Battle plan

Field Commander's lead designer gives us the turn-based dirt

Words: Brett Elston, GamesRadar US

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When building the interface and overall gameplay, did you strike a balance between the hardcore tactical features and ease-of-use for casual players?

To a degree. Interface wise, we’ve strived to keep everything as simple and casual as possible. Figuring out a complex UI should not be a gaming goal in my opinion. As far as gameplay goes, the goal was to introduce many simple and easy to learn concepts over time, that when combined in different ways allowed for a more hardcore tactical experience. I’m very pleased to say that I think we accomplished this goal.

What advantages did you gain from placing FC in a make-believe scenario, with no real countries or existing military vehicles?

This was actually a tough decision for us. In the end though, we felt that a fictional setting would allow us a lot more freedom in molding the world and telling stories without stretching people’s suspension of belief too far.

Was much emphasis placed on making the commanding officers stand out as characters, or is the focus mainly on strategy action?

The focus was definitely mainly pointed on strategy action as you say. The characters are meant to be more light hearted caricatures, like the heroes of a television cartoon more than deep emotional characters.

How many units could we potentially have running on one battlefield? We're assuming some of the last missions are over the top.

Currently for performance reasons, the game limits each side to a maximum of 50 units on the map at the same time. So yeah, 100 units battling it out on the screen at once is entirely possible.