Panzer Corps 2 is changing up victory conditions, heroes, and transportation By Ian Boudreau

The latest dev diary (it’s number five, if you’ve been following along) has some interesting news for players interested in what Panzer Corps 2 is going to be doing to change up the original formula. Big changes are coming to the way the game handles hero units, awards, victory conditions, and more.

Probably the most impactful change announced in the new diary is the overhaul of how Panzer Corps 2 handles victories. Matrix says that the difference between major and minor victories often felt unfairly arbitrary, and that players weren’t willing to settle for minor victories when the difference was something as simple as, say, a turn number.

“Players wondered why finishing on turn 10 is a major victory with all its inherent bonuses, but finishing on turn 11 is already a minor victory, and finishing on turn 9 did not give any additional bonus,” the developers wrote.

What’ll happen in Panzer Corps 2 is that prestige will be awarded based on how quickly you accomplish battlefield objectives like killing enemy units or capturing flags. Matrix says this will maintain the push to finish battles as decisively as possible, but it removes the punishment for taking a turn too long.

Transports are getting a minor tweak, but it’s one that will have a big impact on strategic planning. The existing system required units to have an unused move action to embark on a rail, sea, or air transport. That turned embarkation hexes into massive choke points as units queued up around them. Now, instead of using a move action to embark, you’ll use an attack action, and you’ll be able to move into an embarkation hex and out of it in the same turn. You still won’t be able to embark and debark on the same turn, however, so the enemy gets a chance to react to your movement.

Matrix also says its seriously scaling back on the number of heroes you’ll get in a campaign. The reasoning is that heroes were so plentiful that they didn’t feel “special” anymore. To correct this, Matrix says its reducing the number of heroes by “several times,” and each hero will be more powerful to compensate. You’ll also be able to dismiss unwanted heroes, and reassign them between units.

The full dev diary has further details on changes being made to the Awards and Bonus Units systems, as well. Taken together, these represent a pretty major shakeup to some of the dynamics of Panzer Corps, so it’ll be exciting to see how they change the flow of battle. We still don’t have a firm release date for Panzer Corps 2, but we’ll continue keeping track of its progress.