Mar 5, 2024

War Thunder - War Thunder Commander

Meet the Zerstörer 45! This is an experimental German SPAA armed with 30 mm autocannons, capable of inflicting deadly strikes into enemy vehicles, and is coming in the next major update.

Zerstörer 45: An SPAA for Germany at Rank IV

Features:

Quadruple 30 mm turret!
Excellent ballistic properties.
Open fighting compartment.

Vehicle History
[expand type=details]
In parallel to the development of the Flakpanzer IV ‘Wirbelwind’, equipped with a quadruple 20 mm turret, the Ostbau Werke company also produced a second variant in November 1944. This version was then outfitted with the same quadruple mount but armed with modified 30 mm MK 103 cannons instead. Initially, firing tests of the turret were conducted on a Flakpanzer IV ‘Möbelwagen’ chassis. In December however, two dedicated prototypes were constructed using the chassis of the existing Panzer IV Ausf. H medium tanks.

Despite the work done however, the Zerstörer 45 never made it past the prototype stage as the factories of the Ostbau Werke got destroyed in the final months of the war and thus a full-scale production became impossible.
[/expand]

Meet the Zerstörer 45!

The Zerstörer 45, is in fact in many aspects quite similar to its close relative — the Wirbelwind — but is distinctly different from it in terms of firepower and layout. Keen to find out more about what this vehicle entails when it arrives in the Alpha Strike major update? Let’s take a look at all of the details!

You may already be familiar with the no less infamous Wirbelwind, which is an outstanding SPAA that the Zerstörer 45 is quite close to. There are some differences though, as instead this vehicle is not equipped with 20 mm cannons, but rather 30 mm cannons. These new cannons, which are modified Mauser MK 103 guns, possess practically the same ballistic properties as their aerial counterparts. As a result, the Zerstörer 45 can not only down enemy aircraft with greater ease than the Wirbelwind, but can also pose a significant threat to ground targets as well!

Thanks to the availability of subcaliber rounds, you’ll also be able to effectively engage even more heavily armored targets without necessarily needing to outflank opponents and hitting them in the sides or rear. This substantially increases the Zerstörer 45’s versatility in battle and allows it to support allies in more ways when hostile aircraft are currently not present above the battlefield.

You may have noticed some changes in the layout of the fighting compartment of the Zerstörer 45 compared to something like the Wirbelwind. Unlike a regular turret, the quadruple guns were covered by side skirts that provided anti-fragmentation protection at best. In the combat position, these skirts would open to allow for the guns to traverse horizontally. This is the position that we’ve decided to model the Zerstörer 45 in War Thunder, which provides better aiming angles, but also means the crew inside are extremely vulnerable to all types of fire. Bear this in mind!

In your matches by Egor, Ground Forces Game Designer: “If spawning this as the first vehicle, take cover behind rocks to remain hidden, keep close to your teammates to provide support. Only fire at enemy tanks if you know you can kill them fast, if you can’t, support your allies by covering and shooting at enemy tracks, barrels and anything to block the enemy’s view. When playing its intended role of an AA, make sure to prioritize and pick your targets, especially aircraft with larger bomb loads that can pose a bigger threat to your team. Fire in short bursts and stay near capture points, as they typically attract enemy aircraft.”

With that, we’ve reached the end of today’s blog. Coming in the next major update, the Zerstörer 45 is going to provide the German SPAA line with another excellent windbreaker — make sure you give it a try once it arrives. Until that happens though, keep an eye on our website for other dev blogs, and happy hunting!

Mar 5, 2024

Maximize your management with the Prison Tools!

Prison Architect 2 - PDX Michaela

Watch TheGeekCupboard show the different management tools available in Prison Architect 2!

⚠️ Please note: The visuals and gameplay footage showcased in this video are from earlier development phases and may not accurately reflect the final game. Anticipate improvements in quality upon release.

The Devs have some additional words to accompany this tutorial - read more about what the devs can tell us about the inmate’s needs below!

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What’s up, fellow architects?
We’re back to preview more features on Prison Architect 2, before its release into the wild. This week we’ll be talking about some of the tools at your prison-running disposal (no, not the type of tool that Prisoners use to tunnel).

Feature Highlight #7 - Prison Tools

The Sharpest Tools in the Sandbox

There are a whole load of tricks at your disposal when you’re running your own prison, and we’re going to dig into a handful of them today. Whether it’s the essentials of staff recruitment and prisoner Intake or the minutiae of prison policies, we’ve got you covered.

Sorting the Wheat from the Staff

How are you going to run your prison without staff members? Poorly, that’s how. Luckily we’ve provided a wide range of employees to bolster your lockdown. You can hire various staff members by accessing the Staff menu at the bottom of the screen.

From there, there are three ‘types’ of staff you can hire: Workforce, Security, and Admin. The workforce makes up a bulk of the people who will run your prison; the Workers who build it, the Janitors who handle laundry, and the Cooks who provide square meals to your prisoners. Security staff are the ones who ‘handle the inmates’, they are made up of various Guards, Enforcers, and Snipers, who will physically intervene in an attempt to keep peace and order in the prison. The admin staff are your managerial team, who provide access to important Bureaucracy upgrades and earn you XP for the time spent at their desks.

To hire your staff member, all you need to do is go to the Staff menu, choose the tab with your employee type, and then pick the role you’d like to hire from the list on the left-hand side. You’ll be shown their daily wage on the Hire button. You can also fire your employees from this menu, by right-clicking their headshot in the staff list. Furthermore, you can select individual staff members in the world and fire them from their personal info panel.

Make sure you’re not over-staffing, as the wage list for your prison is normally the largest expense. You can check how your cash flow is doing from the Finances tab in the Admin menu (but we’ll talk about this more in a future article).

All you do is Intake, Intake, Intake!

Once you’ve got enough staff to handle your prisoner population, it’s time for Intake! By going to the Prisoners menu at the bottom of your screen, you can choose how many prisoners you want to bring in, of the different security classes available to you. You’ll start with access to Minimum and Medium security inmates, and higher securities can be unlocked in the Bureaucracy menu.

There are a bunch of additional options you can apply to your intake. If you have the new Arrival Times upgrade unlocked, you can choose what time the bus arrives, as opposed to the standard 9 am drop-off. You can also choose whether you want the intake to repeat daily, whether you want your intake to keep your prison at max capacity, or even allow for over-filling your prison. Be aware though, that without a high turnover of prisoners and plenty of holding cell space available, overfilling your prison (while lucrative) can be a disaster.

Policy, Camera, Action!

Once you’ve got plenty of Staff and Prisoners, you will probably want to start thinking about the Policies you have in place. Your Policies can have a really big impact on how your prison operates. You can find your Policies by opening the Administration menu.

Prison Policies are things that impact some global rules on how your lockup operates. You’ll need to unlock Policies through Bureaucracy, but once you have them, you can make changes such as choosing which Staff Members carry keys (balancing efficiency and security), or even at what point of their sentence the prisoners are able to apply for Parole (balancing increased release rates against prisoner morale from failed hearings).

The next tab, Punishment, is how you control your Staff response to Prisoners misbehaving. You can choose from some global presets (all the way from Lax to Extreme), or even change the individual severity for each misbehavior, as well as whether the punishment should also trigger a search of that inmate or their cell. This is more impactful than you might think; inmates will respond less positively to harsher punishments and it could lead to further misbehavior, violence, and escape attempts. On the flip side, inmates know what they’re being punished for and how severe it is. The new feature, Punishment Memory, is taken into account the next time that an inmate is making a decision whether or not to misbehave. If they’ve had a recent punishment, and that punishment was strict, they may change their mind about doing it again. This means that you may be able to curb specific issues like high contraband levels, by punishing those misbehaviors more severely. Just be careful; it’s a very fine line to balance.

We got ahead of ourselves!

This week’s video also dives into Programs and Labour, which we also touched on a couple of weeks ago! If you want to read more about the classes and courses you can run for your inmates, or how to manage the labor distribution of your prison, you can find more information on the Steam post for Feature Highlight #5.

As always, thanks for reading. We’re spending a little bit of extra time ironing the game out ahead of its full launch, eagerly awaiting the day we can get it into the hands of you players. We love the game and can’t wait to hear what you all think.

Prison Architect Dev Team

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Next up is Developer Highlight 2:
The World of Career Mode

Next week you will get to know all about Career Mode in Prison Architect 2! Click the bell on the YouTube premiere below to get notified when the video is live🔔

Make sure to subscribe to the Prison Architect YouTube to not miss out on any new tutorials, teasers, and more!

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Join our Giveaways!

Need something to play whilst waiting for Prison Architect 2?

We are hosting weekly giveaways on our Facebook and X(Twitter). Next week you have the chance to win the Psych Ward: Wardens edition! Make sure to tune in on Wednesdays for even more giveaways all the way up to the release of Prison Architect 2! 👇
Join the Giveaway!

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Mar 5, 2024

Developer Diary | After the Demo

Millennia - Firefly

Hello, everyone.

I am Ian Fischer of C Prompt Games, back for another chat about Millennia. This Developer Diary was originally intended to present additional detail about the Ages, but we felt like we had already covered that material in prior Diaries.

Instead, since the release date has been announced, I thought it might be fun to talk a little about this stage of the project, our general development approach, and what we have been working on since the demo.

(Also, being honest, I have been too busy to provide any kind of reasonable build notes for the last few updates, so I liked the idea that, for part of this, I could Dev Diary-ize the build notes and correct that problem….)

Landing the Plane

From a theoretical standpoint, finishing a game is pretty straightforward. The typical practice is that you make a schedule with a chunk of time after everything is done and during this time you plan that nobody on the team has anything assigned to them to build. You then use that block of time to have everyone play their game, find and fix bugs, and polish everything as much as you can.

In practice, you almost never get that perfect chunk of time with nothing to do but test and polish. In fact, you can usually tell when the scheduled period of “nothing” has begun because it’s usually the day when you glance at your inbox and see something like this:

But, even though the scheduled chunk of nothing-assigned polish time is often filled with unexpected chaos, there are different flavors of chaos. I don’t want to curse us – we are not done yet – but Millennia has thus far (happily) enjoyed the mild variety in this phase leading up to release.

Compared to earlier phases of development, life for the team is more focused. We know what is going to be in the launch version of the game and we know when it will need to be done, so perspective shifts from more open-ended discussion about new systems or features to increased attention to completion. In the earlier stages, we spent more time in “hey, I had this idea” conversations and those often ended up with someone putting something in the game later that day. Now, those ideas go into our backlog for later so we can remain focused on tying things off.

While it’s always fun to be in a wide-open creative mode, there’s a lot of enjoyment in the current stage too. There are numerous small issues to address, so if you’re the kind of person that likes crossing things off of your list, you get to do a lot of that. And the list dominates too – unlike early stages of development, everyone is now working on specific items on the punchlist.

Another change in this stage is that the game is no longer a secret. Millennia has been shown to players (in this case played by some) and feedback is coming in. Seeing people having fun playing the early builds and the demo of Millennia is really exciting. It is fuel for the team. I think we were the seventh most-played demo at Next Fest and when we started getting notes that began with things like “so, I’ve played 40 hours of the demo and here’s what I think”, we were all happy.

C Prompt’s Approach

Feedback from the demo players is the latest round of feed but not the first. We make fairly extensive use of external playtesters and have had people playing and giving us feed all through the development of Millennia.

C Prompt is rooted in iterative development approaches. In our experience, the best way to make games is to build the minimum needed to get a skeleton of your idea shambling around, then start the loop of playtest -> feedback -> changes -> playtest.

That means we play our games a lot, from very early stages (the earliest testing of Millennia was more or less a green plane filled with red or white cubes labeled things like “GRAPES” and “HOPLITE”). There are a lot of advantages that come from this approach, but it also introduces a few challenges. For example, the act of looking at and changing a game daily alters your perspective of it. After 1000 hours, it takes considerable effort to see your game with the same perspective you had when you started or from the point of view of a new player.

In the same way, teams can develop a shared perspective on things over a period of time, playing and iterating on the game together.

We have always enjoyed being pretty close with players and found it useful for keeping our perspective on our work. Things have certainly changed over the years, but this is something that has always felt like The Way to us. Back on Age of Kings, at a time when you couldn’t put up a build for people to download, we were burning CDs of the game and freaking mailing them to our beta players.

You find some good things that should have been obvious to you by doing this (in early external tests, we found a bug with building Improvements that was immediately obvious to players but had been invisible to us because we all happened to place our Improvements in the same manner) and you get different feedback than what comes out of internal playtest.

Once the game has become public and more people have been able to play through something like the demo or a larger open beta, the amount of feedback you get increases and conversations between players, which are also valuable to development. Part of our plan for the block of time before release is designed with this in mind – we know early players are going to find things we want to polish or fix, so we plan for that when we lay out our schedules.

From then to Now

So, with the above in mind, with the idea that C Prompt’s focus is now on getting things tied off for a good initial release and that some of our tasks are being informed by beta and demo players, I thought what I would do is grab all of the change notes on our internal system from the point where we made the demo build up to the point where I started writing this.

That looks like this:

That’s maybe a little difficult to read. :)

I went through those and did my best to make most of what is in there make some kind of sense to someone not on the team. (I also made some notes in there on any of the changes I remembered being called out by beta or demo players, just because people have said they like knowing about those things).

It’s a wall of text but, and you can find it all on the forums by clicking here

Thanks!

We hope you enjoyed this Developer Diary. If you are a beta or demo player, thanks, we appreciate the feedback – we’re excited about getting the release build of Millennia into your hands. If you’re excited too, please consider wishlisting or Pre-Purchasing Millennia!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1268590/Millennia/