Unity of Command News

The V-E Day update is here, and it’s loaded! There are 13 new scenarios (all what-ifs), a shorter and punchier Second Front campaign, numerous rule and balancing tweaks, and a bunch of technical improvements, including full UI scaling among other things.

I also, ekhm… only now realize that Update 11 somehow slipped in without a post on our blog, with just a quick note here on Steam🤦‍♂️ Let’s just attribute that to coronavirus-induced panic and move on.

In general, the whole work-from-home thing seems to be working for our team. We are able to stay productive and keep ourselves safe, which is basically all you can ask for at this point. I wish the same, or at least close enough, to all readers of this blog and fans of our games.

[h2]Unthinkable[/h2]
To quote Daniel Mellbin, who designed all the scenarios in the Victory in the West campaign, “things can now get a bit crazy if you succeed with Operation Market Garden and choose to exploit the bridgehead. Things get even crazier if you don’t feel like giving Stalin a free hand in Poland later on.”

Not that it’s super easy to get there, but if you play both Mediterranean and Northern European theaters to their a-historical conclusions, you will be faced with Operation Unthinkable. See, we knew you had secret longings for IS3s, SU-100s, and other Soviet bad boys from the original UoC, so we decided to bring them into play slightly ahead of time 😀

Because things can now get pretty involved in the campaign, we are providing the Scenario Chart below. Click on the image for the HD version, or get it in PDF or full-size PNG. In addition to scenarios and branching, the chart also enables you to track HQs across scenarios. This should allow for better planning of prestige investment in HQ specializations and upgrades.



For those that are slightly tired of slogging it through Italy at the start of each campaign run, we are now providing the Second Front campaign. This one lets you jump straight into the action at Overlord. The Mediterranean theater is removed, and you cannot reach Unthinkable, but other than that it’s the same campaign. You cannot unlock achievements and milestones related to Victory in the West via this shortened campaign, though.

[h2]Rules and Balancing[/h2]
Special forces have received special attention in this update. The specialists with the black icon will, from now on:

• Bypass enemy entrenchment in attack (like engineers) but do not remove it (unlike engineers).
  
• Help their parent unit lower its combat losses: +1 attacker loss shift per active special forces specialist.
  

Additionally, special forces with the amphibious AMPH flag are able to:

• Land un-suppressed in naval landings and major river crossings.
  
• Reduce the river shift from -2 to 0 when attacking across minor rivers.
  
• Allow their parent unit to perform a feint attack (HQ action) across a minor river.
  

We made smaller changes to other specialists too. Amphibious tanks, like the DD Sherman, now provide armor shift when attacking across minor rivers. M10 tank destroyers got nerfed on attack and defense, while still keeping the formidable +3* armor shift. Stacking multiple towed arty specialists is discouraged further: second and third such specialists are pushed up in the loss queue, by 2 and 4 places respectively.

To help the players keep track of specialists and their abilities, we are providing a Specialist Reference Sheet. You can see a small excerpt below. Get it here in PDF.



We did some tweaking on the prices too. The Air Recon card now costs 10 prestige. At the same time, recon assets in scenarios have been slashed to just one or two across the board. This should make the asset and its card more meaningful. The AFHQ/SHAEF card was also reduced in price, as we feel it’s a good card that should be used more often. HQ branch upgrades are now cheaper in general. Hopefully this will encourage players to experiment with some of the less-used HQ actions.

[h2]UI Scaling[/h2]
The game is now able to do UI scaling on its own. To turn this, go to Options and adjust these settings:

• Ignore System UI Scaling: this will make the game ignore the “Make everything bigger” Windows setting. The game will render in native display resolution. Note that the “Make fonts bigger” Windows setting is always ignored for game purposes.
  
• UI Scale: the game will scale (enlarge) UI elements by selected factor, up to 200%. This is done independently of Windows, so you probably want to select the “Ignore System Scaling” option above for anyhing else than 100%.
  

Q: The game appears to be low-resolution and/or text is blurry
It is possible that you have enabled the “Make everything bigger” setting in Windows. Try enabling Ignore System UI Scaling in Options and then restarting the game.

Q: I have a high-resolution display and text is too small to read
Go to Options, and set UI Scale to desired magnification (up to 200%). Restarting the game is not needed.

Q: I’m running with Very High settings on a high-res display and the framerate seems low and/or fan is too loud
Go to Options/Video and set Smoothing to Off. This should be of most help with the framerate, and at the same time not too noticeable visually. Another thing to try is to go to Options/General and disable VSync. This eases the burden on the CPU (not GPU) and should help with fan noise in most cases.

[h2]Taking the Sting out of Easy[/h2]
If you’re finding the game too difficult even on Easy, I recommend that you subscribe to the Recruit Difficulty mod on the Steam Workshop.

I’ve made this one really over-the-top easy. If you’re finding it useful please comment here or on the mod page, as we might want to use the player feedback to add another difficulty level (Cadet level, say).

In a final piece of news, we are releasing the Unity of Command II Soundtrack as a standalone product on Steam. This version offers an extra track (compared to the in-game version), some different mixes and high-quality FLAC files.

As usual, feel free to AMA in the comments.

Cheers!
Tom

A gargantuan FREE update to Unity of Command II, including the new ending to the (overhauled) "Victory in the West" campaign, is now available for playtesting in the newly released Update 12 Test.

How would you end the Second World War? We've been busy making A LOT of changes to the "Victory in the West" campaign to enable you to chose "to impose the will of the Western Allies" by attacking the Soviet forces. Operation Unthinkable is now available, along with IS3 units, SU-100s, Guards Mechanized, Guards Cavalry, IL2s and much much more, as an alternative final battle in the newly released Update 12 Test.

Daniel wrote a nice blog entry describing the path you need to take in order to unlock the Unthinkable, along with instructions on activating the Update 12 Test in case you want to jump in and try the new content straight away. You can read the full blog by visiting our forums, and we'll continue to tweak, update, upgrade and create new content, making Unity of Command II an even better game (and it's already pretty damn good!).

Join the Testing Branch and play the free Update 12 Test today!

"Unthinkable", following an early end to the war things go a bit haywire between east and west

https://store.steampowered.com/app/809230/Unity_of_Command_II/

After a period in testing, Update 11 for Unity of Command II is now live for all players, delivering new content, UI improvements, features, bug fixes and more.

Battle of Kasserine Pass and Operation Nordwind standalone scenarios are now included, completing an exciting trio of Axis operations together with Wacht Am Rhein.

Opening stages of Unternehmen: Wacht am Rhein, Hitler's last-dich effort to turn the tide on the Western Front, played in ultrawide resolution.

The game now includes a “Save As” option. It is enabled by default for standalone scenarios; for campaigns, you need to go to Options > Gameplay > Allow 'Save As'. You also have the option to change the save name when starting a new game/campaign. Happy save scumming!

[h3]Other notable changes:[/h3]

• campaign games can now be restarted from the last conference played. There is a score penalty of 10% (capped at 250) for this, but no prestige penalty.
  
• the game now counts how many scenarios a unit will stick around for (in the campaign), and displays a 1, 2, or 3+ on the unit sheet.
  
• persistent cards that are face down in the deck (for example a para card that was just dropped) can now be recouped for 0 prestige, to make room in the deck.
  
• much more detailed specialist tooltips

You can check the full change log here.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/809230/Unity_of_Command_II/

We are back! Unity of Command II got released in November, to a good amount of press coverage, glowing reviews, and (predominantly) satisfied players clocking up good hours with the game. We, on the other hand, ended up totally busted from the pre-release crunch.

We are now well rested and all that, but the whole thing made me appreciate my friend Fernando’s militant views on crunch that much more. I’m not sure if another Christmas without a released game would be great either, but the crunch definitely had us bruised.

[h2]Release Recap[/h2]
The release day itself was exciting: it’s been 8 years since the original Unity of Command, and more than 4 since Dev Diary 1. We all got together to push the “release game” button at 7pm local time that evening. This button is a new thing on Steam, as previously you’d just schedule a time and the game would be released automatically. Not sure why they changed to this new system, probably not “because it’s more fun”, but then you never know 😀

You’d expect some bugs and crashes on release, and sure enough we had them, but there were no real disasters so that’s good. We made quick work of the crashes even before the holidays (updates 1-9), and have since moved on to balancing and quality of life improvements. As of this writing, the game seems to be in good shape overall.

One persistent complaint that we’ve been getting is that the game needs more tooltips, tutorials etc. This is… true, and is something we are looking to address in future updates. Thankfully, the community has stepped in: check out Unity of Command II – Short Guides by Sampstra Games for example, or this Japanese language guide by Poge. Many thanks!

[h2]Updates and Testing Branch[/h2]
Starting with Update 10 earlier this month, we have created a Testing Branch on Steam. The updates are now bigger and require some testing before being released. If you want to help us test, or just check out some of the new features and fixes, you can join the Testing Branch.

Update 10 has gone live for all users earlier today, and we have already started the work on Update 11 in the Testing Branch. Check out the full changelist for Update 10 on Steam discussions. Notably, Update 10 includes Wacht Am Rhein, a standalone scenario for the Battle of the Bulge played as the Axis.

We’re looking to add more standalones like this in the future. Here’s a subtle teaser for the one coming up in Update 11. 🙂



[h2]Roadmap[/h2]
We plan to continue with the updates, adding new features, quality of life improvements, and standalone scenarios. Regarding entirely new campaigns: we are discussing them (for DLC) but we did not finalize any plans yet. After the huge 30-scenario Allied campaign in the base game, we are perhaps looking for something punchier. We’ll see…

This next image is the design for some of the unit sheet details we’re adding in Update 11. Can you notice the changes and/or guess what they’re for?


These changes will come bundled with a new batch of tooltips, and hopefully all of that will communicate the unit state more clearly to the player.

Another thing we’re looking at is letting the players restart the campaign from previous conference, as opposed to last scenario only. This has been requested often enough, but there are technical issues that make it non-trivial so we’re only getting to it now. The planned score penalty is 10%, capped at 250 (too harsh?). There will be no prestige penalty as usual.

Further down the line, after Update 11, we are working on a rather large content drop (free update, not DLC). This will add a number of what-if scenarios to the campaign, including completely new what-if campaign tracks.

Along with the new content, there will be a few rule tweaks, and a good chunk of AI work. All of this will require balancing, which means that the Testing Branch will become exciting later in February. If you understand “exciting” to mean “unbalanced and full of people arguing over unit stats”, then this might be a test you’ll want to join 🙂

As a final note, we have added Steam trading cards for Unity of Command II. Pending approval, they should go live in the coming days. I’m not sure what to think of this feature, as this is the first time we have trading cards, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

Cheers,

Tomislav

https://store.steampowered.com/app/809230/Unity_of_Command_II/

The first Unity Of Command was designed for the open steppes of the Eastern Front. There, the major battles were about manoeuvre, with tank units chasing and covering miles of ground for their objectives, and lines of infantry moving to counter and support. The steppes were perfect for UoC’s unique focus on maintaining your army’s supply lines.

So, when designer Tomislav Uzelac began thinking about turning to the Western front for its sequel, he knew he had a problem. The big battles of France and Italy were slow and attritional, crossing mountain ranges and facing enemies dug into forests. “The question was, how do you go from Case Blue, where you cover 1,000 kilometres in Russia over a month and half, to Monte Cassino, where you stay pounding on one position for six months?” he tells me.

The answer lay in pushing and pulling at the frontline between military accuracy and game abstraction, and in exploring tiny design details which you’d never think could lead to making a vast theatre of war this fun to play. But as well as dealing with Europe’s topography, the sequel would also have to be a lot more complex than the first.

...

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/01/01/how-unity-of-command-2-balances-game-design-with-military-history/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/809230/Unity_of_Command_II/