We Launched!

Since the July 31st launch we’ve seen players from all over the world join the battle to relive the game they know and love— or take the plunge and play Axis & Allies for the first time. We’re incredibly grateful to our awesome community members who are essential to the game’s development through Early Access.

In this retrospective I’ll be sharing:

• Some of my favorite visual highlights
• A brief discussion of server issues
• An overview of our plans for the near future…!

War Stories: Screenshots

First up - some levity! These maps and screens tell the story of your victories and defeats.

A sea of green:

Hoarding Units:

When a Strategic Bombing Raid wasn't very strategic:

• Three bombers attacked an industrial complex
• 1 plane survived doing 1 damage

The Servers Rolled a Six

We're absolutely aware our launch to Steam began with some considerable stability concerns, so we're especially grateful to those of you who've stuck with us. Upon release, our server infrastructure was simply not up to the task of hosting the influx of players. We faced server-side issues right from the start, including:

• Disconnect / reconnect loops
• Server side latency
• Online AI errors and disconnects

We'd made several assumptions about how to handle simple events like disconnects, without proper consideration for the servers failing as hard as they did. Although we’ve since patched up most of the issues, you can be sure we’ll continue to work on major networking and server improvements throughout Early Access.

Thank you to everyone playing the game, providing feedback, and sticking with us through the hurdles.

Here are a few ways to get in touch (and hear from us):

• Service Desk
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Steam Forum
• Newsletter Signup

What's Next?

Back in August we introduced some major player-requested features and fixes:

• Streamlined Combat Board Experience
• Alternate starting condition: The Larry Harris Gencon v3.0 variant
• Added animation and visual control options
• Performance and networking improvements
• Over 200+ bug fixes

Looking to the future, we'll continue to keep the Axis & Allies community at the heart of our development plans.

Here are a few of the features we plan to include in future development work:

Player Profiles

• Keep track of your wins and losses
• See which power you play the most
• Review previous games

Unit Movement & Arrows

• We hear you loud and clear - there are too many clicks and the movement arrows get pretty confusing (...and it looks like spaghetti).
  • We plan to refine unit movement reduce the number of clicks needed to move unit stacks
  • We have a plan for how to represent unit movement in a much clearer way that should reduce the confusion (and no more spaghetti).

Matchmaking

• We want to speed up the time it takes for players to get into a game
• We're working on a system to match players searching for games together
• We also plan to include a ladder system that matches players based on skill level

Game Notifications

• We're looking into ways we can notify you that it's your turn, aside from email

Fighter, Aircraft Carrier and Transport Improvements

• We agree it's not always clear how the rules for these units work (especially if you're new to the game)
• We're taking steps to make the UI and visuals for these units more clear.

Better AI

• We're working on getting our robot players up to snuff - but you are tough competition.
• We have a few ideas how we can make the AI more challenging contenders.

Bugs, Polish, Stability

• As always, we're prioritizing work on the stability of servers, improving the speed, and overall polish to the game.

And More!

We currently have a ton of content in the Early Access pipe. While we've been releasing content patches with fixes and features about every two weeks since our launch, we now plan to focus on a few larger changes to the game. Expect a slight slow-down in our patch schedule as we'll have our heads down to implement these awesome features. We'll be sure to keep you updated on our progress (the newsletter is a great place for this).

I want to thank all of you for having patience with us as we work through these growing pains. It didn't all go as planned at launch, but we appreciate your feedback, reviews and commentary on the game so far. Keep posting feedback and suggestions. We're listening!

Sincerely,

Cody Ouimet

Producer, Axis & Allies 1942 Online