So let it be written, so let it be done: CMO v1.10 with real-time MP now available

October 6, 2026 · Posted in Command · Comment

The day has come, as was prophesied.
<insert thunderous rumble in 7.1 Dolby Atmos>

After years of mentioning we were looking into this, and years of Command PE already getting first WEGO-MP and then true real-time MP, the stars have aligned perfectly and the tireless work of the CMO dev team has finally paid off. The CMO v1.10 update is now available, and its flagship new feature is real-time multiplayer.

The full release notes for the new update are available HERE.

Some quick notes about the new major feature, and easily the most hotly expected addition to CMO in the recent years:

Two players are supported, either head-to-head (PvP) or cooperative (PvE)
Players can join a lobby, view available game sessions and create a new one or join an existing ongoing session
In-game chat is available (with absolutely no filtering – you’ve been warned!)
One user acts as a player and host; another user then connects to his running instance as the second player. Connectivity is made using GameFabric servers as relays, and all client connections are outgoing (so no need to fiddle with port forwarding etc. on your router).
Because of the relay system, scalability is less massive than in CPE (where 10-15K unit scenarios have regularly been run, thanks to its direct no-relay connectivity). Scenarios up to 1000 units are recommended for optimum performance, though of course players who enjoy excellent connectivity can try their luck for bigger setups.
Any existing scenario with at least one (for PvE) or two (PvP) playable sides can be used for RTMP. It is strongly recommended to avoid scenarios in which heavy Lua scripting is employed, as this can interfere with the MP flow. The dev team has improved several of the included standalone scenarios (e.g. Duelists, The Tiger And The Dragon etc.) to optimize them for RTMP play.
Tacview real-time streaming is not currently supported in MP mode, because of the way the system is currently structured. Depending on demand, this may change in the future.

RTMP is of course front and center in this release, but is far from the sole addition. The team has been busy at work since the release of v1.09 and the “Tides of War” DLC, adding new features and improving and fixing existing items based as always on community feedback. Some of the other new features include:

New map icon option: Full APP-6 (top-level category only)

New dedicated naval formation editor:
The new naval formation allows easier placement of escorts around a HVU, new standard formation templates and numerous other tweaks and improvements.
Phil Gatcomb has made a tutorial video showcasing the new formation editor; check it out.

New map feature: Vector OSM maps. This map layer is different from the other existing ones: Instead of fetching and caching locally pre-rendered raster tiles, it fetches the actual .pbf-format OSM vector tiles that contain all the information used to generate OSM maps, and uses that information to dynamically render raster tiles on the map. This affords a near-infinite flexibility on what information is shown (or hidden), depending on the applied style.
As an example, this is the southern UK coast in the “dark matter” style:

Users can create their own custom styles, and since these are simple JSON text files, can easily exchange styles with others.

Improved relief & bathymetry layer, using the latest GEBCO20 revision, enhanced in detail by EMODNet European coastal bathymetry data for up to 115m/cell resolution in the European & North Africa region, and re-shaded for more finegrained detail up to 600m (maximum depth for the vast majority of submersibles).

As an example of of the improvement (click for extra detail):

New realism feature: Limited Sonobuoy Stocks. “Subs in this game are too vulnerable to pre-emptive sonobuoy blankets!” some of you cried out, not without justification. “Sonobuoys don’t grow on trees, and real-life navies usually employ them only after something else cues them in”. We heard you, and this addition is half of the solution. When this feature is enabled, sonobuoys are no longer treated as an infinite resource (like e.g. external fuel tanks or unguided weapons) and become a finite aircraft store like guided weapons (ie. bases and aircraft-carrying ships can run out of them). They can also be stored & transferred as cargo, like other aircraft payloads. This feature is auto-disabled when the “Unlimited base magazines” feature is enabled.

New doctrine setting: Sonobuoy Use. This is the second part of the total solution to the “over-abundant sonobuoys” problem. It allows the player to define how aggressively/conservatively the AI forces will use sonobuoys while searching for, and prosecuting submarines. Available settings are:
– Automatic for search and localization (default): Sonobuoys are freely and aggressively used by AI-controlled aircraft for initial submarine search (often “carpeting” entire patrol/search areas). CAUTION: If this is used together with the “limited sonobuoys” realism setting, the force can very quickly run out of sonobuoys!
– Automatic for localization: Sonobuoys are not used for the initial search, but are dropped for firming up an already made contact or prior to attack.
– Manual (player order) only: Sonobuoys are not dropped by the AI at all. (Useful if you’re low on them or want to handle this hands-on)

Big update to high-energy laser (HEL) mechanics: We’ve overhauled how they work, starting with a much better model of power-at-impact and atmospheric absorption at different altitudes. This matters most when the shooter and target are at very different heights, including shots from space. We’ve also made laser kills against weapons (the primary use case of current HELs) far more realistic: weapons are now graded by how fragile or tough they are, and that grading is combined with the power actually reaching the target to decide whether it’s destroyed or just hit and survives. Small drones and subsonic cruise missiles are very fragile and glide bombs are fragile, while JDAM-style bombs and Mach-3+ weapons are medium. Iron bombs, rockets, and supersonic missiles are tough, so they’ll take a lot more beam time to bring down. One-shot swatting of an incoming weapon can still happen, but is now the rare exception rather than the absolute rule.

Impact angle / crossing-target as a factor in guided weapon endgame calculations. This has been significantly improved since the original flawed implementation, and takes into account factors such as the target’s LOS bearing-rate toward the shooter, the agility & seeker cross-tracking features of the interceptor, the closing rate etc. So for example under the same difficult circumstances (high LOS rate or high closing speed) the modern ESSM suffers much less degradation than the older Sea Sparrow.

Numerous new antiair/antimissile-related doctrine options have been added, to facilitate a more finegrained degree of control on ABT, BMD and counter-hypersonic engagements.

Submarines can now perform cargo operations, just like surface ships and land transports.

Range-ring colors added as “notches” on the weapons panel, to at-a-glance indicate the target suitability of each available weapon:

And as always, the latest updates and fixes to the official scenarios as well as the latest releases of the DB3000 and CWDB databases.

DB3000 v518 additions

DB3000 v519 additions

NOTE: The electronic manual has also been significantly overhauled.

The Command dev team is already hard at work on the next CPE update, due before the end of the year, along with several major new features that will take functionality and simulation realism another big step forward. Stay tuned!

NOTE: We discovered a last-moment issue in the Matrix (standalone) version of the game; this has forced us to delay the release of this update on standalone for a few days. The Steam version is releasing as scheduled. Sorry!
As a reminder, if you have the standalone version you can also get a free Steam key to play there until standalone releases.

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Mid-August money shot: Community Scenario Pack #52 released

August 14, 2026 · Posted in Command, Community Scenario Pack · Comment

Hot on the heels of the v1.10 public beta introducing real-time multiplayer to CMO, Kushan has now also updated the famous Community Scenario Pack (CSP), the Command community’s curated anthology of user-created scenarios. The new update refreshes 3 existing works and contains 11 new scenarios:

Abra De Ilog Passage, 2028: The Philippines has faced a number of insurgencies during its history. A new insurgency, organized by communist rebels, has erupted. It has taken a page from the playbook of other militant groups and is attempting to put pressure on the Philippine government by threatening merchant shipping at various choke points.

Amphibious Assault on Kharg Island, 2026: This is intended to be a relatively small scenario, scaled specifically around the assault on Kharq Island only. There are no other Iranian forces in play, other than those on, or around, Kharg Island. Expect to be finished with the scenario in about 60-90 minutes of game playing time.

Operation Absolute Resolve, 2026: Recreation of the United States military and law enforcement operation executed on January 3, 2026. U.S. forces conducted a precision strike in Caracas, Venezuela, and captured incumbent president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, to face federal drug-trafficking and narco-terrorism charges in the United States.

Operation Rite of Passage, 2026: It is Day 24 of Operation Epic Fury and President Donald Trump is running out of time. The US-Israeli air campaign has shattered Iran’s conventional navy and gutted its ballistic missile complex, yet the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Over three hundred merchant vessels sit at anchor across the Gulf, their masters unwilling to move while mines drift in the shipping lanes and IRGC gunboats still sortie from concealed coves along the Iranian coast.
Diplomacy, at least, has delivered one card worth playing: Oman has agreed to open its bases and the islets along the Strait’s southern bank to American forces. It is a narrow window, and it is closing fast.

Operation Sunset – Flanker Duel, 1999: What is happening on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea is not a modern surgical war. It is a slaughter. For weeks, both sides have exchanged artillery fire until the landscape has been turned into a hellscape of craters reminiscent of Verdun.

Operation Trident Boreal, 2027: The arrival of B-1B Lancer bombers at the Norwegian base of Ørland has triggered a strategic collapse in the Barents Sea. Under the cover of massive naval exercises, a covert act of sabotage has disconnected the Havis North-1 platform, blinding NATO’s acoustic sensors (SOSUS) in the strategic Bear Gap.
In the depths, the submarine threat between the Bear Gap and the GIUK chokepoint is constant and highly lethal. Unidentified hostile contacts are currently attempting to slip undetected into the Atlantic.

Sea of Japan Crisis – Convoy to Taoyuan, 1985: The Sea of Japan Crisis of 1985 took many experts by surprise. Everyone had assumed the most likely flashpoint involving China would be Taiwan. However, during the early 1980s, tensions over fisheries in the Yellow Sea escalated significantly.

Sea of Japan Crisis – Standing Fast, 1985: China is uninterested in bowing to the Japanese. The Chinese government warns it will continue to make attacks until Japan agrees not to restrict access to the Sea of Japan.

STANAVFORLANT Holds the Line, 1968: This scenario assumes World War III started in 1968 with a Warsaw Pact invasion of Turkish territory. Soviet goals appeared to be modest, limited to seizing control of the Turkish Straits and areas of eastern Turkey that would give them direct access to their allies Syria and Iraq.

TF34 at San Bernardino Strait, 1944: Task Force 34 is guarding the San Bernardino Strait against the IJN Center Force. Prevent the IJN from reaching the landing beaches in Leyte Gulf at all costs.

The Hormuz Gauntlet, 2026: The world contains its breath. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGCN) has turned the Strait of Hormuz into a lethal nautical chessboard, deploying advanced naval mines across the vital shipping lanes. Global energy markets have collapsed, and a generic ‘Group Alpha’ of civilian supertankers is trapped, awaited by swarms of suicide boats and coastal missile batteries.

The new community scenario pack is, as always, available for download at the Command Team site, and also on the Steam workshop.

The CSP now proudly counts 641 scenarios in its stable!

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CMO v1.10 public beta – Real-time MP for CMO is here!

August 12, 2026 · Posted in Command · Comment

Announcement & instructions

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The calm before the storm: Command PE v2.4.4 is here

May 31, 2026 · Posted in Command PE · Comment

Yes, it’s that time of the year again; CMO v1.09 was released to an enthusiastic welcome to its new features and improvements, and the time is now ripe for a similar update to Command-PE. Version v2.4.4 is now available for download to new and existing CPE users around the world.

Far more than merely “v1.09 for pro users”, however, CPE v2.4.4 offers several significant improvements on both the user interface and the simulation engine, while maintaining the tradition of fixes, tweaks and additions across the board.

On the UI & workflow assets, the emphasis has been on:

Higher-resolution and more accurate coastal terrain modeling
Expanded mission/event scripting flexibility
Faster and more fluid map interaction at scale
Reduced UI friction in scenario design workflows
Improved at-a-glance tactical readability

Some of the main UI improvements:

– A fourth map icon option has been added, for full APP-6 icons.

– The optional high-resolution (DTED-1 equivalent) global terrain dataset has been completely refreshed on the bathymetry side. Using the 2025 version of the GEBCO grid, and enhanced by the EMODNet European coastal bathymetry dataset (https://emodnet.ec.europa.eu/en/bathymetry ), which provides up 115m/cell resolution in its applicable costal areas (Europe + North Africa + Black Sea + Red Sea + Eastern Carribbean). This provides a much higher level of detail for coastal naval & underwater operations. As before, the improved DTED-1 terrain is available through the optional “HD pack” for Premium-license CPE customers.

– The relief + bathymetry layer has been drastically improved, using the above high-resolution DTM as the source, and re-shaded for more finegrained detail up to 600m (maximum depth for vast majority of submersibles).

– You can now assign an event action to a waypoint:

The unit can be obtained by the usual ScenEdit_UnitX().
The waypoint action is a dropdown of the event actions.
The triggering unit and WP IDs are passed as a local Lua table ‘wpAction’. The full details can be accessed thru the SE functions using the unit (wpAction.unit) and wp (wpAction.wp) GUIDs.

– A new “Aggressive Tile Management” option has been added, for a smoother map zoom/pan experience if the GPU hardware supports it.

– You can now search for a specific menu or submenu through a textbox. This can be very useful if you do not remember where a specific menu command is located (“Now, where was that command about jettisoning secondary stores….”). Just type the command text in the textbox and you will jump right into the appropriate menu.

– Range-ring colors have been added as “notches” on the weapons panel, to at-a-glance indicate the target suitability of each weapon.

– Numerous fixes and tweaks have been added on the Area & RefPoint Manager, as well as the Lua API access to it.

The simulation engine has also received a number of significant upgrades:

– Aircraft transported as cargo: You can now load and transport aircraft as cargo, using the existing cargo system and conventions. This can be used to model the transportation of both manned aircraft (as e.g. in operation “Nickel Grass” during the Yom Kippur War) as well as UAVs. For the full details and instructions, see the section “Aircraft As Cargo” on the web-based Command manual: https://command.matrixgames.com/manual/

– Launch speed-dependent variable burnout speed for air-to-air missiles. In other words: It is now critically important how fast an aircraft is flying when it launches a boost-coast missile (Optional, enabled by default on new-construction scenarios and quick-battles, disabled by default on existing scenarios).
When enabled, the burnout speed (per altitude) of boost-coast AAW missiles now varies according to the launch speed (in addition to the already-important launch altitude). The weapon’s nominal range assumes a M1.5 launch at 36000ft. If the launch speed is lower (which is usually the case), the effective burnout speed and kinematic range of the weapon will be lower; if however the launch speed is higher this can significantly boost both the burnout speed and the reach of the weapon, way above nominal.
A faster burnout speed provides three critical advantages in the BVR “missile joust”, all other factors being equal:
* Your missile flies further out expanding your WEZ and reducing your exposure to counter-fire.
* Your missile flies at higher average speed, which shortens your commit-engage-disengage cycle and may even turn the tide in your favor if the other guy shoots first.
* Your missile will likely arrive at impact with a higher terminal speed, thus improving its hit probability against an alert and evading opponent.

– Numerous new IAMD-related doctrine options have been added, to facilitate a more finegrained degree of control on ABT, BMD and counter-hypersonic engagements.

– Groundbreaking improvements to the modeling of high-energy laser (HEL) weapons against weapon targets. An Achilles heel on the modeling of HELs in Command until has been the fact that weapon targets (e.g. incoming missiles), contrary to platform targets, have no finegrained/gradual damage model, and thus the often limited damage (in energy terms) dealt to them was frequently misrepresented; the laser shot against them either hit them and always insta-killed them, or missed. A more sophisticated model was necessary, one that took into account the fragility/durability of the weapon target as well as the actual energy delivered to it per successful shot (as already calculated on counter-platform engagements).
Therefore, we developed a system for estimating the durability of each weapon type: for example, a common small-size UAV will be exceedingly vulnerable (most UAVs barely hang in the air), whereas an iron bomb with a precision guidance kit is a much tougher proposition. This “target sturdiness” is then compared against the actual energy delivered by the laser impact (as part of this improvement, the atmospheric absorption model was also thoroughly renovated) and a probability of actually destroying the target is generated. As a result of this change, HELs are now much more faithfully modelled against their primary target set; it now become painfully clear why various armed forces worldwide are in a race for extended ranges and particularly vastly higher power output levels.

– Impact angle / crossing-target as a factor in guided weapon endgame calculations. This has been significantly improved since the original flawed implementation, and takes into account factors such as the target’s LOS bearing-rate toward the shooter, the agility & seeker cross-tracking features of the interceptor, the closing rate etc. So for example under the same difficult circumstances (high LOS rate or high closing speed) the modern ESSM suffers much less degradation than the older Sea Sparrow.

– Plus as always numerous smaller tweaks, improvements and fixes to the UI, simulation engine, connectivity and analysis options.

If you are wondering about the title, the CMO/CPE dev team is already relentlessly preparing a triad of new additions that feature prominently on Command’s development roadmap for the latter half of 2026:

Real-time multiplayer on CMO. Need we say more? This has been announced, is already under testing in a closed-beta environment, and feedback is enthusiastic.
Project Hannibal, a radical renovation of close-combat and ground operations in both CMO and CPE. We gave a glimpse of it on last year’s HOW video, but the whole project is vastly more massive than that. Command already has the best ground ops of any game not focused on them, but Hannibal takes it to another level.
A brand new platform-to-platform comms & datalinks model. If you’ve been noticing that “improved comms & datalinks” is increasingly a major part of the equipment focus on either new or upgraded platforms (“Link-16 and IFDL/MADL everywhere!”), this upgrade will clearly show you what these improved comms give you – and what it means to fight an adversary who out-communicates you.

Stay tuned for updates on these and more developments as the year progresses!

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