This update is about Zero Hour blitz only. Updates for the new SC version will hopefully be coming next week.
Art Progress
Something that's been lacking up till now has been screenshots of the new art.
One thing that was clear in the previous post was just how many new units have been added. These are mostly done now, a few skins are left but this might be something best left until everything is in game and working correctly. This is because of the dramatic visual impact of the scale change.
Something that doesn't come across when it's written is just how much smaller the units look at 50% scale:
(you need to see this at full resolution!)
Staff.tankrush.com
So the units are small. REALLY small. I'm contemplating doing a contrast pass on them to boost the readability at such extreme sizes.
In any case they don't look so great on their own so I think it's best to wait until everything is finalised before showing it all in action where you can appreciate the majesty of scale over the look of puny individual tanks [insert Lenin quote here].
AI
It's sad to say it but the AI is pretty bad. Basically the AI is designed to spam out units in waves. It cheats and it's very limited. This is mostly because ZH itself is limited. We hijacked the ZH AI system and used it as best as possible but all the new logic we added to the game isn't supported because the mod uses and abuses the original systems very badly and the internal game logic just isn't set up to cope.
I'm pretty tempted to overhaul it. It would actually cheat even more, but it would be more script based which would probably allow it to use the new mechanics better,
The basic idea would be to have the AI build factories but then to have scripts that detected the presence of these factories and spawned units based on what the AI has built and maybe also how well the player is doing. The different difficulty levels would modify this but it would do a lot more than just spamming units at your base.
I don't know how viable this is or how long it would take to do, but it would probably put back the final release a fair bit. How do people feel about this?
Forums
It will be (very) old news to a lot of people, but we actually have a forum on the Derelict Studios webzone. Here you can see a drunken rant by a vagrant:
Derelictstudios.net
Just kidding! It's actually Blitz player supremo Dirty Harry explaining exactly why Blitzkrieg rocks so much!
These forums are pretty old so there's a lot of mod history that can be dug up from the news pages. They are also understandably pretty quiet right now (for obvious reasons) but when the new version is released they will be a good place to arrange games, get advice and discuss strategies and tactics!
Challenging AI is welcome for comp-stomping and such. The AI cheats with resources, but so do I sometimes(Mostly :D) because I love the scale of this mod. Being able to send a massive hoard of tanks only to be met by another massive hoard of tanks is always fun.
Yeah hopefully it will be simple to make it work right :D
Those units are pretty small :/ I think they're a bit too small. I know Blitzkrieg II isn't about the detail of the units, but I'd still like to tell what kind of tank it is just by looking at it
You can usually deduce what type of tank it is by how badly its obliterating your forces.
If you'll pardon the reference; "What is this?! A mod for ants?!"
While it may be thought necessary, I implore you, please either keep them at 75% of original size or just keep them at the original size. The sheer added variety in units more than makes up for it.
Yeah I agree with LPJGPR. I think that making the units THAT small really isn't necessary. I think it's a good idea, but you might be going a bit too far... I can't even tell apart the turret and the hull in most of them