Devblog #166: First to Fight

Community members! This week, we announced our “First to Fight” DLC. In our announcement, we said we would elaborate further, and in this blog we will do just that.

Introduction

We are very proud to introduce Poland as the next faction for Call to Arms - Gates of Hell. We choose new factions carefully, and several factors made Poland a strong fit for this release.

Today, we will give you an overview of what “First to Fight” will contain and discuss how it fits into our broader plans for the game.

The leaps forward

Alongside the next faction, we are continuing to improve the game on several fronts. This includes further development of Conquest, our most popular game mode, as well as improvements and optimizations across the game.

This work also supports continued improvements and additions to the Eastern and Western Fronts as we prepare to expand into new theaters.

Single Player

“First to Fight” will introduce several new ideas to our single-player campaign format.

• The single-player campaign will contain 11 missions, making it one of the longest campaign yet for Call to Arms - Gates of Hell. Across those missions, you will play as Polish, Soviet, and German forces, experiencing connected historical events from several different perspectives.

• The campaign will also contain 2 skirmishes that are being built differently from those we have made in the past. They will feature multiple phases, switching between defensive and offensive situations to better suit the historical context of the battles. We are also working to optimize the skirmish battles and improve their complexity and dynamism so they better complement our more heavily narrated storyline missions.

• We are also testing the ability to carry troops forward from one specific mission into the next. This is a familiar feature in Conquest, but we haven't used it in our single-player campaigns. We are introducing it in a limited way first so we can evaluate how well it works in this format. If it works well in this campaign, we may expand on it in future single-player content.

The invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939 marked the beginning of World War II in Europe. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3rd, and on September 17th the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East. Several battles from this period will be represented in the campaign.

The campaign will also reach beyond September 1939, with later events involving the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), including the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Polish environments and Ostfront Remaster

It has been 5 years since the release of “Ostfront”. Since then, we have released countless updates that added content, improved features, advanced the engine, and raised the game's visual quality.

Some of the original Ostfront environment assets were created more than a decade ago and no longer match the quality or optimization standards of our newer content. Developing “First to Fight” allows us to create the environments needed for Poland while also updating much of this older material.

Poland allows us to draw from both Eastern and Western European environments while also requiring Polish-specific buildings, landscape elements, and other new assets. As part of this work, we are updating many of the older environment assets that will be used alongside this new content.

Consequently, when Content Update 7 releases alongside “First to Fight”, all owners of the base game will receive updated environmental assets and textures as part of the Ostfront visual refresh.

Our goal is to keep the entire game visually and technically consistent as it continues to grow. Updating the original Ostfront environments now also reduces the amount of older visual and technical debt we would otherwise carry forward as we expand the game in the future.

Also coming with Content Update 7

Content Update 7 will also add more German early-war equipment. “Finest Hour” already introduced several early-war vehicles for its France 1940 missions, but we still had several units we wanted to add. At the same time, several existing early German vehicles are among the oldest assets in the game and have been on our remake list.

“First to Fight” gives us a natural opportunity to continue expanding and updating the German early-war lineup. Additions will include units such as the Junkers Ju87B-2 “Stuka”, the Sd.Kfz. 231 (6-rad), and new variants of the Panzer I, II, and III lines. We are also adding equipment that arrived after the September Campaign but has been on our list for some time, including the Flammpanzer II and the Sd.Kfz. 251/10 Ausf. B.

These units will be added to the German multiplayer and Conquest line-ups for all players to enjoy. Barbedwire Studios has always aimed to provide an exceptionally broad range of historical equipment in Gates of Hell, and these additions continue that effort.

Poland in multiplayer

For multiplayer, the standalone Polish faction represents the independent Polish Army of 1939 and will therefore be available in Early War. Polish forces continued fighting throughout the war under both Western Allied and Soviet-aligned formations, but those forces do not represent the same independent national roster.

Polish forces fighting alongside the Western Allies are already represented in part through content included with “Finest Hour”. Poland's Early War roster includes several capable and distinctive pieces of equipment. Some saw only limited use during the September Campaign, but multiplayer will let players use them more fully.

Among the new units you will be able to field is cavalry, as seen in the trailer. We are still developing this feature, so we cannot yet confirm the full scope of its implementation.

We also want to avoid perpetuating the well-known myth of Polish cavalry charging German tanks. Our goal is to model Polish cavalry around its doctrinal role as highly mobile troops, who generally dismounted to fight, rather than treating mounted cavalry as a melee or firing platform.

Poland will also add another playable nation to the Early War period, where the current faction selection is more limited. Because our multiplayer periods are tied to historically appropriate equipment, not every faction can appear in every period of the war.

Conquest

Improving Conquest remains one of our major development priorities. We have released several updates to the mode this year, and more are already in development.

In an upcoming update, we are improving how enemy defenders are positioned around objectives, as well as the AI’s purchasing system and resulting force composition. We will cover these changes in detail in a dedicated devblog soon.

Content Update 7 will take another major step in our Conquest overhaul by introducing historical time and “chapters” to the mode. This will allow Conquest to represent better when factions and their equipment were historically available, which is particularly important when introducing a nation such as Poland.

This is not the final step of our Conquest overhaul. We will elaborate on these changes, and what they mean for Conquest, in future devblogs closer to Content Update 7.

The Future

As we discussed in a Q&A earlier in 2026, some of these plans have been under consideration for a long time.

We share the widespread enthusiasm for the Mediterranean theater, and it remains an important part of our long-term plans for Gates of Hell. It is a large theater with a great deal of potential content, including new environments, equipment, battles, and factions, and we want to make sure that when we expand into it, we give it the attention it deserves.

We are not ready to go into detail yet about exactly how that content will be structured or released, but “First to Fight” should not be taken as a sign that the Mediterranean has been overlooked.

We have also seen a great deal of interest in the factions and battles of the Pacific theater. For the foreseeable future, however, our development focus remains on the European theaters. We may consider expanding beyond Europe in the future, but we are not making any commitments regarding the Pacific at this stage.

We appreciate the long-standing support that has gotten us to where we are. Transparency with our community matters to us, and we hope to share more about our plans when we are ready to discuss them.

For those who missed it, here’s the trailer for “First to Fight”:

https://youtu.be/MQ6X9poIJig?si=N4XJWblHy2k3gr7j