Dawn of War II’s detailed squad AI and cover system caught my eye, and I felt that they could be made into a game of their own.

Over the course of four months I created Tactical Insertion: an intense, round-based, Real Time Tactical squad combat mod inspired by RTT classic Ground Control.

Game design

Players choose their forces from a fixed pool of resources during a timed deployment phase at the start of each round. Units train instantly and can be deleted and refunded if a mistake is made. Players then fight either for control of victory points or to the death.

I wanted players to make difficult decisions on a frequent basis and with minimal UI time. This is the polar opposite of most RTS, in which players are typically striving to comply to a pre-conceived build order while achieving the highest clicks-per-minute possible.

• To make decisions harder I eliminated reinforcements and health regeneration, both of which contribute to grind and spam. These changes greatly reduce the level of abstraction in each round: a player’s soldiers become their soldiers, a precious and finite resource, rather than a manifestation of their resource pool.
• To reduce UI time and increase decision frequency I made two core changes: converting as many manually-activated abilities as possible into ambient buffs and halving weapon range. Range reduction allowed me to make smaller maps, effectively doubling units’ movement speed and also reducing players’ reliance on the minimap. In order to rebalance melee units I also doubled ranged damage, which had the beneficial knock-on effect of increasing the pace of combat further still.

The end result is fast, vicious, and memorable combat punctuated by tense deployment phases in which players attempt to quadruple-bluff their opponent’s next choice of units. A successful play in deployment can hand you the round, but a clever opponent can still turn things their way...

Level design

The radically different pace and scale of Tactical Insertion called for a set of all-new maps with walkable areas, cover and distances precisely balanced.

Each map is a porous network of arenas separated by loosely-defined pathways all centred around an open area containing a Victory Point. Once captured the VP starts a countdown to victory for its owner, rendering camping or delaying tactics useless. Arena size and shape was informed by attack ranges and heavy weapon firing arcs.

Reducing Dawn of War II’s scale and implementing repeated rounds placed my maps under great scrutiny. To increase variety I designed one-off setpiece abilities unlocked by holding a secondary capture point. In Sandblast the CP owner can vent superheated steam through a fortified bunker overlooking the central arena; in Thunderhawk Down (an attack/defence map) they can call in a custom-built firebomb artillery attack anywhere on the map.

As well as encouraging combat to spread out over a wider area, the power granted by these setpiece events to their owner allows their counters (such as Sandblast’s bunker) to become equally powerful in response. The sudden shifts which occur when a setpiece CP is taken ratchet up the game’s tension even more, ensuring that every match takes place on a knife edge.