Hello all,
I am proud to announce that Release 7 of Crimson Fields, Crimson Skies is now available for download. This is the culmination of several years work, being a complete re-write of the mod from the ground up, including many new features (including new, fully separated campaigns for the Commonwealth and United States, with a new campaign menu).
To go into a little more depth, Release 7 currently features 4 "Core" Campaigns, from 1939 to 1946 (not a typo, this will become clear). These are the Commonwealth, United States, Axis, and Komintern Campaigns. The Axis and Komintern Campaigns are the largest in terms of length and number of units available, being some 22 chapters in length (and excepting a pair of single mission chapters, all having carefully crafted random missions, sculpted for each chapter). That isn't to say the Commonwealth or US Campaigns are easy or less developed; its simply that with a good portion of their fight being in the Pacific, there aren't as many opportunities for random maps (at present, I intend for this to change in future).
Release 7 also features a completely reworked sound front, with almost every sound in the game being reworked, expanded and revised. This includes weapons, effects, vehicles, ambient, voices. Everything.
Under the hood, the visual effects have been completely reworked to increase stability and improve the look of weapons fire and explosions and the like. In addition, an area I am very proud of is aerial combat, with aircraft now acting in a far more dynamic way than previously thought possible in the enigma engine.
Another significant area of work was infantry, once again being completely reworked to more closely mirror historical tables of organisation and equipment. Squad formations are now more important to gameplay as well, with different formations having more dramatic effects on accuracy, rate of fire and so forth.
An often overlooked area, I also made considerable changes to the "ack" system. This is the system of text messages that generates giving feedback to the player when events occur. In the base game its rather rudimentary, and significant units can be lost without the player realising. As a quality of life upgrade for CFCS, I've gone and enhanced these considerably, and the player will now receive far more detailed reports about enemy aircraft being downed, friendly and enemy units being knocked out, units opening fire, running low on ammunition and so forth. All vital pieces of information on a (increasingly complex) battlefield.
Release 7 also includes new campaign introduction and ending videos, albeit just for the Commonwealth at the moment. As with the Spanish Civil War and Korean War campaigns, I intend to finish and add these as later patches to the "base" Release 7.
One small downside to all this is a slight increase in file size up to 3.24gig (from 2.02gig), but given how much is packed in there (I made considerable savings with recompressing textures and the like) and given today's games of 60+gig or more, it's still a bargain for filesize. The install process has been streamlined as well, being even easier to install than R6, although some new features (the additional campaigns especially) involve the use of modified exes and dlls, all available at my discord. This is a small complication but, well worth the effort for the end result. The game is also far more stable on modern systems with these files too.
There are other changes too, far too numerous to mention all. It really is the largest change to CFCS since its inception over a decade ago, and I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it.
Just to leave you with a few shots of R7. First, Soviet T-28s and T-35 tanks advancing across a contested river crossing outside Moscow in 1941.
Secondly, showing off some of the new "ack" system, Soviet and German forces engage in a small town in Ukraine in the autumn of 1943.
