1. Sudden Death Revamp - 3 items here. One. We have rewritten the Sudden Death calculation for VP scoring when SD kicks in. It's not 100% where we want to be, but it does a much better job of awarding VPs based on forces, distances and time left. Two. You will now have the option in a single player game to Continue. [X(] You can review the results and if you feel the need to take the game to its time limit you can hit the new button and play on. Three. For Multiplayer games there will be the option to play until Sudden Death or Time limit (or Player concedes). Great stuff there!
2. Fog of War - We have done a number of clean ups to the information being shown when browse enemies if off. Now enemy units kills and compositions will not be shown on map, UDP or Diary output. WE have also starting looking into a number of larger scale improvements for the 2.1 game with other things like fading HQ/Radar/Arty contacts, generic unknown markers and fuzzy intel reports. Cool things on the horizon.
3. Data Updates - A number of tweaks and additions here. Including missing US OH-58s, revised AH-1 ammo loads, Aircraft PF ratings fixes, and a few units with incorrect values like Soviet Comm Vehicles with guns that should not have them (whoops).
4. Unlocked Scenarios - Yep you heard right. Steve is unlocking ALL of the games scenarios so you can make those sought after tweaks and changes.[&o] OTS scenarios will still show as OTS in the editors and game and variants will show up as a USER altered item. Hopefully this will create a boom in scenarios on the site as folks crank out variants.
5. Support for larger unit sil artwork and a new unit sil override graphic for the Sub-Unit Inspector. 2.04 will allow for unit silhouette artwork to be based on much larger image. Currently all sils are 128 x 64. You can now use a bigger image of similar proportions (like 256 x 128). Along with this change we have upped the size of the unit image in the SUI and we are adding in a way to have a separate image fill in the now larger SUI image. Having a graphics file with the same name as a sil with a "-S" added to the name will now be used in the SUI in place of the sil. If there is no "-S" image the standard sil image will be used. This will allow for smaller black sils on the counters and a larger color image for the SUI. All still in BMP formats.
6. Almost forgot a biggie. You can now choose the end state order of a move. From any of the three movements (Hasty, Deliberate, Assault) you can set the order at the end to Hold, Screen, On Call, or Resupply. It's not quite multi-orders per waypoint (that's still on tap for 2.1), but it does give you more flexibility in how you want your forces to move and setup.
7. Many, many other tweaks, bug fixes, AI, gameplay improvements. Rob is still working up a list. We have added little things like shifting arty fires, reworked standoff range (much more work to come in this area for 2.1), and a now limited orders functional selection of units under a HQ. Plus more.
Next big question is when do you get it. When it's ready. We are not rushing this one with all of the additions and tweaking. We will be finalizing a number of the code related change through next week and we will then look to test it before releasing into the wild. So wwe will be looking next week for some of our beta folks to run 2.04 and report back issues. Once we have a solid release we will let you all know. We really want a big update that works well out of the gate so we can swing our guns into the next game.
So save up your energy. It's going to be a busy spring on the Red Storm battlefield.
