The Boy who cried ‘Wolf’

We feel like the boy who cried ‘wolf’!

Can you count them, first the Quick Take: Squad Battles blog post, and then the Advance of the Reich 4.03.4 Beta release, followed by an entry in the News Shorts – December 2025 post, and finally another mention in our 2025 End of Year Update. That is four articles or mentions for Squad Battles version 4.03.4. and now you are getting a fifth!

So firstly, the mea culpa. Today was our target day to release the Eastern Front updates. We have been working towards this for weeks, but we haven’t made it. Why? For a few reasons.

·         The ‘Burden of Command’ graphics gave us some very usable 3D assets, but we have had to create equivalent 2D graphics from scratch. This has been a bigger job than expected as we have tried to align the 2D with the 3D. That means the isometric image in 3D is reflected in the top-down image in 2D. We have spent a lot of time on this to harmonise between zoom levels and more.

·         We made the decision to include four biomes for the Eastern front. They are summer, fall, barren, and snow. These biomes have required full sets of 2D & 3D graphics for each, and with the prior game versions only having summer and snow, doubled the seasonal sets.

·         We found a new method, late in December for converting ‘coloured transparency’. We have mentioned a few times that we were running into issues with our current graphics engine where transparency that is any other colour than black causes artifacts in-game. The new method solved that problem, but meant we had to completely redo all the previous images included in the beta.

·         One area that really benefited from the new process was the explosions and pyrotechnics. Not only were both the 2D and 3D sprites clearer and more detailed, but we increased the number of animation frames from twenty to twenty-five. We have been able to use better animations overall, and the result in 2D is particularly striking.

·         We have increased the 3D ‘in-hex’ size. Why is that important? We were limited in how high various structures, such as trees and buildings could be. In many cases, our limits were less than the native heights of the Burden of Command assets, and required us to shrink or truncate images, with less than desirable results. With the larger in-hex size, we have more flexibility.

·         The number of variants of terrain assets has been increased from six to twenty-four. What does this mean? The game system currently randomly selects a graphical tile by type. For example, when showing city tiles, there are only six in game currently, and with a limited number, a high chance of repetition. Moving to twenty-four variants expands the pool of choices and will result in less generic looking terrain. We are only just starting to implement this, but you can expect City/urban hexes to be the first graphical asset to use all twenty-four slots. We will expand the other terrain types over time, but we felt the urban hexes would have a bigger impact initially.

·         Many of the game symbols have been changed. You will notice some real differences with higher resolution items like obstacles and minefields as well additional alignment between 2D & 3D symbols. There are new markers for items like rally and spotting as well as morale states for ‘hexagon’ units like AT and AA guns.

·        Ground states have been updated, there will be new soft and mud terrain included.

Example screen shots of many of these changes will follow the text.

Another area that has taken a lot of time, is implementing new changes into each of the games data files.  As a reminder, here is the current state of the revised Squad Battles titles:

The addition of new weapon & ambient sounds, night shading, additional biomes, and more has required updates to all scenarios, game maps, and weapon and load data. For example, the Red Victory load data is similar, but different to Advance of the Reich and Winter War. This later game's data reflected the addition of new rules such as clearing (removal of obstacles and minefields by weapons), that were not present in the earlier games. The data is now aligned across titles that were applicable.

Titles that were earlier versions have subsequently needed more work, and like everything, it's taken longer than expected.

Let’s talk a little more about biomes. As mentioned, there are summer, fall, barren, and snow environments. These are being used to cover both seasons, and in some cases locations.

For seasons, we have divided the year as follows for the Eastern front:

What this means is that a scenario set in November that is not ground state snow, will use the barren biome. The barren biome represents a period where deciduous trees have lost their leaves and fields are fallow. Though not hard and fast, the above listing is a guide for terrain used in each scenario.

Snow ground state in Squad Battles has been significantly changed. Whereas previously most features were considered clear terrain, they will now be shown.

The one exception to the date determination for the biome is location. We have treated Stalingrad as an exception, as it is essentially in the Russian steppe and a location that has rainfall almost akin to a desert. Regardless of the date, if it is not a snow scenario, then the barren biome is used for Stalingrad scenarios.

Now for the positive news. We have scheduled Advance of the Reich as our Game of the Week for this coming Monday, February 9^th. This build will be the first official version 4.03.4 release and will come with all the changes mentioned above. We plan to have other titles to follow in reasonably quick succession, with the caveat that there is still significant data work to do, timing to be determined. With large changes to the number of files and file structure, we will also advise whether there is a patch available, or a need to download a full build from the store. More to follow on Monday.

Following are some informational screenshots, so you can visualise some of the items covered above. These images are from either Advance of the Reich or Red Victory.

Aligned 2D & 3D.

These two screenshots show how 2D and 3D are matched so that players can recognise locations without a jarring change.

The preceding two shots were from the summer biome. The following two are from the Fall season:

This is Barren and will usually cover the cold months without snow:

Here is snow. Trails and fields that were not previously included are shown:

These are two examples of the difference in transparency.

This is a segment of animation for artillery. Old at the top, new at the bottom.

The effect is more apparent in this image for chemical smoke. Again, old at the top, new at the bottom. The differences are obvious in game for all animations.

Here are some frames of 2D explosions. With the increase to twenty-five frames we can add additional fade and other techniques:

As mentioned, the height for terrain as well as the number of images for each type have been expanded.

This image shows the original 3D Urban graphics (ugh!). Note the overall height, this was the maximum allowable.

The following shows the urban images that will replace the existing urban. Twenty-four of these are used for urban in game. With the additional height we can reflect taller buildings.

And here are some samples of the 2D graphics for urban.

You can see both the urban 3D & 2D in game below:

Game symbols have been reviewed.

These are mines, barriers, and obstacles in 3D & 2D. For the 2D images, ‘Special Markers on Top’ has been selected.

This is the new symbol for blocked Line-of-sight:

And this is the replacement rally indicator:

An example of the morale indicator for ‘hexagon’ guns:

Here is the new soft ground state in both 3D & 2D. Please note that both swamp and marsh in 2D are placeholder graphics:

And mud ground state in the same location:

We will wrap up the post with several in-game screenshots at 3440 x 1440 resolution. As always these are work in progress, and there are a few placeholder graphics.

With Night Shading on:

We hope you enjoyed another(!) peek at the changes coming for Squad Battles. It has been a bigger job than we expected, but we are really happy how it is all coming together.

Fingers crossed, you will be able to see it in the flesh this coming Monday!