Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm features an innovative asynchronous turn structure that models the OODA loop, huge maps, hundreds of meticulously researched platforms and weapons, detailed orders of battle, realistic modeling of modern combat including armor, infantry, helicopters, airpower and chemical and nuclear weapons, 3 campaigns and over 20 single scenarios, realistic weather conditions, modding options and much more!
After the end of World War II, Europe spent years recovering from the losses and the terrible consequences of the conflict. A whole continent found itself divided into two blocs: one lead by the United States with NATO among its allies in the Western bloc, and in the Eastern bloc lead by the Soviet Union along with the Warsaw Pact. Separating the two, an “Iron Curtain” formed of high walls and minefields as well as hundreds of thousands of well armed troops. This was the Cold War, a forty year state of political and military tension between two superpowers that several times came close to starting World War III. While the world survived the Cold War, the effects of the “long twilight struggle” still echo in the geopolitics and military technology and tactics of the present day.
In Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm, World War Three has started, the Cold War has turned hot. Do you have what it takes to achieve victory on the battlefield or will the world end with all out nuclear war?
New Features and Improvements
- By popular demand the mouse wheel now can be used to zoom the map. If you don’t like that it zooms in when you think it should zoom out then just can flip the checkbox in User Settings / General under “Mouse wheel rolled forward zooms map out”. The allowed zoom range has been extended to go from 25% to 250%. Note: When you make a change the label stating the current zoom level will turn to red until the game has time to actually redraw the map at which time the text in the label will change back to black. The time it takes can vary depending on what else the game is doing at the moment but it will catch up again as soon as it can.
- The User Settings / Scrolling and Sound tab had too brief a set of labels describing some of the values that could be set. We have added Windows hints over the various controls to help explain what they are for.
- A new menu item has been created to enable user modified silhouettes. Silhouette images are embedded directly into the scenario files and not read from disk when a game is loaded. It is now possible to force a reload of these images with the menu item “View / Refresh subunit images from disk”. This will force a refresh of all the subunit images in play from the images currently available. If these images happen to be mods then they will be used for the duration of the current game. This process will not change the images embedded in the scenario file.
- The Map Editor displayed the road net for a map but did not actually allow the player to manually edit the road net. This has been enabled.
Bug Fixes
- The Game Setup Options (fog of war, browsing enemy units, etc.) always started each new game as fully checked. Now the option settings will be remembered and the previous ones used by default for the next new game.
- The scenario named “NM_AS 11 Bravo.scn” has been renamed to “NM_AS12 Bravo.scn” because that is what the unit in question was really called.
- The Subunit Inspector panel would sometimes hide under the main map and not return as expected. It will now stay on top of the map until it is explicitly closed by the player.
- The game was not saving scenarios properly when the local Windows data and number format setting varied from standard North American. Our apologies and this has now been fixed.
- The Main Theme.wav file was re-mastered to a standard bit rate. The original bit rate caused computers with older audio codecs to throw an error. Thanks to VPaulus for helping us find this one.
- If the font size of the computer was not set to exactly 100% (96 DPI) or 125% (120 DPI) then the Scenario Editor screen would not be drawn properly or even at all.
- The program no longer needs to run with administrator privileges on the computer it is installed on to pass the serial number check.
- When a game against the computer opponent ended the Command Notebook was not then unlocked to allow the player to browse the computer player tabs. This now works as expected.
- Ctrl-V (Show / Hide all victory points) worked until turn resolution started at which time the game would start to redraw the hidden victory point locations back in. They now stay fully hidden until such time as the player uses Ctrl-V to show them again.
- When jumping from a game back into the scenario editor, the scenario editor would often show large black borders to the right and bottom of the game map. This was found and fixed.
- When a unit name was changed in the scenario editor it would not also update the counter and other information displays with the new name. Now it does.
- If a new player insignia was chosen before any combat units were chosen for a side then a “division by zero” error was generated. Yes, this got past us and all of our hard-working beta testers. Sorry.
- A routine to go and flash a hex three times to draw attention to it – for example, to highlight a victory location or an impending artillery strike – was broken and running too quickly to be of much use. It has been slowed down and is now working much better.
- Setting the general game delay factor can be done in three different places with, as it turns out, three different sets of constraints. They have now been aligned and thanks to CaptHowdy for pointing this out.
- A data bug in the West German data file for the Divisional Recce Battalion causing a crash.
- Several of the British insignia’s had unexpected transparent pixels in them.
New Scenarios
- Mad Russian has contributed a new short Soviet scenario: “WS_AS Purple One 3.scn”
- An unlocked copy of Cap’n Darwin’s tutorial scenario has been included for your editing pleasure. Look for the file “Open – Tutorial Scenario.scn” in the \Scenarios directory.
To download the update, players can run “Check for Update” via the game menu or download it directly from the game’s download page here .
