Air Improvements

Hi everyone, time for this weeks Death or Dishonor and Oak Update dev diary. Today will be all about the improvements to the air warfare coming in the update. Some of you who were at PDXCON this weekend might have had a sneakpeek, but here are the details :) Speaking of PDXCON, I had a lot of fun meeting fans (but yikes my feet after 3 days), and look forward to next years! Issues with the old system When we started looking at the air warfare part of the game we felt that there was two main flaws: Transparency and Control. The system only really showed you information over very long time with graphs so it was very hard to understand what was going on and what you could do to improve things. Control wise it was a lot of work to select, organize and move wings around, not to mention having to open lots of airbase windows everywhere. So what did we do? Check out this screenshot, it shows most stuff we have at once:

First of all we decided to go with something we knew would work well, making airwings behave more like divisions. They are now on the map and you can move them between bases and assign missions in a similar way to divisions and it’s easy to give orders to many things at once. Secondly we made a new air combat interface that should be a lot more helpful and informative. Keep reading to check out all the details... Air Wing Interface Steam post image The air wing interface has been overhauled. The air base window is now gone. Instead, when clicking on an air base, the air wings will be listed on the left, like army divisions would if you selected ground units. We also added the ability to drag a selection box over several air bases to be able to give orders to all of them at the same time. The list of air wings shows relevant information about the air wing, such as its strength, type and missions it’s currently flying.

Relocating wings to a new airbase is easily done by just selecting them and right-clicking on a new airbase. We’ve added arrows to show that an air wing is relocating and its progress. Assign Air missions Above the list of air wings is the mission panel. To give an air wing a mission in the new system, click on the missions icons in the panel, and right click on the target air region on the map.

As before, wings will only fly missions that are suitable to them. This means that it’s possible to select both air superiority and bombing missions with a mix of air wings. The fighter wings will perform air superiority missions and the bomber wings will, unsurprisingly, provide bombing. This change should make it a lot easier to manage orders for several air wings at the same time and reduce the need to micromanage the air units. Another thing you might have spotted in the first screenshot is that we now have special combat icons in air mapmode. These show by base color how it's going (sorry Germany) but also which side is getting air support, so a green plane with a + means they are getting help from the boys in the air.

Air Combat Window As you may have noticed, selecting air wings does not automatically bring up the air region window. This