Part 1: What's happening right now?
Right now we are working on a big update (which we wrote about in the previous episode of the blog), which will integrate all the elements of the game together. As the work hums along, we would like to share some of the unpublished facts about the historical campaign.
Special Operations Units
You experience the war as a special forces commander, which means your role, although local, is crucial for the success of the whole battlefront. While the general forces are attacking (or defending), your units will turn the tide of the battle, implementing lighting war (Blitzkrieg) tactics.
Many battles will be fought side by side with the regular troops. Occasionally, some of their units will be put under your command due to the high priority of the operations entrusted to you.
Your mission as the special forces commander is to do whatever is possible and more to fulfil the orders that you receive, whatever they may be.
Germany
The German campaign will be the first out of the three to become available and will be released no later than July 10. It will comprise the following key battles:
- Operation Fall Weiss (September 1, 1939) - already available in the game!
- Arras (May 21, 1940) - already available in the game!
- North Africa (March 31, 1941) - already available in the game!
- March on Daugavpils (June 1941) - already available in the game!
- Alamein (October-November 1942) - the mission of your task force here is to attack a British supply base far behind enemy lines. Your goal is to distract the British and to strip their troops from the supplies they need for the offensive. You will be greatly outnumbered by the British, but you can rely on the support of Rommel’s retreating Panzer Army Africa.
- 3rd Sevastopol Offensive (June 7 – July 4, 1942) - supported by heavy vehicles, your task force has to break through to the shore of Severnaya Bay and ensure fire adjustment for the siege artillery on the mooring areas to prevent the Soviet command from transferring ammunition and reinforcements to Sevastopol.
- Ardennes Attack (December 1944) - backed by heavy vehicles and jet aircraft, your squad must act behind the American lines, destroying HQs and supply bases.
Of course, this list of missions is far from complete. There will be a whole series of additional battles, and we will try to tell you about them in one of the next episodes of the Development Blog.
After our forced march to the update containing all these missions is complete, we still have a few issues to solve. The thing is, by the time the German campaign becomes available, not all the historical chronicles and cutscenes (plot-related videos rendered by the game engine) will be completed. We are planning to add them a little later.
Also, we have scheduled our time to adjust the difficulty and the duration of missions based on players’ reviews after the update (see more in Part 3 of this post).
USSR
We have already announced the list of the main Soviet missions, so in this section some (stereotypically wintry) screenshots will speak for us.
Allies
For starters, we can confirm that we are working on missions set in the jungles of Southeast Asia. They are at a very early stage of development right now, so we will show them a little later.
“The Dora Mission”
The Dora mission included in the Strategic and Deluxe editions will be added once the work on the global campaign is done.
All we can say for now is that it will tell the story of one of the conflicts near Leningrad.
And now, as usual, a few words from the development team about their most recent week of work.
Vadim, Lead Tester:
After spending a very long time with non-stop testing.
Sergey, lead community manager:
Part 2: Player Suggestions
We continue our tradition of ripping apart reviewing players’ suggestions. Today we have a suggestion by Sam , from the official forum: he would like to be able to “get revenge.”
This idea isn’t new, but it’s still very good. We will definitely go back to it and consider all the pros and cons once we deal with the social functions in the game. The chance that we will implement this in the game is rather high, but we will need to decide its priority in relation to the priority of other social features.
Part 3: The Next Episode
To continue our glorious tradition of interacting with the game community, we have launched a poll for version 0.8.5. In the next episode, we will tell you how the opinion polls work – how the surveys are designed and conducted.
In the meantime, to emphasise the importance of your vote, we'd like to remind you what we have done after previous polls: we’ve improved the campaign missions, multiplayer, and launched both Assault PvP and Skirmish modes.
So please take part in our polls! :)