We’re back again with the second Developer Diary exploring the upcoming Fall of Poland DLC Campaign for Panzer Corps 2. Based on some of the community feedback we’ve gotten already, we have a few points to elaborate upon, as well a showcase for the latest round of intriguing new units being added to the already extensive roster of WW2 tanks, vehicles, and aircraft that are part of Panzer Corps 2!
Not so Key Characters
Although we’ve labelled the new system coming online in the Fall of Poland campaign as ‘Key Characters’, the truth is that the invasion of Poland was a real part of a real war, and there are always causalities in warfare. So Key Character or not, if these special individuals fall in combat or are caught in a crossfire, your entire campaign does not grind to a ‘game over’ halt over the loss of any one individual on the battlefield. There’s no plot armor here!
When we focused this campaign entirely on your CORE units by not having auxiliaries or AI controlled friendly forces, our goal was to drive home that we don’t want players to feel you have a cushion of ‘expendable’ troops you can readily throw away as they do not progress through your campaign. Poland in 1939 was outmanned, outgunned, and outequipped by Germany; every soldier at your disposal is indispensable! Our selection Key Characters, a mixture of veteran soldiers, new recruits, and even a couple of civilians are meant to be the personification of this sentiment.
Without spoiling too much, but to give some insight, we can tell you a little bit about one of these special Civilians you will encounter. Now, if you’re the kind of player who has no interest in what this particular Key Character has to say, or what they are going through as they struggle to survive the war going all on around them... that’s okay too! We have engineered this campaign so you can just ignore the plight of the Key Character and leave them to whatever fate may befall them, as you focus purely on the strategy and tactical gameplay that is the hallmark of the Panzer Corps series.
But on the other hand, if you’re looking for additional historical insights into the events of the invasion of Poland, or looking for that extra layer of challenge to safeguard Key Characters while pursuing your main objectives, or eager to see what kind of special and fantastical rewards you might reap from providing assistance, keep an eye out for the Key Characters that are sprinkled throughout the Fall of Poland Campaign, and read their words carefully. Outside of the basic assistance to keep them alive, there just might be a few tasks that are asked of you, such as delivering medical supplies, operating behind enemy lines, or even searching for missing family members.
Speaking of potential rewards, there is one aspect of the campaign you may appreciate some insight into. Namely the...
Polish Air Force
To try and quickly summarize, one of the key elements of Germany’s successful Blitzkrieg that historically dismantled Poland in mere weeks was their ability to take control of the skies over Poland. In the opening days, hours even, of the German invasion, Polish aircraft were targeted ruthlessly before many of them could even get off the ground.
While the entire Polish Air Force wasn’t destroyed in the opening moves of Fall Weiss, their ability to operate was certainly quite impaired right from the get go. To simulate this, you will never have any opportunity to normally requisition aircraft at any point during your extended Fall of Poland campaign. The luxury of visiting the purchase menu to buy as many P.11 fighters as your heart desires and CORE slots allow has been ripped away from you!
If you’re hoping to have any sort of Air Force to work with in the Fall of Poland campaign, you’re going to have to scrape together whatever Limited Stock or Captured Equipment you can find. Or... if you keep the right Key Character(s) alive, they might be able to help you stock up on not just standard Polish Aircraft such as the P.11 Fighter, but they could prove to be your window into accessing some extremely rare prototype equipment!
Speaking of which, let’s see what some of these new Unit Models look like...
Polish Units
We won’t be covering every single new unit being added alongside the upcoming Fall of Poland Campaign debut, but here are a few Polish units and we want to especially highlight. The first unit is actually a new type of Infantry Cavalry unit, the Polish Uhlan. One of the popular myths of the Invasion of Poland is that Polish Cavalry armed with lances attempted to charge German Panzer tanks, and as fanciful and heroic as that visual might be, we decided not to lean into that particular myth. By the time of the Invasion of Poland, while it is true that Poland did retain an elite force of Cavalry, they typically did not ride into battle on their horses. The days of that sort of Cavalry charge are pretty much resigned to history by 1939, and in fact one of the VERY last such mass Cavalry charges in war took place during the Spanish Civil War, during the 1938 Battle of Teruel, which we explored in the Axis Operations Spanish Civil War Campaign! To better represent this facet of Cavalry in 1939, the Polish Uhlan is actually a switch unit! In its default form, it is very mobile unit with an impressive 7 ‘horse’ type movement, but this form actually has incredibly poor combat stats. In its switch form, however, you can see the Polish Uhlan now fights dismounted and has stats much more befitting an elite infantry unit of the 1939 era. This combination of high mobility that can switch into powerful combat power makes the new Polish Uhlan a very flexible tool for Polish fighting forces. Note that the new Uhlan does not overwrite the old Polish Cavalry unit, but it does cost more slots and significantly more prestige to field compared to the default Cavalry unit.
Image Credit: tanks-encyclopedia.com
As is befitting a game with ‘Panzer’ in our title, our next new unit is a solid tank, actually a prototype 14TP tank. This is not a vehicle that saw combat historically during the invasion of Poland, so it is not going to be a unit you can requisition as you would other tanks such as the TKS or 7TP, but you might be able to field a few of them... if you can find the right Stockpile of them squirreled away somewhere, or perhaps get a certain Key Character to lend a hand.
Up next we have some new Polish aircraft. The P.11, afterall, was a design from 1931, and Poland wasn’t planning to just use that fighter forever. The PZL.50 Jastrzab was designed in 1936 to be a much more modern fighter interceptor, while the PZL.38 Wilk was hoped to fill the roles of a heavy fighter/light bomber not unlike the also twin engine Bf-110.
The last two Polish units we’ll spotlight today are actually both modifications of the iconic Polish light tankette, the TKS. The TKD, with its lack of turret and larger 4.7 cm wz.1925 gun transformed the diminutive TKS that normally would only be armed with a single machine gun into something much more akin to a Light Tank Destroyer.
The C2P tractor, while not strictly a modification of the TKS tankette, definitely shares more than a few components and visual similarity with that tankette, but the C2P is actually an unarmed transport. This tracked transport offers Poland something to haul equipment around with that isn’t horse drawn or wheeled, and will also serve as one of the Key Characters primary mode of transport, for as long as they might survive through the campaign of course.
A full list of new units will be displayed at the bottom of this article, but for now we have to move to spotlight some...
German Units
For Germany, we have new variants on both the Panzer II and also Panzer I.
For the Panzer II, we have the IID and IIG now joining the current existing Panzer IIC. In the Panzer IID, we have improved ground speed over the IIC thanks to four large road wheels and torsion bar suspension. The Panzer IID would eventually go on to serve as the foundation for the Flammpanzer II Flamingo.
Meanwhile, the Panzer IIG was a 1938 design that aimed to be a really souped up Panzer II on steroids, but the wide array of modifications and improvements ended up delaying historical production so badly that a mere 12 Panzer IIGs were completed when production ended in 1942. So don’t expect to see many of the Panzer IIG in Fall of Poland, but you might want to watch out when you do!
As an experiment in Panzer Corps 2 as a whole, something we might be dabbling with are full fledged Command Units. We sort of saw this originally with the Panther IVH, the Command Tank with a Panzer IV turret and dummy gun on a Panther Chassis, but now in Fall of Poland we’ll be seeing the Command Tank version of the Panzer I in the Panzerbefehlswagen, a Command Recon Car in the Kfz 14, as well as a Command infantry unit with the new Wachtruppe.
At time of writing, we’re still tinkering with the exact designs and gameplay effects these specialized Command Units will bring to the battlefield, as well as potentially having other factions other than Germany having these sort of Command Units, so we’ll see how those plans pan out moving ahead into the future!
Conclusion
Thanks again for joining us for this second Developer Diary on the latest upcoming Panzer Corps 2 DLC. We’re gearing up to launch the War Stories Fall of Poland campaign on or before September 1st, in honor of the significance of that historical date! Get ready for that, but in the meantime be sure to add the Fall of Poland DLC to your wishlists! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3023770/Panzer_Corps_2_War_Stories__Fall_of_Poland/
As a final note, here is that complete list of new units and new models debuting alongside the Fall of Poland Campaign coming soon:
Germany:
[expand type=details]- Panzer IID
- Panzer IIG
- Panzerbefehlswagen
- Kfz13
- Kfz14
- Steyr ADGZ
- Wachtruppe
- PL Headquarters
- PL Uhlan Cavalry
- PL Uhlan Infantry
- PL ATR Infantry
- PL HW Infantry new and improved model
- 7TP mod 1939
- 14TP
- TKS 20mm
- TKD
- PZL.50 Jastrzab
- PZL.38 Wilk
- PZL.46 Sum
- C2P
- C4P
In case you missed the Panzer Corps day Twitch event, you can re-watch it here