Hey everyone!
Now that the year is coming to a close, I just want to talk a bit about what we have planned for the full release of Fire & Maneuver, which should be around February 2023.
tldr: We are adding several new scenarios, new campaigns, a grand campaign system, improving and polishing the battle and campaign systems, adding attack/defense game mode, implementing huge optimization changes, overhauling cavalry, overhauling artillery, adding a ranked mode, improving ui/animations as well as sounds, and increasing our map count to 100! All of this will be done before we declare our game FINISHED.
I'll first start off by saying that we are aware of frustrating bugs with the new cosmetic system (namely, outfits being removed even after unlock) as well as the battle and campaign systems. We have two large updates remaining before F&M comes out of Early Access, and bug-fixing will be a major part of each update (especially our final update).
Besides that, we're also aware at the lack of content and unpolished content that is in the game. There are only a handful of scenario battles and they aren't very fun. The campaigns aren't very balanced and there is only one free Campaign with the game. There are also just 23 maps in the game, which is practically nothing when the game is trying to represent battles from America to France to Italy to Crimea. The battles are laggy, and cavalry and artillery aren't very fun to use. Oh, and the playerbase is small which only exacerbates the problems with the game's lack of singleplayer content... We have solutions to all of these issues.
Scenarios
The scenario battles currently featured in Fire & Maneuver include:
- Williamsburg (ACW DLC)
- Milazzo
- Malakoff
Scenarios can be a fun way to jump straight into a match on a historic battlefield and that's why we'll be expanding the scenario system.
You can see here that scenarios will now come in sets of three, allowing the player to play series of battles sequentially. The Expedition of the Thousand, Fall of an Empire, and Allied Incursion scenario packs all planned to be free, but the Western & Eastern Theaters, as well as the Blood & Iron and Empire of the Sun packs will be DLC. You may notice that the Blood & Iron pack is under a DLC called "Wars of Unification Pack." We are not actually creating a new DLC for this pack, but rather, adding it to an existing DLC (Franco-Prussian War Music Pack) and renaming that DLC to have more content in it. Currently, we are planning to create only one additional DLC for the launch of F&M which will be centered around the Boshin War in Japan and include two new factions. More information will be available about that early next year...
Finally, we included a few one-off scenario battles like Paris, Gettysburg, and Solferino, which we wanted to include as single scenarios.
Campaigns
I won't go into too much detail about the F&M Campaigns, you can read about the upcoming changes to campaigns in this post: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1679290/view/3405310798875486932?l=english
The biggest change we're making is zooming further out geographically, to give players more of an open sandbox to wage a larger military campaign. Something I did not mention in my last post about campaigns is that we have been working on a GRAND CAMPAIGN MODE that spans Europe and Northern Africa. You can see the early sketch for how we plan on dividing provinces here:
Players will be able to assume control of all countries displayed on that map, including minor nations. We have enlisted the help of prominent community members in the F&M Discord to help us create over 100 new unit cards for all of these minor nations, and they're doing an excellent job. I am very gracious to have their help, they are "Badbrix," "Mauzer," "Ocean," and "That Belgian Guy." The unit cards were originally created by Nico Vico, an excellent artist- but there's no way he would be able to finish 100 new unit cards in time for our full release!
The last thing I'll say is that I do plan on adding some more tutorials about how the campaign works, but considering that we're reworking so much of how the campaigns work, I will be holding off until release day.
Battles
The next two updates will be centered around first reforming cavalry, and then reforming artillery. Our next update will be titled "The Ride of the Valkyries" and is set to release on December 8th. With it, there will be changes to every nations cavalry rosters, with the skirmishing and efficiency trait applied to many more cavalry units. This is because all cavalry units will receive new formations and so will finally have a use for efficiency. The skirmishing trait is also undergoing another rework which makes it more applicable to more cavalry units. Our goal with this update is to make light and heavy cavalry more distinct, and to make light cavalry, in particular, more predictable.
Our artillery update will also add in new formations, but we can't give out too much information on this just yet. We are also considering giving artillery a new "suppression" mechanic which will allow it to pin down enemy's cohesion from afar, making artillery bombardments far more useful.
Something I am very excited about are all the new maps coming to F&M. I (Griffin) have personally designed every map and will continue to do so until I reach 100 maps. If you're curious to see which maps I plan on making, you can take a look here.
This is just a preview here
Maps in red I plan on remastering.
Maps in green are already in the game.
Maps in purple are finished but aren't in the game just yet.
Maps in light grey I am in the middle of working on and will be in the next update.
Maps in dark grey (Boshin War) are maps that I can't work on yet until we've finished all of the environmental assets.
You may notice at the bottom of the image above that the Total Map Count has been brought up to 41 from the current 23 maps in game. My goal is to reach 50 total maps (more than doubling the map count) for our next update. And in the update after that, to hit 100.
It goes without saying that a lot of polish needs to be done on UI, sounds, and animations. We will be dedicating time to this in January or February, but will not be making many polishing improvements until the game is solid and all major bugs have been addressed.
Modes
Recently we just rolled out capture zones in Quick Match and we will be extending this mode to Ranked. Ranked mode is going to roll out either in the next update or the update after, and will come with a leaderboard!
In addition to that, we are adding a new Attack & Defense game mode to custom battles, which should be a lot of fun to play on in the historical battlefields (like Gettysburg). This can be used alongside our multi-day battle system, so players could theoretically fight a 3-day long attack & defense Gettysburg battle. There are some other quality of life features coming to battles that improve on the UI, but we'll speak more about them in the changelog for the next update. We are hoping to eventually make the Attack & Defense game mode the default for Campaign battles so that if an enemy army attacks your fort, you are actually dynamically defending the area.
Bugs & Optimization
There isn't too much to say about this besides that we are very aware of the bugs in F&M and are working very very hard to fix them. You will need to be patient however, as the bulk of the polishing and bugfixing will come with our final update early next year. That said, we are working on making sure any gamebreaking bugs are eradicated for the upcoming update. In the month of October, our small development team completed 79 new tasks (including features/bugs/polish, etc). In November, we've completed 153 (so far). We are working incredibly hard, around the clock, to polish Fire & Maneuver and release it as a fun and polished experience. We very much appreciate all of your support, and the recent positive reviews acknowledging the improvements we've made are very encouraging.
As far as optimization goes, it's always been our goal to get F&M to run on as many computers as possible. We would like to eventually get F&M on Mac & Linux, but there are no promises yet. As far as FPS drops go, we have implemented a new change to how our foliage sprites (tree/bushes) are rendered, and on our development build this has resulted in an FPS increase of anywhere between 10 and 30 frames. This should be a massive boost in performance for anyone playing on maps full of forests! Past that, we are looking into improving the way the unit sprites are rendered, but that will prove to be a harder challenge.
AI
AI is going to see some large changes, but mostly in the final F&M update. We are working now to allow players to finally change the difficulty of the AI, as well as edit its aggression levels. This will allow you to fine-tune the AI you're playing against to recreate historical scenarios in custom battles. It will also add variety in campaign battles, with different AI armies having different levels of aggression in battles. This will most likely be rolled out in our final update, but we'll see!
Playerbase
The player-base has been pretty low recently, but this hasn't discouraged us at all. All of the marketing money for F&M has yet to be spent and is going to be heavily pushed for our FULL RELEASE, when the game is finished, the way we intended for it to be played. To celebrate our Full Release, I will be regularly streaming F&M on my channel (The Armchair Historian) and setting up streams with other gaming youtubers. In addition to this, we'll begin regularly hosting tournaments and events again in our Discord: https://discord.gg/fireandmaneuver. Right now, I'd rather put 100% of our time into finishing the game instead of dividing it amongst hosting events and tournaments as well as development. We are currently all working full-time on F&M, the same amount of hours (if not more) as we did during the actual development.
This is all for now, I hope it's been informative!
Griffin