Panther Games' Highway to the Reich revolutionizes wargaming with its pausable, continuous time game play and advanced artificial intelligence. Command like a real General, under real time pressures to achieve real objectives on a real map all within the fog of war. Issue orders to your powerful AI controlled subordinates or take total control of every unit. Fight the world's most advanced AI opponent or match wits against your friends online or over a LAN. Highway to the Reich covers all four battles from Operation Market Garden, including Arnhem, Nijmegen, Eindhoven and the 30th Corps breakout from Neerpelt.
Development and testing have progresed well. Paul should crush the last known bug this weekend and I should finish off the Reference Manual too. We plan to put out another final candidate build ( #66 ) next Tuesday. This will have everything completed, except for our Intro movie and the MapMaker and ScenMaker manuals. The game is very stable and looking great. It will be tight, but I reckon we can still go gold by the end of August, with a release at the end of September. Hooray!!
Question: For those of us with RDOA, you've mentioned that we can turn in the disc for a discount on HTTR. It'd be great if we could take care of that as soon as the game goes gold, so we can get the game shipped to us as soon as its released.
The boys at Matrix have provided us with a great theme for the intro movie. We have cleaned up a lot of the sound playing code. You no longer get the "reverb" effects when too many sounds try and play at the same time. The overall effect is much better sound effects.
We have also made it possible for users to mod the sounds, either by replacing the existing ones or adding to them. You can simply add in extra sounds which will become part of the pool of playable sounds for each weapon category.
Anyway I have got to go to bed now. It's after midnight and we've just finished uploading the latest build for our beta testers, including a new Reference Manual. It's been a long, long day. Good night.
We don't have any music playing in the game - only during the intro movie. Maybe next time. Music is very subjective and what you and I may like others won't. We'll take suggestions for music for the next game though.
Just to let you know that we did manage to release build 66 last night along with the first draft of the Reference Manual. Three manuals down ( Tut #1, Tut #2 and Ref ). Only two to go! ( ScenMaker and MapMaker )
So things are looking good. Still waiting on the Intro movie. Otherwise it's looking good.
We don't have any music playing in the game - only during the intro movie. Maybe next time. Music is very subjective and what you and I may like others won't. We'll take suggestions for music for the next game though.
Just maybe some generic classical
Classical suits a wide variaty of tastes and works for wargames
Id stay away from a rock music at all costs since those tastes differ quite a bit
Making it generic or having some minor group do it would keep you from expensives liscenses as well
I don't mind having music in games as long as I can turn it off. Hearts of Iron has some stirring 'Wagnerian' stuff on there but I find it distracting when I'm micro-managing or engaging in diplomacy. I find the music in Uncommon Valour much less unobstrusive and leave it on. In AA frankly I don't miss it.
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Music on a game disc is just wasted space to me. I never leave it on. I want to hear the sounds of battle. The only background noise that I would like to hear is perhaps a 15 second droning of planes overhead a minute before airborne reinforcements arrive.
I'm relatively new to this forum and based upon what I have read HTTR is going to be a must buy. I think the maps look great but can you describe how unit movement will be animated? Also, since the map scale is difficult to determine from the screenshots do the units have "range" based upon their primary weapons or is all combat initiated only by adjacent units?
The counters just move (remember in some scenario's you have some 30000 men under your command), and if you highlight them you can see how they are deployed (road collumn, line etc)
As for your seconds question. Combat is handled very realistically and quit complex.
First of course you have to spot the enemy (depends on unit training, recon value, deployment, visibility.
Each unit consits of several weapons, let's take the 1st Coy KG Jungwirth.
It's a '44 Mot FJ Coy.
The Mauser KAR 98 is effective to a range of 500 with a normal ROF of 1.
Range Accuracy (%)
50 90
100 81
200 65
300 46
400 28
500 14
The MG 42 LMG is effective to a range of 1500 with a normal ROF of 10.
Range Accuracy (%)
100 85
250 72
500 57
750 42
1000 29
1500 14
First is determined which of the weapons is going to fire (no Mauser's firing at tanks, formation of the unit, and supply status, -ie each round is modelled so you can have plenty of 9 mm's rounds left but you don't have 7.92 mm in store. Only those MP 40 SMG will fire then, while the MG 42's keep quit)
As you see above each weapon type does have a hit probalilty which in turn is affected by the people who fire it (their training, morale, cohesion range etc) and also by weapon accuracy, range, the terrain, visibility etc etc.
AA handles direct fire (anti-personnel fire and anti-armor fire)
If you fire at armoured vehicles then you can add parameters like penetration ability of the weapon, armor thickness and slope effects.
Then you also have area fire in AA.
Air strikes & bombardement (Mortar's, artillery and nebelwerfers) fall under this, where the callibre and type of the shell, shell weight and bursts will make part of the parameters.
So there are quit some parameters which effect combat and the results.
