Source: UbiBlog

Rainbow Six: Siege boasts a thriving community of online players, and the game’s overall health is always chief among the development team’s priorities. As such, the team has made the decision to focus on improving the overall Rainbow Six: Siege experience over the next three months with a series of improvements and changes called Operation Health.

Operation Health is a hard push toward tech improvements and bug fixes, and it introduces a new three-stage deployment process for updates, with new features first rolling out on a Technical Test Server, then on PC, then on consoles. (There’s also a new on/off feature in case a rollback is needed). Because of this new focus, the planned Hong Kong season will be pushed back to Season Three in August, while November’s Season Four will feature South Korea. Poland will no longer have its own season in Year Two, but its GROM Operators will be available at the start of seasons three and four. The number of new maps has also been reduced to three, and includes the most recent map set in Spain.

Read on…

A Tsar is Born. Can You Bring Third Rome to Glory?

For 500 years, the princes of Russia have kept the faith. Through civil wars and Mongol conquest, the word of God has not just survived, but has united our people. Those princes who embrace the church will find glory, those who turn their back will be cast to dust. There have been two Romes, and both have fallen. Muscovy is the third.

There shall be no fourth.

Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio are thrilled to announce Europa Universalis IV: Third Rome. The first immersion pack for the best-selling historical strategy game introduces a wealth of region-specific content, and takes a deeper look at one of the greatest powers of the early modern era – Russia. Russian cultured nations will find new interactions for their government and the Orthodox Patriarchate, deepening the experience of playing this rich and fascinating region.

Russia now gets two unique governments, with special abilities that allows them to tighten their grip on power. Use your administrative ability to reduce provincial autonomy. Call on your diplomatic resources to suppress incipient revolts. Use your military resources to quickly recruit streltsy units for your army. Rule with the iron fist that comes with a divine blessing.

Features of Europa Universalis IV: Third Rome include:

• Tsardoms and Principalities: New ranks of Russian government with new abilities and, for Tsars, strong bonuses including the right to claim entire States – not just provinces
• Iconography: Commission great religious icons for the Orthodox Church, boosting your empire’s power depending on the saint you choose to revere
• Patriarchs: Consecrate highly developed provinces with Patriarchs, adding to the authority of the Orthodox Church, but for a cost.
• Streltsy: Special Russian soldiers that excel in combat, but raise the cost of stabilizing your empire
• Siberian Frontier: Russian nations can slowly colonize uninhabited border regions, with no fear of native uprisings
• New Graphics: Includes three full unit packs and new portraits for Eastern Europe.

As usual, Third Rome will be accompanied by a free update to Europa Universalis IV, available for everyone who owns the base game.

Watch the Europa Universalis IV: Third Rome Announcement Trailer here.

Without any doubt, the United Kingdom as we know today, couldn’t exist without the conflict known as the “English Civil War”. For 9 long years, from 1642 to 1651 the country saw two major factions fighting each other to the end not just for supremacy, but to build the foundations of the new English Society for centuries to come.

Starting with inconclusive battles and with practically untrained troops, this conflict ended with the establishment of probably one of the best armies England ever had – the New Model Army – and with the initial structure of a Constitutional Monarchy that remains a part of England to this day.

Even though Parliament only achieved final supremacy in the management of government affairs 40 years later during the Glorious Revolution, the seeds of change which ultimately lead to the creation of the English Kingdom similar to its present form, can be directly linked to the battlefields of Edgehill and

The new turn-based grand strategy game developed by Ageod and published by Matrix Games aims to recreate this bitter and decisive war with historical precision. With a detailed selection of the historical units of the conflict you will find the Covenanters, Newcastle’s whitecoats, Cromwell’s Ironside’s, the New Model Army or the Cornish legendary infantry.

Players can build and manage their armies, throughout the campaigns set in the various theaters of operations like Yorkshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Bristol, Lincolnshire, and more.The game includes an innovative card system that lets you trigger general “war” events such as the Commission of Array, Recruitment, Break Blockade.

More Historical Events are triggered throughout the game giving the player crucial decision points. These cover anything from the seize of a city, The arrival of the Queen to Covenanters intervention.

Watch the English Civil War release trailer here.

By Joe Evans @ Legit Reviews

Corsair has added yet one more product to their ever growing gaming peripheral repertoire with their launch of the GLAIVE RGB Gaming Mouse. If you’re like me, the word glaive drew a big blank so I had to look it up to find out that it simply means ‘sword’. Being that a sword is an instrument of warfare and many games are combat based, it seems as an appropriate a appellation as any. It also follows the seemingly growing trend of titling it in all caps which is probably some clever marketing trick to make the product stand out in a listing or triggering some memory mnemonic in prospective customers. Maybe it’s none of the above and I’m simply reading too much into it. Either way, we have our hot hands on one to see if it meets one of their taglines of “Winning never felt so good”. Sword in hand, we plunge ahead.

Read The Review Here

Check out these latest hardware announcements for today from around the web. Also included are some hardware news bits, and on some days, a few rumors tossed in for good measure. Click on the links below to read the official press release, visit the products web page, or to an independent news source.

• ZOTAC Announces GeForce GTX 1080 Ti ArcticStorm with Full-cover Waterblock
• Raijintek Intros the Leto Tower-type CPU Cooler
• New AMD 16 Core Ryzen Whitehaven Engineering Samples Surface
• Linksys EA9300 Tri-band MU-MIMO Router Unveiled For $300
• NETGEAR Nighthawk X10 R9000 Tri-Band Router Supports 4600Mbps
• BIOSTAR Intros Radeon RX 580 8GB Dual Cooling Graphics Card
• Inno3D Squeezes a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Into a Single Slot

The public beta phase of the v1.12 update (the companion to the upcoming “Chains Of War” DLC pack) has been concluded, and the “Gold” version is now going through the production paces. We have already covered most of the new major features in the DLC, such as communications disruption, aircraft damage and the new weapon types. Today we are looking at arguably the most anticipated new feature of v1.12: Cargo, amphib and airdrop operations.

About Chains of War:

20 minutes into the future, a spark erupts in the Korean peninsula that will lead to a theater wide conflagration embroiling the entire Western Pacific and drag all major powers into it. With nothing less at stake than control over the world’s busiest trade routes and containment of the emergent superpower, the Pacific becomes the world’s stage – and the players are getting down to brass tacks, for this is the game that no side can afford to lose.

The geopolitical nightmares of the new century: The creators of the award-winning “Northern Inferno” shift their gaze from the Atlantic to the Pacific and bring into focus the challenges of the early 21st century: The ever-present tensions between North and South Korea reach a boiling point, while China and the US vie for control of the strategic choke points and bases through which the world’s commerce functions. Will the US maintain its strategic pre-eminence in the most important world theater or will China complete its ascend to superpower status?

The new gears of war: Think the new war in the Pacific will be just like the 1940s but with better bullets? Think again! All-new systems and technologies radically change the face of modern high-level conflict. Network and cyber attacks pull apart carefully constructed communications networks, leaving forces in the field blind and separated from their consorts. Electromagnetic pulses delivered from high-altitude nuclear detonations or tactical EMP weapons fry vulnerable electronics, disarming powerful units in a split-second. Massive anti-ship ballistic missiles threaten to turn aircraft carriers into sinking, burning hulks. Railguns deliver accurate, punishing fire at long ranges, challenging the post-WW2 reign of guided missiles. Anti-satellite weapons disrupt the critical communications & intelligence nodes orbiting high in the stars. High-energy lasers burn their targets with intense beams invisible to the naked eye. Are you ready for the intricacies of 21st century war?

By Thomas Soderstrom @ Tom’s Hardware

The liquid CPU cooling market has typically been divided into low-cost/closed-loop and high-priced/open-loop configurations, but manufacturers have attempted to bring forward products that were supposed to combine the best of both worlds over the past few years. Buyers of factory-filled open loops have been able get all the convenience of a leak-free factory assembly plus the option to open it later to add components. Yet there was never a best-of-both-worlds compromise on price, because those factory-filled loops deployed premium-priced components.

Fractal Design presents potential solutions in its 2x 120mm Celsius S24 and 3x 120mm Celsius S36 kits. We got our hands on the two-fan version in time for a launch-day review.

Read The Review Here

Source: TechPowerUp!

NVIDIA has released an update to its GeForce Experience application that is sure to be loved by streamers and gamers alike who previously found ShadowPlay support on Vulkan and OpenGL games to be lacking. Version 3.6 of the program adds official support to games that make use of these renderers. Screenshot, video, and broadcast functions that Shadowplay enables are enhanced by the addition of support for these APIs, which means you can now use ShadowPlay with a press of a hotkey to record and stream your Doom and Minecraft gameplay at 4K 60fps.

Other improvements include a unified Broadcast screen and a newly revamped Video and Screenshot upload interface: YouTube and Twitch streamers can now control broadcast options from a unified screen, and log in to all services from there as well. NVIDIA has also worked some improvements to its GeForce Experience Gallery, by adding an upload history screen that displays all prior uploads and locations. You now also have the option of instantly jumping to the file location of a screenshot or video in Windows Explorer through a new button.

You can download the new GeForce Experience Version 3.6 from the official GeForce Experience webpage.

Check out these latest hardware announcements for today from around the web. Also included are some hardware news bits, and on some days, a few rumors tossed in for good measure. Click on the links below to read the official press release, visit the products web page, or to an independent news source.

• Corsair Launches Dominator Platinum Special Edition Torque DDR4 Memory
• Lian Li Announces ROG-Certified PC-O11WGX Now with Accessory Bundle and PCIe Riser
• Fractal Design Announces the Celsius Series AIO Liquid CPU Coolers – VIDEO
• AMD Confirms Press Conference for Computex 2017 – Vega is (Almost) Here
• EVGA Gives Away Unigine Superposition Advanced to ELITE Members
• MSI Teases Upcoming High-End Motherboard – Possibly X299 Chipset Based
• BYKSKI Offers Waterblock for Sapphire RX580 NITRO+
• ASUS Intros the VG275Q 27-inch Gaming Monitor
• Cooler Master Introduces the MasterBox Lite 5 Chassis
• MSI and SteelSeries Present the World’s First Motherboard with PrismSync and GameSense Integration
• Deepcool Launches Captain EX RGB CPU Coolers with LED Lighting
• Gigabyte Teases AORUS M.2 SSD Thermal Guard

The awesome firepower of an AC-47’s miniguns was on full display when an Australian journalist bummed a ride with a “Spooky” crew.

By Steve Birdsall @ Historynet.com

In 1967 a blackened, burned-out wreck lay near the minefield on the perimeter at Bien Hoa Air Base in South Vietnam. It was just one of hundreds of American aircraft lost to enemy action, but there was something special about this one.

The airplane was a “Spooky,” an AC-47 gunship. It couldn’t seem to hold a coat of paint, so they called it The Leper, but it had logged one of the best in-commission records of any aircraft in the U.S. Seventh Air Force. The Leper had started out as a Douglas C-47 transport, serial no. 43-48356, that left the United States for Britain on August 5, 1944, to serve in another air war long ago. Between battles it had racked up time as a VC-47 with Logistics Command and Air Defense Command. In September 1965, Tactical Air Command sent the transport to Eglin Field in Florida to be modified as a side-firing gunship.

Read on…