DTA: Covert Revolt Development Update



Greetings Commanders!

We shared some news about our upcoming Covert Revolt (CR) singleplayer campaign during our TS 24th Anniversary live-stream event last month. This news post echoes the news for those who missed the stream.

If you haven't heard about the CR campaign before, check out our earlier news post and trailer!









The image above outlines the CR features we revealed during the stream. Consider this information additive to what we revealed last year - all the points that we revealed last year still apply, aside from the length of the campaign. I'm going to keep it simple and just explain each point in detail :

• There is a branching storyline - CR has multiple points where you can make decisions that affect how the story will play out.
  
• Currently I have 7 different endings planned for the campaign. Which one you get depends on what choices you make through your journey.
  
• CR has 3 primary routes or branches: A, B, and C, which all have 2 or 3 different endings. Choices made during the early missions will decide which routes you end up on. Each route contains a unique set of missions - they're not just copy/pasted versions of each other, but each route can be considered a full campaign of its own.
  
• Each route of CR contains between 14 and 20 missions. All routes of the campaign, when combined, will contain a total of over 30 original missions for you to play! Each mission also contains cutscenes with the "visual novel" style system that we revealed last year.
  
  
  • This means that one playthrough of the campaign can be expected to take around 20 hours (+- 5 hours, depending on your skill level and chosen difficulty), while a full "completionist" playthrough of all routes can take up to 50 hours.
  
  
• I recently asked the public for testers, and a great number of people volunteered to test the campaign. In addition to people in our staff, this means that CR missions are getting a lot of playtesting and improvements based on feedback - you can be sure the experience will be polished when you eventually jump into the campaign yourself!
  
• CR missions contain dozens of optional objectives. They bring a variety of effects - some tie into the branching storyline, some make the current mission easier, others make future missions easier or different, etc.
  
• As said last year, I have paid special attention to difficulty scaling in this campaign. Our good number of playtesters have further helped with getting the difficulty scaling right. Easy is easy, while Hard is hard. Everyone who has beaten the original WW C&C campaigns should be able to also beat CR on the easiest difficulty levels and routes, while veterans will find themselves greatly challenged by the hardest difficulty levels.

Unfortunately, I also have to announce a delay for the campaign's release date. As originally announced, I wanted to release CR this year already. However, I realized that fleshing out all branches of the storyline so that the story does not feel "rushed" or otherwise low-quality at any point requires a greater number of missions. This is why the number of missions has increased from last year's 20+ to 30+, which has forced me to push the release date to the first half of next year.

I hope this delay will be worth it in the campaign's quality when it eventually reaches your hands next year.


Other upcoming updates













While CR is our biggest project at the moment, it is not everything that we've been working on. To keep you entertained during the wait, we are preparing big changes to our Skirmish AI. Particularly, it is in the process of learning to expand its base towards multiple resource fields, which will make it a much more competent, human-like, and simply fun opponent to face on most maps.

This change will also make AI more fair to play against because its expansion has allowed us to radically reduce its cheats while still roughly retaining its original difficulty. Thus, it will be possible to utilize various tactics against the AI that previously have mainly only worked against humans. For example, the AI is now vulnerable to economic starvation by hunting its harvesters, and eliminating its refineries or factories with flank attacks is now also easier to achieve (because its base is not only one big blob).

We will release a separate news post about all features of the new AI when we will eventually release it, sometime later this autumn. So, stay tuned for more updates, Commanders!