Field Hospitals
Field Hospitals can be built by Medical units, and serve as automatic treatment areas for Medical units that pick up wounded men via the Find Wounded order. Units being treated in field hospitals are treated faster, and convalescents return only to units in range. This replaces the existing system in which convalescents trickle back randomly to units along the front, which allows you to prioritize units that need to be reinforced.
Performing Wiring, Trench or Comm. Trench actions now activates a separate Build Mode, which allows you to chop and change the lines you draw. This is in response to complaints about the inability to fix mistakes.
Buildings no longer appear underground.
I've made a couple of optimizations to the AI's unit rotation functions, which should prevent the game from slowing down so much when enemy units rotate lines.
Saving the game now saves terrain properly.
Thanks for playing!
Terrain
Hi all,
Early stages of destructible terrain are in! So far only a few building types have included, and only a few different configurations. I want to know what you all think before I start adding more types of terrain and customizing things a bit more. For now, houses act as shelter. They hide units from view, and essentially function as a combination of dugouts and blockhouses (albeit less effective at protecting units than blockhouses). The tradeoff is that buildings obscure lines of sight, and will be permanently destroyed if they take enough artillery fire.
I've also taken the liberty of implementing a bunch of the suggestions I've seen in the discussion forums.
Bugfixes/Changes:
Destructible Terrain
Commanders now auto-assigned at start.
Aircraft now auto-assigned to pilots at start.
Supply units have been tweaked so that they automatically resupply and return to their previous order. This should reduce some of the micromanagement associated with supply lines. This was actually present in the last update, but I forgot to tell anyone.
An event log display which can be shown and hidden at will.
Coffee and alcohol have been included as new supply types. They aren't limited in number - you can just keep grabbing them from rear lines as you see fit. Coffee provides a temporary bonus to sight range via the new "Alert" status, while alcohol provides a temporary movement boost to help facilitate frontal assaults. Just for fun, each nation has its own version of alcohol.
Health bars showing unit numbers, morale, primary supply, and readiness are now included on unit lists. This will hopefully provide more visual feedback with regard to unit status.
Fixed the "Loading caches" savefile issue! Best part is, you don't need to restart - you can use the same savefile.
Thanks for playing!
Terrain
Hi all,
Early stages of destructible terrain are in! So far only a few building types have included, and only a few different configurations. I want to know what you all think before I start adding more types of terrain and customizing things a bit more. For now, houses act as shelter. They hide units from view, and essentially function as a combination of dugouts and blockhouses (albeit less effective at protecting units than blockhouses). The tradeoff is that buildings obscure lines of sight, and will be permanently destroyed if they take enough artillery fire.
I've also taken the liberty of implementing a bunch of the suggestions I've seen in the discussion forums.
Bugfixes/Changes:
Destructible Terrain
Commanders now auto-assigned at start.
Aircraft now auto-assigned to pilots at start.
Supply units have been tweaked so that they automatically resupply and return to their previous order. This should reduce some of the micromanagement associated with supply lines. This was actually present in the last update, but I forgot to tell anyone.
An event log display which can be shown and hidden at will.
Coffee and alcohol have been included as new supply types. They aren't limited in number - you can just keep grabbing them from rear lines as you see fit. Coffee provides a temporary bonus to sight range via the new "Alert" status, while alcohol provides a temporary movement boost to help facilitate frontal assaults. Just for fun, each nation has its own version of alcohol.
Health bars showing unit numbers, morale, primary supply, and readiness are now included on unit lists. This will hopefully provide more visual feedback with regard to unit status.
Thanks for playing!
Quabity Auschwitz
Hi all,
Some quality of life updates that have been requested by some of you have been included. Destructible terrain not in yet, but I just wanted to release this update in the hopes that it makes the game a bit easier to play. There are some important things addressed here.
Bugfixes/Changes:
I've redesigned the unit information window so that units and their superiors/subordinates are easier to see and select. Let me know what you think!
Autosave now works. You can save daily, weekly, or monthly.
The ability to schedule attack orders using the Scheduled Order screen.
A Retreat button once you send units over the top. This also works when you use the "Charge Positions" order.
Thanks for playing!
Threads
Hi all,
Relatively minor update this week, as most of the work I've done is under the hood. I was hoping to include destructible terrain this week, but it's not quite ready to roll out yet. The reason I'm releasing an update anyways is because I've made a few changes to the way the game runs through each game tick.
Previously, the game timer would interrupt the game and cause issues with using the interface, as well as essentially locking up the game for a few milliseconds while it processed each game tick. Now I've moved things around in code so that the majority of the game tick runs in a separate thread. It seems like an obvious thing to include even before releasing in Early Access, but in my mind performance comes secondary to correctness ie. I was initially more concerned with making sure everything worked and was fun rather than how quickly it ran (as long as it was playable, of course).
Using the UI should now feel a lot more responsive even while the game timer is running, and I'm hoping things run a lot smoother in general. Let me know if you run into any issues - if any of you have done programming yourselves, you'll probably be more than aware that multi-threaded/concurrent programming occupies its own special place in Hell. Nevertheless, I'm hoping this improves the game experience for a lot of you.
Bugfixes/Changes:
Made game tick concurrent.
Prevented the HQ and Aerodrome from refreshing every game tick, which should make those screens more easily useable while the game timer is running.
Added the ability to use the WASD keys to scroll.
Reduced the number of subscreen refreshes, which should make things less "choppy"
Drag-selecting entire groups of units and issuing orders to them will now ignore HQ units if HQ units are unable to perform those orders (build orders, wiring, etc)
Selecting HQ units will now highlight their subordinate units as well.
Added weapon names in the Order of Battle subscreen.
Updated the tutorials so that they are no longer broken versions of the main map. This also means that the bug in which the map toggles in the upper right corner of the screen now work in the tutorials.
Changed the game icon to something other than the default Godot icon.
Soon to Come:
Destructible Terrain - I have one house type completed, as well as the underlying logic for any type of terrain in general. I probably won't release this feature until I have at least a few different building types, otherwise it's going to look really weird.
The ability to schedule attack orders using the Scheduled Order screen.
A Retreat button once you send units over the top.
Better UI for managing subordinates/superiors. Right now it takes several clicks to, say, select a company within a brigade, and then to select all platoons in that company. I'm probably just going to steal the interface from HOI3, but it will take me a few days to implement, and I wanted to get an update out today.
Artillery gun-pits. Some of you have suggested this, but until now I couldn't think of a gameplay-related reason to include them. Since artillery can't enter blockhouses, I'm thinking these will basically be blockhouses for artillery. They take longer to build, and it takes artillery units a long time to settle into them or leave them. However, artillery will be protected from counterbattery fire and aerial observation (signals units can still spot them, though). Let me know if this sounds good!
Thanks for playing!
Hotfix 2
Hi all,
The air combat changes from the last update broke all the tutorials, so I've released a patch that fixes them all. Sorry for the trouble.
I've also made a few more changes to pathfinding, which should hopefully help the game run a little smoother late-game.
Thanks for playing!
Remembrance/Armistice Day Weekend Update
Hi all,
I've added a couple of new features this week!
Alternate Font
The Settings screen in the main menu now has the option of switching to an alternate font which I believe shows up better at lower resolutions. This can only be done on the main menu, because allowing it from the pause menu would be MUCH harder to implement. Let me know if the new font helps - I can always change it to something else if necessary.
Aircraft
I've now made it necessary to assign aircraft to individual pilots before sending them out on sorties. It's pretty basic at the moment. Once you get 1,000 Valour points, you can upgrade any of the aircraft to better models, which provide bonuses in combat against inferior enemy aircraft. You can also have pilots change planes if one becomes too damaged.
Let me know what you think of this feature. I'm not 100% sure how much detail should go into it, so I'd love the feedback.
Bugfixes:
In the process of tweaking the aerodrome, I noticed that new pilots weren't being generated. Now, at the beginning of each month, if the number of pilots and/or planes is too low, new ones are generated.
Pilot info now contains an icon to indicate whether they are Recon or Escort pilots.
Fixed bug in which scheduled orders for dugouts and blockhouses wasn't working.
Fixed bug in which Dry Weather Only scheduled orders wouldn't work a lot of the time.
Optimized pathfinding a bit, which should reduce some lag whne pathfinding over long distances.
Thanks for playing!
Hotfix
Hi all,
Just published a quick hotfix for two easy-to-fix yet important bugs that were introduced in the last update.
1. Fixed dugouts, blockhouses, and mine entrances not working. I broke this when I tweaked the code to allow for field supply dumps.
2. Offensives no longer reset if the enemy performs an offensive first.
Sorry about these bugs, folks. Guess I introduced too many new features in the last update :)
New AOE Features
Hi all,
I've added a few more new features that have been requested over the last few weeks.
Field Supply Dumps
Dugouts can now be turned into field supply dumps by supply units carrying supplies, by using the "Add Supplies" order. Field supply dumps can hold all types of supplies and provide passive supply regain to units in range. This replaces the existing system in which everyone regains supplies passively no matter where they are - now units must be near a field supply dump. Think Protoss pylons.
It also means that if you're able to capture an enemy field supply dump, you get to steal those supplies.
Order Delay
Command ranges are now working, which means that order delay now works. When a unit receives an order, each HQ unit "passes it on" to its subordinate units, with a delay incurred depending on the cumulative distance.
For example, each HQ unit has a default command range of 15 tiles. If a rifle platoon receives an order to move, the order chain starts at its Brigade HQ. If its Battalion HQ is 18 tiles away from its Brigade HQ, then it will take 3 game ticks to even begin moving. If its Company HQ is 20 tiles away from its Battalion HQ, then an additional 5 ticks are added. Finally, if the rifle platoon itself is 17 tiles away from its Company HQ, then 2 more tiles are added, which means it will take 10 game ticks (100 minutes in-game) before the rifle platoon starts to move.
A new icon now appears next to a unit's task when it encounters order delay.
Let me know if you like these changes!
Bugs:
Fixed a bug which would cause the game to lag horribly when the tile information window was visible. This may explain a lot of the performance issues in the game.
Fixed a bug in which air patrols were observing EVERY tile on the screen instead of only tiles which had things on them.
Division supplies now actually become lower when supply units take supplies (I can't believe I missed this one). To balance things out, starting supplies are now higher, and monthly intake is also higher.
Scheduling
Hi all,
I've added a new sub-screen at the top of the screen alongside the Aerodrome button. This screen lets you schedule construction orders and artillery bombardments in advance, with the option of limiting them to a certain time. So, for instance, you can make units set wire only at night, and have them repeat it every night.
The screen gets populated with the units you currently have selected. In addition, I've also added another button at the top-right of the screen, which allows you to quickly manage and view existing orders. Hope this helps make the game a little easier to manage.
Changelist:
New Schedule screen which allows you to manage scheduled orders.
Added orders pop-up button at the top right of the screen.
Bugfixes:
Fixed Pilot experience bug, where it would remain as Inexperienced despite hitting 100%.
Pilots now withdraw properly and re-appear on the pilot list. Previously, they would mysteriously disappear.
Fixed a bug in which drag-selecting units would only select one unit from each tile.
