Hi everyone!
You might remember that our last update was announcing that we’ve started beta testing. Now that we’ve had some time to let the beta run, we think it’s worth sharing how it’s been going!
As expected, there’s been a lot of bug-stomping going on as the first builds hit the ground, and we’ve been hard at work getting the game running more smoothly. With our small group of testers, we’ve gotten some great feedback on the balance of the game and have been taking steps to make it even better, from control improvements, bug fixes, AI tweaks and new features. So, let’s take a peek.
Naturally, one of the hardest challenges has been striking a balance between conventional warfare and nuclear weapons. Needless to say, nukes can be a bit overpowering, so it’s been an ongoing process, but the new addition of CBRN defence tools, a refined ‘accuracy’ system for ballistic missiles and a complete overhaul of the chemical weapon system should help swing the balance back to where it needs to be, and also add a bit of historical flair and realism to the game.
By popular demand, chemical weapons have been rerolled as a way to quickly dispatch and slow down enemy armies, at the cost of being indiscriminate, causing collateral damage and also turning you into a bad person.
We’ve also introduced multi-selection for units! Fans of the first ICBM might have noticed that you could originally only select one unit at a time. While this was good enough for the original and fit well with the style and tactics of the game (it’s not exactly good form to order every single one of your silos to attack the same target, one nuke will usually do it, for example) the sequel demands a little more finesse, with the increased scope of units, and especially with the advent of mobile land units and conventional warfare. To that end, we’ve implemented unit multi-selection, and there’s plenty of ways to use it! You can click and drag a box around the units you want, or select all of a particular unit type, add or subtract units to a group, and even assign groups or individual units to hotkeys. This can be handy if, for example, you want to move a few army groups and their supporting elements at once, or if you want a silo with a 25 megaton ICBM on speed-dial if the enemy tries anything funny.
Multi-select in action. Take note of all the units attached to the unit menu. You can quickly select individual units within the group and issue specific orders to them on a whim.
On top of that, there’s also been plenty of smaller, less dramatic tweaks and fixes. We could talk about how a line in the 4th tutorial was slightly reworded to be clearer, or how the engine handles complex modifiers is slightly different, and a dozen other things that are utterly uninteresting, but just know that we’ve been keeping busy making the game better.
I fixed a typo. Whoop-de-doo.
So, where do we go from here? After our latest patch drops, we’ll be able to get more feedback and fix any major issues that arise, and once things are more stable, we should be able to expand our pool of testers and start poking around at the multiplayer side of the game and make sure everything’s running smoothly. And while our testers are doing that, we’ll be dipping our toes into the campaign…
So, that’s it for this update. We’ve had our hands full keeping up with all the feedback we’ve been getting, and the game is getting all the better for it. We’ll see you again when it’s even better!