Hello Commander,
Today is milestone day! And more precisely, the still unannounced yet already delivered milestone
MARMONT. It brings to you several items that we have announced and teased in some previous DevBlogs, namely
snipers for all nations,
LRRP overhaul, some
new units,
new soundtracks,
maps rework,
urban improvements, new
language, ... and more.
And of course, balance changes.
[h2]A little bit of historical context[/h2]Each
WARNO milestone is named after a famous French marshal active during the Napoleonic wars.
Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont belonged to the
petite noblesse and trained as an artillery officer. He immediately adopted the principles of the Revolution and fought in its armies, where he quickly became acquainted with a fellow penniless artillery officer,
Napoléon Bonaparte, with whom he was even roommate for some time.
When Napoléon rose to power, Marmont was never far away: aide-de-camp to his friend, then promoted general in Egypt, he was among those Napoléon entrusted with his Coup d'Etat of 18th Brumaire. Although promoted to général de division and general-inspector of the artillery at the age of 30 only in 1804, Marmont was disappointed not to be made a marshal with the first promotion.
For Marmont, although a very good artillery officer, was an ambitious and self-important man, sensible to fawning. Intelligent and well-educated, a cynic with a sharp tongue, he would always consider himself above his peers. A trait which would lead him to occupy a unique and dark place among Napoleonic marshals.
Governor of the Illyrian provinces (nowadays part of Slovenia & Croatia), he was recalled back at Napoléon's side for the 1809 campaign in Austria, where he was finally promoted to Marshal of the Empire and Duke of Ragusa. Sent to Spain, he proved one of Wellington's most able and dangerous opponent, before being recalled at Napoléon's for the campaign of 1813 in Germany,
In 1814 in France, his performance would have secured him a place as one of the best general of the campaign, had his vanity not brought him to occupy another place in Napoleonic History: that of the "
Judas among Marshals", the man who betrayed and brought Napoléon down.
His VI. Corps amounted for about a third of Napoléon's small
Grande Armée of 1814 when Marmont let himself be convinced by royalist conspirators that he would be France savior's, putting an end to war, if he would remove his troops from under Napoléon's command. Which he did, leaving Napoléon with no choice but to abdicate.
In doing so, the deposed emperor commented about his former friend: "
The ungrateful one, he will be more unhappy than I will".
For Napoléon knew Marmont had been lured by unctuous words, but would be forever remembered as a traitor. And indeed, for the rest of his life, under whichever government he served, Marmont would always be reminded by fellow officers and court members that he once betrayed his master and could not be trusted. "
Raguser", from his title Duke of Ragusa, even became a byword for "to betray".
And even today, the ostracism against "Marmont the Traitor" can still be felt! For Paris
intra muros is separated from its suburbs by a ring of boulevards, collectively known as the "
Boulevards des Maréchaux" for their are named after all of Napoléon's marshals. All? No, for two are missing:
Grouchy, wrongfully accused of being responsible of the defeat at Waterloo, and of course
Marmont, for his betrayal.
Despised by his peers, Marmont ended up his life in self-exile at the Russian court in Saint-Petersburg, then in Venice.
[h2]Snipers[/h2]But let's get back to 1989!
This milestone introduces the much-expected
snipers. Although scoped rifles also make an appearance with
LRRP too, the only units truly worthy of the name (and thus the trait)
Sniper are the two-man recon infiltration teams. Other scope-equipped soldiers in various squads are mere marksmen: they get a more accurate rifle, but that's all, not the sniper bonus.
All nations will get sniper teams, although not all divisions. Scout-sniping in its modern definition was an Anglo-Saxon tradition (starting with Canada in WW2) passed on to foreign special forces, but never as widespread as in English-speaking armies. Therefore, while all British & American divisions have some, only a selected few other divisions have special forces' snipers attached.
Sniper units all come as a two-man team with
Very Good optics and the
Sniper trait. The latter grant them,
when static only, an
Accuracy bonus and a +1
Stealth level. For we all know the
value of not being seen!
Here is the list of all the sniper teams added:
- French SNIPER SAS (11e Division Parachutiste)
- W-German FERN. SCHARFSCHÜTZE (2. Panzergrenadier-Division)
- E-German FJ SCHARFSCHÜTZE (4. Mot.-Schützen-Division)
- Soviet SNAYPERI SPETSNAZ (35. GvDShB)
- British SNIPER (all British divisions)
- American SNIPER (all American divisions)
Scoped rifles are divided into two categories:
bolt-action &
semi-automatic. The former has a longer range, better accuracy but slow rate of fire; the latter has shorter range, lesser accuracy but ... you guess it? ... better RoF.
Sniper teams preferably use a bolt-action rifle when available to the nation, while semi-automatic ones can more commonly be found in non-sniper squads. The following rifles have been added to the game:
- French FR-F2 (bolt)
- British L96A1 (bolt)
- American M14 (semi-auto)
- American M24 (bolt)
- W-German PSG-1 (semi-auto)
- Soviet SVD Dragunov (semi-auto)
- Soviet VSS Vintorez (semi-auto)
[h2]LRRP[/h2]LRRP stands for
Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol, you know those scouts with
GSR trait ingame:
- FERNSPAHER
- SAS PATROL
- LRS
- SPEZIALAUFKLÄRER
- SPETSNAZ G.R.U.
Now that the
GSR trait has been introduced, we have reworked all LRRP squads to fit a (roughly) same pattern: a veteran 6-man team, with
GSR trait and mostly light weapons. In some cases, weaponry has been adapted to fit a marksman (with scoped rifle, but no sniper trait), therefore we're inviting you to check them for differences.
Only one nation remained without LRRP:
France!
That's why MARMONT introduces the new
DRAGONS-PARAS squad to fill this role with the
5e Division Blindée. The
13e Dragons Parachutistes, or
13e RDP, was the French
First Army's elusive French LRRP unit, its eyes and ears.
[h2]New units & models![/h2]But the
snipers and
DRAGONS-PARAS aren't the only units we're adding with this milestone.
With Oudinot, we introduced the
Military Police trait for ... military police units obviously. But only NATO had such troops.
The reason wasn't a specific bias against Pact, but because military law enforcement didn't work the same way with WP armies and as such there wasn't a direct counterpart in Soviet & East-German divisional TO&Es.
MARMONT rectifies this omission with the introduction of the East-German
MILITÄRSTREIFE and Soviet
KOMENDATURA patrols. Both featuring the
Military Police trait and added to all WP divisions. And since the latter used a specific version of the UAZ, we've modeled it too while we were at it.
We're also introducing a second Soviet
MiG-29: same variant, but different loadout, a cheaper one.
The reason why was both to give
35-ya GvDShB a choice between a top-of-the-line MiG-29 and a lesser armed but cheaper one ... but also to feature a new gorgeous camo we identified. Look at that beauty:
Although they were already featured ingame, we've reworked both Soviet
MiG-27K (LGB & SEAD) with their specific nose. And in the process, we reskinned the LGB one with its own specific skin.
[h2]Maps[/h2]Based on community feedbacks, we made some modifications on
Cyrus and
Two Lakes maps.
Regarding
Cyrus, we have improved the treatment of the plateau edges, which previously had too many trees blocking the units' LoS toward important strategic points. Additionally, we have made graphical improvements to both
Cyrus and
Two Lakes, including modifying urban densities within cities. Our goal was to bring more realism to cities by reducing the size of gardens around housing and redesigning some districts.
We have also enhanced lakesides on both maps by adding new textures and assets, as well as reworking the color scheme and lighting to reinforce their overall appearance. We have also optimized the game's performance in order to improve the gameplay experience.
Finally, three new maps have been added to ranked mode:
Two Ways,
Black Forest Storm &
Loop[h2]And more ...[/h2]By popular demand, MARMONT also introduces
four new soundtracks for you synthewave lovers!
And last but not least, WARNO now has a
Polish translation. Still incomplete in this version, but the rest will be added soon.
We wish to thank
GreenHD, and hope you will too, for his heroic efforts in bringing that localization to the game.
And for course, balance changes, which you'll find
here.
[h2]But what about the FOB?[/h2]
FOBs were meant to be delivered with this milestone, but we detected a last minute bug regarding them. Waiting for it to be fixed and rebuilding a version meant delaying MARMONT to Friday ... and you know we don't release on a Friday. Hence it would have pushed back release to next week.
We considered it was better to deliver MARMONT without it in order to fix the
FOB properly, then release it to you ASAP as a hotfix.
[h2]See you on the battlefield[/h2]Don’t forget to join the passionate
WARNO community. Check the latest news on the
Steam News page or visit the
Steam Forums. Get together with other players on either the excellent
Discord server,
Reddit page,
YouTube or our
Instagram.
See you on the battlefield, commander!
