Hello everybody,

 

as you of course remember, one of the key new features of Battle of Kuban is the new gameplay mode - Career. In this mode, you'll build your character, a military pilot. His career will develop day by day in the chosen theatre of war. Each morning (except the days with non-flying weather), the plan for the day is set and the outcome of an each sortie influences your squadron (the pilots can be wounded, lost, the aircraft can be damaged, etc.). The player character will participate in some of the sorties, while the results of other ones will be generated automatically based on the overall frontline situation, how experienced the AI pilots are and which aircraft with what armament they have, weather conditions and so on.

 

At the end of the day, all pilots stats are updated and in the course of the following days, they could be awarded and advance in rank. When the player character becomes the regiment commander, new tools are given to him during the planning phase to assign other pilots to a mission, set up their aircraft, weaponry, fuel and plot the flight route.

 

One of the planned features of the Career mode are historically correct weather conditions for each day (averaged for the theater of war), squadrons positions and what aircraft they had. The daily tasks reflect what the squadron was up to during the set timeframe. Overall, this mode will let you learn more about the battle of Kuban (and Moscow and Stalingrad).

 

At the beginning of our work on the Career mode, we performed a huge research on squadron histories and the community helped us in this endeavor. In addition, we found almost all German squadron emblems. In Soviet tradition, the air force regiments didn't have emblems, so we decided to use their banners instead. Take a look at some of the emblems and banners you'll see in the game after the Career mode release:

 

  

  

Note from Jason - A very special thanks to our friend Isaac aka 10.N./ZG1_SPEKTRE76 for his help in researching and creating the German squad emblems. We very much appreciate it.

 

Now onto other neat things. Since our map of Kuban includes a significant chunk of the sea, we decided to improve how various warships look in our engine. First, we used more complex materials for 3D models of the ships (some of the screenshots of them were published in the Dev Blog #164).

 

Second, since the torpedo boats were widely used in the Black Sea, we're developing the new torpedo tech. Anticipating a question you're probably going to ask, we're making the new tech suitable for supporting aircraft-launched torpedoes in the future. Such aircraft are not planned for Battle of Kuban, but it's possible that they will appear later, so we always try to make new technologies as universal as possible.

 

Third, we invested into improved physics, graphical effects and some other minor stuff for the ships. Here's a short video that shows the result (please note that the sound is WIP and not finished yet):

 

 
 

In the end, we can tell you that we plan to release the update 2.012 at the very end of August - as it turns out, it will be a humongous update with many very big and important additions that affect the entire project. It's too early to publish the complete change list since some of the tasks can take longer to finish, but at the moment everything is looking fine and we hope the update 2.012 will contain everything we planned for it.