The Field Orders Update

The Directorate has work for you again - and it isn't running out.

Ten campaign missions

Challenge › Missions

The campaign is back, with ten missions built in the Map Designer: Field Post Certification, Checkpoint Merlin, Depot 9, Ashcombe Command Post, Three Floors Down, Depot 27, Ridge Line, The Halberd Shelter, Cinder Ridge, and the Skywatch Acceptance Trial to finish. They take you through trenches and dugouts, fuel depots between earth berms, buried command posts reached by lit galleries, a ridge with its radar hidden on the reverse slope, and shelters two and three storeys underground. Each one has its own briefing from the Directorate, and a hint for when a shot goes wrong.

A three-storey deep shelter cut away on the range: a blockhouse over the stair shaft, barracks and a generator on the top floor, the command deck below, the vault at the bottom, with target markers over the commander and the archivist Three Floors Down: the commander on level two, the archivist in the vault on level three.

Every goal is marked

Range › any mission

No more guessing what to hit. Every goal now has a marker floating over it: a star with an arrow pointing down at the structure to wreck, showing how much of it is gone against what's needed (DESTROY TANK A 0% / 40%). Marked targets get a star over their heads, and anything you must keep safe gets a blue shield with its damage against the limit. A goal turns green with a tick when it's met, and red when it's broken. A goal off the edge of the screen gets its marker pinned to that edge, with its distance and an arrow showing which way to look.

A field post on the range with markers over it: a star over the guard hut reading DESTROY THE GUARD HUT 0% / 40%, another over the watchtower, and TARGET stars over the dummies in the trench

A mission generator

Map Designer › Random map, and Generate...

The Map Designer can now draw up a whole mission for you: the land, the works, tunnels, air defence, dummies, the goals, and a briefing written from what it actually built. Press Random map for a new one at once, or Generate... to choose:

• Site: field post, fuel depot, command post, deep shelter or ridge line.
• Air defence: none, light or heavy.
• Difficulty: 1 to 5.
• Seed: the same settings and seed always make the same map.

Every map it hands you has been checked first: every gun has power and a radar to aim by, no ground is left hanging, and every goal sits on a real structure or dummy. Change anything you like by hand, then test it or save it like any other map.

The Map Designer's Generate a mission window: site, air defence and difficulty choices, a seed box with a Random button, and the Generate button

A generated command post in the Map Designer, with the Random map button in the toolbar: a sandbag ridge, a trench, the air-defence battery on its hill with its power circles, and the buried command post beyond the gully Random map: a command post under air defence, generated in about a second.

Field orders, and fresh work in the Career

Challenge › Field orders, and Career › offers

A new Field orders tab in Challenge holds five generated missions a day: one field post, one fuel depot, one command post, one deep shelter and one ridge line, at difficulty 2 to 4. Everyone gets the same five on the same day. Another set draws up more for the day. Field-order stars are counted separately from the campaign's.

In the Career, three new generated sites now come up in the offers every week alongside the campaign's maps. They get harder as your firm completes contracts and stays in business. There's no air defence on them in your first three weeks, and no heavy air defence before week 10. Deep shelters only come up once your firm can build for the Siege 32.

The Challenge screen's Field orders tab: five orders listed with their barrels and difficulty, and the first one - Outpost Harrow - open with its briefing, a preview of the site and its rules

Radar-laid air defence

Map Designer › Stamp › Anti-air, and Range

AA turrets and CIWS no longer fire blind. A new Radar dish stamp tracks rounds out to 220 m, and every gun on the field needs a powered radar before it will engage. The radar and each gun also need power within 8 m: an Industrial generator, a new Small generator (1.4 m, for inside buildings), or a wire run from one. In the Map Designer, every radar and gun shows its 8 m circle: green when it has power, red when it doesn't.

There are three ways to blind a battery: knock half the dish off, take out its generator, or cut the wire. The generators now run on Gasoline: hole the tank and the fuel goes up. Set a generator ablaze, or knock a fifth of it off, and it stops.

The radar, the AA turret, the CIWS and both generators are now drawn as detailed pictures, and pieces break off them as pixels when they're hit.

The Map Designer with an AA turret, an Industrial generator, a radar dish and a CIWS, each with its 8 m power circle drawn around it - green where it has power, red where it doesn't

An Industrial generator on the range taking a hit: fire and smoke pour off its side and pieces of its casing break away as pixels

Set the guns yourself

Map Designer and Sandbox › right-click an AA turret or a CIWS

Right-click an AA turret or a CIWS to tune it. The settings save with the map.

• Both:
  • Accuracy: 0-100%. For a turret it's how hard its missiles can turn; for a CIWS, how tightly its shells group.
  • Range: 10-300 m for a turret, 10-200 m for a CIWS.
  • Reaction: 0.05-3 s before it first opens up.
• AA turret:
  • Missiles: 1-20.
  • Reload: 0.1-5 s between missiles.
• CIWS:
  • Shells: 10-500.
  • Fire rate: 2-40 shells a second.
  • Burst: 1-60 shells.

Defaults puts them back: an AA turret carries 4 missiles, reaches 140 m, reacts in 0.25 s and reloads in 0.7 s; a CIWS carries 60 shells, reaches 110 m, reacts in 0.3 s and fires 14 shells a second in bursts of 10. The campaign's guns run at 40% accuracy with a 0.35 s reaction.

A CIWS now holds its fire when something is in its line of fire - its own depot's fuel tanks, a hill, a radar standing in the way - instead of shooting straight through it.

An AA turret's settings window open over the turret in the Map Designer: Accuracy 100%, Missiles 4, Range 140 m, Reaction 0.25 s, Reload 0.70 s, with Defaults and Done buttons

Sealed fuel tanks burst

Range › any tank of Kerosene, Gasoline or Napalm

Fuel sealed in a tank now explodes when a round or a blast breaches the tank. The burning fuel's pressure tears the wall open from the hole outward and throws the pieces clear, a fireball of burning fuel jets out through the tear, and the rest of the energy goes off as a slow blast in the open air outside it. Everything that spills afterwards is already alight. Gasoline goes up hardest, then Kerosene, then Napalm. In testing a burst tore 30 to 83 pixels of steel out of a tank's wall, and one HE 24 into tank A at Depot 9 wrecked 87% of it.

Only a real hit sets a tank off. Fragments and flying debris punch holes in it and it leaks, but they won't make it burst: an HE 24 going off 21 m short of a sealed tank leaves it standing. Fuel standing open - a tank with no lid, one already holed, a pool on the ground - burns but doesn't explode, and a tank only bursts once.

A Kerosene tank at Depot 9 bursting: the tank torn open, a fireball of burning fuel jetting out of it and smoke rising, with the second tank intact behind it

The same spot a few seconds later: the tank reduced to a burning wreck on its base, with fuel still burning on the ground

Starter rounds for every barrel

Career and Challenge › your rounds

Every new Career firm and every Sandbox and Challenge save now has rounds it can fire without researching anything: a Slug 16 and an HE 16 for the Standard 16, plus an HE round for every other barrel - HE 8, HE 24, HE 32, HE M16 and HE M32.

The Round list on the range showing Slug 16 and HE 16, both ready

A bunker generator for the Sandbox

Sandbox › Range › Random bunker

Under Random building there's now Random bunker. Choose a kind and a distance - 30, 50, 80 or 120 m - and press Generate:

• Dugout: a timber-propped room 4-8 m long under 0.8-1.4 m of earth, its stair coming down from the rear, with a trench of three in front.
• Casemate: a concrete box 5-9 m wide with steel-reinforced walls 0.5-1.0 m thick, a sandbagged roof, firing slits, sometimes a second room, and an earth berm in front.
• Command post: buried 4.6 m down and reached by a lit gallery, sometimes with a magazine of TNT behind it.
• Deep shelter: one to three storeys under 0.5-1.6 m of earth, with stairs, a vent, a generator lighting every floor, and a steel-lined vault.

Every size comes from the seed, which is shown with the bunker, so you can build the same one again. Re-roll draws up another and Remove clears it.

A deep shelter generated on the Sandbox range: three storeys of concrete under the turf, with barracks, a generator, the command deck and a vault, and the Random bunker controls on the left

Changed

• Missions: goals are now structures and dummies only. Target cores came apart into too many pieces to finish off, so no mission asks you to destroy them any more. Map Designer goals can carry a name ("tank A", "the west pillbox") that shows in the goal list and on the markers.
• Rounds: steel and aluminium noses now wear about 1.6 times faster, and a thin wall of 2 pixels or less tears apart on impact instead of mushrooming.

Fixed

• Memory: the game used to unpack every campaign map in full - about 25 MB each, around 245 MB for the ten - and every map in the Custom list too. Maps now stay packed until they're needed, and only the three most recently used are kept unpacked.
• Tunnels: braces on sloping tunnels no longer fall out of the roof.
• Markers: markers over the same building no longer pile on top of each other.
• Map Designer: a long briefing or author line no longer pushes the right panel's buttons off the edge.
• Staff: Let go of Larry.

Mind the tanks. See you on the range.