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Thanks for your patience and your passion for our games!

Catalyst Game Labs

It’s a computer game for Leviathans based on some shareware. I did a screen capture below to show a game on my computer in action to give you a quick idea of what it currently looks like.

So, what exactly does this mean? To be honest, no idea. Will we release this for people to purchase? No idea. Will it instead be released for free? No idea. Will there be an open alpha test? No idea. When could it come out? No idea?

I think you get the picture. Ultimately I absolutely believe the universe and visuals are cool and robust enough to support a full-fledged, AAA title. But in the mean time, we’re exploring every option, including this little computer game that would allow people to connect and play the board game online.

If you guys are interested in this, or interested in an alpha test, then by all means, let me know. It’ll certainly give me good ammunition for what the community would like to see as we explore this option more fully.

Thanks!

Randall

Despite years of working with spread sheets, some times you lose site of the over-all effect you’re looking to create with your data. So below are three jpgs that show one ship’s line on a spreadsheet…it’s a very, very wide spread sheet. But to show it here, so it’s relatively easy to understand, had to split it into three sections to view.

This spread sheet contains all the ships designed to date and really does a superb job of allowing me (and others) to design a ship in a codified way. This provides both a way to easily compare it to other ships to ensure it’s got a unique feel, and also makes it easy for layout to generate a Ship Card based directly off of this data.

Now if you’ve played with the Lieutenant’s Manual (or had the chance at a convention to play with the Commander’s Manual), you’ll likely be able to decipher what most of the short-hand mean. You’ll notice that just as I described in the linked blog post above, the first take on the RM Cassipoeia makes it the fastest ship to date, with the most Miss Slots and it has the lightest Structural Integrity. That, combined with its weapon load-out, give it a little bit of a “Pontbriand light” vibe.

Don’t worry that you don’t see any torpedoes…because of that vibe, as described above, there’s no aerial torpedoes currently on this one…but have no fear, the other ships have a good pile.

Remember how I said above you can lose sight of things in a spread sheet? Well I’ve been staring at the data for a while and it wasn’t until I saw the actual Ship Card that I realized something’s not working as is. I wanted to change the Port/Starboard non-move Location Dice from DRed to DYellow on this ship to mix it up, but I felt I couldn’t change the move Location Dice to a DBlue or it’d match the Bow, which would just be odd (and making the Bow a DGreen would be too over-the-top(. However, looking at the Ship Card I realize that having both of those the same dice not only is a non-starter for game balance, but the in-universe aesthetic is too violated for that.

So now I either need to change it back, or take some serious look at the probabilities again and see if I can squeeze something in that would be between DYellow and DRed…perhaps 2DBlue…gonna have to review. Ultimately, these numbers are just the first step. They’ll go through some heavy playtesting to ensure the ship has its own unique feel and isn’t too broken (i.e. either too strong or too weak).

Either way, still great to reach this stage of design and can’t wait to get these off to playtesting this week.

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

So been seeing a lot of great discussions going on about what new material should be released online as a consequence of the continued delays. I’m fully willing to fall onto the proverbial sword on this one. A combination of the continued hope the game will finally come out, as well as a subconscious desire to not work on new web material as it means driving that stake a little further in my wound. But it’s time to stand up, stiff-upper-lip and all that, and get some new material flowing for you chaps wanting to toss some dice in our 1910 skies.

Now, right out of the gate, let’s discuss the Commander’s Manual. There’s been some suggestions of releasing this before hand. In fact, well over a year ago I brought this up tentatively and a little over a month ago I sent out a big email to the Catalyst Management team, but also included some other key players (two in particular that together have 40+ years of marketing/distribution/retail experience in our hobby). The email was a break down, as I saw it, of the pros and cons of releasing the Commander’s Manual in PDF form before the Core Box Set is available on store shelves.

Ultimately it was decided that as many experiments as we’ve done with Leviathans, that’s an experiment that’s just a little more than what we’re willing to commit to at this time. We simply have no way to gauge its effects on the ultimate sales of the Core Box Set. It could do what we’ve seen with print books and increase sales…but it could also be detrimental as this isn’t a book. Now we continue to discuss this, but at the current time there’s no plans to release the Commander’s Manual in PDF format.

With that said, however, there’s a pretty big list of things we could work on and release via the website in the near future. Here’s a few I can think of:

• New Story Fiction
• New Sourcebook fiction
• James Fighting Leviathans: Excerpt from 1910 3
• Point System Open Beta Test
• New Campaign
• Minor Powers

New Story Fiction
This would be along the lines of A Monster In The Sky and What Prices Paid serial fiction as posted here.

New Sourcebook fiction
A huge host of additional “fleshing out” sourcebook material could be created that’d weave around the Gazetteer, as previously shown through articles posted here.

James Fighting Leviathans: Excerpt from 19010 3
For those that haven’t seen the first two PDFs before, you can find more details here.

Obviously more ships are always cool. However, because we’ve only released a very limited number of ship classes to date, I’ve been a little leery to create so many variant “named ships” all based on the same classes released to date. Don’t want to over-load on those variants. However, if that’s what the community would like, more than willing to oblige.

Point System Open Beta Test
A year and a half a go we ran a Point System Open Alpha Test. I’ve got a Point System Open Beta Test document all ready to release as a free PDF as soon as the Core Box Set is available, which incorporates the details from the original playtest, as well as covering all the details of everything from the Commander’s Manual.

I fully realize releasing this before the Core Box Set is available means a fair bit of the material won’t be usable yet…but it would be a nice preview of what’s coming over the horizon.

New Campaign
A little over a year ago we did an Open Alpha Test of The Channel Campaign. We’ve been kicking around several concepts on additional campaign that would follow this mold, from roughly the same size, to much larger conflicts. Depending on what the community would like, we could also tie one of these into a Minor Powers PDF. Lot’s of fun gaming potential here.

Minor Powers
This has been something I’ve blogged about in the past and we’ve kicked it around for over a year now. But the idea would be a series of PDFs that would cover “batches” of Minor Powers, including a little fiction, a short sourcebook write-up, and finally some ships; these would mostly be “older ships”, so the art would come across as a kitbash of various extent designs. We couldn’t do all of them too quickly, because not all such minor powers bought British and French older vessels, and that’s the art we have on hand. But we could work on an initial PDF that deals with powers that did directly pull from the British and French, allowing us to generate the full Ship Card/fold-up box experience.

There ya go, a whole toolbox of goodies. Now note this won’t take the place of my normal blogs and updates. Instead, this is additional material you’ve all earned through your patience and continued excitement that’ll bring more immersive experiences (whether simply to the universe or your gaming table), while we all wait for that pesky Core Box Set

Please list, in order of preference, what you’d like to see. Also, if you see a cool aspect you’d like to see fleshed out that’s not on the list above, by all means, suggest away.

We’ll take your suggestions and use that to start building new material for the site.

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

Amazing how the weeks at the end of a year fly by, especially as you’re hard at work trying to unstick several production projects.

Much to my shock a sample of the “final production” miniatures, exactly as they’ll appear in the Core Box Set fell out of the mail yesterday. As I always promise, as soon as I had a moment to catch my breath, I’m sharing these.

Now the miniatures we received at Gen Con, while the decks were painted different for the British and French, the hulls were the same color, when the French were suppose to be lighter. Now we wanted the British to actually get a darker hull, but ultimately the French were considerably lightened. Considering we learned that the British were almost lightened after we explicitly told them to darker the British, we’ll take it.

Additionally, the tray as been completely revamped. The previous vacuum tray the ships sat in did not have a lid (just a plastic bag), so the pieces for the stands just cascaded everywhere. Additionally, the miniatures were held in place so tight it was the labors of Hercules to extract a ship without bending a turret or shearing off masts. However, the new vacuum tray is almost perfect in every way. It’s got a lid that holds everything in place and the ships simply slide in and out of their positions with ease.

So what does this mean for a Street Date? We don’t know. Supposedly this means that all the Core Box Set miniatures are done and they’re working on the Fleet Sets. We’re waiting on visual confirmation of that so we can make the hard call of trying to wait for the fleet sets, or simply pull the trigger to get the Core Box Set moving immediately so we can have it out first quarter next year.

As always, as soon as I have news, you will!

Thanks for all the patience, crewmen…

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

So Bryn and I managed to get a Germans Vs. French playtest in before Thanksgiving.

As with the British playtest we threw all six German Ship Cards against the six French Ship Cards that’ll be in the Core Box Set.

We set up almost exactly like the previous playtest.

Once again, the first few turns rolled out similarly to the Germans vs. British, with Bryn splitting his forces and me surging to the left.

Because of the back-and-forth maneuvering on the board you tend to see with the French as they continually try and line up aerial torpedo shots, you’ll note that one of my Light Cruisers and two Destroyers are heading back along the lines they just moved previously.

Unlike the last game where I spun all my forces up the left side of the playing area (from my POV), because of that back and forth noted above, I decided two try and swarm my three destroyers from two different directions onto the German battleship Baden.

On the far side of the playing area you’ll see my battleship with all three German destroyers swarming. Despite my best efforts, they were able to slide into the Starboard side where I’d been savaged by the German Bracketing Crew ability and I lost my Battleship that turn. However, I took two ships with it as it fell from the skies.

In the meantime my destroyers systematically annihilated the Stern Location, leaving the Baden unable to move.

After destroying my battleship, Bryn rushed the Tiger over to do what it’s purpose-built for: Defensive Screening (I’ll share the details on this specialty ship in a future blog)…trying to protect that mortally wounded Stern Location. However, by this point I still had all the ships active with torpedoes, including the wonderfully fun French Lave Light Cruiser with its two torpedoes per side, and by sheer attrition (coming from every side and some good rolls) I was able to destroy the German battleship.

As with the British playtest, this game appears to coincide with the playtest feedback we’ve been receiving…namely that while one or two of the ships need some tweaking, on the whole we’re right on track and it leaves the Germans with a great feeling during game play.

At this point we’ll probably go ahead and make those tweaks and re-send out to the larger playtesting group as well as re-running the British vs. Germans ourselves once more.

And of course hopefully I’ll finally get those pesky Italians done and have a playtest report to share sometime in December as well.

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

First, huge apologies for the last few weeks of silence. For those unaware, we just launched two new BattleTech websites (bg.battletech.com and battletech.com) to coincide with the announcement and launch of the MechWarrior Online site…really awesome stuff for BattleTech fans.

However, that has meant for almost 3 weeks now I’ve done nothing but eat and breath website work. The speed with which I can tear covers off of PDFs, turn them into multiple sizes of jpgs, generate a PDF preview, and then stitch it all together on a page with a half dozen different links, as appropriate, is a little crazy.

The last two days have finally gotten the site to a point I can scale back my work on it to an hourish a day and get back to a host of other projects, including my weekly blog posts.

Second, no, we still do not have a Street Date for Leviathans…if that info had come I’d have let the websites crash if need be to shout that news…. Promise…as soon as I have it, you will.

Okay, now on to the fun of playtesting German Vs. British ships (this wrapped up almost two weeks back…silly websites). I asked whether you’d be interested in seeing some games play out and I got enough “you bet” responses, so here I go.

Just as in the Core Box Set, the Germans will feature six Ship Cards for the four miniatures: a Battleship, two Light Cruisers and three Destroyers. We put all six of them against the six British ships slotted for the Core Box Set.

For unknown reasons, I like my ships at a cant; Bryn likes deploying them straight on.

We immediately surged forward. As I was already oriented to the left of the playing area, I took my squardon there.

Bryn made the classic mistake (right up there with a land war in Asian and dealing with a Sicilian with death was on the line)…he split up his forces (we both were surprised, talking about it after the fact, as he’s usually far better than that).

Despite splitting his forces, he was able to maneuver into the front and back sides of my squadron with a pincer, and the Crew Bracketing capabilities of the SMS Wiesbaden, SMS Dresden and SMS Falke flexed some fearsome muscle.

By this time the starboard of the HML Leviathans had been hurt and knowing Bryn’s SMS Hannover was going to be in my stern, I made a broach turn, flipping the battleship around. The next turn of fire, almost fully surrounded by enemy ships, was ruthless.

In the literally years of playing Leviathans at this point, I’d never a seen a ship so damaged. On the last fire of a previous turn, Bryn only had to roll a four or higher on 2DRed (i.e. 2D10) for that all-to-fun Breaking The Keel Roll…and he rolled snake eyes. The game stopped for a good five minutes to groans of agony and a shout of stiff-upper-lip pride. Finally the next turn he killed the ship.

The entire time he was concentrating on the HML Leviathan I’d been concentrating on a series of ships and and by now he’d lost one of his Light Cruisers and a Destroeyr, while the rest of my fleet was still alive and moving to encircle his SMS Baden. Took three more turns and I lost a Destroyer and Light Cruiser but even the awesome armor of the pride of German engineering gave way to that many ships swarming across six different locations.

Ultimately I was left with a love for the vibe of the Germans, and despite the sheer tenacity of the British Battleship skewing things a bit, I felt it was an excellent match-up. And while I’m still a little leery of how powerful the Bracketing Crew is, I’m not as worried…plenty of testing still to go, of course. Next up, French vs. the Germans.

Couldn’t help but end with this photo…my precocious 9-year-old daughter who always gives daddy or very loud support, much to Bryn’s chagrin.

See ya next duty shift.

Randall

SteamCon III just happened over the weekend and as usual it was a blast. While there’s some growing pains here and there, I loved how the gaming area was almost triple the size of last year, with more and varied games being run.

Below are a few quick photos I managed to snap while running dozens of people through Leviathans, while talking to dozens more about the universe and game.

Thanks to all the new people that stopped by and gave the game a try and let me blather on; thanks to those that played last year and enthusiastically returned to check it out this year; thanks to Ross and Kevin and the others running the gaming area: always a great time and I’m already looking forward to SteamCon IV (though I really need to be in an outfit next year, I think).

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

I’ve got the usual large playtesting apparatus banging on them and Bryan and I took them for a jaunt over the weekend…a pile of fun.

These photos are when the game was two turns from the end; three ships already down and the rest fairly damaged.

This first photo is from Bryn’s German side.

The second photo provides a little closer look at the German Ship Cards.

The final photo is from my British side, where you can see a piece of paper with a pile of scribbles of clarifications needed on the new Bracketing Crew Slot rules we were playing with.

We’re starting up another game this week, but this time we’ll put all 6 British Ship Cards in the Core Box Set against the full 6 German Ship Cards from their faction box on a four x four mapboards to see how that plays. While there are absolutely some nips and tucks that I can see needed already, on the whole I’m already loving the feel of the Germans in game play.

If people are interested in photos of that playtest as well, just let me know!

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

I had an absolute blast last year at SteamCon II and I’m looking forward to running a pile of Leviathans games at SteamCon III next weekend. I’ll be in the Laurel Room Friday and Saturday, making noise, tossing dice and having a great time with who ever shows up.

If you’re in the area, stop on by and grab your first game, or a more expanded game if you’ve already tried the QSR.

Hope to see you there!

Randall