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Dovetail Games update - 20th April 2023 (CATAN Console Edition)
Hello folks, We are delighted to share some very exciting news with you about the next stop on the line for Dovetail Games. As of today, Dovetail Games have been purchased and will be joining the talented team at Focus Entertainment, a widely-respected games publisher and developer, based in Paris, France – famous for publishing fabulous experiences including Snowrunner, Cities XXL, Hotel Renovator, and many, many more. They are a big admirer of our games, our communities, and our plans for the future – and we’re delighted to be part of their mission to offer fresh and unique experiences to players around the world. As we transition to becoming part of the larger organisation – which in itself will bring new expertise, new opportunities, and new possibilities – we will ensure that the process is seamless and that you continue to receive the high-quality, immersive products and services that you have come to expect from us, including CATAN® – Console Edition. Focus Entertainment pride themselves on providing their Studios with independence to do what they do best, and we are confident that we will have that same autonomy. We will remain the same DTG you know and love, and we’re looking forward to bringing you all the content we’ve promised – including Helpers, CATAN ® - Console Edition on Switch, and everything else within our Roadmap (and beyond!). Our aim is that everything remains business-as-usual, and that we will surprise and delight you with the high-quality experiences we develop and publish. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for continued support. We hope you’re as excited as we are, and we look forward to you riding alongside us for many years to come. The team at Dovetail Games.
2 months ago
Dovetail Games update - 20th April 2023 (Train Sim World)
Hello folks, We are delighted to share some very exciting news with you about the next stop on the line for Dovetail Games. As of today, Dovetail Games have been purchased and will be joining the talented team at Focus Entertainment [http://focus-entmt.com/], a widely-respected games publisher and developer, based in Paris, France – famous for publishing fabulous experiences including Snowrunner, Cities XXL, Hotel Renovator, and many, many more. They are a big admirer of our games, our communities, and our plans for the future – and we’re delighted to be part of their mission to offer fresh and unique experiences to players around the world. As we transition to becoming part of the larger organisation – which in itself will bring new expertise, new opportunities, and new possibilities – we will ensure that the process is seamless and that you continue to receive the high-quality, immersive products and services that you have come to expect from us, Train Sim World. Focus Entertainment pride themselves on providing their Studios with independence to do what they do best, and we are confident that we will have that same autonomy. We will remain the same DTG you know and love, and we’re looking forward to bringing you all the content we’ve promised – including Peak Forest, the Thameslink Class 700/0 EMU, and everything else within our Roadmap (and beyond!). Our aim is that everything remains business-as-usual, and that we will surprise and delight you with the high-quality experiences we develop and publish. As a thank-you to everyone who has been a part of our journey thus far, and to celebrate our new owners’ country of origin, we are making our French Add-ons available for free on Train Simulator Classic and Train Sim World for a week this May. More details will come when they are available to download. This includes: Train Sim World: * LGV Méditerranée: Marseille-Avignon Route Add-on Train Simulator Classic: * LGV: Marseille – Avignon Route Add-on * LGV Rhône-Alpes & Méditerranée Route Extension Add-on * TGV® Réseau and TGV-RDuplex EMU Add-on We’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for continued support. We hope you’re as excited as we are, and we look forward to you riding alongside us for many years to come. The team at Dovetail Games.
Train Sim World 3 - 2 months ago
CATAN 101 - How Trading Works
Trading is fundamental to CATAN and is an essential tool for all players to better their situation. In this video, we’ll explain the trading process in CATAN – Console Edition. Watch the video or if you prefer feel free to read on, or do both! To start with let’s define the difference between how trading is affected when “Combine build and trade phase” is On or Off. When Combine build and trade phase is on, during your turn you can initiate trades at any time and multiple times during your turn, this is the CATAN experience most players are familiar with. When Combine build and trade phase is off, during your turn, after you have rolled the dice you can initiate trades, you can trade as many times as you like but to progress to the building phase of your turn you need to hold down B or Circle to Finish Trading, you cannot trade again on this turn. There are two ways to Trade in CATAN – Console Edition, Domestic Trade: Trading with other players, and Maritime Trade: Trading with the ports around the outer edge of the island. Domestic Trades. During your turn Press Y or Triangle to initiate a trade. You will see your character at the top and your competitors down the left-hand side. All the resources are displayed and you’ll notice along the top there are 0’s above some of the resources, this is showing what resources you have that you can currently trade with. For the purpose of this example, let’s suppose you need wood and you are willing to trade some sheep for that wood. Highlight the sheep resource and press up on your left joystick or D-pad so a 1 or 2 appears above the sheep in the You Give section, now scroll across to the wood and press down on the left joystick or the d-pad, there will now be a 1 under the wood in the You Receive area. Now hold down A or X to confirm you wish to offer this trade. Down the left you’ll now see responses from the other players, an X means the player has rejected this offer, a question mark means a player has proposed a counter offer and a green tick means a player is willing to accept this trade. I f a player has accepted your offer, press A or X to accept the trade or you can choose to Accept None by pressing B or Circle. Maritime trades. As with Domestic Trades, press Y or Triangle to open the trading menu, once open press R1 to move over to Maritime Trade. Maritime trading is not trading with other players, you can think of it like trading with the bank. As standard to complete a Maritime Trade you will require 4 of any 1 resource to trade for 1 resource of any other type. These odds can be improved by building settlements at ports around the edge of the island, you can see the terms displayed above each port, for example the wood port will provide you with any 1 resource in exchange for 2 wood. Finally, you have the option to opt out of trading altogether. By pressing L3 on your controller you’ll notice a red line appear through your bag underneath your character. This will prevent trades from being offered to you. This can be a useful tool if you are not in a position to trade anything with your competitors, you can toggle this back on at any time by pressing L3 again. That concludes this artilce on how to trade in CATAN – Console Edition, for more videos and tips subscribe to our channel or follow us across our social channels @DTGBoardgames. See you down the road, Catanians [https://linktr.ee/catanconsoleedition]
2 months ago
CATAN - CONSOLE EDITION ROADMAP: APR.11.2023
Welcome Catanians, to the first CATAN – Console Edition Roadmap. Our goal is to have a Roadmap once every three months where we will discuss all things the future of the game. This will include quality-of-life improvements, new features, new content, and more. The roadmap will be broken into three chapters. * Next Turn: Content we expect to release in the next 3 months. * On the Horizon: Content we’re actively developing and will likely come 3-6 months from now * Longest Road: Content that’s in the planning or early stages of development that will likely be coming 6 months plus from now. As with any roadmap, everything we are about to discuss is subject to change and may end up coming later (or, sometimes earlier!) than expected. There is plenty to be excited about so let’s roll on into it! You can watch the video version of the Roadmap here or if you prefer, keep scrolling to read all about it instead. The Lowdown If you’re anything like me and you don’t want to watch a video or read an article and you just like looking at pictures. This picture ↓ gives you an overview of what’s to come. Want more information? Keep scrolling! Next Turn Next turn is content we expect to release in the next 3 months. Since releasing on February 23rd, we have seen loads of fantastic feedback from you, our resident Catanians. We wanted to start things off by talking about some of the suggestions and quality of life changes and improvements we have been working on based on your suggestions. By far the most common suggestion has been for a turn timer in online multiplayer games. We understand the importance of being able to keep games moving - and we want to make sure our version of the Turn Timer is functional, sensible, and customisable. To ensure this is the case we wanted the turn timer to do a few things. 1. It needs to be visually represented in-game so it’s clear for all players how long is left on a turn. 2. We are adding a 3-strike system. If a player fails to complete their turn within the allotted 90 seconds, 3 times, they will be removed from the game and replaced by an AI player. 3. Customisable to give you the freedom to define turn limits when in local games and private online games When joining the Online Multiplayer Queue this 90-second timer system will always be present as default. For local games and private online games via the Join/Create menu, there will be various options for you to customise turn timer limits, giving you options when playing with friends and family! We expect to have the turn timer out around the middle to end of April. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out patch notes on our website, catanconsoleedition.com we have a dedicated section called Your Feedback where we keep you up to date on what we are working on based on your feedback. You can also read these from the in-game news that you can access via Profile on the main menu. As I’m sure you are all aware CATAN is at its core a 3-4 player game, but it can be expanded to cater for up to 5-6 players and that is exactly what we are going to do. This will expand the island of CATAN with an additional 11 terrain hexes. This will come at no extra cost to all players who own either the standard or Deluxe editions of CATAN – Console Edition. We will share lots more details on this as we get closer to it coming to game. On The Horizon On the Horizon is content we’re actively developing and will likely come 3-6 months from now Our first expansion is coming for CATAN – Console Edition in the shape of a Helpers of CATAN Add-on. Some of you may already be familiar with this expansion, but for those who aren’t, Helpers of CATAN will work with the 5-6 player extension of CATAN – Console Edition and adds 12, very helpful new characters who provide special abilities you can use throughout your game. For example, let’s say the robber is on your wheat hex, on your turn before you roll the dice you can use the Digur card – by doing so you can move the robber back to the desert and collect one grain resource from that hex in the process! More information, release dates and all that fun stuff will be revealed at a later date. Longest Road Longest Road is content that’s in the early stages of development that will likely be coming 6 months plus from now. If you were to spend a few minutes perusing our social channels (@dtgboardgames by the way), you will likely spot a common theme in the comments that many, many, many of you have been asking for. And what is that you ask? “Is CATAN – Console Edition coming to Nintendo Switch?”. Well, we are very happy to now be able to say YES. CATAN – Console Edition is coming to Nintendo Switch and is actively in development as we speak by the team at Nomad Games. We’ll have more information and specifics on this in the future but for now, Nintendo Switch players, rejoice in this glorious news. Now as this add-on is some way out, we’re going to be keeping our cards a little closer to our chests, we wouldn’t want any robbers banging on our door. What we can say is that we are working on a LARGE expansion for CATAN – Console Edition and we will hopefully be able to provide you with more details on this in our next Roadmap, three months from now. That’s the end of the road for our first Roadmap, we hope you’re as excited about the future of CATAN – Console Edition as we are. If you aren’t already follow us across our social at @DTGBoardgames to stay up to date with all things CATAN – Console Edition. For now though, see you down the road, Catanians. [https://linktr.ee/catanconsoleedition]
2 months ago
CATAN 101 - Setting Up Your Game
CATAN – Console Edition features various ways for you to play and experience CATAN. In this article we’ll explain what each of these are, how to set up games with your friends and family as well as online games. Watch the video below or if you prefer, you can read the written version below. Offline Games In the Local Game menu, you are presented with two options, Quick Play and Configure Game. Quick Play Quick Play is a single-player experience against 3 AI competitors that gets you straight into the action. The game takes place on the default board layout, characters are randomly selected and all initial settlements and roads are placed for you, the location of the initial settlements and roads will always be the same. This is a great way to learn the game and to test your skills when key initial strategic decisions like where to build your initial settlements and roads are taken away from you! Configure Game Configure Game serves a few purposes. This is where you’d come to set up a local multiplayer game with your friends and family, and you can also set up single-player games against the AI. When entering Configure Game, you’ll notice your name at the top, this is Player One, i.e you. By selecting your name you can change your character, colour, hex frame, and dice skin. You’ll also notice the other three players have an image of a microchip next to their name, this is telling you that currently, they are AI players. If you want to play against AI, make any other changes you’d like and select next. If you are playing together with family or friends, from the Configure Game menu depending on the number of players you have in the room, toggle them from AI to human players, each player can change their character, colour, frame, dice, and hex frame. If there are three of you, you can choose to either play as a three or include one AI player, a minimum of 3 players is required. You only need one controller to play but if you have more, you can use up to four. Once all your players are set up, select Next. From here you have a few options. If you select Variable Set up the map will change to Random and the 19 terrain tiles and 18 number tokens will be randomly generated, if it is off, you’ll play on the default board layout or if you are a Deluxe Edition owner, you can select one of the 5 Championship Board layouts. Combine build and trade phase When combine build and trade phase is toggled on, all players can initiate trades throughout their turn at any time. This is the experience most Catanians are familiar with. When combine build and trade phase is toggled off, on your turn after you’ve rolled and the relevant resources have been delivered you are able to trade, once trading has been completed you must Finish Trading to move onto the building phase of your turn, you cannot trade again on this turn. Enable Second Screen When you toggle this option on, a QR code will appear on screen. On your smartphone or tablet, open the camera app, focus the camera on the QR code, and click the link that appears on the screen. When the link has opened, select your character and your resources and development cards will be displayed, keeping them hidden from your opponents. When you are ready, press Start! Online Multiplayer In the Online Multiplayer menu you are presented with 2 options, Join Public Queue and Join/Create Private Game. Join Public Queue Join Public Queue will match you against up to 3 other players online, you will either join another player’s lobby or will become the host of the game. When you are the host, other players will be able to join your lobby and you will be responsible for starting the game once everyone has readied up. You’ll be presented with a menu that looks just like the Configure Game screen. After you’ve chosen your player, colour, dice and hex frame, select Next to move onto the final stage of the game set up. Here you can decide to toggle on or off Variable Set up and Combine Build and Trade Phase, you’ll be able to start the game once all players in the lobby have hit Ready and are highlighted green. Only the host can start the game by selecting, start. Join/Create Private Game Join/Create Private Game is where you can play with your friends online. If you are creating a game or joining a game the first thing you’ll see is a pop us asking you to enter a name, if you are creating a game this will become the lobby name your friends will use to join. Think of it like a unique password for you lobby! From here the menu is very similar to what you’d see when setting up a local game. That concludes this acrticle on the different ways to play CATAN – Console Edition! See you down the road, Catanians [ [https://linktr.ee/catanconsoleedition]]( https://linktr.ee/catanconsoleedition)
2 months ago