Dev Diary - PDXCON Recap and Team update

Hi everyone! We need some recovery time after PdxCon before we talk about more new stuff so today I figured we would recap stuff from PdxCon as well as talk about some team and studio topics. I am happy to say that we announced the name of the next big expansion - No Step Back!

No Step Back

We finally announced the name of the next expansion at PdxCon! (I accidentally wrote it on twitter last week but apparently nobody had time to spot that hehe). No Step Back will launch together with the 1.11 Barbarossa update and the mission statement is to focus on Soviet, the eastern front and refreshing land warfare and logistics! This is a huge undertaking that changes a lot of key components of the game, especially the AI. This has been a major reason for waiting with Soviet. We needed to build up both ai stability and get a new partisan system in place and have time to rework supply etc etc, so its the culmination of a long plan towards this goal and its nice to see it coming together.

No Step Back - Teaser Trailer

This wasn’t a full reveal - we will be showing off and announcing more features as the dev diaries come online. We also showed some more up to date visuals on the ongoing work on the (wip) supply system:

There will be some more in depth looks on this again. We are currently working on how motorization functions as part of it but it's roughly as presented before with a focus on connecting supply hubs using railways and convoys to project supply, with motorization improving the process. The mapmode is starting to really come around and is much easier to play with compared to the one we showed in the initial early look diary (just don't look too close on the red - lack of supply color above, I grabbed it from a bug report where stuff was intentionally made extra bad for those units to test… but I felt it showed off the state well).

placeholder train graphics as our proper models aren't in the game just yet, but doesn't it look cozy? :)

We also teased some pictures of the railways and trains, as well as confirming that there will be railway guns as a new unit type. They function a lot like naval bombardment support and are intended to help break tough defended positions (probably cities/railway hubs). More on those in a dedicated train porn diary in the future :p

Soviet tree wise we do not wanna show off too much yet. It will have its dedicated diaries (plural) and its one of our more ambitions trees yet, both in size and in player choices. Soviet is after Germany the nation thats most important to get right for a ww2 game, and compared to Germany a lot more complex. Here is a little teaser (are those icons placeholder or is it a shaved marx?), feel free to speculate what choices hide outside the screen...

(yes I know center is on the left. Trust me it makes sense. You are crazy I am not crazy!)

PdxCon Recap - Statistics

Let's start off with some yearly statistics updates!

We keep trending up on active players. This year’s record peak was 899k players in a month which is crazy!

Majors vs Minor nation picking keeps slowly converging towards an even split:

Modding wise here are the latest numbers