We're in a reflexive mood as we're wrapping up our 5-year journey to depict all the main theaters of WWII in Europe. Today I'd like to personally thank the designers whose dedication and love went into making these campaigns the epic journeys that they are: Daniel Mellbin, Charles Berger, Krešimir Čuturić, František Průša, and Hexaboo. Thanks a bunch guys, and remember: this achievement, the 9-DLC, continent-and-war-spanning wargame would never, ever exist without you.
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Also, please find the developer notes on the Berlin DLC below. You may call them a post-mortem, rather than a dev diary - we were too busy before the release day at any rate.
If I may comment on the notes, I find them unnecessarily defensive if anything. I am reproducing Hexaboo's text without changes though.
The Berlin DLC is a great addition to the DLC lineup, and is doing justice to this final chapter of the story of WWII in Europe. Complaints about unit stats and similar are, to me, myopic at best. We should, in my humble opinion, respect the designers of these wargames (and each DLC *is* a wargame of its own) - in the same way we would respect a book author or a film director.
I don't see how anyone would prefer some sterile lineup of cookie cutter DLCs to the broad variety of approaches to wargame design that we actually got: the staggering losses of Moscow 41, the wild alt-history of Desert Fox, the exhiliration-to-exhaustion arc of Barbarossa. I wouldn't have it any other way!
Anyway, enough of me, I'll let Hexaboo take it from here... cheers from Tomislav!
Berlin DLC Designer Notes
As we set about working on the campaigns of Berlin, and agreed on their timeframes, it was clear to us that the Soviet and German units in the game simply no longer represented the changing realities on the front. Actually, that was already kind of obvious in Kursk, but for that campaign we decided to keep everything mostly as it had been. For Victory in the East, and Balaton, things needed to change. The Red Army needed to become the well-organised and supplied machine that it was, albeit with rising manpower shortages, whereas the Germans had to be increasingly scraping the bottom of the barrel, dipping into the reserve army and mobilising various militia formations. And all that making sure that the game still had plenty of challenge to offer!
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And thus came the new Soviet infantry, with a 4 or even 5 attack rating. This might seem like much, but these units are limited to 5 steps (manpower shortages!), which only results in a 20 or 25 total attack, which is below the 28 of full-strength German divisions. So it’s a fair boost in the power of these guys, but not something that’ll send them into orbit. The defence, notably, hasn’t changed, so Soviet infantry can be somewhat vulnerable to counterattacks, which leads us to the other new feature of the DLC.
The 1-specialist Soviet units are finally gone! This something that has always felt very constraining, because of how tinkering around with specialists is such an enjoyable part of Unity of Command. So we knew right from the start that we’d raise the limit to 2 specs, and then there was a booming voice in the sky that suggested we don’t nickel-and-dime it, and just go all-three. So we have, and you can load 3 specialists into every Soviet infantry unit out there. Later testing revealed that three was a bit too much of a good thing for tank, mechanised, and cavalry units, so we had to downgrade them to 2 specialists.
Another balancing idea that went into Berlin is the ‘debasing’ of the statistics the specialists have. If you want a recipe for a snowballing disaster, keep the statistics of the specialists as-is, and suddenly let the player have two or three times more of them. So to make a situation like this workable you either make the opponent a lot stronger, or do what we did: halve the stats! The twist here is that in doing so, we always rounded the stats up, especially the important armour and artillery shifts. This resulted in two ‘new’ specs stronger than one ‘old’ spec overall. Additionally, specialists in the game come not just their raw stats, but with functions and special abilities, and being able to combine these in a single unit is a huge benefit of its own. So what if they are half-strength? You can have something like an engineer/special forces/artillery combo in a unit, with all the associated perks. The bottom line is that 2 or 3 new Soviet specs are effectively equivalent to 1.5 or 2 old specs, plus choices, choices, choices.
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Meanwhile, the German infantry got split into three tiers. As you can see, this was a great excuse to also give them new models (partially based on what we’d already had for Desert Rats/Fox).
Tier 1 is your good-old infantry, covering virtually all of the units that were around in Kursk, except for a little defensive armour hike. You can say it is to represent the anti-tank capacity the Germans were flooding into their forces, but mostly, it’s there just to add some gameplay spice. Tier 2 is the same as the old guys defensively, but is much less capable in attack, and these troops were intended primarily to represent the mobilised reserve army (Grenadiers/Volksgrenadiers), but we’ve frequently used Tier 2 infantry for various ad-hoc units, blocking detachments, nearly-destroyed units, and so on.
Finally, Tier 3 is for all sorts of glorious 1945 German militia. Low stats, low speed: these guys just sit there and hope for the best. In Berlin, in addition to the obvious Volkssturm, you can see them as territorial militias, construction battalions, factory security, fort regiments, firefighters, and anyone else who could hold a Panzerfaust. All this means that the Germans are made weaker on paper, but you still have to choose your targets carefully, as Tier 1 stops being the primary type only very late in the campaign.
Meanwhile, the stats the tanks and mechanised units had on both sides in Kursk felt mostly alright. The Soviets got their specialist buff, which is nice enough, and keeping German tanks and tank grenadiers strong is a reasonable representation of historical reality, and most importantly, the best way to make sure the AI remains capable of launching damaging and dangerous counterattacks.
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As a final point for today, let’s talk about something people have been wondering about since release. Yes, what about the bloody prices?! Those of you who have played Kursk may have noticed how easy it is to hoard up thousands of prestige by the end of that campaign. From the game design perspective, that is a problem. This means that, on the one hand, the player has virtually unlimited resources to snowball, and on the other, prestige is no longer a resource that forces the player to make interesting decisions about what to buy, and what not to buy. In Kursk, the 1-specialist limit was a bit of a moderating factor, but with 3-spec Soviets in Berlin, it all went out the window, because you can now technically stuff your infantry full of ISU-152s and make all challenge go away.
To make this work better, we did a study of the amount and type of losses usually sustained in the campaign during testing. This gave us a good-enough picture of how much the player needed to replenish their force to roughly its original state. And with these data in our hands, we set up two price ranges for specialists (and steps). The first range is the low-price stuff, it’s the stuff that is commonly lost and that you’ll need to ‘replenish’ your force. It’ll still eat up most of your prestige, but you are virtually guaranteed to afford this. The second range is the premium specialists, which you don’t necessarily need, but are there for you if you want to give a particular unit extra punch, a bit more of that armour or artillery. These are priced in a way that prevents the player from buying more than a handful per conference, and makes these specs compete for prestige with other types of purchases, i.e. paid HQ level-ups and cards, which is ultimately the point. Get that prestige account as close to zero as possible, and make shopping a bit more of a meaningful event.
So, with these burning questions out of the way, let’s end this post. Happy 5-year anniversary everyone, and until the next post, when we’ll talk about discarded campaign variants, HQs, and historical research!