Greetings Comrades!

As some of you may remember awhile back we dedicated a week to showcasing some of the gameplay elements that will differentiate Dawn of Victory from Sins of a Solar Empire. Well, the time is right and some of the major elements we've been working on are nearing completion, so we feel it's appropriate to reveal some of the new mechanics you can expect in our first release. First up is probably one of the biggest changes we've been working on:

Why Assault?

Dawn of Victory is pretty slow. Not in the base SIns sort of slow - after all, you won't be doing a lot of colonizing. It's more that fleet actions are deliberately slow: we want people to have time to strategize and set up their fleets.

In testing I quickly realized that even the smallest maps were much too slow, both for utility reasons (it's hard to test) and gameplay reasons. Sure, somebody with a couple hours to burn would be good with the maps we've done already, but there needed to be a quick play mode. At the same time, many of the historical actions in Dawn of Victory's backstory weren't slugouts between fleets at separate stars.

Enter the Assault gamemode. Assault is a separate gametype, meaning all maps that use it will be designated on the map screen. Right now, our prototype Assault map is Hammerhead Depths, or the invasion of German-occupied Tanarsus that sparks the Soviet/German war. Keep in mind this mode is still under construction and the final result may be different, especially when referring to specific times.

Overview

Instead of two sides with planets at which they build structures and ships, Assault is attack/defend. This means that only the defender has one key "objective" planet, and they are limited to this planet exclusively. Their job is to defend by holding choke point planets connected to the planet they must defend. If they manage to defend their planet from invasion for a specific time (map-dependent, from thirty minutes to an hour typically), the USSR loses their rally point and the game. If not, the USSR player wins. Pretty simple.

Attacker

The attacker begins at their Rally Point. For the first 5-10 minutes, jumping out of this rally point is restricted. The defender won't have all the fun during this time, however, since the attacker starts with no ships.

Instead, ships are called in through three separate structures. Each has three different premade selections of their appropriate class of ship. For example, the Frigate rally can spawn three different assortments of Flak Frigates, Torpedo Frigates, Destroyers, and Resupply Cruisers. Each assortment has a different role - some are centered around raids or quick strikes, whereas others are heavier, slower selections.

At the beginning of the game, a player will be allowed to choose one of three of these selections. The others will be unselectable for a fixed amount of time (around 8 minutes right now). The ships will warp in and then be your units. After that fixed time rolls around again, you'll get another three selections at each of your rallies. After your third selection, you'll be near the time limit.

During setup you will also get free fighter building and time to arrange your ships and fleets. As a result, both the attacker and the defender should be pretty busy until they can start attacking.

Right now, the defender can warp to your rally point, but you will be granted a damage and speed bonus when in range of the rally point to prevent camping. The individual spawning rallies are indestructable, as is the rally point itself. The defender is supposed to defend his choke points, not camp your spawn. We are currently working on resolving this problem by making the path to and from your rally point only accessible to the Soviet player.

Defender

So how is the defender supposed to hold their single planet against three different lines of attack?

Keep in mind Dawn of Victory, unlike base Sins, has droppable mines. Assault also allows the player to drop smaller versions of the turrets that they can normally construct around gravity wells. So the defender is given several minelayers at the beginning of the game, a couple recon scouts, and encouraged to heavily entrench around these choke points.

During their setup time, the defender is also given various bonuses to income and build cost and speed, and can research at an increased speed throughout the match. As a result, despite starting at a disadvantage, the defender can eventually reach capital ships that outrank what the attacker can be supplied. Defending will get easier and easier as time goes on.

Conclusion

The result is a fast-paced "scenario" game that can be played quite a few times in the time it would take to play a normal game. We're hoping to get two or three Assault maps in the first release, but that's not a given (you'll see at least one, however).

Take part in helping to define the Dawn of Victory Universe, sign up to our forums and wiki at:
Dawnofvictory.com
Dawnofvictory.com/wiki
Enlist Today!

When we started working on mines, they were a oft-requested addition to Sins, and pretty novel. With Entrenchment...not so much. Entrenchment adds deployable mines of different types - homing, slowing, and basic proximity mines are all in the game. Entrenchment's way of doing things is actually pretty easy: pick a general area where you want to place mines, click, and the mines are scattered closely in that area. The reason we couldn't copy this exactly is simple: we want to bring you the first release of the mod for just Sins, no expansion purchases necessary.

What they did

Not a whole lot. Mines have, to my knowledge, never been implemented in base Sins and Entrenchment mods tend to leave them alone or make extremely minor changes.

What we did

I bet you're going to say "hey, you guys did this already". At least if you've paid attention over the last year or so. Fact is, that old mines video is..well..old. And pretty generic. We used placeholder models and only showed the basics: the things exploding. I talked about their gameplay role just as generically. With the alpha pushing ahead at full steam, I was forced to narrow down how the mines would operate, and how they would be disabled and destroyed. Even now it's not set in stone. Here, I'll give you a peek at how it's most likely going to work (and does in the current build).

Mines are a way of making an enemy player go where you want. They do a lot of damage and you don't want to hit one. Mines' traditional power was clearly predicated on fear of hitting them, but differently from the mod: in real life, minesweepers were necessary to detect and defuse them. In Dawn of Victory, mines are almost completely overt. Your enemy will see them and purposefully navigate around them. This is their strength, though - build a spiral based minefield maze around your planet's gravity well and the other guy'll be forced to follow that maze or spend time disabling each mine. As a defender, your mouth should be watering here: if your enemy screws up, he takes a lot of damage, and if he doesn't, you get free reign to hit him anywhere you want to in the well. You can also position your ships anywhere you want as the proximity sensors on mines will not fire on friendlies.

So how do you clear these things? Entrenchment makes Sins mines completely invincible except to minesweeping scouts. This didn't end up being very conducive to the gameplay we wanted to provide, so we scrapped this model. Mines' ranges are larger than the ranges of most ships except torpedo cruisers, so simply running into them and blowing them up with guns doesn't typically work. Instead, you'll need to jam them with ships like the Kalinin Resupply Cruiser, then move in to destroy them before the jammer runs out of power. Obviously, the quicker you destroy one mine, the quicker you can get to the rest with your remaining power reserves, so a couple speedy corvettes are great for mine-clearing.

Of course, there is an element of faction-specificness to mines as well. Soviet players can research and build a mine with flak guns which protects it against strike craft raids (unfortunately, not against railgun cruisers), and the German player has a variety of ships throughout the game that drop our old favorites, R/T (Remote/Timed) mines. Soviet mines tend to do more damage than German ones by virtue of German ships being able to pick them off easier from range with railguns earlier in the game than the Soviets can pick German mines off.

Take part in helping to define the Dawn of Victory Universe, sign up to our forums and wiki at:
www.dawnofvictory.com/forums/
www.dawnofvictory.com/wiki/
Enlist Today!

Base Sins' approach to defenses is that they are a delaying tactic to weaken enemy combat ships and provide basic defense against things like planet-bombing frigates. As such, the Gauss turrets and their analogues were well-armored but took a long time to reload and did mediocre damage. They were difficult to destroy, but only served one real purpose (which admittedly made a hell of a lot of sense in Sins' scheme of things).

What they did

Other mods have realized this way of doing things is a little constricting and that some planet defenses could be effective in a damage-dealing role. After all, they don't move, so you don't have much of an excuse to not avoid them. This is a start, but without effective mechanics in place to force more tactical defending and/or tweaks to Sins planet-bombing mechanics, players will simply place them at the edges of gravity well as bonus damage-dealers or in the same spots near a planet to cover them from attack.

What we did

This focus on an interdicting role for planetary defenses is a big deal in Dawn of Victory. As you saw with mines, walling a player into chokepoints is a great strategy. But eventually they'll make some sort of headway against your mines - especially later in the game, when strike craft are plentiful and cruisers can outrange them. Thus, it's necessary to reinforce your chokepoints with long-ranged turrets. While not as complex to disable as mines, turrets serve both the roles of damage-dealer and scary "i don't want to go there" structure. Mines are your passive defense, turrets your active defense. Mines are your sandbags, turrets are your ZIS-2s.

And like any artillery piece, turrets can be replaced by traditional mobile units. You could just as easily back your minefield up with a bunch of flak frigates and a few destroyers, or on the German side some speedy corvettes. But turrets are a quicker and cheaper investment and can be placed much more easily. They're also much more versatile: fielding a destroyer against a German cruiser is going to result in catastrophe, but a turret can do just as much damage to that cruiser as it can to a corvette or frigate because of its diverse damage types. More on this damage dealing aspect in a later journal this week.

Finally, each faction has a different sort of turret, diversifying defenses. The Soviet Union uses a all-purpose quick reloading, moderately armored Weapons Array with heavy flak and light torpedoes, while the German Reich uses a long-reloading and slightly less armored Railgun Platform with a long-ranged medium railgun.

Take part in helping to define the Dawn of Victory Universe, sign up to our forums and wiki at:
www.dawnofvictory.com/forums/
www.dawnofvictory.com/wiki/
Enlist Today!

Planetary Defenses III: Hangars and Defensive Structures

Base Sins' hangars were pretty much just hangars, and there was no real "buff" structure for planetary structures. Each defense structure typically had a specific role to play.

What they did

Most mods have focused on improving and diversifying the existing roles of the single-role defenses, like Phase Jump Inhibitors being able to completely shut off phase jumps out of a system temporarily when researched.

What we did

Hangars
Hangars are pretty similar to base Sins' version, except structurally weaker and with some changes to their abilities. The main change is that they support much more fighters than their Sins counterparts - swarms of fighter craft are not uncommon. However, they're more expensive, take up more slots, and are less durable. It's intended that a player use only one or two hangars, rather than a lot of them spread across a well.

Hangars also give small area-of-effect bonuses to ships near them, such as an increase in hull repair rate. Hangars do not serve as repair docks for your ships, though - they are very much unqualified to do maintenance on anything larger than a fighter. Only the existing abilities of your crews to repair hull breaches are amplified.

Defense Stations
The Defense Stations (the Coordination Hub for the Soviet player and the OKW Station for the German player) are large structures that can boost the effectiveness of planetary defenses or ships defending a planet. They essentially serve as planetary grid control centers, aiding the effectiveness of your ships' targeting, for example, or speeding up the reload speeds of your turrets. Unlike the Civilian-tree Comm Center (its closest equivalent), Defense Stations serve a very specific purpose.

One function of the Coordination Hub and OKW Station is that they can both disable the minefields in a gravity well. This disables their proximity trigger but makes them invincible and immune to jamming. This is as close as we can get to the gameplay mechanic we wanted with Sins hardcodes in place: the original goal was to make a minefield that was entirely cloaked, then could be deployed with explosion triggers coming about 5 seconds later in order to throw off an attacker. Of course, it's not quite the same, and if it ends up being a easily exploitable mechanic with no real legitimate use (people just repeatedly toggling minefields over and over), it'll probably be removed. However, in testing we hope that players will be able to find a way to use them tactically, with safeguards on how often they can be toggled.

Defense Stations are very good investments as their bonuses often apply to everything in orbit, meaning just one can greatly enhance the effectiveness of your defense strategy. However, their bonuses generally do not stack, so expect diminishing returns with more than one. Instead, you should be using your Military slots for more defenses!

Take part in helping to define the Dawn of Victory Universe, sign up to our forums and wiki at:
www.dawnofvictory.com/forums/
www.dawnofvictory.com/wiki/
Enlist Today!

What we started with
Gravity wells in Sins were rather small. Planetary bonuses often changed total well size or the point at which you could build tactical structures, but smaller wells kept ships clustered together. Weapon ranges were often extremely similar across frigates, cruisers, and capital ships, meaning it was difficult to achieve a victory based on tactical maneuvering rather than ability micromanagement or fleet composition differences.

What they did
A lot of mods have drastically increased gravity well size and have been much better for it. Even base Sins can benefit from larger gravity wells, especially with regard to planetary defense placement. A lot of people don't take advantage of it, but gravity wells also slow you down the farther in you are, so larger wells also provided a more subtle gradient in this respect.

What we did
Gravity wells are a lot bigger in Dawn of Victory.

There's two main reasons for this: to accommodate long-ranged ships (more on that later), but also to make sure that players can use tactical structures like mines intelligently. With lots of space, you can draw an enemy into a certain area and then attack him: with small gravity wells, it's much more advantageous to either cover the entire well with mines or place them near each other, where an opponent would jump in.

In Sins, frigates were often treated as cannon fodder, and because of the way their weapons were aligned, the extent of strategy when it came to frigates was often simply repeatedly moving them out of range. Thanks to larger gravity wells, longer-range ships can successfully stay behind and fire their torpedoes or railguns while gunnery-focused ships with a focus on closer-ranged engagements can move up and hold a line in front of those ships. In short, it prevents homogenization of unit types, making each unit seem different rather than just another frigate to throw at the enemy.

And ranges are very different in Dawn of Victory. Ships like torpedo cruisers can often fire across the entire extent of a gravity well, depending on the planet's type and well size. Guns like medium cannons have decent but not exceptional range, and low-caliber guns like light turrets and flak have very poor range. Players again are encouraged to stagger their units rather than sending them in one big auto-attack blob.

In short, what different ranges and gravity well sizes do is help discourage "fleet composition wars". But tactical movement is only half of it.

Damage and Repair

What we started with
Sins' approach to damage is rather scattershot. Before I show the big damage graph, let me explain how it works. Ships in SoaSE have a set armor type, and weapons have a set damage type. Certain damage types do better or worse against certain armor types through damage multipliers - for example, a bunch of Garda Flak Frigates are going to do very little damage against a Kol Battleship because the Kol has VERYHEAVY armor, while they'll do a lot of damage against strike craft because the strike craft have an armor type of VERYLIGHT. Here is a graph showing how certain damagetypes do in base Sins:

As you can see, ANTIVERYLIGHT and ANTILIGHT behave how you'd expect, but ANTIMEDIUM and ANTIHEAVY do nearly the same amount of damage across all armor types, with ANTIVERYHEAVY actually doing more damage to heavier armor than not. Why is this? The most likely explanation is to keep capital ships, one of which is free at the start of most Sins games, balanced in the early game. Another possible reason is accounting for accuracy - Sins uses a damage per tick system, and so visual effects don't always line up and shots always hit. Since accuracy therefore cannot be reduced, nearly every ability in Sins' that reduces accuracy simply cuts damage, and so the curve of ANTIVERYHEAVY may reflect smaller ships' ability to get away.

In addition, ships had shields that regenerated relatively quickly, with hulls that did not. Sins had a Repair structure as well as several units that provided hull repair and sometimes shield regeneration.

What they did
It varies. Some mods that kept the Shield attribute made it even quicker to regenerate while weakening the Hull attribute. This also ties in with damage, since if shield mitigation is kept in and damage is raised, downing a shield is a much bigger deal. I'm thinking of Stress's mod Sacrifice of Angels 2 mostly here, and the system (except for its sort of confusingly high damage numbers) does work really well.

What we did
Remember that graph up there? Ours looks a little different. Here's them side to side:

Since our unit tree is linear, rather than relying on capital ships at the start, we have no excuse not to heavily linearize damage. As a result, heavy guns do a lot of damage against smaller ships.

You might ask how this is balanced for longer games: after all, what's the use of a frigate when everybody's got lots of heavy guns? The answer is that a majority of the per second damage on a larger ship is in ANTILIGHT and ANTIMEDIUM, because the heavier guns fire a lot slower. For example, the Slavny has a medium cannon on the front, but the engine will turn your Slavny sideways most of the time because its light guns on the side have more average DPS. In fact, a ship with ANTIHEAVY damage, the Torpedo Frigate, is specifically designed to be balanced against the Flak Frigate, with ANTILIGHT, and the Destroyer, with ANTILIGHT and ANTIMEDIUM. In testing, it's worked just as well as in theory.

As a result, you achieve a sense of progression while keeping your older ships still relevant. The flak on a Slavny or Retivyy is never as powerful as that flak frigate, and so while your big ships can still counter unit spam and aren't completely vulnerable forever (like in base Sins), the role will be better served by a smaller dedicated ship, even later in the game.

The sense of scale has been one of the more interesting results of our testing. It's remarkable going from "wow, I built a Destroyer, I bet I have the best fleet now!" to "I have a Slavny, I bet I have the best fleet now!" to "I have five Slavnys, a Retivyy, and ten destroyers, I bet I have the best fleet now!". Sins' sense of scale was violated at the start, since you use your capital ship at the start for so much and you're limited to one combat unit.

Repair is a similar overhaul. If you've been paying attention to past journals, you'll know that since "shields" have been replaced with "armor", your armor does not regenerate. Your hull does, though, but since your hull is a tiny % of your ship's HP, that doesn't matter much.

As a result, ships cannot just sit around in a gravity well for ten years regenerating all their health. You have to send them back to a shipyard for repairs or choose which ones to send to a forward advance. Often I would save my frigates in base Sins when raiding neutral planets by retreating the ones that were near death, but then I realized the replacement costs for those ships weren't even worth the micromanagement. Here, it often is, and since getting to a torpedo frigate line is like a massacre waiting to happen, you may want to consider retreating your forces even when they're not half-dead. Think of how you can cause an enemy's artillery to route by flanking them with cavalry in E:TW for a similar example.

Right now light shipyards can repair frigates and heavy shipyards can repair cruisers - we fully intend for players to make regular trips back to repair their ships while sending fresh reinforcements in to hold systems rather than keeping their forces stagnant in a system. The relevant shipyards are relatively expensive, though, so destroying an enemy's shipyards might be an interesting way to cripple their fleets or make them dump a lot of money into a replacement.

Take part in helping to define the Dawn of Victory Universe, sign up to our forums and wiki at:
www.dawnofvictory.com/forums/
www.dawnofvictory.com/wiki/
Enlist Today!