Article by: William Abner

The Lordz Games Studio is a privately funded, independent game development studio based out of The Netherlands and Belgium. Launched in 2006, we are dedicated to developing cross-platform titles that are fun, highly playable and mirror our passion for military history. We just love developing strategy and war games.

Most of the company’s founders share similar “modding” roots as we started as a successful modding community, and created some very successful freely available and award winning modifications, especially on the Total War series.

Since we hooked up with Slitherine/Matrix, the biggest world-wide strategy and war game publisher, we have worked on several strategy games with them, like Commander, Great Battles Medieval and Battlefield Academy and have become great friends and colleagues over the last few years.

Panzer Corps is a new series of strategy games inspired by the classic and iconic Panzer General games. Our initial release is set during World War II in the European theatre covering all the major battles of WWII. You’ll be controlling the Germans and all their cool equipment against the allied nations. We wanted to capture the flavor of these past great games, find what made them fun and addictive and build on that. We also wanted to make Panzer Corps stand out on its own and give it a modern twist so have taken the core concepts and built on them with our own designs and cool new features.

Although there will inevitably be comparisons with Panzer General, Panzer Corps is in no way a remake, sequel or directly linked to Panzer General. It is very much its own game, but the team is truly inspired by Panzer General and hope to achieve some of what it did back when it came out.

Perhaps the most interesting design decision in PG was that it was essentially a tactical game set on an operational scale. You could play the famous battles of WWII, like the invasion of Poland, The Low Countries or France, but the units you controlled looked and behaved more like squads of men and small groups of tanks. It gave you the grand strategy feel of being a general because of the map scale, but the types of units you commanded made it feel more like a tactical game and this offered the interesting tactical decisions associated with that. From a realism point of view this is of course nonsense, but it turned out to work extremely well for game play and was a huge hit.

The gameplay was also very approachable and simple, but at the same time has a lot of depth. It was the original easy to learn but hard to master game design that all designers are looking for.

Added to that was strong RPG element (your core units carry over from battle to battle, gaining experience, and the player gets attached to them over time). It had that “just one-more-turn” factor, it was totally addictive.