Hey everyone,
It's about time we share with you one of the more exciting (and unexpected!) developments of 5.0. Thanks to the great efforts of Panzershreck, with texturing support from Don Durandal, and modeling support from Wangrin and Nightfall, the Great War 5.0 will boast a comprehensive set of custom battle maps. Moreover, several of these maps will feature extensive - and functional - trench networks, an important aspect of ww1 that up until now we've not been able to properly simulate.
For those of you who follow our TWC forum, this may be familiar news to you. Still, we urge you to keep checking in, as progress in this area is both quick and always made public.
Custom Maps
The maps cover many significant battles, campaigns, or generally interesting locations, such as the coast of the Gallipoli Peninsula or a site of the Battle of Verdun. Within them you will find street lamps, roads, abandoned and destroyed buildings, tunnels, burnt trees, barbed wire... you name it, and it's probably there. All this comes together to provide a new layer of immersion to TGW battles, not only creating a new, more modern atmosphere, but simulating the ruined, desolate landscapes that resulted from the destructive years of war. Perhaps most importantly, defensive structures from barbed wire to sandbags to buildings to dugout forts will offer greater opportunities for cover, more complex maneuvers, and on the whole more interesting battles.
Click here to see more. The later pages will hold the more recent developments, and up-to-date screenshots.
Trench Networks
Back in April, Panzer surprised everyone with something many of us had anticipated since the mod began: trench networks. Not like the vanilla earthworks, but proper trenches - dug into the ground, extensive, and defensively useful. I'll let him say the rest, or you can read it here, along with several other videos.
Panzerschreck wrote: After two weeks of intense work, I present here my work on two maps : trench warfare and the same one with snow, trench warfare winter.
We create a special thread, because a lot of players were asking for full trenches for several years.
I kept my project secret because I was not sure to succeed and most of all, I wanted to make a little surprise-gift for the team and the players.There are a lot of new models in: 5 differents models of trenches, an hospital, observation balloon, more burnt trees, crashed plane, lines of gabions, new ruins and well.
Of course you will see that all is not perfect, on some places, soldiers cross the models. I tried to limit that with the battlefield itself or with uncrossable models, but there won't be miracles. Though, I think that I will be better practicing with these new models in next maps.
Are soldiers protected? Yes : the first reason is that only the head and shoulder can be targeted by rifles. So I made tries with the INSER button, and saw that most of the bullets of the attackers hit the ground, before hurting a soldier (but they can kill too of course)I Hope you will enjoy this work and also, it's the occasion to see all the excellent work of the team on units, sounds, models, tanks etc. 5.0 will be a total conversion as you can see.
Also, please note that these maps and trenches are currently only available in custom battles. We may explore methods of introducing them into the campaign in the future, but there are certain obstacles we'd first have to overcome.
We hope you enjoy!
~The Great War Mod Team
very nice!
Awesome!
very nice but is there a download yet and if so where
The latest BETA version (4.6) is available on our "official page" link. It is unstable and unfinished, so we have not made it available on moddb. All posted screenshots and videos are of 5.0, which is currently under development. We won't give release date estimates at this time.
Not to be picky it looks very nice but arn't the trenches a bit big or is it like that for gameplay reasons?
I guess it avoids having nightmares trying to place a whole group inside the trenches. ****** pathfinding and clunky AI will do that...
As dunadan said, it helps with pathfinding and allows us to keep our planned unit sizes. Gameplay must come first, after all.
that video is atmospheric as hell! I agree the trenches would look better if they were narrower, but i think this way favours gameplay, which is more important.
will the tanks be able to drive over the trenches or will they just crash like in the battle of the somme
im afraid that whizzing sound sound of the shells may turn into "That most annoying sound" if you hear it that loud whenver artillery shoots from big distances, atmospheric or not, my ears hurt from the vid :<
I think you should lower the distance where you hear the screaming of shells so it's just heard if a shell zooms a couple of dozen meters from the camera.
I mean atm, it's the the whizzing shells we hear the most, not the Thunder of cannons or rumble of explosions.
If it becomes a problem, we can address it in a minipatch after release.
thanks for your quick answer, love you guys :)
a campaign would be amazing!
cant wait!
Nice job! But where the hell is the download link?
It's not released yet.
So do u build the trenches during the campaign or are they already on certain maps
They're available when you play custom battles on certain maps. If we find a suitable way to put them in the campaign (buildable or not) we'll let you know.
Will the cities be sized like the ones in vanilla or will they be bigger?
I plan to increase city size for those playing on the smallest unit setting. For larger sizes, maneuvering through a large town would be cumbersome.
Hey i noticed when the tank is firing that it fires more like a howitzer. Should it fir more like an AT Gun
Just an idea on how to get trenches in the campaign map. Maybe you could build them in the building menu then it would be the battle maps of that province.
Hello to the Modders, as so far this mod looks amazing.. still missing some stuff, like naval units, and permanent trenches. Like in the version of Empire total war, the generals had the option of building forts why doesn`t this mod allow the generals the option to build trench systems? Just an idea.