Turns of War

There have been some opinions about the game being unbalanced, that the computer player has an unfair advantage. Actually, one of the ideas of this game is that the AI has to play with exactly the same setup like the human player.

As you might have noticed, the battle maps and units are the same whatever side you play. Play as German, and the AI player gets the Allied units. Play as Allied, and the AI player gets the same German units you just had.

If you’re playing on easy difficulty, the AI’s units are weakened (they start with 70% health instead of 100%). So there’s no unfair advantage for the computer player at any time.

In some missions, you might think they’re impossible to win since the AI side has more or better units. Take a look at the winning conditions though, and the picture changes. You might just be required to destroy 25% of the enemy’s units to win.

If you still feel a mission or unit is unbalanced, please let us know – send an e-mail, post a comment, join the forum. We’d always like to hear from you.

Hey everyone, we just uploaded version 1.0 – out of beta!

The most important change here is the movement and attack. Terrain now has an effect on how units can move, which opens up a whole new range of tactical decisions. Forest, hills, river and mud tiles slow down movement. This makes the game more realistic, and also more challenging. Timing and delaying enemy movement is even more important now.

This can even mean that some slow-moving units (like heavy artillery) can’t be moved at all from their positions, if all adjacent tiles have too high of a movement cost. This means that the respective unit has been set up before the battle, often by moving it in a disassembled state into position as a static defence. In the tactical context of the battle, the unit can’t be disassembled and moved.

Attacking no longer shows a red shaded highlight over the full range of the unit, as this could become pretty confusing for units having the same or larger combat range than move range. Now, enemy units in range are marked with a crosshair. In case you were wondering, it’s a German Zeiss crosshair from WW2.

It hasn’t been too long since the last update, but we’ve found some bugs in the victory conditions that we wanted to have fixed quickly and shipped to you guys. The unit description for the German paratroopers was broken as well and is now fixed.

beta-4 has just been released. It’s been a while since the last release, mainly because we were busy forking the open source game engine we’re using. We’ve come across rather frequent race conditions that caused force closes. Our fork should safeguard against these now, so we hope for a more stable experience.

Some balancing work has been done as well. The British Bofors 40mm AAA was underpowered in comparison to the light French 13mm Hotchkiss. The 40mm shells pack quite a punch, so we upgraded its anti-aircraft power.

The ingame manual on long-tap on a unit has proven rather cumbersome. First, it’s pretty well hidden and not many people were able to actually discover it. Second, it had a tendency to get in the way of the swipe navigation. We’ve removed that function and created the “field manual” icon in the top right corner, on the control bar. This will do the same thing as the long tap before, it’ll open a dialog with details and statistics on the currently selected unit.

The second level, the “Battle of Lillehammer”, was too hard on the Allied side. We’ve reworked the winning conditions, as the previous ones were very hard to achieve.

The beta phase is nearing its end, once the force close problems are out of the way, we’ll be working towards a 1.0 final.

Hey everyone, happy new year. 1.0-beta3 is out in the market, adding two main features besindes bugfixes for reported problems.

Attack Sounds
Each unit (own and AI ones) are bringing their own, authentic attack sound. These sounds were composed after original samples from the respective weapons being fired, to add to the authentic WWII feel. We hope you like them. In case you need to turn the volume down now (like, when you’re in a public place), the volume buttons on your phone are attached to the media volume.

Unit Info
We kinda had this on the website game manual, but it’s nicer if you can get the information ingame. So each unit now can be long-tapped to display a detail info dialog with basically the same info and stats that you can find in the manual.

After releasing beta2, which was mainly bugfixes, we’re planning beta3 to pick up some feedback we got so far.

One request was to show more unit info inside the game. We’ve got the unit pages in the game manual posted here, so we’ll be getting a condensed version into the actual game. There will be a new item in the menu to display a contextual unit info overlay, and then it’s just down to tap the unit you’re interested in.

Get it while it’s hot! beta1 was just uploaded to the Android market and should be listed any minute now. We’re all damn excited here after all the hard work!

*Phew* it’s done – 15 levels designed. Just a little bit more integration work, and it’ll be off for testing. Stay tuned folks, getting closer to release!

I’m in the middle of designing the levels according to the historic battles, and just wanted to drop a very special thanks to form.axishistory.com for all the detailed information. You guys are an amazing read, I’m often getting stuck just reading other posts instead of doing my research

Andengine has some nice support for sprites. We’re using that for changing the unit images to the respective orientation. To do that, we need an image that’s composed out of several sub-images, one for each direction.

Now the designer only produces one image, and she can’t be bothered to manually rotate and align. Here’s a simple script that solves this, using the awesome imagemagick:

#!/bin/sh

cd $1

for file in *.png ;
do
  NORTH=$file
  EAST=e_${NORTH}
  SOUTH=s_${NORTH}
  WEST=w_${NORTH}
  NE=ne_${NORTH}
  SW=sw_${NORTH}
  FINAL=$file

  convert -rotate 90 $NORTH $EAST
  convert -rotate 180 $NORTH $SOUTH
  convert -rotate 270 $NORTH $WEST

  convert +append $NORTH $EAST $NE
  convert +append $WEST $SOUTH $SW
  convert -append $NE $SW $FINAL

  rm $SOUTH $WEST $EAST $NE $SW
done

I’m just running this on a directory containing the source files, and it’ll turn them into sprite files. Huge timesaver, batching/scripting ftw.