine 4 technology. A bit iterative here, a bit derivative there, Ancestors manage to sucessfully adapt the CoH formula into something really unique with its visceral and cinematic combat, with a somewhat deep tactical squad based combat that takes a sub-genre that’s been somewhat stagnant since CoH established itself in 2006″

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Total War: Three Kingdoms “Fates Divided” DLC is out

Hey, FireFly Studies, get your notebooks out and learn how to properly design an interesting, captivating and much-loved Eastern themed strategy game. With the factions of Cao Cao and Yuan Shao’s being overhauled, now fully developed to work with the new 200CE starting date. More new characthers, new units and multiple balance changes and bug fixes. You can get the new DLC here.