Attention Panzer Generals!
Panzer Corps 2 has a whole goody bag of awesome stuff planned for this Holiday Season, so we hope you enjoy reading all about the juicy content we’ve got lined up for you. We’ve gone all in with a new DLC campaign, free solo scenarios, and are proud to announce we’ll have even more content coming as part of Slitherine’s 25th Anniversary celebrations.
As with Ghost Division before, we’re once again very pleased and humbled by the positive engagement we’ve received from the 1st Guards announcement. So thank you to all our players for making up this awesome Panzer Corps community that has lasted for more than a decade.
Now then, on to the first content preview, our 1st Guards Developer Diary!
As 1st Guards moves towards its November launch date, we wanted to share some of our insider throughts on the content, while giving our players a preview of the content they can expect from this latest DLC campaign for Panzer Corps 2.
With the commercial and critical success of Ghost Division, we really felt like Panzer Corps 2 found a solid formula that players really responded positively to: much stronger content-focused campaigns at competitive pricing.
So if you were a fan of Ghost Division and the classic strategy gameplay that defines Panzer Corps, 1st Guards is all of that ramped up even higher.
We’re cutting the fat and dropping you right into some impressively large battles, with well above average slot deployment limits. As early as the second scenario, there are huge deployment zones available, especially for those players who prefer managing large amounts of forces instead of fewer high overstrength units.
And once the Axis invasion of the USSR begins with Operation Barbarossa, your deployment options and limits will only continue to expand as you experience the Soviet Guards’ journey from the desperate battles of 1941 to the triumphant storming of Germany in 1945:
This theme of large deployment zones, and also having multiple such zones, is a theme you will see consistently throughout this campaign, to provide players with maximum flexibility and choice on how to tackle each battle.
For a prime example from the middle of the campaign, we can look at the Citadel Sortie scenario:
Your main objectives to win the scenario, marked with gold dots and red arrows, are due west.
The bonus objective to earn large sums of prestige to buy and repair your units, are typically scattered around the maps.
But your special bonus objective, the one that will reward special and prototype equipment rewards, is marked in red dots and black arrows.
So as you can see this, is an excellent example of the freedom of choice you’ll have to exercise when tackling such a scenario. Do you split your forces and approach all objectives simultaneously? Do you focus on one objective at a time? The decisions are yours, but be warned that serious challenges await, and spreading your quantitatively superior forces too thin against the qualitive nature of some of the mightiest German forces could lead to disasterous results!
Again as with Ghost Division, our continued focus with the Elite series is to take a History First approach. This means there won’t be any fictional scenarios, or what if battles like something out of Operation Unthinkable. If you’re a fan of that content though... well we just might have you covered in other ways, so stay tuned for that.
But for 1st Guards, the spotlight falls on the real actions that the guards spearheaded; from the encirclement at Stalingrad, to the battles of Kursk, and beyond.
Our goal is to inform players of this history, not as a passive observer, but as participants in command of battles that characterized the most colossal struggle of the 20th century.
Based on some of your Ghost Division feedback, we also made the decision to also cut out fictional characters from the Elite series. While amalgamous characters are very helpful narrative devices to help players establish wider context to the battles they are engaging in, there is no shortage of real heroes that participated in World War II, so we’re going to try and shift to more letting real history just speak for itself.
The Red Army is especially unique for World War II, as more than any other nation it featured women in combat roles, from snipers to tank commanders to pilots. The real story of Mariya Oktyabrskaya is incredible, and actually really heartbreaking. She lost her soldier husband during the initial Barbarossa invasion, and then went on to sell of her possessions to raise money to fund the production of a T-34 tank, which she was then allowed to drive into battle with the Guards Tank Corps! That’s definitely a story worth retelling.
Our awesome 1st Guards artworks have once again come from the efforts of artist Adrián Rodríguez, and we hope you enjoy them as enhancements to the written descriptions of the battles of our 1st Guards DLC.
While I’ve personally been utilizing a lot of generative AI features on my own, we continue our pledge to keep generative AI assets and writing out of all official Panzer Corps 2 products. Some of us have been with Panzer Corps as a series for almost 15 years now, and we’ve gotten this far without generative AI. Perhaps some day for some future project, but not this day.
It is fun though, and quite satisfying, to get results like this back. Panzer Corps definitely has a very unique feeling to a lot of its elements such as the writing, and it shows.
Thanks for reading our latest Developer Diary, we hope you’re even more excited to experience the 1st Guards campaign when it comes out later this month on November 24th!
But remember, this is just the first taste of content we have coming. We have more announcements for the upcoming free solo content, and here is a spoiler for the special Slitherine themed content that is coming as part of their anniversary celebrations: