Hello commander!
We are back again, this time with a smaller, but hopefully warmly welcomed new Steel Division 2 feature, specifically created for the Army General strategic campaign mode. Let’s welcome the new Auto Deployment tool to the stage. What does it do? It will speed up your deployment phase by automatically placing your units (and put down those critical but time-consuming defenses) in your deployment area at the beginning of a tactical battle.
How does it work? Read on!
The New Auto Deployment Tool
We noticed that when entering a battle in one of our Army General campaigns, the deployment of your troops and units could get repetitive. This repetition would get boring pretty quick, and as game designers that’s an experience we don’t like! That’s why, behind the scenes, the team has been working on a new Auto Deployment tool. This new feature should speed up the clock and ease the strain of any repeated mouse-clickety finger action experienced by a player during the deployment phase.
We had two objectives in mind with the new tool: on the one hand, we wanted to decrease the amount of time you spend in the deployment phase, on the other hand, we looked for a way to limit or remove the repetition of placing your units at the start of a game.
As with all our new features, we are set at opening up Steel Division 2, making the game more accessible for newcomers while still giving veterans the option to ignore a new feature if they wish to do so.
How does it work?
The principle of the Auto Deployment feature is simple: the AI takes over placing your units, vehicles and defenses, putting them down in the best and most tactically-sound location. Under the hood, the new tool uses exactly the same algorithms an AI opponent does when placing its units.
Now players can hit a button, and voilà, deployment complete.
If you are not happy with the initial automatic placement of your troops or structures, you can right-click on a unit. This will allow you to manually move it, which you can reposition or replace with another unit if you so wish.
An alternative way is to place your most important units yourself, say your Tiger tanks or your bunkers, and then click auto-deploy to allow the AI to finish the deployment of the rest of your battlegroup for you.
Not only that, but we have also redesigned the interface shown at the beginning of a battle. Now it should be much easier to see which players and divisions are being present at the start of an Army General game.
That’s it for this week
As always, keep an eye out on Steam and Eugen forums, or social channels (Facebook and Twitter). You can also join us on our Discord channel or Reddit page.
See you on the battlefield, commander!