Danny Green, President and Lead Programmer
at Radioactive Software will make you either depressed with what you haven’t accomplished in a year, or make you strive to be more like him. The majority of Gettysburg: Armoured Warfare was programmed in a year. He does admit to working on the technology that underlies the game for almost a decade though. Gettysburg Armoured Warfare is an alternate history war game that puts more modern weapons into the hands of Civil War troops and lets them go at it in a RTS and TPS modes.
Alright, let’s get the elephant out of the room shall we? Gettysburg: Armoured Warfare is not for Civil War purists. Hell, it might not even be for fans of the actual Civil War, unless y’all’re down in Dixie and still think ya shoulda won, because you might be able to do just that in the game. Now I ain’t castin’ no aspersions on noone, I’m just sayin’ that this game ain’t historically accurate, as denoted by the alternate history intro and, I suppose, the mini-guns and steampunk weaponry and vehicles.
Right, so let’s get on to what Gettysburg Armoured Warfare is all about, which is killing. It’s about putting together an army out of the 14 unit types that are available - infantry, cavalry, tanks, ships, APCs (armored personnel carriers), artillery, zeppelins, etc. with some 30+ weapons. You can play as the Union or the Confederacy and between the 64 players on the server, there could be over 1,024 controllable units on the battlefield which spans 9km x 9km.
Everyone has particular types of strategy they like to employ in these sorts of games and if that sounds like you, then you’ll be thrilled to know that you can save your armies to the Steam Cloud for continual reuse every time you play. That means you don’t have to sit for 15 minutes before each match and create a whole new army from scratch which is really quite nice. There’s other Steam support like achievements as well and a persistent point/XP system with statistics tracking and more.
Game modes in Gettysburg Armoured Warfare are set to include things like Army Skirmish and Deathmatch. Deathmatch is the mode that can support up to 64 players, but that’s 64 players, each with their own army. You can’t give orders to your units in Deathmatch. In Army Skirmish it’s more of a full-featured RTS. Deathmatch is more like jumping into units in an TPS mode to destroy your enemies. The other troops in your army are AI controlled and will go take over command points and such and it looks like everyone has the same sort of troops in Deathmatch.
