Team Alligator Interview by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson
	We officially apologize and repent. I remember seeing the trees and they did look great, but obviously not all of us saw them- Ed. One thing we are not doing, however, is creating any cities. We thought long and hard about this. The problem with cities is simply size; there are many good technical reasons why we can't create a full-scale city at high resolution with the technology currently available. Look at Apache Havoc or even our own Team Apache. These are the best anyone has yet achieved, but they are too small; a little piece of downtown with no suburb. They look phoney. So we are boxing clever. We are not aiming to produce convincing cities. Instead we are facing up to the surprisingly more difficult challenge of building a convincing town. And believe us, that's a really tough task! Q: The campaign in Team Apache was essentially a semi-dynamic one, with a persistent environment but branching mission structure. Is this also the case with Ka52? A: It certainly is. There are tradeoffs involved with going for a scripted mission environment or a fully-dynamic one. Both have their adherents, but we are not convinced anyone can yet produce a genuinely accurate and satisfying dynamic campaign. We are convinced that there's nothing to beat a really well-crafted mission; for variety, breadth and balance it is the best. Until the shortcomings of the dynamic campaign can be overcome, scripting remains the way forward. However, we have moved forward to a halfway house with our semi-dynamic campaign mechanism. We are able to employ features such as persistence of death and sophisticated flagging techniques to create a replayable campaign around a branching mission structure. We are creating literally hundreds of missions for the campaigns. Players should be able to get at least two or three playings out of each campaign, which by our reckoning is pretty good value for anyone's money! Q: How many campaigns will be modelled and what is the setting? A: We have two campaigns: Belarus and Tajikistan. Belarus is set against a background of the collapse of the Russo-Belarus Pact in the face of nationalist sentiment. Tajikistan deals with an uprising by the Islamist opposition against the regime in Dushanbe. Click to continue		The Belarus campaign is a high-intensity war set amid rolling European terrain against a competent Russian-equipped Belarusian army. The Tajikistan game takes place in the harsh hills and lush river valleys of southern Tajikistan. This will be a low-intensity campaign against hill-fighters every bit as tough as the old Afghan Mujahedin. We will have a third area, Siberia, for the training missions and as a setting for many of the networked missions. Q: Tell us about damage and physics modelling? A: The full-force physics modelling will see the player get battered around the sky, as in Team Apache. We have a number of physical effects we hope will impress people. As for the damage, we are taking the sophisticated damage modelling of Team Apache a few steps further in resolution and detail. One thing to note is that we have expended quite an amount of effort on modelling the warhead/ armour interaction in this sim. In the absence of top attack weapons, attacking main battle tanks from the front may not be a tactically sound option; you'll need to scoot around to the sides or rear. We distinguish between various grades of steel and composite armour, as well as first- and second-generation Explosive Reactive Armour. We also distinguish between types of warhead, from kinetic energy rounds such as HVAPFSDS and APDU to chemical energy ammunition such as HEAT and Tandem warheads. Go to Page Seven
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