If you’ve got a hankering for the old-school Command and Conquer era of classic RTS games, you need to keep an eye on DORF. The aptly named indie studio DORFteam has been impressing us throughout its development process with its distinctive style and creative unit designs. It blew past its Kickstarter goal in April, earning sufficient funding to hire another programmer and incorporate support for co-op campaigns. It’s also always worn its C&C inspirations on its sleeve, but such obvious adoration doesn’t mean blindly following the past, and the team explains how it’s looking to correct one big flaw with infantry.
In the current build of DORF, infantry follows the old Command and Conquer strategy of falling prone when attacked by certain weapons. “While this does have some mechanical benefits like improved defense and lowered speed while under fire, this system was never especially great, and always seemed like it was never thought out much past the way it worked in the original C&C in 1995,” the developer writes in its latest update blog. “It also seemed somewhat redundant, given how easily infantry can be slaughtered by machine guns and artillery in those games.”
To find a solution, DORFteam looked to a much more modern strategy game – the turn-based tactics of Menace, Overhype Studios’ love letter to the likes of Jagged Alliance, which implements a smart suppression system. Certain weapons fill up a meter, and when it maxes out, it forces the targeted infantry to drop to the ground. DORFteam says it’s taking a page out of Overhype’s book to design something similar for DORF.
“Suppressed infantry will obviously move at a crawling speed, and have reduced accuracy, but does have better protection against most weapons while in this state, and suppression will apply to the entire squad, not just individuals. This will be an elegant way to keep weapons like machine guns relevant in their anti-infantry role, without either making them too damaging against infantry (and thus leading to the C&C problem of infantry being largely useless), or nerfing them into irrelevance.”
The team’s hope is that “you won’t get the C&C problem of entire groups of infantry being instantly obliterated by explosives and machine guns,” but such counters “will still force infantry into a reduced state, while friendly forces can advance and close the distance.”
Also discussed during the blog is DORFteam’s planned squad-reinforcement system. “The idea will be that your recruit resources are used to reinforce lost squad units, and certain buildings that ‘store’ recruits will automatically replenish them if they’re nearby.” You can see a demonstration below, but keep your eyes out for some of the current issues, such as “squads more or less becoming unkillable if enough recruit reinforcements are present, and the fact that the squad seems to endlessly move backwards.”
Fortunately, the developer already has some ideas for how to fix this. The issue of endless reinforcements “can be solved by reducing the range of these recruit buildings and also giving them a relatively small storage size.” As for the movement, it’s aiming to tackle this “by introducing squad leaders and followers/section leaders to each squad.” This idea comes from another classic RTS: “We actually looked at a document that Relic put out on how this works internally in The Company of Heroes games,” the developer reveals.
Inspiration is the mother of innovation, so I’m all for this smart picking and choosing of great ideas, but another of DORF’s highlights so far has been its creative unit design. To round out today’s preview, we get a few glimpses of some more additions. The Empire’s basic rifle squads add a Machine Gunner, which can fire without deploying but gains more accuracy if it does. “It’s a unit that can provide additional firepower for offensives, but is better suited to holding the line.”
Add an annex to your infantry academy, and those Machine Gunners can be replaced with Mortars. “These provide additional firepower at a much greater range,” DORFteam remarks, “though of course this is a tradeoff for being unable to fire while undeployed and being unable to target aircraft.” Then there’s the Chemical Gas Sprayer, an upgrade for Empire Grenadiers. This provides a corrosive effect to counter light vehicles, and toxic gas that further enhances the Grenadiers’ ability to flush out fortified positions.
There are also some new vehicles on show, including a basic Medium Tank for the Empire, which comes with a 75mm cannon and a machine gun on both its turret and hull. “This isn’t super exciting by itself,” DORFteam admits, “but depending on the annexes applied to the vehicle factory, this unit can be updated into other types, such as the Tank Destroyer and Assault Gun variants.”
This system of annexes unlocking variants will be core to the unit progression. The Halftrack, for example, will have the potential to branch out into a Cruise Missile Launcher, or “a chemical gas thrower that can suppress infantry and cause debuffs to vehicles.” For Heavy Tanks, DORFteam is working on “versions with improved firepower and anti-air capabilities, as well as a version with a large chemical projector that creates a close-range explosion reaction for demolishing buildings and vehicles.”
Today’s last inclusion is a particularly fun one: the Ironworm. It’s an Empire-Warband hybrid, meaning you’ll need to be playing as the Empire and then capture a Warband vehicle factory in order to get your hands on it. This strange beast is “a fast-moving light tank intended to ram enemy vehicles,” and comes equipped with both flamethrowers and an autocannon. Now we’re talking.
That’s all for this month’s update, but there’s certainly more than enough to chew on. “Next month we plan to have more fleshed out in the map editor tools, a working early iteration of skirmish, and more and more units,” DORFteam concludes.
There’s still no fixed release date for DORF – its Kickstarter page gave 2028 as the plan, but the developer notes that this is “a very cautious estimate we’ve given, just in case things go wrong.” All things being well, it’s hoping to release the game in 2027. If you’re as eager as I am to stay up to date with its progress, you can wishlist it on Steam. Its blend of throwback ’90s style and modern sensibilities is just the kind of thing that puts a smile on my face.