Stonewall was a fun multiplayer (also solo-able) gameplay mode that was designed to be an experiment into the “defence” gameplay mode that was all the rage back in the early 2000s. I am proud to say that the mode was successful enough that the team tasked with creating the famous Last Stand Mode in DoW2 looked to Stonewall as a foundation and inspiration to build from. It also inspired a lot of player mods and was well received by the community in general. The mode was playable from either the American or the German side.

In this mode, the player is control of a special HQ building at the center of a town to defend against 16 waves of increasing difficulty. If co-op friends join in to play, each player has their own HQ to control. The base has two special mode-only tech tree paths to upgrade along. In addition, there were different buildings with different properties associated with them (and conferred only upon the owner) set in the 4 cardinal directions of the town. It is up to the players to sort amongst themselves how they would specialize through the upgrades or building ownership. Because we were short handed at the time, it was no small feat to create this mode, and I was the mostly the designer who created it from paper design to a reality (thankfully another designer helped maintain the mode while I was gone for a couple of weeks on vacation!). I had to constantly iterate and balance for both Axis and Allied factions using a table based scripted spawn system of my own creation (which I was able to salvage the fundamentals of for some gameplay experiments in unreleased Company of Heroes 3 work).