“In my concept paint-over (a quick digital painting that shows the map and major features as they might appear in game … with notes and reference photos attached), I built around the idea that wherever mankind explores, tourists typically follow. I developed the area as a remote vacation destination with mysterious ancient ruins, modern hotels, and dramatically steep, mist-shrouded cliffs into which breathtaking waterfalls poured majestically. On top of this, I layered the planet’s recent, tragic history. Covenant bombs had cut the area off from the cities and turned the man-made structures into smoking rubble. The wreckage of mankind’s attempt to flee the invasion was littered through the setting. “

Tactically, most of Pirth is pretty straightforward. You’ll want to have a strong infantry for this small and short skirmish map. Utilizing scouts for opponent disruption can go a long way in throwing your opponent off his game as well.

The tactics of the map are interesting, and like you guess everything is about moving quick. Being a 1v1 skirmish map, it’s about speed and establishing a presence early on. They even suggest trying to get a foothold in your opponent’s extra base.

Over at HaloWars.com, Vijay Thakkar shares some of the experience of creating leader powers, and what went into the balancing of them.

The first power brought up in discussion is ‘Rage’. It’s exclusive to the Arbiter, and is known to cause some massive amounts of destruction to the table. Thakkar discusses some of the development of Rage:

It didn’t take much time to get something up and running, showing the Arbiter running around and teleporting to attack by flicking the right analog stick. It turned out that controlling the Arbiter like this and hopping across the battlefield in a matter of seconds was just crazy fun. I knew we were getitng somewhere when I could bring a coworker over to my desk to try it out and the result was a giddy smile on their face and a thirty minutes of brainstorming ideas on how to improve it. That process of just excitedly throwing ideas around with fellow gamers is absolutely one of the best parts of game development.

The next power to be discussed is Vortex, and is exclusive to the Brute unit. This physics based power can really turn the tide of a battle, but like other powers must be used a certain way to be effective. You can tell that a lot of tweaking had to be done to this power to make sure it didn’t become overpowered. Vortex also has a unique style, and mechanic to it as addressed by Thakkar:

It became important to have Vortex stand out from the other powers: it needed to have its own chaotic nature and feel in its camera and controls. We prototyped a variety of potential solutions, from a fixed camera over the shoulder of the Brute looking forward onto the Vortex to directly controlling the Vortex the same way as Cleansing. There was even a version where the player controlled both the horizontal and vertical movement of the swirling death ball with both analog sticks. As we iterated, freer camera control stood tall and I’m quite glad that we could find something in the middle, controlling similarly to Cleansing but with some unique twists. In the final version, the camera is focused on a point between the Brute and the Vortex, effectively keeping both in the player’s visibility, and the Vortex’s vertical movement is automatic in a sinusoidal pattern (which also helped to give the internal objects some more motion). Finally, Vortex employs a similar system to Rage in that its cost changes based off of the state that it is in. It is the only power that costs nothing to maintain, (only taking resources when dealing damage), and is also the only power that actually improves its potential damage the longer it is active. As the Vortex picks up more and more pieces, the power of the final explosion increases to devastating amounts, which combine with the damage inflicted by the thrown debris, providing an effect that was a bit more chaotic in nature.

Here is a list of the map names, along with a short description…

* Barrens: Difficult terrain channels units into killing zones. The side that controls the Forerunner artifacts will have the advantage (1v1 Map).
* Blood River: Secure base locations on nearby cliffs overlook this naturally red-tinged river. The soldiers that fought over its two narrow crossings gave the river its name, which has since taken on a greater meaning (1v1 Map).
* Glacial Ravine:A snow-topped mountain range forms a natural barrier that cuts this region in half. Control of the two energy walls at the narrow central pass often determines the outcome of the battle, though clever use of the Sentinel Factories may play a role as well (3v3 Map).
* Memorial Basin: The high ground in the middle offers good cover for infantry, while the generally open terrain transforms organized battle plans into bloodbaths (2v2 Map).

Along with the maps there are brand new achievements to try and unlock…

* Tour Coming Through: Hot drop 50 squads to your Covenant Leader in a single game on Memorial Basin (30 points)
* Never Leave a Man Behind: Finish a game with 5000 net resources contributed to your teammates on Barrens (15 points)
* Drain Cleaner: Kill 20 enemy squads with a continuous Covenant Leader Power on Memorial Basin (30 points)
* Killjoy: Disrupt 5 active Leader Powers in a single game on Blood River (25 points)

The Historic Battles DLC is now available and will set you back 800 Microsoft Points.

Here’s an excerpt and some pictures from the post…

The first thing we do when we start a new campaign is to do some research. Instead of hitting the history books like in our Age of Empires games, we grabbed anything we could from Halo and absorbed it. We read books, played through the games, and talked with Bungie to make sense of any questions that arose. I personally spent a few days doing nothing but playing the Halo campaigns in the office to refresh my memory and get some inspiration. This helped more than I even hoped… people would stop by my office to watch me play and learned some things they may have forgotten about the games – or to yell at me to turn it down!

The content designers got together and brainstormed. At this point the story was still in the works, so we threw out crazy ‘what-if-we-could-do-anything’ ideas. For example, I really wanted to do a mission where two Scarabs were destroying a city, and the player’s job was to stop them before a certain number of buildings were destroyed. That ended up on the cutting room floor with a bunch of other cool stuff, but the process gave us a lot of good gaming fodder - we ended up morphing that idea into the Super-Scarab in mission 07. So, once the story started becoming more concrete we found places to use those ideas.

If you want to know some tactics for the map, here’s an excerpt from the designers:

Because of the choke point and decent travel time from one side to the other early in the game, it’s pretty safe too boom up. This is why I really like using Cutter and elephant/marine rushing on this map. If I can setup my Elephant near the enemy bases and get it pumping I can slow down their boom sometimes, even keeping them off the open base location near their start area while my partner boom/techs freely. This tends to leave me behind the curve a bit but I can still get to ODST’s and just support my teammate until we can get the win.

There are talks of lessening the effectiveness of Warthogs. The allowance of friendly fire, and team killing. One fix the team is promising is that invisible units will now have invisible health bars.

EUREKA!

When units first engage one another, the first determening factor is accuracy. There are two parts to accuracy, first is if your shot is firing true at your opponent. Then the factor of distance to target is considered. Depending on those two factors, your attack will land or it won’t.

Damage is determined by a couple of things. First, is the weapon that your unit is using coupled with the armor of your opponent. And of course vice versa if you’re being attacked. Below is a chart with specific attack modifiers based on these two factors…

Damage type/ armor type lookup table (real numbers from the Halo Wars database)

(via: HaloWars)