Operations:
Previously, Regiments only featured skirmish modes - which are separate battles with no consequences beyond the immediate game session.
In Operations, you will lead your regiment through days of grueling combat over several maps, making tough decisions and experiencing the full weight of their consequences.
Operations feature a high level of persistence. All the losses are recorded, the deployed platoons retain their positions, the engineering obstacles stay where they were emplaced. Even the wrecks and the scarred terrain remain between battles on the same map. Each phase of combat advances the time of day - eventually, you'll have to fight at night, relying on night vision equipment or Illumination artillery rounds.
Between and during the battles, you have to ration several types of resources, the key one being Operational Points. It can be used to replenish losses in the depleted companies, to order more supplies or engineering support, or request new Task Forces or upgrade existing ones with better equipment.
The enemy will not sit idly and will ferociously counter-attack your hard-earned gains. A wide variety of war events is represented by the Events system. Some are beneficial, like extra air support or an allied battlegroup. Some are negative - supplies failing to reach you in time or an enemy electronic jammer interfering with the communications and radars.
How to Join:
Join it by clicking this button on the Regiments steam page: Store.steampowered.com
This will add a separate app "Regiments Playtest" to your Steam library. Download and launch.
Playtest will be available for a while - the entirety of January is assured.
Guide:
If you don't want to dive in blindly and test how intuitive are the Operations mechanics - this should be a useful read before the playtest.
Steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net
What to be aware of:
Regiments is in the beta state. The core functionality is present, but not all extra features are implemented and not everything is polished to the same standard.
A sound upgrade is a major planned milestone.
While performance has improved over the previous demos, it's still a big point of work. A review of the GPU-related slowdowns just began and not all lag spikes are addressed yet.
Tutorials are somewhat outdated, especially when it comes to new mechanics, but still worth checking out. The Operation presented can be tough diving in blindly. It is recommended to refer to the online manual and read the Regipedia articles too.
Hotfixes may introduce breaking changes to the active campaign saves. I'll try to avoid it as much as possible, but it's a possibility.
If you use AZERTY keyboard - note that the default Stop hotkey is Z and the controls
tab doesn't notify you about the conflicts yet. You'll probably have to rebind the Stop hotkey
along with the camera controls.
AVAST/AVG users - we're resolving the issue with the .exe being flagged as false positive. For now, you can whitelist it manually.
I tried the playtest and I have to say...Absolutely great playtest! Can't wait for the final product, I'm keeping my eye on this!;)