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Joel Billings -> RE: WitE 2 (12/19/2017 10:54:18 PM)
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Here's where we're at. We have a working game that allows us to test the campaign and a few smaller scenarios we've created. The basics are in for most systems, but there are some major ones still being designed and implemented. Here's some of the major items left to be done:
1) Adding in functionality for air divisions, which is a level of player control between the individual squadrons/groups and the corps HQs. The intention of this system is to allow players to focus on more easily moving around air divisions and not having to micromanage exact placement of air units on specific airbases unless they wanted to. Once done, we need to develop the more automated ways to play the air game (like some of the tools we have for this in WitW, but with more functionality/flexibility than in WitW).
2) Interface face lift. We've got a number of new interface elements and we need to make the most of them while also give the interface a graphical facelift.
3. Campaign Victory conditions. We have an event editor that allows us to use events as part of the victory conditions for both small scenarios and campaigns. We have not yet decided exactly what we are going to do for Campaign victory conditions although we've kicked around a number of ideas.
4) Theater boxes and events. In the past few months we've made a lot of progress on the off-map theater boxes and events that go with them. We've added the Allied Strategic bombing events, tied to German air strength in Western Europe. We need to continue work on adding other off-map events and various tracks that go with them (Western Allied campaigns in North Africa, Italy and Western Europe, partisan activities in the Soviet Union, the Finnish front). We have many of these events happening now on a fixed schedule, but we've recently added the system to track German force values in the various TBs. We need to set requirements and the impact of being above or below the requirements on the events and balance this.
5) Navel system review. Just going to allow Soviet amphibious landings in the Black Sea, but need to make sure we've got the right naval transport capabilities in the various waterways for both sides.
6) Production system review and balancing.
7. Complete initial slate of scenarios.
So at the moment we can play a scenario like Road to Leningrad and it plays out pretty well. However, you have to play the WitW style air system with no AI help, and the naval transport capabilities are probably too good in the Baltic. We want the air game to be something that players can easily get into and increase their involvement with it as desired. We're recently added the city forts rule that allows players to stack more units into a fortress like Odessa or Sevastopol. This took some time but it was necessary and is having an impact on play.
I don't want to give a date for the game as it depends so much on how much time our various contributors are able to devote to the game over the next year. I do wish we were further along, and expect that we'll need a solid 6 months of testing (or more) from when we reach a solid game-play beta. We won't be there until we get items 1-6 nearly done.
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