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When developing PT Boats: Knights of the Sea, we tried to reach the golden mean between realism and interesting gameplay that would bring a lot of fun to the gamers who are fond of simulation and strategy games. The topic of today's' blog is "Damage Modeling". We hope that you will find some hints here making your playing experience more fun!

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Weapon ballistics. 

All weapons in the game are divided by groups, and each group uses its own physics model to calculate the shooting process (flight trajectories, damage etc.)

Small arms and artillery.

Before we start talking about artillery, we feel it necessary to say a couple of words about the conflicts between real life and interesting and rich gameplay that every game developer faces. The effective shooting range for artillery and machine guns was shortened in the game compared to real life distances to ensure that gameplay is more fun than the "grey" reality (yes, we realize that we have just stepped on the slippery slope of the balance between true realism in video games vs. gameplay fun).

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'Nuff said!

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Hi all!

Well, I promised a small bone for you since it's been a while since I've tossed out a significant one. So let's talk about bridges!

Since Combat Mission: Normandy is set in France, rather than the arid environment of Syria, bridges are a rather common tactical challenge for many historical battles set in that area of operations. The bridges that are in CM may look like placeholder artwork at the moment, but they do function quite nicely. Not nice enough to show you right now, but nice enough to talk about

 

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Brit’s defenses on the central island are meager are unlikely to withstand what ND will probably dish out in retribution and to take back that island. I decided immediately to send some units in to help out.

You can see a transport with three units from me heading for Berlin in the north, while ND’s transport is en route from the south. Notice how one of my planes is using Brit’s airfield as base of operations in the west.

ND’s units land on the coast south of Salvador and begin hammering Brit’s units to pieces.

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I was incredibly lucky with my starting position. Since we had chosen to play with map edges instead of a wrapped map (you can wrap the top-bottom and left-right edges), this immediately gave me the advantage of not having to worry about my back, and being able to focus my expansion into the top-right corner of the map.  (some of the screenshots can be enlarged by clicking on them)

My starting position as seen from God Eye View.

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Recently, we played a multiplayer game with four players + 1 novice AI player.  It was a randomly generated map, with wrap turned off.  This means there would be corners and edges to the map.  Having edges to the map is nice because it means players don't have to worry about being attacked from certain directions.  On the other hand, if you're unlucky enough not to be backed-up against a map-edge, you don't have the advantage that other players do.

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