I’ve just today added objectives back in to the map, along with a display of their distance from the player, the direction toward them, and a colour signifying their status: neutral, friendly-controlled, or enemy-controlled. Objectives must now actually be held by a unit to count as captured, meaning that in the future the player will have to decide which of their friendly units they leave to defend an objective if they have to hold on to it.

You might also notice from this screenshot and the one form the previous post that the command menu looks quite different from before. I’ve returned to an earlier idea of having basically one action (or set of actions) per turn, rather than adopting the wargame-style phase progression. This brings ArmCom2 even closer to the play experience of a tradition roguelike, without, I trust, losing anything in terms of realism and fun. The way I have it set up for now is that moving ends the player’s turn, but in the future there will be a chance to get a free turn if you’re moving along a road or in open terrain, the roll for which will be influenced by the type of tank you are commanding. Difficult terrain, on the other hand, might make you skip your next turn. Firing a gun doesn’t end your turn but you are limited to firing for the rest of that turn, and most weapons can only fire once per turn unless they maintain their Rate of Fire.

These are all ways of abstractly dealing with time, turning a reality where everything is happening at once into an orderly system of discrete events, but I think it’s a system that should work well in practice. Certainly the change to an action-based rather than phase-based means that things can happen much more quickly, both when traveling overland and when fighting a battle.