Geof Rey Evans, Game Manager of WWIIOL-Battleground Europe, announced that the patch 1.25, focused on the introduction of Tables of Equipment , will also update the way speed for tanks and every motor vehicle is calculates.
What will happen is that slow tanks like Churchills, Matilda and Char will show up some good climbing abilities on low gears.

As some of you are no doubt aware, due to the discoveries of a few players who did some quite awesome and time consuming evaluation testing ... of the tanks of Battleground Europe ... some quite undesired handling anomalies were found, cheifly to do with hill climbing.

Now, when we build these tanks (or any ground vehicle) we include engine power and vehicle mass and their relative contribution to road speed, and with slightly less emphasis (only due to the vast variety of what would be "approrpriate" and the nature of our terrain model compared to real life) cross country speed also.

However, we never before included any hill climb standard as part of that profiling, but rather treated each build as an item unto itself. So as it turned out ... when all the tanks were tested side by side, some weirdness was evident. Engine power and roadspeeds were still correct, but under certain situations you would obviously find yourself in while playing, performance of some of the tanks was completely wrong ... or handled badly by the game engine would be a better way to put it.

I did some evaluation of my own inside the data and it was clear that this was much more important than just "a little odd" and had direct and fairly consequential impact on game play.

Clearly, although the task would be enormous (because it means an audit, which means ALL vehicles ... not just the ones you think are wrong .. in their own vacumn, that's not how it's done) ... and taking into consideration that v1.25 development tasks are already set (and some already being cut to make the deadline) ... under normal circumstances this "new task set" would have to be scheduled for a subsequent dev. cycle, and thus would not be done at the very earliest until two cycles out from where we are now.

I didn't think this would cut it for this game, and our customers. So the audit began 2 weeks ago being performed after hours and on weekends. Not very good for us ... but good for the game.

I want to let you know it will make the v1.25 release and I know, from seeing the results, that you will be very happy indeed. All the tanks are so much better for it. Some more than others, as there were 4 that were terrible ... but all of them are better off as a result. The biggest improvers were the PzKw.IVg (it's nice now) and StuG.IIIg (nice too B) ... the S-35 and H-39 are not the useless slugs they once were. The S-35 is actually reasonably good across country now, since it was called "the Cavalry tank" this kind of makes sense.

The slow ones are still slow (Churchills, Matilda, Char.) but they work well in heavy going, such as climbing and uneven ground where their low gearing or speed in those gears contributes to tractability in heavy running. Just like they should. The fast ones are all still fast. Most cross country speeds look better, although the ones that were really fast before did not really improve (M4a3 slowed a little but still accelerates well) ... since these fast tanks were already very quick you won't feel any real differance in the seat of your pants, but the middle ones are doing better, and feel good. If anything the differance between the fastest and the slowest (generalizing here, so don't jump to any conclusions ok!) is less than it was before. There's a really fat middle group which are all very close.

I still have a few left to do. I managed to get 100 hours of work done (what I thought it would take) in less time than I thought it would require based on stealing bits of the work day here and there, but if someone could tell me where it was I was living I'd like to get back to my house sometime. B]

You're going to like them. All of them. Hell, they even adhere to their realtive power/weight ratios for the most part (this is never a cut'n'dried thing despite opinions to the contrary) and it all makes a lot more sense now.

Just a little "something extra" for v1.25 ... consider it that extra heavy eggnog we brought you for Christmas. B]

PS: This is all vehicles not just tanks. Tanks are all people talk about but we're including everything. Even ATG's and AAG's get a berm climbinmg audit.
__________________
Geof Rey Evans
Producer/CRS
Game Manager/WWIIOL-Battleground Europe
"this is rocket science, it just looks like a video game"