And for this year's time honored tradition, we give thee the very first sneak peek at CM's return to the Eastern Front:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2u71...QOi5IOX0fvkiMw
We'll give you a lot more visuals to chew on in January, but here's some non-visual stuff to think about. Let's see... where to start?
1. Ground to Air fire. Yup, now those AAA guns can do what they were supposed to do (shooting at aircraft) instead of the more fun role of plastering enemy units with lots of HE. Details are to come at a later time. In fact, we only got this to play with a few hours ago
2. Ammo Dumps. Since Fortress Italy vehicles have had ammo loadouts tailored to the unit type it's supposed to transport. Now this has been expanded somewhere and then made even better. When you purchase a unit that has vehicles you can opt to have the combat units only, the vehicles, or Ammo Dumps. The latter is the ammo stripped out of the vehicle and made into a stationary "unit" on the map. No more do you have to choose between standard ammo and a perhaps unwanted vehicle loaded with extra ammo. It can be placed wherever you like during Setup and during the game units can draw from it as they already can from vehicles. You can put the Ammo Dumps near your combat units, or concentrate them to the rear somewhere. Your choice!
3. Vehicle Ammo Leveling. This is a common frontline technique of evening out ammo supply between vehicles in order to keep as many vehicles in the fight as possible. Sometimes an entire platoon was withdrawn and leveled with another, other times it was just vehicles within the same platoon after one or two wound up firing off a lot of ammo. Like real life, however, this is kinda tricky to pull off under combat conditions. Vehicles must be parked VERY close to each other and left unbuttoned for quite a few minutes before leveling can take place. In other words, vehicles performing leveling are sitting ducks. For short games this probably isn't a very useful feature, but for you guys playing longer scenarios it's bound to be quite handy.
4. Larger Maps. You didn't think we wouldn't try out larger maps after doing all those speed improvements, did you? Shame on you if you didn't think we would! As of right now you can make maps roughly 30km2, with as of yet undetermined max length in any one direction (we're playing around with that still). Now you can make huge square maps or very long narrow ones. And yes, we also dramatically improved 2D map performance in the Editor to make the experience of building one of these monsters a happy experience instead of living death
The speed improvements in the Editor obviously apply to smaller maps as well.
5. Tank riders, but you already knew that
The number of soldiers each vehicle can take depends on the vehicle itself. Some, you'll find, don't take any because in real life they effectively couldn't.
And of course the usual things one should expect from a new theater of war... new terrain, new UI graphics, etc. Oh, and obviously what I just mentioned is just a few things that are new to the game.
Better still... these new features are going to be available to CMBN and CMFI as Upgrade 3.0. So those of you who don't want to slug it out on the Eastern Front (which us Ostfront grogs don't understand) you can enjoy the new features with what you already have in your hands. Provided, of course, the features are applicable to your particular front. I don't think you should expect to see Russian style Eastern Orthodox spires in the middle of Sicily for example