While you wait for the alpha test, I wanted to provide you a more in-depth look into what has been accomplished, what's to come, and details on how exactly the system works.
First of all, there has been significant progress made on the actual mod modification. All the upgrades have been made squad based and their usage costs have been changed based upon the costs that we're posted (subject to change).
In addition, a custom win condition has been written which loads your units into the game and writes statistical output at the end of the battle, such as which units are still alive, how much experience they gained, etc... We hope to be able to offer more advanced statistics such as how many units they killed too, but we still have more testing to do.
We are also testing an auto-territory manager that eliminates the need to capture flags, but grants a team the sector immediately based on there being no opposing team forces in the sector for x amount of time. Our hopes are that this manager along with a game timer (7.5 * number of companies) will be used to determine if a battle is a victory, a draw, or a loss.
The remaining issues on the game mod front are keeping track of airborne and built units (howitzers and 88's). Paratroopers and Paradropped AT are going to require special tracking since they aren't spawned at the start of the game. It's a challenge to make sure they get to keep their persistency, including the experience they gained, their upgrades, and how many are allowed on the field. Howitzer's and 88's pose the same issue due to their ability to be built in the field. If your 88 has level 3 veterancy, you are going to want to make sure it keeps it if it survives the battle, right?
On the website, we've got the signup form completed as well as the side and doctrine selection. We've also got the company creation done and the unit purchase form is ready but currently undergoing an overhaul to make it more user friendly (due to the ability to buy forces for all your companies).
Despite all this, however, we still have quite a bit of work to do. Our biggest hurdle and probably the main obstacle to alpha is our war map. We haven't yet got anything concrete to show the map with sectors, controlling side, and the location or each players companies. The website still needs an interface for selecting which units from your company will take place in the battle and an interface for moving your companies around the war map.
As you can probably tell, progress is definitely being made, however there is still work to be done. We'll keep you updated on the progress and hope you are excited as we are to get this underway.
