There is a lot of conversation about the new compilations, and one of the questions that many readers and posters have had in one form or another is, 'what's actually in the books?' We think that's a fair question, so I'm here this week to give you a quick tour of the compilations.
Before we give you a preview of the forces inside the books, I'd like to first address the thought that this compilation is nothing more than a mere re-pointing. I can assure you that this is not the case, at all. We did look into publishing a simple update for the books, but the more we looked into it, the more we realized it was anything but a simple task.
Perhaps the biggest motivation was to bring the book up to speed with the latest publications, especially the new Version 3 rulebook. This involved a serious look at rules, updating platoon structures (such as tank-destroyer, reconnaissance, or fortified platoons), checking all of the warriors' game texts, and adjusting points (for example, reluctant tanks or medium tanks). There was also stuff that simply wasn't working the way we wanted, such as in the case of the U.S. Rangers and Breeching Groups.
These were all things that fundamentally tore open the old Normandy books. We knew at this point it wasn't a simple update project, so we took it to Pete and JP, and together we had a serious discussion about where to go from here. We decided to go for the whole hog. The Normandy books would be bigger, better, and packed with value.
As a company of avid wargamers, we love Normandy, and like many of you, we're completists. We still had a lot we still wanted to add to the compilations. These included Web PDFs, new list variants, and adding old lists from Fortress Europe. Tapping into our passions, the three of us writers added a lot of new content to these books, making them even more comprehensive than the older books, in terms of units involved in the Normandy campaign. While it's impossible to cover every single unit, we think we've got very close to that mark with these books.
There are a lot of new changes in the book, and I don't have the opportunity to cover them all just at the moment. We'll get more information out to you as we draw closer to June, so stay tuned. But for now, I'll leave you with an extract from both books covering what forces we've included...
