You can tell from the big screenshot below that all the game elements are in. That means it’s game on… finally.

If you’ve been following this blog thinking “is this thing ever going to happen?” well, perhaps you were not alone. Moving the game to our own 3D engine (written in python!) was difficult and, at times, scary. We’ve completed it though, and I’m happy with the results.

I understand there will be people who take issue with 3D presentation as such. Feel free to unload in the comments 🙂 though obviously we’re way beyond the point of no return now.

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Playing a full game turn is now within our sights, save for the plus-sized hurdle that has to be dealt with first: enemy unit visibility. The game now features Fog of War, so all the game rules need to be re-checked for visibility. Moves and attacks will obviously change FoW, but there are also new mechanics like air reconnaissance, and HQ abilities play an important role as well.

But even before that, there’s the basic question of who actually sees what.

For example, in the screenshot below, I’m playing as the Allies, and any Axis units in FoW are hidden from me. Once the game ends though, I can watch the replay (history mode) and, in the replay, I do want to see what the opponent was doing behind FoW. So, the FoW overlay is still turned ON in replay, but the enemy units are not hidden any more. Continue reading →

We’re in that happy place where you put together a bunch of existing, but previously disconnected pieces and they all start working together seamlessly.

We have a front line now. Graphically, this is nothing new, as the front line renders in much the same way as the movement boundary. However, previously, we did not know where the front line was, as we were still working on the game state. So it took us maybe two hours between realization that hey, we can now add this, and seeing it live in the game. I could get used to days like that…

We’ve improved on hills, which were the least readable type of terrain in UoC, and not much better in the new game either. The new version is a big improvement but I’d still bet this is not the last we hear of hills. We’ve also added rail, as the new game makes a distinction between rail, and paved and unpaved roads. Rail is always touchy graphically, as sleepers create an aliasing effect when zoomed out. I think we’re doing a good job but feel free to weigh in. Continue reading →

The rendering finally does most of what we want it to. It was about time frankly.

We’ve added billboards to display unit status: step count and the rest. I was unhappy with the amount of zoom normally provided by other games using this Civ-like perspective. I think this is partly because scaling the billboards is hard, which we learned (duh) the hard way. Now that we can scale them though, we’ve been having a great time zooming in and out. It’s really awesome.

The Allied faction gets its own color, which is green, unsurprisingly. Our original idea was to keep it blue vs. red, but that puts us in problems for future Axis campaigns. Axis would be blue when playing against Soviets, but red against the Allies. There are no good solutions here (don’t even get me started on making the Allies red) so we simply gave the Allies a jacked up green.

A bonus is that we can now use yet another color for when we want to be historically precise. For example, Finland in a 1939 scenario would be classified as Neutral (faction), rather than Axis. Feel free to propose a color for the neutrals… finding enough distinct colors for all the things we want color-coded is our daily nightmare, and we gladly welcome you to it.

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In other news, we’ve started working on vehicle models, and they’re already looking sweet…

If we are victorious in one more battle, we shall be utterly ruined — Pyrrhus of Epirus

I’m writing this on the back of three weeks spent entirely on scaling our mod-friendly map system to work with the huge map sizes required. Frustration abounds! While I’m sure the community will appreciate the new modding possibilities (see more below), I’m starting to worry that we’re over-engineering the whole thing.

To this end, we’re doing a Summer of Systems — in short, any low-level system that isn’t in by the end of August, we’ll just have to do without. A lot of what’s left is various 3D magic and similar nice-to-haves, so if we prioritize properly this is perfectly doable and the core of the game won’t be affected at all.
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Nice, eh? Since this is now in proper 3D, you can zoom and rotate the map as you like.

I assure you we’re open! — Dante Hicks

It’s been a few months since the last diary entry, so frankly you’d be excused to think we’ve all gone AWOL or something. BUT! – we were in fact cheerfully working on various low level systems, and actually managed to get a lot of work done. The screenshots below show you approximately where we are with the rendering engine, that is, almost everything works now.

I was happy enough to load the game onto a laptop and start showing it, somewhat gingerly, to other developers at the Reboot Develop conference last week in Dubrovnik. We got a lot of positive feedback, which may or may not be down to devs being a supportive bunch and all. It did feel good to have a working game again.

Since we were showing the game on a proper gaming laptop (cheers to Admir from Croteam for providing it), this was a chance to compare laptop performance to our desktops (both the laptop and the desktops are running the game at about HD resolution).

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We got an offer we couldn’t refuse… to use this well known coastline for our mapping code tests.

“Hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way” 

— Søren Kierkegaard

Work on the new game is continuing apace, and the time has come to confront our old nemesis – map making. If you’ve been following us long enough, you may remember my protestations about the amount of map making in the original Unity of Command as well. This time around, the mapping situation is both better and worse, depending what you’re looking at. So let me show you what’s new.

The Sheer Size

The good thing about moving away from Russia (at least for the moment) is that there’s much less terrain to cover. No seriously, if you haven’t had to manually assign a terrain value to every hex from Lake Ladoga to the Caspian – you may have missed how ginormous Russia really is. If you have, go look at the map now, it’s huge.

So, less terrain to work on – yay! In fact, the theater is so miniature, by comparison, that we’ve actually had to zoom in a little. The map scale is now 15km/hex, down from 20km/hex. Incidentally, this shortens the duration of the turn from 4 days to 3. It’s easy to work out why – so that distances covered by units in each turn stay the same. Continue reading →

Yes, this is what you think it is. Find a few more details about the new look at bottom of this post.

“I do not intend to send any more evening situation reports until the war becomes more exciting”

— Field Marshal Montgomery, one day prior to Battle of the Bulge.

A full update on the campaign game will take more than one post, but you need to start somewhere, so here it goes: an introduction. Check out the pretty pic to your left (you’re welcome!) and relax – it won’t be too long.

At its very core, the campaign game stays the same: you play at the operational level, meaning you don’t control production, politics, and diplomacy. Furthermore, since you’re playing all the battles, you are not playing as any one commander individually. In fact, you’re standing in for the entire operational-level stratum of your faction’s military, literally all of the three- and four star generals commanding at army and theater level. Continue reading →

Top to bottom: Cameron Highlanders and Indian troops march past the Great Pyramid (1940); Finnish soldiers on skis with reindeers, near Jäniskoski, Finland (1940); A squadron of Bren gun carriers, manned by the Australian Light Cavalry (1941); German horse-drawn cart stuck in rasputitsa near Kursk, Russia (1942).

If you are forward of your position, your artillery will fall short.  — Murphy’s Laws of Combat

World War II was, more than any war since Napoleon, a war of movement. Whereas World War I was characterized by grinding offensives, stalemates, and endless artillery barrages, the sequel sent the infantry out of their trenches and swept them up in grand encirclements and breakthroughs. It is that spirit of maneuver that we strived to bring to Unity of Command, and that we now seek to refine further. So let’s talk about how units will actually move around the map.

As before, there are two main types of movement – infantry and mobile. Infantry includes anything that moves around on legs, including cavalry. Mobile units are the various flavors of motorized, mechanized, and armored units. The difficulty of moving a unit through some terrain is expressed as movement points (MPs): it costs 1 MP for an infantry unit to move through a light forest, but 2 MP for an armored division to do the same. This way, armored units are best kept to the open terrain that is their forte, while the infantry slogs through the mud and brush.

On top of this basic distinction, we now introduce cavalry, ski, mountain and perhaps other specialized movement types. A Soviet Cavalry Corps, well known from UoC, moves as infantry (good in rough terrain), while having more MPs per turn (bigger range). This is exactly as intended, however being classified as infantry also meant that it was able to enter mountain hexes which is not realistic. So, the new cavalry classification will simply mean: same as infantry, but mountains are forbidden. In the same vein, Finnish ski units are infantry whose movements are unaffected by snow.

Speaking of snow, we are tweaking several different systems in order to improve winter scenarios. The snow movement penalty is changed so that each unit gets a 1 MP reduction (infantry) or 2 MP (mobile). For veterans, this comes out of their extended movement, while for others it comes from the regular part (clever, eh?). The net result is that, while everyone’s movement is slightly impeded, veteran units are noticeably better at maneuvering in the snow. This way, the game will organically model things like the Soviet ability to conduct deep operations, which improved markedly over the course of the war.

We also removed the snow combat shift (it punished attacking in the snow), because it discouraged offensive combat in the winter (wrongly!). This turned out to be a systemic nerf for the Soviets who, historically, are the attacking side in most of the winter scenarios. Finally, the winter season will now feature supply disruptions in a big way – previously, only mud interfered seriously with the supply situation. The overall idea is that we create an intensity of combat that is similar to what we get during the summer, but with less fluid maneuvers and pronounced supply difficulties. Think of a couple of tired, punch drunk boxers desperately duking it out in the final rounds, and you’ll get what I mean.  Continue reading →

Completely unrelated to the rest of this post, I’m pleased to inform you that production has finally started on the “shiny pics” side of things. I can’t show you those just yet, but here’s a planning sketch for the “UoC Test Range” instead. Cheers!

Mehr sein als scheinen.

— Moltke the Elder, referring to combat system tweaks in Unity of Command

Unity of Command is a game that emphasizes maneuver, supply, and logistics over brutal grinding, but even the most daring dash and encirclement will still involve a fair amount of fighting. In the new game, we are not changing the combat system in a big way, more like ironing a few wrinkles, plus some changes to bring it into line with the rest of the new systems.

From a designer’s point of view, combat in the game actually unfolds on two distinct levels. The first level, which is the main topic of this post, is the immediate combat between two units on the map. We try to make this “single combat” as realistic as possible, but there are limits. The most obvious ones are the one-unit-per-hex representation (no stacking) and the IGOUGO system (each player gets to move all his units during a turn).

The other level happens over a full turn for both players, or even 2-3 turns. When all the individual battles are put together and the scenario flows together nicely, we try to achieve a higher level of realism. Single, division level combats come together to form larger offensives – and the maneuvers come back around and make individual battles easier to win. Executed correctly, a good plan is a virtuous cycle. Continue reading →