Heat of Battle v0.31 (Call of Duty Modification) Mini Review

Introduction

Heat of Battle is a "Capture and Hold" Mod for Call of Duty.

This mini review mainly covers the differences between Stock Call of Duty (CoD) and Heat of Battle (HoB), for a more detailed description of CoD in general you should read one of the many CoD reviews.

Game Type - Capture & Hold

The aim of the mission is to capture a number of command points around the map. The position of these points is displayed on a compass in the bottom left of the screen.

There is also a variation on this theme, which involves one team starting off with most of the command points, and they have to defend them against the enemy attack. If a command point is lost it cannot be retaken, this produces the much used formal attack and defend scenario, where one team camps the points and the other team attacks. The attacking team have until the round time runs out to cap all the points.

A status of which team currently has each point is displayed in the top left.

Different maps have a different number of command points, generally maps would have 2, 3 or 5 commands points. The spread of command points throughout the map should generally give a balanced game for either team. Of course there are always exceptions to this rule, either by lack of play testing or the creator of the map designed it with an inherent bias towards one team.

Team work comes into play when trying to capture these points, as they often take more than one person to cap. A dynamic system can be used to determine how many players it takes to cap a point, for example if there were only one person on each team, only one player would be required to cap the points. As the number of players on the server increases, the number required to cap the points increases. The most people I've witnessed needing to cap a point is three. The dynamic feature of this can be turned off, giving points a set number of people required to cap, regardless of player numbers.

Another server side variable available is to hide the number of frags people have gained, and only display the points which were gained by capping Command Points. This would obviously be used to encourage the capping of the command points rather than a concentration of TDM style play. I think either setting has its benefits and with the right people there should be no reason why frags cannot be displayed.