Arctic Maps and New Hardware

Two things landed this week that change what a battle can look like: a third biome, and a batch of units and structures that fill the gaps the first roster left open.

The Arctic

The lobby's terrain card now offers Arctic beside Temperate and Desert. Tundra lowlands whiten toward a glacier line a third of the way up, above which an ice sheet damps the relief into domes stepped in ice shelves, blue-white with crevasse blue on its slopes. Shores are frozen shingle, the rock is dark and cold, and the sea is steel-blue with pack ice: polygonal floes thick along the shores and scattered over deep water, with small bergs among them. Ships sail through. Snow-laden pines stand below a low treeline, dead trees at it, tussocks and scrub on the tundra, erratics on the ice.

Deep snow on the high ground slows vehicles the way sand does in the desert. The cold climate draws clear skies, overcast, fog and snowstorms, never rain. A snowstorm is driving flakes, spindrift, a white-out sky and a howling wind, and it cuts eyes to 42% and thermal sights to 65%. No night crickets up here, either.

New hardware

Eight additions, each picked to close a gap:

• Light Armored Vehicle. A tier 1 eight-wheeler at 72 km/h with a 30 mm autocannon that hits helicopters and low aircraft, thermal eyes and its own smoke grenades. An escort for scouts, engineers and trucks, and a quick reaction force. It loses a straight fight with a tank.
• Mine-Clearing Vehicle. Land mines had almost no counter. This tier 2 tank-chassis clearer reveals enemy mines within 60 m to the whole team, sets off the ones it drives onto harmlessly with its flail, and fires a line charge that blows every mine in a 20 by 120 m lane ahead.
• Close Air Support Aircraft. Slow, heavily armoured, with a 30 mm rotary cannon and two anti-armour missiles. It attacks in gun runs: lines up, dives firing, pulls out, comes around again.
• Airborne Early Warning Aircraft. A four-jet radar plane with a spinning rotodome: all-round air search to 6 km and surface search to 4 km for the whole team, and because it looks down from altitude, hills never mask it. Unarmed, fragile, loud on enemy ESM, and the one aircraft an anti-radiation missile will home on.
• Early Warning Radome. A big dome with air search out to 5.5 km, so long-range SAMs can fire at full reach. Fragile and loud.
• Counter-Battery Radar. It sees no units. It tracks enemy shells and ballistic missiles in flight within 4 km and gives the team a 30-second track on the gun or launcher that fired them, with an alert.
• Coastal Missile Battery. Four radar-guided anti-ship missiles from the shore, out to 6.5 km, with its own surface-search radar.
• Anti-Radiation Missile on the Strike Airplane. It homes on a transmitting radar or jammer heard by the aircraft's ESM. Switch the emitter off in time and the missile lands tens of metres off, which makes emission control a real decision rather than a checkbox.

The air-superiority jet also got a new airframe: F-22 style, with a chined body, caret intakes, a diamond wing, canted tails and internal weapon bays.

Fly it yourself

Select an aircraft and press F6 to ride along, in the cockpit and then a chase view with a flight HUD. Press F7 to take the controls: the mouse aims and the aircraft turns to follow, W and S set the throttle, Q and E pick a weapon, and the left button fires. Guns go down the nose, missiles at the boxed lock, bombs on release. F7 again hands the aircraft back to its orders. It runs through the host, so it works in multiplayer.

A bench where AIs fight so the numbers can be fixed

Balance has been done by feel until now. The new tuning bench stages 1v1, 2v2v2 and 2v2v2v2 battles with every seat an AI, one Balanced and one specialist per alliance, at four times speed, and records every unit built, lost and credited with kills, every weapon's shots and hits, each team's cash every 15 seconds, and where the bases ended up. It writes a report with a verdict per unit against the median and a list of suggestions.

The first run already changed the game. With eight commanders on a standard map the nearest enemy HQ was 1.67 km away and the first kill came at 1.4 minutes. So the map now grows with the lobby: 8 km across for up to four commanders, 9 km for five or six, 10 km for seven or eight, with the same seed, shape and biome and more room between the bases. The run also showed the LAV, the tank, the mortar and the scout car destroying four to eight times the median value per credit spent, and the flak gun rarely hitting. Those are the next numbers to move.

Also

• Aircraft engines are Doppler-shifted from the aircraft's speed relative to the listener, and a fast, close pass leaves a flyby whoosh.
• The smoke screen is now many small puffs born in a flattened dome that swell and roll under a slow noise field, rather than a few big blobs.
• Clicking Attack on something the selected aircraft can't hit now says so, instead of silently doing nothing. In a mixed selection only the units that can hit the target take the order.
• Every automated check and playtest now runs headless in batch mode, which is how the regression sweep of 50-odd tests got done in one night.

Next: a new map shape, and the ground you have to discover.