One of the new gameplay features in Making History: The First World War is the ability to place naval mines in sea regions. Using the special Minesweeper unit, nations can mine coastal waters for defense measures, or blockade enemy shipping lanes to sink merchant and naval vessels. Sub Minelayers are useful for more stealth actions in enemy waters. Both of the dedicated naval mining units can deploy mines whereas only the Minesweeper can be used to safely remove them.
Naval mining units can lay a limited number of mines on a single turn. Each drop will add to the density of the mine coverage in the targeted sea region. A higher mine coverage increases the likelihood a ship traveling through will be hit. Sea mine effectiveness should be balanced to avoid exploitive potential. No sea region will 100% blocked. However, hitting a mine will inflict critical damage and have a strong chance of sinking the stricken ship.
The German Sub Minelayer is a Type UC II submarine and the SMS Albatross is the German Minelayer/Mine Sweeper unit.
All the major improvements to artillery gameplay have been incorporated into The First World War. Additionally, we’ve reimplemented the artillery spotting feature from The Great War. This provides an accuracy bonus to artillery bombardments when an observation order is active.
British Observation Plane is represented by a Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2 and the Observation Balloon is a Caquot type.
Any aircraft patrolling a bombardment targeted region can provide the observation bonus. The Observation Plane unit is a non-combat aircraft used specifically for this purpose. These units are useful in the early war period before air combat technology becomes widespread. The Observation Balloon brings an artillery bonus to all artillery groups in the region. While they are highly vulnerable to attacks, since they operate in the region you are firing from, other units can be offer some defense.
Work on all the new aircraft unit models is almost complete. There is a wide variety of unit types representing historically important planes, ships, tanks and artillery.
Italian bombers models represented by the Savoia-Pomilio SP.3 and Caproni Ca.3.
To avoid making a hard choice between quality and quantity, we’ve put larger focus on creating more surface detail without increasing the texture resolution or model weight. These screenshots show the models significantly larger than they look in-game. The unit models will look even better the game and support other improvements to the game environment.