The Enhanced officers mod features:

Leaders no longer have random stats.
Every officer starts with identical base stats (25 Combat, 25 Morale, 50 Staff) but can have individual ‘traits’ that create variations from the standard. There is now a reason for different stats. For example an officer can have the trait ‘Risen from the Ranks +12 (com)’ which raises his combat stat to a higher level. Traits can be positive or negative.

Officers now have a rank and derive from a service (Army, Air Force, Navy or Support).
Most of your officers will come from the Army service (Infantry, Armour, Artillery, Command) but a number will come from other services. I’ve standardised on the British system so your army officers will commence duty as ‘Acting Major’, your Air Force officers as ‘Acting Squadron Leader’, etc.

Officers are more focused
Officers can come with previous training in a specific area so you will know what they are best suited for right from the start. The first action card they receive will be directly related to their training. Eg. The officer from the Armour Academy will always receive ‘Blitz’ as his first card.

The Types of Officers available have been widened
There are now Air Force, Naval, Command, Logistical, Intelligence and Engineering officers. Each has their own dedicated action card that they are guaranteed to receive first up.

There is a defined hierarchy of command
The officer at your Supreme HQ is considered to be your Commander in Chief (‘CIC’). All other officers at other HQ’s are his subordinates. Your CIC answers to High Command.

There is a dynamic relationship system
Your subordinates have a relationship with your CIC which models how effective they are at working together. Bad relationships can result in ‘command friction’, good ones in bonuses. Your CIC’s overall relationship with all his subordinates reflects how he is viewed by High Command.

Your CIC gains experience from the act of command
You subordinate officers can also gain experience from their day to day interactions with your CIC.

Your CIC can only command a certain number of HQ’s in proportion to his rank
An Acting Major can’t be expected to effectively run half a dozen subordinate HQ’s. You can no longer spam HQ’s everywhere, they are a limited, precious commodity.

There is a lot more information feedback
For example, officer cards now show the base risk of injury and death as a percentage rather than ‘medium’.

There is plenty of immersive detail but minimal ‘colour’
There are no random officer events. Officers are treated as serious military individuals.

‘Realistic Officers’ option.
You can no longer recruit endless officers and cherry pick the very best. Like every other Commander in the world, you have to work with what you’ve got (there are reasonable limits placed on the number of Officers). This restriction is, as indicated, optional.

Click here for more information.

I have found a publisher for the new mystery title. So soon the veil of mystery will be lifted and some more information will then be forthcoming.

I have mostly been working on this game, but also finished 2 new public beta versions. Both are now downloadable from Matrix Games.

First of all Decisive Campaigns v1.06 which brings a big balancing improvement for long running games. The problem that a number of German players encountered was that at a certain point their offensive would come to an hold but their high command kept considering the player on the offensive because the Soviets were not making gains. In v1.06 failing to attain high command orders will result in high command taking a less offensive posture and eventually going to a defensive mindset. The Soviet high command will on the other hand become more offensive minded as its player keeps succeeding in holding their defensive objectives. Also 2 hardcore variants are added to the campaign scenarios (hardcore recon and constrained oil), the historical reinforcement schedule especially for SS in 1943 has been improved and a number of other small finetunings have been made. Last but not least quite an improvement has been made to the offensive AI and it should finish off encircled troops more aggresively now.

Secondly Advanced Tactics v2.15 which brings quite a number of fixes and finetunings, but also some considerable AI improvements.

Furthermore Small General and Small General : Eastern Front have been updated as well.

Some progress has also been made with DC3. But nothing new to report on this front for now.

Kind regards and happy wargaming!

Vic

The working title is ‘DC : Clash of Titans’ and I am planning for this title to remain on the eastern front. However the scale is going up to 1 week turns, 30km hexes and mostly divisionally-sized units. Its a big change, but after doing SG:EF and DC : Case Bue I felt ready in doing a fully detailed eastern front game. I thought about keeping the scale the same as in the previous DC titles. It would be nice to have this detail over this huge front, but a lot of players were already overwhelmed by the unit count of Case Blue. Actually with the current chosen scale the unit count will be more or less the same as in DC:Case Blue, and would explode to 3 or 4 times that if I would keep the scale regimental.

Due to this new scale there will be a higher unit density per hex, which will help the AI, since it really has difficulty with cat-mouse like tactics in areas where real front lines are missing. I also hope to expend the AI a bit further especially on the strategic considerations level.

I am not sure yet if i am going to focus on Barbarossa only or do the whole war, I think i’ll do the whole war.

Almost most importantly I am doing a big, very big, overhaul of the way scenarios are setup and creating a new editor called “the Simple Editor”. My aim is that anybody should be able to make his own scenarios with this editor. As people who tried the DC editor know, it is quite complicated to do anything else than making small changes. Not impossible as the recent release of the recent Tannenbaum Blitz scenario proved, but just a bit to hard.

What I am trying to do with the “Simple Editor” i am now designing for DC3 is giving the scenario designer a streamlined model to set up a scenario in a number of steps. First the designer chooses a map file. Second he imports a number of troop&equipment libraries. Thirdly he imports some historical unit libraries. Then he can change the ownership and VP value of the hexes and place units, and basically the scenario would be ready to play.

Though with this steps only there would be no victory event, high command orders or weather or anything… For these last things to be in the scenario the designer has to import the event libraries he wants to use. For example the “Victory Condition Library” which would allow him to set through a special more user-friendly interface (no scripting!) the conditions for the different victories the game can end in. The same for example with a “Reinforcement Units Library”, “Wheater and Seasons Library”, etc…

Basically my aim is to make design of a scenario just a matter of putting some pre-made building blocks together and giving each some special instructions that are well documented and done through a better interface.

By splitting up the different tasks involved in making a scenario it will also allow for some designers to focus on their strengths. Like for example some will be able to compile Commander libraries, some OOB libraries or Troop&Equipment libraries, some might just create map files, and some will want to create their own event libraries. Probably i’ll even create special editor modes for making maps, troops&equipment, commander and historical unit libraries.

I think if all goes as planned we’ll see much more user/third party scenarios made with DC3 than with my previous games.

Also I plan to make an offer for joint-ventures for proven scenario designers who want to make fully new games from scratch with this engine and commercially sell their creations.

As always I conclude with the statement I hope to tell a little bit more about the mystery project the upcomming months :)

Happy gaming all!
Vic

The naval AI has never been the strongest part of ATG and this mod seems to make playing the AI on ocean-rich maps a lot more challenging.

The advanced resource rules basically force you to have actual connections between your mines and oil wells and the rest of your empire.

Read more about this mod on the matrix forums.

Its available for download on the VR Designs scenariobank

Also thanks to Roy Blackwell who has been posting NATO counter mods dilligently for ages, who has also provided this AI and resource mod with NATO counters. More info here.

Screen of an advanced resource rules report:

These two months also saw a major bug hit my Decisive Campaigns series. Somehow Microsoft managed to release a Windows7 update which actually caused my existing games, that where running just fine untill that moment, to breakdown on quite a lot of system configurations. It was very tough and time consuming to find out what was happening and why, but I eventually managed to code around it, lower memory use and even increase the speed of map scrolling in the DC titles. New patched versions of the patches for Warsaw to Paris and Case Blue have just gone gold a few days ago over at Matrix Games.

Advanced Tactics Gold v2.14 finally went gold as well, bringing the new officer feature to the masses.

Furthermore I have started spending a few hours in the week on DC3. :) Currently working on a new simple editor and a new easy way to design scenarios, while keeping the complex editor in at the same time to allow die-hard designers (like me) to create components for the simple editor. For me this DC version has to unlock the potential of the engine by making it much easier for players to design their own scenarios and interexchangeable-data files. As for DC3′s actual subject, its very probably going to be Operation Barbarossa and maybe beyond. Probably on divisional-regimental scale with weekly turns instead of the regimental-batallion scale used in DC1/DC2.

Oh… and Small General is now also available on the Samsung App store.

If you like it please give some feedback over there or on the DC:WTP matrix forums.

Here are some additional screenshots: (click to enlarge)

Furthermore I decided together with Matrix Games to provide a bundled purchase option for both Decisive Campaigns games.

Ohh.. and Small General has been patched. (expect another small patch soon)

But most of the work this month went into the new mystery project. This project now officially has priority above all others.

I really try to make some time free to do some initial work on Decisive Campaigns 3, but it is proving hard to make the time. I will try harder though. The engine deserves a third installment. Hope to report some more progress here in the next months.

Never played Small General yet and have an Android tablet or phone? Load up the Google Play store and get it. Here are 2 extra pictures from the game running on the Nexus7 to get you motivated: