Battlegroup42 1.61 - Preview news

The release of Battlegroup42 1.6 can certainly be called the most successful BG42 release ever. On release day our server nearly broke down due to the enormous traffic being caused. Until today we´re counting almost 6000 downloads from our website alone, the overall amount of downloads can´t even be estimated. For that we want to thank our fans and the community. Many new players on the [MOB] Server show us that 1.6 is a big hit.

A project as big and complex as Battlegroup42 is almost impossible to keep free of bugs and some of them made it into version 1.6 despite all testing. In the past weeks after the release we have been gathering bug reports from our players and fixed the bugs. We also used this feedback to do some changes on the maps which had been released with 1.6.

And since the BG42 team is never lazy we can also present you some new content. Definitely the most interesting is the Japanese heavy cruiser Furutaka. This impressive ship was modelled by our Navy expert Cabrio and coded by Sarge31FR. Besides its main armament it features two medium artillery turrets on each side, two torpedo launcher turrets, two dual AAA guns and a traversable seaplane catapult. Starting with 1.61 it will be available on the map Rabaul, replacing the Hatsuzuki. There will be more maps for this fantastic model in the future.

How to use the Furutaka catapult

The Furutaka was one of two ships of the Furutaka class and was commissioned in 1926. After a total refit in 1939 the ship with a displacement of 9150 tons featured a main armament of six 8 inch (203mm) cannons in three dual turrets and a secondary armament of four 4.7 inch (120mm) cannons in single turrets. In the beginning of the war she participated in every important operation in the Pacific - Guam, Wake, New Guinea, the Solomon's and the Battle of the Coral Sea. During the Battle of Guadalcanal she was heavily damaged by American cruisers during a night battle near Cape Esperance and sank shortly after. Her sister ship Kako, which mostly operated together with the Furutaka, was sunk earlier on 10 August 1942 by an American sub. In the night before she had dealt serious damage to the American and Australian forces near Guadalcanal during the Battle of Savo Island.

Our weapons expert RuppDee beefed up two old weapons. The British Enfield No.4 and the American BAR models got some corrections, more details and new skins. Additionally RuppDee created a Japanese suicide mine (the lunga mine) which can currently only be found as a pick-up kit on Iwo Jima, more maps may follow. Its functionality posed some problems for our coder Sarge31FR which we finally solved. To use the mine you have to stab it against a target, just like a bayonet - which means the end for both the target and the player.

Last but not least we want to tell you about two new maps we have packed into the patch. Just like Bir Hakeim in 1.6 those new maps come from zara5ustra´s workshop and were touched up by Sarge Surfat. 114-to-Messina is about the advance of the British 8th Army on the Strada Statale 114 along the eastern coast of Sicily. During their retreat the German and Italian troops fought heavy battles with the British troops in order to cover the evacuation of their troops across the street of Messina. The second map, Comacchio, is about a British operation during the allied spring offensive in northern Italy in 1945. Sarge Surfat made this map into a push map. Both maps come with bot support which originally in the maps and was improved by Lotte from EOD and Sarge31FR.

Now the only question that remains is when the patch will be released. We don´t have a date yet but it will be soon. Currently the patch is in the beta-testing phase but we are certain that it will leave beta status very quickly. So stay tuned and visit our website www.battlegroup42.de regularly !