Fifteen Missions and Three Sensor Lessons

Until this week, the only way to learn Wavefront: Vanguard was to drop into a skirmish and get shot at. That changes with this build: the game now has a proper single-player path, from the first click through to a three-way battle against two AI commanders.

Basic Training, then the lessons

Basic Training is offered on first launch. A coach walks you through the camera, selection, your first orders, building a base, and the first fight, step by step. It ends with an offer to play a skirmish against an Easy AI.

Its last screen also offers three sensor lessons, because the sensor model is the thing that makes this game different and the thing a new player is most likely to misread:

• Radar and the Shared Picture. Switch a radar on, read its coverage, and watch a SAM site with no radar of its own fire on the radar's tracks.
• Eyes Forward, Fire Behind. A forward observer spots a supply dump for mortars that can't see it. Bonus: lase the target.
• Hunting the Silent Hull. Sensor buoys and a maritime patrol aircraft find a deep submarine that is holding fire, and torpedoes sink it.

Each lesson takes a few minutes, and the last one hands you straight into mission 1.

The missions

Fifteen scripted missions, each on a fixed map seed with its own weather and time of day, so a mission plays the same way for everyone. Completing one gives a star, and each of its two bonus objectives adds another. Bonus objectives reward playing well, never a coin flip: speed, no losses, doing the optional hard thing.

In the order the game lists them, with the difficulty ramping up:

1. Beachhead. Clear an outpost.
2. Night Raid. Thermal sights in the dark.
3. Hold the Crossing. Take a position and hold it for eight minutes against seven waves.
4. Minefield. An engineering problem.
5. Fog of War. Reconnaissance in fog.
6. Sandstorm. Desert weather that cuts your eyes in half.
7. Blind Their Eyes. SEAD: the enemy radars first, then the command post.
8. Jammer. Electronic warfare.
9. Forward Observer. Designation and indirect fire.
10. Supply Run. A convoy through ambushes and a minefield.
11. Oil Rush. An economy race.
12. Air Superiority. A fighter fight over an archipelago.
13. Laser Screen. Naval air defence.
14. Decisive Battle. A full battle against a Normal AI.
15. Last Commander. A three-way fight.

Stars and XP are saved to your account, and the first completion of each mission pays XP, as does every new star. Seventeen more mission ideas are on the backlog, including a submarine hunt, a river bridgehead, a carrier strike and a co-op mission with an AI ally.

Smoke on the tank

The main battle tank gained a pair of smoke discharger banks: two salvos of four grenades each, landing about 30 m out in a fan toward the threat and making a wall that lasts 30 seconds. Smoke blinds eyes and thermal sights, laser designators, gunners and infrared seekers. A heat-seeking missile already in flight loses its lock and drifts tens of metres off. Radar sees straight through it.

The tank fires smoke on its own when a guided missile is inbound or an enemy laser is on it, and you can order it by hand. A logistics truck refills it. In the test, a gunship's missile fired from 1.5 km came down 58 m from the tank, which took no damage.

Also in this build

• A loading screen with a progress bar and a random field note about one unit, structure or weapon, with its rendered icon.
• A field guide (F8) for every unit, structure, deployable and weapon, with a 3D-rendered icon, its role, cost, requirements, durability, sensors and weapons.
• Fully rebindable hotkeys, 54 actions with two keys each.
• A colourblind team palette, a help panel with searchable sections, and lobby and battle chat with pings for allies.
• The whole interface was redrawn on one design system, with icons on every production and construction option instead of three-letter codes.

Next up: making the land itself more interesting to fight over.