How Unity Of Command 2 balances game design with military history

The primary Unity Of Command was designed for the open steppes of the Jap Entrance. There, the main battles have been about manoeuvre, with tank models chasing and protecting miles of floor for his or her targets, and contours of infantry transferring to counter and help. The steppes have been excellent for UoC’s distinctive give attention to sustaining your military’s provide traces.

So, when designer Tomislav Uzelac started enthusiastic about turning to the Western entrance for its sequel, he knew he had an issue. The large battles of France and Italy have been sluggish and attritional, crossing mountain ranges and going through enemies dug into forests. “The query was, how do you go from Case Blue, the place you cowl 1,000 kilometres in Russia over a month and half, to Monte Cassino, the place you keep pounding on one place for six months?” he tells me.

The reply lay in pushing and pulling on the frontline between navy accuracy and sport abstraction, and in exploring tiny design particulars which you’d by no means suppose may result in making an unlimited theatre of struggle this enjoyable to play.

However in addition to coping with Europe’s topography, the sequel would additionally should be much more advanced than the primary. “It was a way more technically sophisticated struggle than the Jap entrance,” he says. The struggle right here was closely affected by intelligence and the Allies’ nearly continuous air superiority. There have been amphibious landings and it concerned armies from many alternative nations. ”Multidimensional. We wanted extra stuff.”

And so UoCII options extra stuff. There’s fog of struggle, you may take prisoners, acquire intel, carry out seashore landings and particular assaults on enemy positions to weaken them, and your armies have HQs. However the factor concerning the authentic UoC, which was launched in 2011, is that it’s a thoroughbred of a wargame.

Look, it’s at 45th on the Best Strategy Games on PC listing, and Tim Stone describes it as ”high-calibre history-steeped hex leisure”. Based mostly on the identical hex-based battle system as Panzer Normal, it options solely as many programs because it must emulate its real-life battles and really feel strategically deep. “Once I look again I’m proud that I used to be disciplined and I lower out plenty of stuff and what remained was cohesive,” says Uzelac.

(A brief apart: Uzelac was the unique writer of AMP, the pioneering MP3 participant which grew to become Winamp when it was ported to Home windows. So he’s not solely performed a pivotal position within the evolution of struggle video games, but additionally within the MP3!)

The results of that cautious modifying is a fantastic and extremely readable UI which made UoC rather more accessible than lots of its wargaming friends. So, confronted with including all that stuff to the sequel, Uzelac says he needed to ask himself one other query. “How one can current it in an inexpensive bundle so the participant wasn’t going to get scared away?”

The reply got here with having military HQs as areas on the map. On the floor of it, it might sound odd so as to add one other new characteristic to scale back litter, however in actual fact, in addition to a thematically essential a part of a military, Uzelac noticed HQs as a option to current a menu for a lot of of UoCII’s sport programs.

Uzelac had set out with the intention of utilizing HQs to current Drive Swimming pools. This technique collects troops which have peeled away from models broken within the area and which have made their manner again to HQ as ‘stragglers’. As soon as there, they change into a part of your Drive Pool, and you should utilize them to bolster your models.

However quickly sufficient, he realised HQs may do extra. How about establishing an Engineering department in them, which may maintain UI for bridging constructing and repairing? These skills have been current in UoC however he’d nebulously categorised them as Theatre Belongings, and they also didn’t have a really structured place in your armies.

And why not add extra branches? Operations contains the Suppressive Fireplace motion, which added a brand new option to take care of enemy models – bombarding them with artillery with out going right into a full assault – and No Retreat, which makes a unit maintain its floor, it doesn’t matter what assaults it.

”So we had Drive Swimming pools, Operations and Engineering, so instantly the HQ may do three issues,” Uzelac says. After which he realised one thing. “For those who have a look at the overall employees system, it’s precisely the best way armies are organised into branches.” Although he was enthusiastic about sport UI and serving to gamers familiarize yourself with new programs, his HQs have been following how military headquarters work in actual life.

From this basis, extra concepts naturally slotted into the sport with out bogging it down in complicated element. He added extra Operations actions, corresponding to Set-Piece Assaults (reduces the entrenchment of a dug-in enemy), and new branches: Intel lets you take enemy stragglers prisoner they usually’ll start to disclose enemy positions, supplying you with sight into the fog of struggle. Logistics offers with resupplying models.

So HQs have been about giving construction to the systemic complexity that the Western entrance demanded of UoCII. “After getting some construction, you utilize what you might have and attempt to get every little thing you want from a minimal variety of elements,” says Uzelac. “As a result of clearly, we don’t wish to scare the participant with 200 programs.”

And that readability was additional supported by a nuanced little bit of interface design that you just’d in all probability by no means suppose was so vital for the sport’s growth. “As soon as we figured it out, we have been offered on the HQs,” Uzelac says.

When you choose a unit and hover your mouse cursor over an adjoining enemy, you may scroll by means of the HQ actions it may well carry out with the mouse wheel. “It actually accelerates your play and it grew to become tremendous enjoyable,” says Uzelac. What’s extra, the order of actions is at all times the identical, so you may depend on your muscle reminiscence to get to the identical motion every time.

One other associated and important however tiny UI element you undoubtedly gained’t have thought of was the concept HQ branches and actions can be positioned in the identical locations on the toolbar, whatever the military’s nationality. You see, every military has its personal improve tree, which grants entry to actions. “However when you’re enjoying bunch of those armies without delay, a British, Canadian, the Individuals, the Free French, you may have 4 or 5 HQs, and it’s a ache to have each one be totally different. So the design constraint was that they at all times should be aligned in the identical order.”

This constraint helped to standardise actions throughout all armies, additional simplifying play. However the crew was nonetheless capable of grant every military its personal flavour unlocking actions at totally different ranges and having them value various quantities of Command Factors to make use of. So the British Eighth’s experience in engineering means it may well do extra bridge-building at stage one, whereas the American First has cheaper artillery actions. “We determined that for the DLC, whenever you ultimately play because the Germans, they are going to be allowed to have a unique structure as a result of they are going to be very totally different.”

UoCII continually dances within the house between historic accuracy and summary sport design. The idea for HQs emerged from accuracy however they have been used to unravel a design downside, and that answer ended up pushing them in the direction of accuracy. However for the way HQs work on the battlefield, effectively, Uzelac needed to put sport design first.

As you would possibly count on, models can solely use HQ-based actions once they’re inside vary of their HQ. However since in UoCII you often management a number of armies, this raised a battle. “For those who have a look at historic maps, there’s often a exact line between two HQs, the place the Individuals are as much as this line and the Brits are from this line,” explains Uzelac. “We tried that within the early prototypes, and it was utterly unplayable.”

The query was about how to attract the road. Uzelac couldn’t tolerate the concept of constructing gamers draw it on the map, particularly since they could have to redraw it each flip. And having the sport do it robotically, with every HQ pushing on the opposite in accordance with some formulation, would inflict opaque and complicated restrictions on the place gamers can place their models.

So as a substitute, HQ spheres of affect overlap one another. It breaks with historical past, however as Uzelac says, “It kinda works. It’s nonetheless in your pursuits to maintain your models collectively as a result of your British models can’t use the HQ skill of an American HQ, however we’re not constraining you particularly. I’m fairly positive you could possibly have a way more in-depth hardcore simulation the place you’d actually draw these traces, however that’s a unique type of viewers and sport for this stage of historic constancy.”

This, in fact, wasn’t the one exhausting query HQs posed. What occurs whenever you transfer an HQ? What occurs if one is overrun by the enemy, or if it may well’t entry provides? The solutions needed to bridge being understandable with flexibility, for the reason that guidelines needed to apply equally to small attritional maps and the wide-open ones of the later struggle.

“I can present the state diagram of this and it’s absurd. So OK, what ought to be the punishment if an HQ is out of provide? We had it that you just couldn’t transfer. However that was too harsh, since you couldn’t escape.” Within the ultimate sport, Uzelac made it in order that your HQ can transfer when out of provide, however it loses a stage of its Logistics actions and a stage of a random different department.

And the way ought to an HQ be overrun by the enemy? In any case, in actuality, the headcount of a military’s headquarters is a number of occasions bigger than its fight pressure. A single unit couldn’t actually take care of one. However within the sport, you may overrun one with a single unit, so long as it has three spare motion factors.

“The HQ is an abstraction; actually it represents the rear echelon of the military,” says Uzelac. As such, overrunning an HQ doesn’t destroy it, simply removes a few of its upgrades. “I particularly didn’t wish to make the sport about searching HQs, as a result of even after the worst defeats, just like the Germans misplaced a complete military, the Sixth, in Russia, they usually simply reorganised it fairly shortly.”

One other space the place Uzelac ditched authenticity in favour of readability was air help, which was as soon as going to be an enormous a part of the sport. “It’s all written down and designed, however we sooner or later realised it was 5 occasions extra advanced than the unique.” Gamers would struggle over management for airfields, which might have ranges of affect. “We went too far. It added an enormous cognitive workload for the participant.”

However apart from the wasted growth time, that was OK. “It’s cool. We’re lacking on some historic particulars, just like the Allied fighter-bombers that have been prowling the roads in Normandy and stopping German tanks from attending to the frontline. However there’s no sport in there.” For a lot of the Western marketing campaign, the Allies had overwhelming air superiority and the Germans had nothing to counter it, so it could lack the push and pull of a correct technique system.

UoCII has an interesting relationship with its historic inspiration, because it balances the ugly mess of actual struggle with the attractive simplicity of sport struggle. Nonetheless, Uzelac needs the primary half of the marketing campaign, the “countless slog” by means of Italy’s mountains, didn’t should observe historical past so carefully.

“The second half is rather more free-flowing. Typically I want we wouldn’t do historic video games, as a result of then I may actually front-load the enjoyable stuff. However that is the way it was.”