Matrix Games

Greetings once again to our glorious Panzer Corps 2 community!

We have one final Dev Diary on Fall of Poland to share with you today, including an announcement for its release date.  But before that, we wanted to have a quick word about...

Panzer Corps Day
Wow! What an amazing success Panzer Corps Days turned out to be!  Our expectations on player numbers and stream watchers were completely blown away.  It’s hard to fathom tens of thousands of players tuning into our channels to celebrate Panzer Corps Day with us, but that’s exactly what happened.  As always, we are humbled by having so many people interested in and playing Panzer Corps and Panzer Corps 2 even after so many years, you all are amazing!

As someone who has made 144 Panzer Corps Grand Campaign scenarios and 172 Panzer Corps 2 Axis Operations Campaign scenarios and worked on so many aspects of Panzer Corps, it has been such an incredible journey I’ve been on with all of you. Thank you, once again.

Here’s to hoping we’ll be able to celebrate Panzer Corps Day every year from here on out, and make them even bigger and better! 
- Content Designer Kerensky

And now, back to Fall of Poland!

Integrated Image System

So the biggest new feature we have not yet talked about with Fall of Poland is we have a brand new integrated image and messaging system now.  This is something we know players have been wanting for a very long time, and it’s great to finally have it.

The artworks we have been sprinkling into Fall of Poland storefronts and past Dev Diaries are the original works we will be integrating into the scenario message event system.

As you can see, we’re debuting this system with War Stories Fall of Poland, but we’re excited to invoke this system to improve the flavour and context of these mid scenario messages in future Panzer Corps 2 content.

Additionally, we’re hoping this will be a boon for creators of custom and user made content and campaigns. It’s going to be very exciting to see what kind of imagery our players use to enhance scenario events. Real historical imagery? Custom artworks? Iconic World War II photograpgy? We can’t wait to see the awesome WW2 theme visuals people come up with.

New Polish Cavalry
From our last Dev Diary, we mentioned some new Polish Cavalry units, but we didn’t show them off.  Time to fix that!

As you can see, this is the new Polish Uhlan Cavalry unit in its default form.  They are mounted, with excellent mobility, but rather poor combat stats.  This form is meant for rapid movement, to either cross the battlefield quickly or participate in assisting with long distance flanking and encircling efforts.

The switch form of this unit, the soldiers of the Polish Uhlan will dismount from their horses, and fight on foot as traditional WW2 era infantry fighting forces would.

Here you can see their movement radius is significantly lower than their mounted switch form, but their combat performance is dramatically improved!
The Uhlan is definitely an extremely flexible and potent new unit for Poland to deploy, just remember to manually switch them to the form you need them to operate in!

Forced Withdrawal
One final item we wanted to discuss.  And actually, this comes from early internal discussion on how do you make a Poland 1939 campaign from the Polish perspective that isn’t just about ‘getting your teeth kicked in’.

To help with the historical reality of the immense difficulty the Polish forces faced in September of 1939, we have a new sort of objective, the Forced Withdrawal objective.

Basically, for players who want to fight to the bitter end and see what the Polish were up against, this new objective type allows for a nice out from the historical result of many of these battles of the Polish Campaign.

A good example would be to look at the Battle of Mlawa scenario.

You are tasked with defending the line here, but you will very quickly find the German attack forces to be overwhelming, as they definitely were historically.  We designed Forced Withdrawal objectives to allow players who want to fight against impossible odds to do so if they really feel like it, but we don’t force everyone to fight impossible battles that break history.

As they say, discretion is the better part of valor, and triggering Forced Withdrawal objectives are going to be a way for players to yield the field, to continue to play through the campaign and also preserve their CORE forces for the battles ahead, instead of expecting players to fight and win against impossibly difficult odds.  This is a very overwhelming amount of Luftwaffe aircraft pummelling your forces!

Conclusion
Thanks again for joining us for this third and last Developer Diary on the latest upcoming Panzer Corps 2 DLC Fall of Poland. We’re aiming for a launch on August 29th, the end of this month!  We are looking forward to getting this DLC out in time for the historical anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Poland, which we all know is September 1st, 1939.

By deploying the DLC a few days in advance of September 1st, we want to make absolutely certain our players will be fully prepared to experience and fight their own Battle for Poland on its fateful anniversary day!