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Over the past months, we’ve been hard at work refining the features and systems that will shape Scramble: Battle of Britain’s 1.0 release. We’re approaching the point where those features are beginning to lock into place, and we’re excited to share more about the future of the game as we move forward.
In the meantime, we want to take a closer look at some of the new mechanics we’ve been building through a series of dev diaries. Today, we’re diving into one of the major pillars of our upcoming Channel Defense Campaign: Raids.
We started prototyping the foundations of our campaign mechanics as soon as Scramble went into early access. Our Squadron Leader game mode was our first attempt at giving every Scramble pilot an identity and a sense of permanence, and when we added pilot traits, suddenly every pilot had a unique capacity for flying and fighting.
Squadron Leader asks the player to carry the same batch of pilots through 30 randomized days of Scramble dogfights, but we want our Channel Defense Campaign to operate at a grander scale. We started asking ourselves how we can give the player the feeling of attacking the same kind of massive formations of bombers and escort fighters that regularly traveled the English Channel in 1940.
Given that the player generally controls only a handful of airplanes in a Scramble match, we started looking at how we might chain dogfights together, so the results of one Scramble match propagate through a larger battle. After a lot of prototyping and design iteration, we settled on a system that we are calling Raids, in which the same handful of intercept sections take turns engaging a large force of enemy aircraft in a series of chained dogfights until either their pilots are exhausted or they have achieved a target Duty score.
Some core Scramble themes are duty, attrition, and defending the islands from Luftwaffe bombs, so our Raid systems prioritize these through simple, understandable mechanical analogies. Players accumulate Duty points by continuing to engage the enemy in multiple dogfights, but players will maximize their Duty score by rejecting bombers. A bomber that turns for home counts just as much toward your Duty score as a bomber that crashes into the sea; manage risk to your pilots, keep them flying in subsequent dogfights, break up the raiding bomber force, and be careful not to get too greedy sticking around to soak up kills.
Raids will be composed of mixed formations of fighters and bombers. You may find yourself bounced by free hunting Bf109s in the first fight, but holding their attention may help delay the escort fighters in a subsequent dogfight. A large formation of Heinkels off your nose may have escort fighters arriving in fifteen turns, so a single slashing pass and hasty escape may allow your pilots to reject some bombers, score some points, minimize damage to their airplanes, and continue scoring points in the next chained dogfight.
Fuel is a new mechanic exclusive to Raids; each scrambled RAF section has enough fuel to engage the Luftwaffe forces in two dogfights, but sticking around for too many turns in the first dogfight may exhaust your section’s fuel and prematurely return them to base.
While designing Raids, we asked ourselves how we could motivate players to employ tactics that reinforce the themes of attrition and fragility. Scramble rewards bravery, but survival matters just as much, so we improved our escape mechanics to help players disengage more reliably, and conserve their plane and pilot. Pilots carry stamina and ammunition states from one Raid dogfight to the next, but pilots who bail, die, or accrue critical damage to their airplanes will leave their section understaffed in subsequent re-engagements, and it's hard to reject bombers without a full section of interceptors.
Below you can find two work-in-progress screenshots from development. These do not fully represent final visuals or UI, but they can give you an idea of the current implementation and the underlying logic behind Raids, including how chained engagements and tactical decisions play out.
Raids are one of the key systems helping us bridge Scramble’s dogfights into a broader campaign experience. We’ll have more to share soon as we continue internally testing the systems, mechanics, and ideas shaping Scramble’s full release.
As always, thank you for following the development journey. We’d love to hear your thoughts and questions in the comments and/or on the official Discord server (where you can also find other players for multiplayer matches if you’d like!).
And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to wishlist Scramble: Battle of Britain and stay updated as we get closer to v1.0 launch.
