[12 Nov 2005]
[20 Nov 2005]
Well, you might have seen the teasers over the last two weeks. I'm afraid I'm out of teasers and there's been a slight delay. So I'll post what's comming this weekend, and aim for a release next weekend.
Yes, something is comming. But it's not Release 3... sorry... it is my pet project.
What I'm doing, mostly on my own, is creating a new campaign for Blitz 2. You guys guessed it, it's set in North Africa.
Here's a snippet from my design brief:
What is it?
This is a mini mod-for-a-mod. I decided to take the already brilliant Blitzkrieg 2 mod (which I work on) and add an Africa campaign to it as a pet project (nearly all the team members have their own pet projects, this is mine). With this, I intend to:
Create 2 Single player campaigns, 1 Axis and 1 Allied each 7 battles in length
Depict major battles of the war in Africa
Raise Blitzkrieg 2’s level of realism a notch
And thus doing this, I would create for the mod:
Approximately 10 new units
Code for 10 new locomotors
Code for 6 new weapons
12 new maps
14 missions
This would of course mean that in creating this mod I would have to learn World Builder, a program I had never touched before starting this… so here’s a message to other map creators:
“Please don’t open up my map in world builder and post a page of criticism on a forum. I wont read it! I know my maps wont reach any standard you guys fly, I’m still on the steep learning curve. All I care about on this is that the missions work and are fun to play. This is just my personal project I made for fun. If you don’t like it, I don’t care.”
Now that’s out of the way…
How will this mod be different from Blitz 2
Blitz 2’s gameplay is very different from vanilla Generals. In particular the economic model. Money was earned by taking and holding as many civilian structures as possible, money gained through tax, loot etc… I’ll be keeping this model for the mod (although being set in a desert, don’t expect every mission to contain plenty of buildings), in the missions that don’t have many civilian structures in them, don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get enough resources to complete the mission.
In Blitz 2’s founder’s own words: “This mod was made for fun, not absolute realism, and gameplay reflects that.”
I would like to deviate from that slightly. As I said before I would like to add a touch of realism. For technical reasons it’ll never be truly realistic, but at least I can get close. Blitz 2 had a tendancy of throwing everything at you from the word go.
For this mini-mod, forget about picking subsides or spending Generals points on technology upgrades, that is gone in these missions. You will get what hardware was available for that point in time. Each mission is based on a real battle. So for example early on in the Axis campaign you are only able to build Panzer II tanks. Heavier hardware like Panzer IIIs and IVs are trickled in as reinforcing reserves, giving the feel that early on these heavier tanks were in short supply for the Germans. As the missions progress more of these units will automatically become available and more advanced units will start rolling when they did in the real war. Tiger tanks, for example, were not even invented when the war in Africa broke out, however you may find yourself running into one or two while leading the final attack on Tunis (technically there weren’t any left for this battle, but heck… gameplay ).
What I was hoping to release this weekend was the Axis mission 1. The 2 teasers leading up to the release last week and the week before. Unfortunately, there has been a slight delay, and hopefully it'll be available next weekend. Last week's teaser was the briefing for this mission (good for those who bothered to translate it (thanks for your help there Ironduke!).
Axis mission 1 isn't the start of the war though. It's just the start of the Axis campaign. The start of the allied campaign starts somewhat before against a very different enemy. But more of that later on
