Behind the Scenes

Questions on the new sandbox campaign for Waterloo can go here.
Post Reply
User avatar
norb
Reactions:
Posts: 3778
Joined: Mon Nov 26, 2007 9:59 am
Location: Central Florida
Contact:

Behind the Scenes

Post by norb »

So what was is the sandbox campaign? It's exactly what we named it because we did not want to confuse people, having them think it's something it's not.

This is THE major new feature in the engine. It took the most time and the most testing, the most bugs. We have been thinking about doing this for so long, it's been started and abandoned before, so we were faced with how to succeed. How to make it different this time around, to finish to our quality.

The first step was to create something that we could finish in 7 months. It had to be basic, the bare bones of a campaign, but fun! That's the way we always do stuff, keep it simple and make sure we got it right. What are those basics? Command lots of men, move them around, split them up, join them again, have them go into towns. I personally like a little battle experience, so we added a touch of that. Not enough to get gamey, but enough for you to care about your men. Enough for you to want to slowly build up your experience and not risk sending your best troops into death's arms.

One thing that came out of testing with realistic LOS was it was too hard to find the enemy. So we made it a little more fun and allow you to see any occupied town. That way you get an idea about where the enemy is and you don't spend days trying to track them down. Mostly cause Mitra wrote the AI, it's him you're fighting, and he's not sitting still.

For the map I've had this image from "Battle for Middle Earth" where they used a scaled down real map as the campaign map. I knew we had to have that. Little Powell took up that challenge and delivered splendidly. It's exactly what I was thinking when I was trying to describe it.

We had to come up with rules for the battles (you always get an upper level officer cause our sandbox works better that way). What happens when you lose a battle, when you win, lots of back and forth with the test team.

Towards the end we of course asked ourselves 'What's the point!'. So we added the game modes. Needed a way to win. Each town has a slightly different benefit for holding them. Again, nothing too gamey we are a historical war game, but something to add a little to the map.

The clock was a bear. Our battles are so long, how to handle them with the camp clock. So we came up with a system where you can exit any battle and return to the camp map. Then you can run the camp clock up to the earliest time of all your battles. You cannot run it past any of your battles. This is a little more realistic in that everyone doesn't just stop moving cause someone is fighting somewhere.

I think it turned out great and am so happy that we finally got something in and working and it's fun.

To us the biggest issues are:
1. no reinforcements - I remember the hoops we had to jump through working on 'Waterloo - Napoleon's Last Battle', it's not easy, but it will be a great enhancement to the battle engine to use in our scenarios as well.
2. need to work on unit placement in giant battles
3. kind of from #2 in that huge armies meeting on the roads go melee crazy in LOS battles. Of course it would be crazy for two giant armies to meet on a road.

Thank you for everyone's feedback. Everyone on the team has their pet feature they want, many want the ability to create an historical campaign. Right now our goal is to get the modders the tools they need and make sure what we shipped is perfect. Then when we have tons of feedback we'll work on something new, you know with an SOW patch it's rarely much about fixes as adding some more spice to the game :)
Post Reply