When a second edition of a game comes three years after the first, any explanation as to why turns into an extended mea culpa. I have to sell you, the punter, on why you want to drop your hard-earned dough on the new edition of Wing Leader: Victories.

Let’s lead-off by saying you don’t have to spend a penny. I intend to make the updated data cards, rules and scenarios for the second edition of Wing Leader: Victories available for download.

Let’s also say that you don’t need the second edition at all. If you have the first game, it ain’t broken. You can play it and enjoy it as is. Don’t buy the new edition unless you really want it.

The changes from the first to second edition are an indulgence—an attempt to scratch an irritating designer itch. There are some minor changes to the rules, but more substantial changes to the aircraft data cards. Updates to the ADCs represent the bulk of the new edition revisions.

What’s in the Second Edition?

The second edition will initially manifest as a reprint of Wing Leader: Victories. This will include some updated components that first appeared in Wing Leader: Supremacy, such as the map and battle display. It will also have revised rules and aircraft data cards, on which I’ll say more below. And to season the package, we have included some brand new data cards and scenarios, which draw in favourites such as the Swordfish torpedo bomber, the Ju 52 transport, the La 5 and Whirlwind fighters.

You can preorder the second edition Wing Leader: Victories by clicking HERE.

If you already own the game, preorder the Wing Leader: Victories Update Kit by clicking HERE. The update kit provides all the pieces you need to upgrade your game to the second edition.

The Rules

The second edition features very few changes to the rules. This is the v2.0 rules set published in Wing Leader: Supremacy, with some additional tweaks. The full list of revisions is as follows:

• The addition of new marker counters.
• New abilities for AT guns, Edge ratings and maximum bomb loads.
• Scenarios now indicate when variant aircraft are used.
• Radioless Wing Leaders have new restrictions.
• Edge ratings improve air combat ability.
• AT Pod markers have been revised.
• The effects of high speeds on air combat have changed.
• Twin-engined fighter VP has been revised from 2 to 1.5.
• Me 163 rules are revised.
• Barrage flak attacks have a greater chance of generating cohesion checks.
• In place of the Jet modifier, basic speed modifies flak attacks.
• The no aim bombing penalty has been reduced to –1.
• Dive bomber immunity to air combat during a dive has been revised.
• The calculation of strafing bomb value has changed.
• AT Pod rules have been replaced by the new AT Gun ability.
• Instead of halving bomb values for flights and disrupted squadrons, these now incur die modifiers to attacks.
• Added an optional rule for rolling bombing results.

These amount to a list of minor tweaks. The biggest changes (indeed, the focus of second edition) are to the flak and bombing rules. The most substantive of these are:

Flak. Changes to flak modifiers help differentiate between early war light bombers and late war fighter-bombers. (Rationale: As flak gunners got the measure of light bombers, including dive bombers, speed became the important survival characteristic.)

Flights. The treatment of flights has changed so that they no longer halve their bomb strength when bombing, but instead apply die modifiers. This is not only a more streamlined rule, but it no longer handicaps fighter-bomber flights. (Rationale: Historically, the Western Allies operated their fighter-bombers in flight rather than squadron strength. In the second edition, flight-strength Jabos can do serious damage to tactical targets such as troops and tanks.)

AT Guns. Rules for specialist air-to-ground anti-tank guns have been revised and rebalanced through the creation of a new AT Gun ability. (Rationale: We hadn’t really properly codified the range of AT guns available to air forces.)

Rating Aircraft

The primary driver of the second edition was the desire to completely overhaul the ecosystem of aircraft data cards. This ecosystem now comprises over a hundred published cards, plus another seventy slated for future publication–a selection of aircraft that covers the gamut of the pre-war and wartime era from Spain and China to the fall of Japan and the Third Reich.

From the beginning of Wing Leader development I tried to base aircraft data on hard values, to minimise arbitrary rating. However, when reviewing the first hundred ADCs I found weaknesses in specific areas of rating and discovered that there were inconsistencies across the gamut of cards. Specific problems I’d found were:

Misrating. A few aircraft were completely misrated. These were errors that went uncorrected. Aircraft such as the Bf 110C-4, Hurricane Mk.IIC and B-25C all get deserved performance boosts in the second edition.

Climb Ratings. The climb values and the rules for calculating altitude bands were applied inconsistently. This was fixed by returning to a data-based approach and more firmly-applied rules of thumb. The updated ADCs included in Wing Leader: Blitz were a partial fix of this.

Turn Ratings. Though based on rules of thumb, turn values are the most arbitrary of all the ratings and are based on assessments that had been applied inconsistently. The data cards most affected by errors included Light bombers, Dive Bombers and Torpedo Bombers. In the second edition the assessment criteria has been tightened and applied more consistently.

Edge Cases

The Wing Leader approach to the core combat value of speed is data-based. However, the game eschews the kind of ‘rivet-counting’ detail of other air games in favour of sorting aircraft into different bands of performance.

The core thesis of Wing Leader is that fighter aircraft advanced through a series of generational improvements, mostly to engine power. Within a generation there was little to choose between fighters. They were all within the same band and were roughly matched.

It’s a broad-brush, detail-lite approach that works for the majority of cases. However, there are some awkward aircraft that sit at the boundary between bands and don’t quite fit either of them. The classic example is the Hurricane Mk.I. It’s not as good as a Spitfire Mk.II, nor as poor as the MS.406, so where does it sit? Without more granularity, it defaulted to the lower band.

The answer has been to introduce a new ability, titled ‘Edge’ (as it sits on the edge between two bands) that gives a small benefit in air combat. Interestingly, this ability has helped differentiate between advancements within series of aircraft, allowing the Spitfire Mk.VB to be differentiated from the Spit Mk.II, or the La-5F from the basic La-5.

On the whole, I’ve aimed to avoid adding granularity to such a broad-brush game, so as to avoid too many arguments over details. However, the edge rating has turned out to be a welcome addition.

Bombing Values

Of all the changes to data there is none bigger than the revision of the bombing data. And of all the changes it is this that provoked the second edition.

All performance rating issues were easily-fixed errors or issues of inconsistency. However, bombs strengths were data-driven and consistent. The problem here was a fundamental design error in assigning linear values to bombs strengths. The formula was:

(bomb payload in kg)/50

For Wing Leader: Victories and its early-war aircraft this was not a great issue. Bomb payloads were small. However, I did not do due-diligence on testing late war aircraft. From bomb strengths in the 20s and 30s for early war medium bombers, the late war heavies were suddenly registering bombs strengths of 50 or more. (Over 100, in the case of the Lancaster!)

Put simply: this broke the bombing system. In hindsight, a linear calculation for bomb payloads was a bad idea. It had certain advantages in that attacks were based on raw bomb tonnage, but it did not capture the law of diminishing returns that applied to scattering bomb loads hither and yon. It became clear that a curve would have been more appropriate.

After some searching that considered a logarithmic scale, I finally decided on a square root curve, which seemed to offer the best fit. The new formula is:

SQRT(bomb payload in lbs)/3.5

This has the benefit that the common bomb load of 1,000 lbs (450 kg) is a value of 9 in both systems. Aircraft with those loads will not change. However, it raises the value of lightly-loaded bombers higher, so that the D3A1 Val leaps from a 5 in ‘old money’ to a 7 in the new system, which fixes an issue with the inability of Vals to hurt carriers. And bomb loads at the upper end have flattened, with a B-17G dropping from a bombs strength of 45 to 19. When compared to target damage values these are far better fits. In the old system a 50% hit from a B-17 was a fatality on every game target; in the new system it will heavily damage the stronger targets, but will need many more squadrons to complete the demolition. When fitting bomb strengths to targets we get more credible fits of payload to outcome.

Along with bomb strengths, air to ground rocket values were refactored to match the targets. With the new numbers we now have interesting tradeoffs between weak-but-accurate rockets and strong but inaccurate bombs.

Finally, anti-tank guns were broken out into their own new ability and their strengths better-fitted to the targets.

Rebalancing

If there’s a mea culpa to give, it is that the area of the game that has evolved the most from the first release of Victories has been the bombing rules. Originally, bombing was intended to be a minor part of the game—maybe a third of the scenarios at best. Instead, on-map bombing represents the lion’s share of scenarios and that extra scrutiny has resulted in the gradual evolution both of the rules and of the outputs.

Inevitably, changing values results in a requirement to rebalance scenarios, and for second edition Wing Leader: Victories we have done just that. The revised bombs values mean that the victory thresholds for scenarios are often based on achieving Heavy damage to targets rather than Crippling or Fatal levels. Having done a lot of spreadsheet work on mean damage outputs from bombing attacks, the victory thresholds have been rejigged to the new values, and the test crew have been re-evaluating the bombing scenarios.

Play Second Edition NOW!

The next step is to take a look for yourself at drafts of the second edition rules, scenarios and ADCs, so that you can judge the changes for yourself and even help test and feed back on the changes. These drafts include all the published and unpublished data cards created so far. You can download these in .pdf form from my support website here:

Wing Leader Downloads Page

I hope this will persuade you that if you don’t want to spend the money, you will not be cut off from the rest of the Wing Leader community. But if you do want to buy hardcopies of the new boxed game or update kit, you will get value for your money.

The Future

If we get enough P500 orders the second edition of Wing Leader: Victories, and the update kit, will be published later in 2018. Along with it I shall ensure everyone can download finalised ADCs for the rest of the game system.

As the first edition product goes out of print we will hope to reprint them with second edition ADCs. We may even include new content in them, as we’ve done with Victories, so as to make the purchase worth your while.

Whether you want to spend money on the second edition, or simply print and play the updates, I hope you’ll join me on the journey.

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