Fortress Europe is a historical realism modification for Company of Heroes 2 that is currently in development.
Battlegroups, Combat teams, Kampfgruppen; all these terms describe a collection of units assembled for a specific mission or purpose.
In Fortress Europe, you will pick a Battlegroup at the beginning of every game. Each Battlegroup comes with a tailored selection of unit choices and abilities, similar to a Commander, but is modeled on an actual historical unit type and the support elements it would be able to call upon in battle.
All units are organized according to their historically accurate formations. Countless hours of research have gone into examining US Tables of Organization and Equipment, British War Establishment documents, German Kriegsstärkenachweisungen papers, and what little information is available on Soviet organizations. These wartime documents detailed the size, ranks, and equipment allocated to all military units, allowing us to make formations in Fortress Europe be as historically accurate as possible.
This means every squad, team, and section have the correct amount of men and exact weapons they would have been issued. Platoons you deploy will be constrained to the equipment they had and the amount of squads or vehicles they actually possessed.
Ever found it weird that the armour profile of a tank in Company of Heroes was just a single value for front and another for the rear? The loading tips may talk about side armour, but there is no such thing in the game.
So we changed it. Fortress Europe has the entire armour profile for every vehicle, containing each plate along with their thicknesses and slope angles. When ever a shot strikes a vehicle we determine which plate was hit for that side and at which angle. Using a formula derived from the book WWII Ballistics - Armor and Gunnery, we get the result of the impact.
Also, there are no hit points. Damage is done to the internal components and the crew inside. Kill enough crew members - or knock out enough systems - and the remaining crew will bail out and retreat. Igniting the ammo will take out the entire vehicle. Hits also have a chance to cause fires, which will either force the crew to bail out or waste their time extinguishing it.
Company of Heroes has always rewarded smart micromanagement, but babysitting your units can be frustrating. To ease the burden, infantry will automatically use anti-tank grenades and launchers on enemy tanks that get too close. Vehicles and towed guns will automatically switch to the correct ammunition for the target they're firing at. Infantry in the open will fall back out of range if suppressed, rather than lying prone and waiting to die.
- Our ballistics system is 75% complete. Armour penetration is working as planned, critical hits are the next task to complete.
- Units are 90% complete, most just need additional abilities and upgrades to flesh them out.
- Battlegroups are 50% complete, we are working on a system that can handle all the units in submenus.
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