Armoured Commander II News

This update brings a number of small fixes and improvements. My thanks to everyone who reported issues and helped me work on them!

Two game systems have been substantially changed: animation timings for attacks, and the handling of a Player Commander stay in the Field Hospital. Hopefully in both cases this will result in improvements: increased gameplay speed for the former, and better reliability for the latter, but although I've tested both, it's possible that new issues have been unintentially introduced, so please report any bugs/crashes on the Steam discussion board or on the Discord. Full changelog follows:



ADD: Nation definitions for Republican and Nationalist Spain, Australia, and New Zealand by YARD
ADD: Flag consoles for Spain by Allie, and Decoration consoles for Spain by Engineer Zero
ADD: Limited range and effectiveness of HEAT for Finnish version of PaK 35/36 Steilgranate
ADD: Operate AAMG to Quick Commands
ADD: Pop-up message when a Fate Point saves the Player Commander from death from a firepower attack
ADD: Pop-up message when an unjam weapon attempt fails
ADD: Player vehicles can now be retrofitted with a radio if the player keeps it beyond the date by when it was historically fitted with a radio
ADD: Sound effect for reconning a zone

CNG: Slight change to the rarity factors for PSW 231 (6 rad)
CNG: Skill list in Add Skill menu now only sorted alphabetically if player does so via a key command
CNG: Firepower attacks that hit the leg/foot when crewman is in an armoured vehicle are no longer ignored, but have less chance of causing damage
CNG: Attack animations now run simultaneously as the to-hit roll animation
CNG: For an incoming attack that cannot be saved with a Fate Point, a continue prompt will no longer be shown

FIX: Many portrait fixes and additions by chri
FIX: Crew names for Soviet Union and Romania by YARD
FIX: Unit portrait variants now updated when continuing into a new campaign
FIX: AI units can no longer pivot before attacking when bogged
FIX: AI units can no longer attempt to dig-in after previously acting that turn
FIX: AI units can no longer attempt to unbog when being Overrun
FIX: Effect of Lightning Reflexes and Quick Reflexes skills on injury chance
FIX: Check for limited range of HEAT ammo for Steilgranate
FIX (hopefully): Bug where player commander could spend a very long time in the field hospital
FIX: AAMG location and turret definition for M20 Utility Car
FIX: Grazing hits can no longer 'downgrade' a crewman's condition to Shaken
FIX: Critical AP hits did not increase chance of destroying entrenchments / fortifications
FIX: Soviet 76LL APDS should now have the correct base AP score of 18

Some important fixes and changes in this update:



CNG: List of crew skills in Add Skill menu now ordered alphabetically
CNG: AI units can no longer Surrender if they've already performed 1+ actions that turn

FIX: Possible crash due to unit support menu not returning proper result when support request is cancelled
FIX: AI units can no longer attack targets in the 4th hex ring of the scenario map
FIX: Road depictions now run through fields rather than under them
FIX: Player unit types being incorrectly identified as obsolete when moving into a new campaign
FIX: Possible that no battle was triggered upon moving into a zone with a Rescue objective
FIX: Fully implemented bogging down and unbog attempts for AI units; bogged-down AI units can no longer move until they unbog

The end of 2021 seemed like a good opportunity for a longer post on my plans for the game in the new year.

Armoured Commander II was released on Steam out of Early Access in September of this year and since then has gotten quite a few updates. My current plan is to finish the game by the end of August 2022, although I’ll continue to provide bug fixes and general maintenance after that time. My hope is that by then I’ll be able to add everything I wanted to the game, and will have at least laid the groundwork for further additions in the form of community mods.

There are nine general areas where I will focus my development work over the next few months, presented here in no particular order:





I have at the moment a list of a few bugs that need to be addressed in the next minor update, and I expect that bugs will continue to be reported through the new year. The Discord community has been especially helpful in this, since they can report an issue quickly and I can usually address it in a hotfix in fairly short order. As new features get added, new bugs appear, so this will be an ongoing task for me throughout the new year.



Again, this is an area where the Discord and Steam communities have been very helpful, since they have suggested interface and display changes that have ended up greatly improving the game. Even minor things like changing a display colour can greatly improve the overall experience of the game. This also includes minor changes to gameplay, such as a recent change where I removed Overrun as a separate command and turned it into an action under the Drive command. The player can still perform the same type of attack, but now it’s much more flexible in terms of when and how it’s used. I’ll continue to make these sorts of changes wherever possible.



There’s still a number of unit types that have been suggested on the Discord and/or have portraits ready to go but still need to be added to the game. Many of these were historically quite common, while others were very rare, but all of them have a place in this expansive game.



This is a mechanic that I’ve been working on for a while – to have gun tractors spawn with gun units, and give them the ability to tow the gun around the scenario map if needed. I’ve already added some elements of this but still need to finish it off. This will bring in some interesting game choices, such as whether it’s better to target a gun tractor first and thus remove the gun’s mobility.



I’ve already added a new region and two new campaigns set in the South Pacific, but there’s much more to do in this area. Although tanks were not very well suited to the terrain of the Pacific islands, they still played an important role in many important battles. Already the unique features of the region and the forces involved have created a new type of game experience in the Battle of Luzon campaigns.



There’s a few important areas of the war that are not yet represented in the game, such as late-war Italy, and the Finnish-Soviet front. I definitely want to add these before I can call the game complete.



This is something I may or may not end up adding, but I had an idea to have a random modifier apply to some or all campaign days. For example, you might be told that today is a decisive battle, and so receive a VP bonus; or you might be offered amphetamines for your tank crew, which reduces fatigue but increases the odds of critical failures. These would add a little more variety to different campaign days, even if you’ve played the same day mission before.



There’s many aspects of the game that are either missing sound effects altogether or are still using rather generic effects. I’ll continue to add these as needed, and hopefully in time the soundscape of the game will be much more mature.



This is a feature from the original Armoured Commander game, which is to have a visual depiction of the region and your location within it. All campaigns currently provide a geographical location for each campaign week, so adding this should just be a matter of creating the PETSCI consoles for each region, and providing the game with the appropriate geographical references.


There’s also a few other areas that I would like to work on, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to before the end of the summer. The Second Sino-Japanese War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Korean War are all settings that would fit well within the game. Some work on these has already been done on the Discord server, so perhaps the players will have already completed these before I can get to them myself.

In any case, it should be an eventful first half of 2022 as I continue to develop Armoured Commander II, and hopefully help it grow into the completed game that I had envisioned years ago.

A minor update with some additions and a good number of changes and fixes. On important change is that a few commands have been changed into actions. To Unbog or Overrun, your Driver should now be on the Drive command; to Unjam a weapon, your crewman should now be on the Operate Weapon command. In the rare case that one of your crewmen is on Unbog, Overrun, or Unjam Weapon orders when you update, their order will automatically be reset to Spot.



ADD: Semovente da 75/34, Semovente da 90/53, Semovente 105/25
ADD: 'Very Unreliable' stat for weapons
ADD: Bonus to chance of Fire Small Arms action when player is on Overrun

CNG: Unbog and Overrun are now actions within the Drive command
CNG: Unjam Weapon now an action in the Operate Weapon command
CNG: Fire Small Arms action now takes place at the start of the Shooting Phase
CNG: Commands that require the crewman to be CE will no longer be available in positions that are always BU
CNG: More commands that require the crewman to be CE will include a warning in the Command Phase if the crewman is currently BU
CNG: Slight change to colours of to-hit/effect resolution bar graph
CNG: Slight change to layout of to-hit console
CNG: LoS depictions no longer drawn during AI attacks

FIX: Better handling of warning when crewman is unable to operate an AAMG or attempt an unjam because they are BU
FIX: Bug where immobilized armoured targets could be destroyed by HE as if they were unarmoured
FIX: Bridge generation procedure could add bridges over rivers in strange places
FIX: Shortened display of Half-Tracked movement class in unit display to avoid overlaps
FIX: SU-57 main gun changed to 57L
FIX: Display overlap with display of empty crew positions in bail-out screen

Just a small hotfix to get the "On my Mark" battlegroup command working properly (hopefully!)