Welcome aboard Captain,
Welcome to the third entry to our current diary reboot series. Captain. Last week, we talked about the changes we are making to the qualities of the men under your command. This week, we'll be talking about the equipment your men can get to improve their chances in combat.
First of all, your crew is getting a glow-up after all these years! In addition to a series of mouth shapes and eyebrows options for the character generator to pick from, we are also adding new period-authentic clothing options and changing the effects of the existing ones to fit the new system.
Previously, we had the problem where it wasn't clear what effect clothing had, and to what extent. That will be fixed in this update, with each clothing item giving a specific increase to certain character attributes, and a decrease in some cases. This also indeed means that the Binoculars will have a gameplay effect after all this time.
In addition, clothing options will now have an associated cost, so no more free armors for your entire crew. However, these costs will be modest and the attribute boosts should more than make up for it.
Last, but not least, we are also adding new handheld weapons; namely the M1919 Machine Gun and Rifle Grenade Launcher. The M1919 is a more expensive upgrade over the BAR, giving you decent anti-aircraft and soft surface target firepower, while the Rifle Grenade Launcher is a cheaper alternative to the Bazooka, lobbing explosive grenades.
Oh, and Sun Sensitive characters will also wear sunglasses, so be on the lookout for those cool sailors!
A feature that was commonly asked for by the community of our Captains was the ability to prioritize guns for Gunners; so you could assign gun positions as particularly high priority for your gunners to occupy. We're happy to say that this will be implemented!
Finally, we are adding the Attack Transport, a heavily armed landing craft that will find its way to many assault groups. A better armed and better armored sister to the Coastal Tankers, the Attack Transports will also carry more supplies for you to plunder.
The design goal for this unit is to add some additional RP rewards to assault groups, so playing for defense doesn't feel unrewarding, which was a common complaint we have received from some of our Captains. The previous addition of the Coastal Bombard was also meant to serve this purpose, and the Attack Transport is here to help that further.
So while not exactly a flashy unit, we are hoping for them to be interesting enough to fight using early game weapons while improving upon a small niche of units. Oh, and this is only one of the variants of this ship; there is another variant with less reward and a nasty surprise up its sleeve! Do you feel lucky, Captain?
You can see most things we have talked about here on the Experimental Branch update tomorrow. Due to time constraints, the gunner priority feature will not make it to the Experimental Build patch tomorrow, but you can expect to see it in the game before too long, most likely next week.
That will be all for now,
Captain,
T.T.