Dear friends, we're proud to present the second episode of our developer diaries.
Part 1: What's happening right now?
While one part of the team is working on improving Skirmish after our recent testing (our previous blog article was about this mode, so check it out if you missed it!), the other part is preparing the next update. So let's talk about that!
The updates described below are planned for release before July 10, 2016. And don't forget that Skirmish will be available next week.
Multiplayer + Historical campaigns + New economics
The main menu will be replaced with the globe you've already seen in the historical campaign in Blitzkrieg 3. After some serious revisions, it'll be a strategic screen where, like a real commander, you will be able to plan and perform operations:
- Secondary historical battles (side missions);
- Main decisive battles from campaign stages;
- Multiplayer battles (Assault, Skirmish 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3).
To complete a stage of the war and move on to the next period, you must win a Decisive Battle. Secondary battle goals will be optional, and completing them will provide various rewards:
- Units;
- Experience;
- Commanders' trust
After wining a decisive battle, you can always go back and fight the earlier periods of the war (both in the single-player campaign and in multiplayer).
But there's one small hitch. Completing a decisive battle to advance through the story requires us to complete all of the historical missions. Unfortunately, we haven't completed them all; by the time these features will be released, we'll only have the German campaign ready. So, for now it's going to work like this: if, for example, you're playing as the USSR, you'll control the Soviet army in all battles, but when you start a historical mission, your units will be temporarily replaced by German ones.
You might ask: why introduce this system now if not everything is ready yet? Well, because we can't test our new economics right before the game's release, so we need to do it now :)
By the way, we're going to introduce things smoothly, so there will be a "transition period." During this period, players will have a specific amount of resources for use purchasing an army, based on their rating and lots of other stats. Those who choose not to buy troops will get a standard set of units. So there's no point in buying a huge army just hoping it'll be transferred into the new economic system :)
By the end, we'll have unique armies, and each individual unit will become more valuable, ultimately increasing the value of battles.
Player's Base
The globe will be the first thing you see in the game (unless you've already chosen a faction when you first launched Blitzkrieg 3). Thus the player's base will also be located on the globe.
You can't build and upgrade buildings on your part of the battlefield anymore, but you can raise defences using fortifications and units you have received for combat achievements.
The base itself is now a decoration which reflects the player's progress, both with the appearance of its buildings and by showing your best troops marching in front of your HQ.
Thus your combat achievements will be visible by looking at your base.
And now, as usual, a few words from the development team about their most recent week of work.
Captain Morgan, Lead Programmer:
We've greatly improved pathfinding. You'll be able to see this for yourself after the next update. This doesn't mean we've stopped working on it, but we've achieved a whole new level of quality.
Before:
After:
We've now got a lot less standing around and passing through things now :)
Vadim, Lead Tester:
For the QA team, this week was The Battle of the Bugs. Almost every bug was looked into, all in the framework of a friendly discussion...
Then we followed that up with regular reminders so that our people would stay focused on fixing the bugs.
Sasha, Lead Technical Artist:
Part 2: Player Suggestions
We are still discussing player suggestions. Today on our table we've got a suggestion by Lunar_Daemon from the official forum: “I suggest increasing the time that effects like immobilisation and optics damage affect vehicles up to at least 1 minute.”
Let's imagine we've incorporated your idea. Which, by the way, is actually pretty great – but would only fit different basic game conditions.
So, let's imagine that the player may lose an important part of their army for a minute (for example, a heavy tank which is essential for their assault). In that case, they'll most likely stop the assault and just wait around for a minute.
So we'll need to introduce additional countermeasures (otherwise, the player will face an uncontrollable gameplay situation). Let's say we add something like a repair truck into the game. By doing this we're forcing the player to always have this truck with them. And forcing players to do things is bad. Especially on Blitzkrieg 3's scale. If this truck were just a little tool in a big army (i.e. if our gameplay was based on different principles), we could do that. But we've got to remind you that our armies aren't that big, and our system for acquiring new units increases the value of each new unit on the map.
So we arrive at the basic principle of this game. It's meant to go at a moderate pace. In order to significantly increase the duration of a damage effect, we'd have to change lots of other things. We wouldn't be able to simply make it last longer. So this apparently doesn't fit into our current plans well; if we did make changes like this, developing the game might take forever. If you have any ideas about possible countermeasures we could introduce to balance out this kind of change, please share them with us in the commentary section :)
Part 3: The Next Episode
To make the wait for the next episode (which will be centered around historical campaigns) a little more interesting, here's a list of battles that Soviet troops will be fighting in Blitzkrieg 3: Luga, Rzhev, Sevastopol, Stalingrad, Kursk, Warsaw, Berlin.
What do you think: which battles will we introduce for the USA and Germany?