Fall Update Part 1

For Fall I added a bunch of things to move this game from prototype to real game. The Steam page is registered. I’ll be updating a bunch of stuff in here so it will be ready to go in Early Access in 2024.

From a tech point of view. The biggest was the save file system which will enable you to obviously save the single-player game and all of the stuff that happens while you play the game in the background this will include Steam Cloud saves, game profiles etc.

1. Game Profiles, Game Save/ Load

The Ground Radar Vehicle – this is an arch-type vehicle one of the 21 primary ground vehicle types in the game. Introducing the ground radar vehicle also introduces new gameplay mechanics, the radar system and jamming/datalinks, and passive/active detection mechanics. The Ground radar vehicle can be deployed on a battlefield mission in both multiplayer and single-player missions.

The Ground Radar Vehicle in multiplayer is a support vehicle that aids your team. It can deploy and quickly ID enemy and friendly targets share battlefield movements and link ground vehicles together to provide better situational awareness. The GRV is used either solo or in a two-man driver & radar operator play. The Driver must avoid enemy forces and keep the GRV out of harm’s way as it is unarmored and very fragile. The radar takes any damage its pretty much disabled and must be repaired.

In Single player the radar is a powerful yet niche vehicle, it can be used on many different mission types and is able to detect and track targets from long ranges, during the mission you will mostly play in support role and use its advanced datalinks and jamming as your are unarmed and can’t actually fire a single shot, instead you can actually target enemies remotely and engage them using drones and allied fire support. Call in artillery fires from the radar’s datalinks and then use a drone to do battle damage assessment via video links.

Radar Ground Vehicle characteristics
Active/Passive Radar Detection
Radar Controls/Settings
Beyond Visual Quad Tree Radar Detection – using the quadtree radar system we can simulate radar interactions well beyond the world in game rendering size.

This is super important for performance and immersion. How it works is very simple, it scales the size of things down when you are outside of the visual draw ranger of the game engine terrain tile, so “targets” that are hundreds of miles away remain in-game while they are not drawn at scale or real distances (this makes it performant), this was a compromise in Unity game engine; we stream the terrain into blocks that are anywhere from 4km to 10km square tiles, if a target is 100km away from you, visually they would be in some 10 blocks away from you since we aren’t going to draw all the blocks, and you won’t be able to see it but the game still needs to keep track of it and implementing the quadtree radar allows us to do that, this is important because its the basic building block for Beyond Visual Range air combat which is coming soon after this is implemented.

Now the system isn’t going to be perfect things like ground clutter and mountains masking radar returns are going to be simulated and not 100% based on real math.

Datalinks – share target, video, and navigation information with friendly units.
Jamming – full digital jamming simulation with jamming affecting radar burn-through rates, contact shifting, and more. I going to post a separate update about the jamming systems when we get them ready to show. Here are some of the source materials we are using for our game design.

New Factions Announced

The game will ship in alpha with 4 factions, and release to beta with 12 total.

New Day/Night System

New Ground Vehicles

New Variants
SHORAD –

New Aircraft and Models

FA-XX

A-21

MIG-31

Single Player 4X World + Vehicle Combat Simulation

• Research Mechanics
  – research new stuff to unlock:
  – vehicles
  – resources
  – new infrastructure
  – world events
  – country events
  – improve countries’ standard of living to avoid civil war
• Spy Mechanics
  – create spy networks in foreign countries
  – recruit assets and exploit them to carry out covert operations
  – covert ops include, sabotage, drone strikes, assassination, funding rebel groups, and cyber-attacks there are over 20.
  – agents are divided between carrying out missions in countries or being assigned to hunt down enemy agents in your country and capturing them
  – captured agents can be traded for your own captured spies or other assets.
  – spies and agents have permadeath.
• Diplomacy
  • Trade Deals
  • Build Alliances
  • Manage your Rivals through sanctions, blockades, and tariffs.
• Resource Management
  • Building infrastructure to improve your citizens’ lives needs energy and workers.
  • Infrastructure requires resources management, and combining different infrastructure types to achieve province bonuses and boost productivity.
  • Balancing infrastructure requires compromising good and bad, a factory might create jobs and boost economies but increases pollution long term and ultimately lowers your population’s happiness.
• Navy Forces + World Map
  • Create Fleets and manage them moving them around the world’s oceans in real time, fast forward, and speed up time.
  • Use your navy to carry out military operations and conduct full-spectrum naval warfare.
  • Ships crews are fully simulated with watch stations affecting the performance of various systems. Eg a Radar operator that is “exhausted” will be less effective than a rested one.
  • Gameplay mechanics are based on these sources this.
  • Ships not at war must carry out maritime operations including over a dozen mission types of drug smuggling, blockade enforcement, and keep waterways clear of pirates.
  • Control submarines, large capital ships, and small patrol boats.
    
• Unit Management
  • Build and manage military units, combining different ground and air units into combined arms brigades that can then be moved around to different military bases around the world.
  • Units have officers who have permadeath, can be killed in combat, and must be replaced.
• Invasion Planner
  • Build complex invasion plans and carry them out, including nuclear, chemical, and cyber strikes.
  • Leverage air and missile strikes to cripple your rivals in the first 24 hours of war.
  • Taking out critical infrastructure or targeting senior leaders, all come with risks, including retaliatory nuclear strikes.
• Endless Military Mission Generator
  • Generate combat missions based on over 20 mission templates, missions take place in a variety of environments from desert to jungle, urban and open battlefields.
  • Victory in combat missions unlocks new variants and more experienced officers.

Multiplayer

Coop PVE

Mission Combat Missions, play with up to 3 people per vehicle in missions with up to 4 vehicles for 12-player team coop missions against the AI battle system, which furthers 3 layers of bot agents that commander different levels of combat. [General Bot / Office Bot / Solider Bot]

Team-based PVP

plays with up to 42 players online
teams of 3 or 2 player-controlled and Bot bot-controlled vehicles.
Modes include Invasion, Conquest Assault, and Random Objective Assault