Ostheer Released! news

Hello comrades!

Today is a special day because our new second faction, that is the third axis faction in Eastern Front mod, is now released. It is named Ostheer and represents the German armies that fought on the East campaign. We have being working on this project almost five years, and built it from scratch so everyone on the team hopes that you like the result.

The Ostheer features a complete new faction with new Command Trees, units and abilities that is designed to fight against the Red Army, we have spent the last months in the beta tweaking and tuning stats, so we expect the balance in this release is suitable for good gameplay and tactics. Thanks to all the balancers and beta testers that helped us to reach this state, your help is really appreciated.

On the AI department, Ostheer has a basic AI coding, because our AI coder had an accident he could no longer continue to help us, so don't expect improvements yet because you will be disappointed. However, props to Robotnik for assisting us with the Ostheer AI.

As usual, there are things that we would like to polish more before release, but there would be more time to do that in the coming months. For now the Soviets will use their usual vehicle and building assets, except for the ones you have seen in the screenshots we have shown and except for the machine gun nest, which uses a new asset more close to what we wanted to depict in the original version. Ostheer has many tweaks left to do, but we will do it in the coming months. You can expect from us that we continue to support the mod as usual so, if you see something inaccurate you can be sure we already have it in our TODO list ;)... however, feel free to report it, we never know when we could forget something.

About the foreign troops intended to be part of Ostheer, this are old news though, but they are no longer part of a call-in in the support tree. We will release them as a reward faction(or a new faction a bit similar to Ostheer, but that depends of the changes we want to apply) so do not despair comrades! We really have a good selection of weapons for them and they are ready, so you will see them use their weapons and only seldom use of German equipment. In example, we have the Panceltoro 44M that Hungarians will use against their enemies, it is about the same caliber than the US bazooka, but it shouldn't be underestimated ;).

About the Soviet faction, most of the factions feels the same, however, there were some changes made to make the gameplay more dynamic and to give players more choice about what tactic to use, you will see what we are talking about when you play as Soviet. Now, for the upcoming soviet models, we have the new SU85, SU122, IS2, SU76 and the T34 variants(76 and 85) being worked on. As you can imagine it is a lot of work, that's why they aren't finished for 2.0 but we expect to have them in the coming months.

We also have removed some units from the reward panel: IS3 and Royal Marine Commandos; IS3 model is not ours, but we are also discussing what we should do with it, because not everyone is happy with this unit. Also, not everyone was happy with RMC either, because it hadn't a place in Eastern Front mod because you know, it is about the Eastern Front and Brits have nothing to do with them... however our reason to remove them is that they are not balanced in their current state, and that could break the experience of players with this new release, which is what we want to avoid. We intend to add a poll soon about what we could do with RMC, internally Devs have discussed this and we got our feedback so we want to know what the Eastern Front players would like we do with them, so far we have three choices: 1) Remove them, 2) Keep them as it, 3) Make a new faction with them(because will be easier to balance then)... but we will talk more about this process later.

We are also working on the campaigns, you could say half of the active team members are working on Ostheer and the other half in the Campaigns... this doesn't mean there is a lot of people around though ;). You could count them with your fingers :). Still progress is being made.

So, here we expect everyone enjoy this release, and hope everyone looks forward for the future updates and announcements that involve the community :). Thanks to all the people involved in this release and thanks to the community for waiting us all this time for this moment!

Thanks for downloading and continue to enjoy,

Eastern Front Development Team

Download Location can be found here!