Battlefront.com, the online purveyor of combat wargames including the TacOps and Combat Mission series, on Monday announced plans to publish DropTeam, a new real-time tactical simulation game currently in development by TBG Software. It’ll appear later this year for multiple platforms including Mac OS X.
While many of Battlefront.com’s games emphasize gritty realism set in historic World War settings or modern warfare scenarios, DropTeam trades that for a science fiction environment set in the far future. You visit the surfaces of different planets ranging from verdant Earth-like words to desolate, radioactive wastelands as you land fighting vehicles, mines and automated turrets, taking control of armored vehicles while coordinating your team.
DropTeam is multiplayer-capable, both for computer-controlled AI players and other humans. The game features detailed, accurate physics and ballistics, according to the developers and true line-of-sight features. “There are no ‘hit points’, limited view distances, unrealistically short weapon ranges, or other gross simplifications that are typical of many other sci-fi games,” they note. DropTeam will be playable on public servers with up the 16 players.
TBG Software noted that DropTeam’s engine can be modified by players; scenario and unit data is stored in XML files and terrain data uses industry-standard topographic and geological file formats, so anyone on any platform will be able to mod for it.
Specific system requirements were not noted with this announcement, but the developer describes the game as “very scalable with a wide range of systems.” Both the client and server components will be available for Mac OS X.