Cheers folks! We bring you another update, where we iron out those creases and add some new and interesting features. Our favourite is Battle Maps - a series of maps you get after each played scenario. You get to see what you and your opponent actually did, on a beautiful map belonging to one of those historical atlases!
And here is an update on what we are working on right now. With this update we have done all the planned major updates. From now on we will be focusing solely on upgrading the system with the Grand Campaign features we discussed before. We have already started the process, and our ambitions are getting bigger and bigger with each new iteration of the design. It is going to be really something, and it is going to be worth a wait 😉
Apart from that, we are also starting a new board game design project which will be announced and you will be able to follow its progress on our main game website. We are a game design company and we like to mix it up a bit - some computer games, some board games, maybe even both versions of the same system. We'll see how it goes!
That's that from the Panzer Division Team. We wish you happy holidays, lots of free time and enjoyment and many interesting gameplays! 🎅
Tom
Note: each new update is well tested before release, but if you happen to find any bugs or technical issues - please let us know. That way we can help you and others to have a great gaming experience.
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What's new in this version
Battle Maps
You have played a scenario for hours, hitting that enemy where it hurts, sweating on the desert sands and finally winning the day. Wouldn't you love to have a good, clean map showing your exploits. The kind of map that belongs to the historical atlases, with units and arrows pointing in various directions. Well you have now! We bring you Battle Maps 2000 Extraordinaire!
How does it work? Each time you finish a scenario (either by winning or losing), and after you close the Battle Stats screen (by pressing Escape key) - a battle map will appear. Here you will see the situation for each day of fighting. You will be able to flip through these maps using buttons in the panel below (or your arrow keys), or maybe view it as a slideshow.
But that's not all! You will also have two options for saving those maps to your computer. You can save a single map, or even an entire map series as JPG images on your desktop. That way you can share those maps via socials with your friends, and store them for safekeeping and analysing. Isn't that something, your own historical maps!
We hope you'll like this feature. If it becomes a hit, we'll expand on it later on.
Combat Info Update
We expanded the combat info a bit, giving you that one more level of awareness that's always needed while fighting. First of all, we upgraded the Combat Panel - it now shows total Morale and Strength losses for each target unit. These totals are shown as headers, with bigger and bolder fonts and here you can see the total moral which one enemy unit is losing. Below those totals you have a detailed list of each of attacking units, showing how much each of these units damages the target, and how big are their individual Combat Differential and Efficiency factors. You can also hover over those numbers to read tooltips which explain this new panel in more detail.
We have added a new Combat Bar view option (the one you chose with a button in the Minimap Panel). This is "Hover/Select Full" option - it shows combat bar for hovered and selected units, and for all enemy units which are firing at them. If you have that option turned on and you hover over a unit in combat - you will see combat bars (arrows) pointing from that unit towards its target, and all combat bars which point at your hovered unit. Some of you will find this way of representation best suited to their needs.
Scenario Difficulty Level
We sometimes get questions how are some of our scenarios balanced (usually if some of the scenarios are found to be too difficulty to win). The thing is, this game tries to be close to the historical account. This is a game after all, but we cannot twist history so much that it becomes easy for Axis to win at El Alamein. Although we can do the most we can to make each scenario interesting and challenging, but some scenarios will still be very hard, and some others very easy to win.
In order to show you the difficulty of each scenario, we added a Scenario Difficulty label on each one of them. You can see this difficulty in the Scenario screen (where you choose your scenario) and in the Stats dialog. Difficulty has been approximated based on our playtesting, so it isn't perfect for each one of you. But it does give you a good information of what to expect. You can adjust your difficulty by setting the AI Level up and down (to Easier or Harder). We hope this will make you more aware of the challenges you are facing in each of our historically accurate scenarios.
Scenario and Gameplay Rebalancing
Tweaking and rebalancing - that's a day to day task it seems. We've revisited some of our scenarios and rebalanced them to make them more interesting (while keeping true to the historical account, of course). We have also revised the AI Levels to make their differences more pronounced. Harder AI level will be a bit more harder, and Easier level a bit more easier.
Here are the rebalanced scenarios:
- rebalance Easter Battle - make it a wee bit more easier for Axis to win
- rebalance Battleaxe - make it a wee bit more easier for Allies to win
- rebalance First Alamein - make it a wee bit more easier for Axis to win
We have also reduced the Efectiveness of artillery units in close combat to just 25%. This was a must, as we have seen that artillery was used in close combat to devastating results for the opponents. This just wasn't so in this campaign (we know that British 25 pounders were sometimes used to fend of Italian armour, but these were rare occasions).
Minimap Zoom
Wouldn't you love to see the entire minimap zoomed out in your Minimap panel? Well you can now! We have added zoom in and out buttons to the minimap. You can now adjust the zoom level to your needs. But beware - zooming out too much will make your units and roads look very tiny.
Other Changes
Here are the other changes we did:
- Supply FoW - show enemy unit No Ammo and No Fuel icons and info panel labels; if enemy unit is without ammo or fuel - that should be visible (but with no detailed info)
- allow player to upload Scenario Maps and Intel Maps for custom scenarios (those files will have to be added by player in new subfolders within CustomScenarios folder)
- change default HexGridVisibility for new players to 25%
Issue Fixes
- fix issue - CombatBar must not be scaled based on the Unit Scaling Factor, but on the map scale - this is because it has to connect two adjacent hexes with combat arrows
- fix issue - when changing UI Scale in Options dialog, the command panel and group buttons are repositioned only after closing the Game Menu dialog - they shoud be repositioned on closing the Options dialog
- fix issue - in multiplayer game, client does not hear a sound when receiving notification for capturing/losing objective (or other good/bad notifications that produce sounds)