Making History: The First World War News

This release does not have many new changes since we are mainly spending our time working on the new scenario The Russian Revolution. There is a new Armored Train unit and this will receive better combat balancing by the next update. Besides fixing small content bugs, feedback on The Balkan Wars has led us to make some modifications to the nation AI to increase adherence to a more historical flow.

Changes to the AI scripts are highly sensitive and can lead to unintended consequences. For that reason we try not to make drastic alterations. Oftentimes, odd AI behavior is caused by seemingly unrelated events. These are increasingly harder to track down as the game gets more content heavy and the deeper they occur in a playthrough. The Early Access community has been very helpful by providing both bug reports and actually saved games that we can investigate.

We’ll continue to release an update every 2-3 weeks or sooner when possible. A list of all the significant changes in the latest version of Making History: The First World War Early are listed below.

Update #5 Release Notes:

• Fixed errors in Italian and Austrian Mountain Infantry models
  
• Added new Armored Train Model and Unit to game
  
• Removed University from Cleveland TJC that prevented upgrades
  
• Revised Soviet Democratic flag set
  
• Modified AI Army Recruitment Templates
  
• Switched Auxiliary Cruisers name source to match Cruisers
  
• Fixed 0% Prospecting chance in TBW regions that had resource deposits
  
• Adjusted French AI to ignore Greek 1914 regions in 1912
  
• Added date constraint to Italian Albanian interference
  
• Fixed string error in Ottoman Naval triggers that made Turk mining fail
  
• Added Alliance Breaks to Balkan nations prior to declaring 2nd Balkan War
  
• Fixed multiple string errors in events
  
• Partial update of Historic Naval unit names
  
• Updated Resource objects in TBW regions
  
• Removed Building restrictions from Factory Outputs, prevented recruitments of units
  
• Fixed Typo in German-Argentina event
  
• Reduced chance of FRA, GER, ITA & RUS having Early war
  
• Stopped AI naval mining when at peace.
  

There is not an update this week since we do not have enough items completed to justify a new release. Our focus has been on content development for the next scenario: The Russian Revolution. This scenario will start players off in September 1918 just after the final German offensive fails and the Allied Hundred Days Offensive is in progress. As German, Bulgarian and Ottoman lines begin to collapse, fresh American forces join the fight. Internal instability further undermines the status of the Central Powers and they are ready to find a way out of the war.

This is where the game gets interesting. The Central Power governments are losing control of their empires. Throughout Europe and the Middle East, long suppressed nationalists-minded populations are preparing to fight for their independence and conflicting claims. All this while Russia is torn asunder by a continent-wide civil war. An emerging Communist ideology is fighting to inherit the lands of the former Tsar against a divided and dysfunctional opposition.

The event scripting for The Russian Revolution scenario is just beginning. We want to have a significant amount of that work done before releasing this to the community. For this scenario we were inspired to add a new unit to the game. It’s an Armored Train based on the rail weapons used by the Czech Legion during their legendary campaign along the trans-Siberian railway. This unit will be in the next update.



Here’s what we are planning to work on for the next few weeks:

• Scripting events for The Russian Revolution scenario
  
• Begin implementing Achievements
  
• Review Territorial Claims for all scenarios
  
• Explore adding an Always Expand/Prospect Order for Resources
  
• Implement an Add Claim mechanism to Nationalities Panel
  
• Stop AI mining Sea Regions when at peace
  
• Discourage France from declaring war on Ottomans to defend Greek Claims
  
• Add military units to The Russian Revolution
  

Partial list of items we will have left to finish before official release:

• Add possible 4th scenario focused on MP play
  
• Balance cities in all scenarios
  
• Rework Fleet and Air Content for TRR
  
• Improve Music
  
• Add Difficulty levels
  
• Turn On Editor
  
• Turn On Multiplayer
  
• Turn On Steam Workshop
  

The above lists are not comprehensive and they exclude a lot of non-feature work. We have wish-list items and features that may still find their way into the game. The next update will likely come out in a week and after that we hope to release The Russian Revolution.

In this release we are introducing a new scenario called The Balkan Wars. The scenario covers the five critical conflicts that dominated the WW1 era. It begins in March of 1912 with the Italo-Turkish War over Libya where a weakened and unstable Ottoman Empire struggles against the expansionist minded Italians. Then the Balkan nations begin the first of two wars over the remnants of the Ottoman domains in Europe. These actions all lead up to the events surrounding the July Crisis. The assasination of the Austrian Archduke, followed by the outbreak of a cataclysmic conflict involving the world's great powers. And finally, war exposes a growing discontent in the Russian Empire causing a government collapse and a bloody civil war.

As with all Making History games, The First World War does not seek to maintain a restrictive historical timeline. The AI is provided incentives to follow a historical path but oftentimes game actions alter AI decisions as the scenario progresses. Most playthroughs of The Balkan Wars should see the regional wars that precede WW1 and the rise of Soviet Russia. But there will be times that an early conflict might arise or maybe a delay in the start of the Great War due to the confrontation in the Balkans.

We’ve added some code to counteract a common financial exploit of maxing out the Tax Rate slider. Previously the consequences of putting your taxes up to 100% was almost nonexistent in many nations. Now when the Tax Rate is too high, there’s an elevated chance of increased Corruption. The threshold for triggering the penalties is different based on Government Ideologies and the harshness of the penalties goes up with the rise of taxation. In general, Socialist nations tolerate higher taxes than others.

There’s a similar modifier tied to Government Support. Now the national populations will gain radicalism if Government Support becomes too low. Again, the point at which the penalties kick in are different according to Government Ideologies. Authoritarian and Democratic governments are more susceptible to low Government Support. Both of these policy penalties should encourage players to be better government managers to avoid chronic instability.

There are a few game balancing changes for this release. For one, we’ve added some build restrictions to hardware units like Artillery, Aircraft and Ships. This means some units are only available when a prerequisite Factory is present in the city where you are recruiting. For instance, if you recruit a Ship that requires a Level 3 Shipyard, you can build that unit in any city that has one. Even if you order the Ship in a Level 1 Shipyard, as long as there’s a Level 3 in the same city, the option to build will be available.

Since the major part of this update is the new scenario, we’ve put most of our focus toward preparing The Balkan Wars for release. Still there are some of the bugs and suggestions from our Early Access users addressed here. We thank everyone for pointing out the misspelling, content errors and general critiques. For a small team like ours, community feedback is a critical part of making the game better.


Update #4 Release Notes:

- New scenario The Balkan Wars made playable
- Added length to delay AI’s desire to cancel Trade & Money Transfers
- Fixed Number Ordering in Research Topics
- Revised Northern Chinese Democratic flag since it was the same as one in the Chinese set
- Added function to remove mines when nations disappear
- Added building restrictions to units based on infrastructure levels
- Implemented constraint on High Tax Rates, increases Corruption penalty
- Low Government Support now generates radicalism in owned regions
- High Tax and Low Government Support penalties tied to Government Ideology
- Increased nMaxRevoltRisk to make revolts a bit more likely
- Expanded Population column width to prevent large values being clipped
- Added more restrictions on seeing enemy Mobilization settings
- Balanced The Balkan Wars nation data
- Fixed West Virginia Demographic data errors
- Changed Desert Movement for Wheeled units to 1 Per Turn from 0
- Fixed misspelled Strings in multiple events
- Fixed incorrect Baghdad location

This article is a 'first look' at an Early Access (EA) version of Factus Games' Making History: The First World War (for this article FWW). Good thing, too, because it didn't take me long to realize that FWW is absolutely a Grognard level wargame and is gonna need a lot of time investment to play right.

Some dozens of hours later I am still learning the ropes, so expect a detailed analysis and review of how this thing works both historically and competitively after it drops for real in about three - four months.

Until then, here is what I have to report.

Basics and Visuals

FWW is a region based grand strategy wargame covering the entire globe, Ireland to Japan and everything in between. By that I mean the game is concerned with running the entire conflict by ministry of war level decision making and managing national level resources to obtain victory. The 'grand' part means that your strategy not only deals with the military part of the equation, but everything else such as the economy, diplomacy, research, and internal social issues.

Read the rest of the story...

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A new update to The First World War is now live. In this release we’ve continued improving the Naval Mining system. Mines will now sink enemy trade by destroying shipping capacity in the same fashion as regular trade interdiction. A successful hit also reduces the mine coverage % to represent detonation. The interdiction system has been modified to have some variance in strength to simulate a measure of luck inherent in navigating waters with mines present.

Some UI features involving Unit Groups are now extended to the Groups List in the Military Panel. You can now toggle between Mobilize and Demobilize plus take command of your Colonial forces with one click on the list. We’ll be adding a method to stop nations from setting too many units to Mobilize when their Readiness is low. This will prevent the use of the mobilize buttons to ramp up unit strength without raising Military Readiness.



Colonial Empires can now take command of all their Colonies or Protectorates units using the Empire Military Command button. This is located on the Colony Government panel.



The German AI had a bug that was preventing it from employing tactical attacks on Belgium. This was sometimes leading to a Belgian victory and even invasions deep inside Germany. The changes may end up making Germany too strong in the early stages. We promise to keep testing to achieve a better balance in every area of the game.

The feedback we receive from the community is a key element of Early Access development. User reports have alerted us to several bugs we have been able to fix for this release. Some were simple string edits, but others turned out to be important flaws. We had particular trouble resolving some movement bugs that were keeping some units from moving 1 region through Mountains and Deserts. Hopefully that issue is behind us now.

A description of all the changes in the latest version of Making History: The First World War Early are listed below.

Update #3 Release Notes:


- Naval Mines are now destroyed after a successful hit
- Naval Mines will interdict Trade and sink Shipping Capacity
- Modified Naval Mines hit Probability & Power parameters
- Created factor to Naval Mines hit Power mechanic in trade interdiction to vary losses
- Altered AI to be more concerned with national threats - less likely to send units to Colonies
- Fixed 1 region Artillery movement bug that did not account for Transportation Infrastructure
- Added Mobilize/Demobilize feature to Military Groups List
- Added Command feature to Military Groups List to take control of Colonial groups
- Added button on Colony panel to take command of all units owned by the Colony.
- Updated Canadian Nationalists Decal/Flag set
- Fixed Notification image for Unrest and Revolt ending events
- Added new French, British & Indian colonial forces
- Modified German AI to use Schlieffen Plan - was skipping most deployments
- Changed Relationship penalty to a bonus for French support of Russia event
- Fixed relations notification reference string between Germany & Mexico event
- Removed Desert movement restriction on Wheeled units
- Suppressed ability to see if your enemies Unit Groups are set to Reinforce ON/OFF
- Fixed sea region reference error in Ottoman Naval mining event
- Fixed Errors in Belgian Liberation Events - Could lead to the UK becoming a Belgian nation