Victory at sea pacific tutorial1/17/2024 Wargame: European Escalation was a recent example, and a good one, too, bought on Spain's Costa del Sol earlier this year and impressing me so much that I later bought a follow-on title, Wargame: Airland Battle. While I'm on holiday, I usually visit local video game shops or departments, on the lookout for bargains - typically, games I might not try, at full price. Still, it was a classic, worth playing if you have an old enough system somewhere to hand (Win 98 to XP inclusive, IIRC).Īnd so to the to the present day.last week, in fact. And unfortunately, FS's graphics engine won't run on modern PCs. Nothing I've tried since Fighting Steel has come close to providing a convincing PC simulation of classic WW2 surface actions, being either too 'gamey' or too limited in scope - usually both. Each kit had a little potted history of the relevant battle in its box. And I really loved the 1/1200 Eagle kits, released in themed sets based on famous Royal Navy actions. I made many a 1/600 Airfix warship kit, back in the days before multi-lingual instruction sheets no longer told you that part 21 was actually the starboard main armament fire director. Which I relished, having been brought up in the post-WW2 era and soaked up TV documentaries like The Valiant Years and films like Sink the Bismarck! and Battle of the River Plate. Gun and torpedo action was what FS did and it did both very well indeed. Night battles became much more interesting when the FSP mod added tracers and AI was quite good, with ships making good use of smoke screens. I didn't miss FS's lack of land, even for the Gaudalcanal actions likewise, the lack of planes or subs. They didn't fall into the trap of giving you some kind of gamey, simplified, crosshaired gunsight to aim your weapons, or worse a floating reticle in the 3-d world. Whether you found this intuitive or not, the thing that struck me was that it looked like the designers' aim was to put the player the role of the ship's captain (or commander of a division of ships), letting AI-run systems take care of the rest. The FS command interface was extremely well designed, giving alternative 2d (map) and 3d views and the ability to command individual ships or divisions - which you do by issuing orders for speed, course, target and weapon selection via a neat set of icons. We get a good range of adequately-modelled warships (and transports) from the German, British, US and Japanese navies and the ability to re-fight most of the classic WW2 surface ship actions, many added by the mod community. Still, as a sim of operating US destroyers, it wasn't bad and the graphics were better than the earlier SSI sim, Fighting Steel.ĭespite very basic graphics, no land, subs or planes, Fighting Steel, especially with the FSP mod, was - and IMHO still is - the classic WW2 ship sim. This meant you couldn't use the classic destroyer tactic of launching torpedoes while making smoke, then putting about and disappearing into your ready-made smokescreen. But what we don't have is a proper surface combat simulation, a truly worthy successor to classics like SSI's Fighting Steel and Destroyer Command - notwithstanding some Silent Hunter mods which provide a limited measure of surface ship action.ĭestroyer Command did what it did (the clue here, being in the title) reasonably well, despite the gaping ommission of ship-laid smokescreens (other than a purely visual mod, whose screens offered no actual cover). And we have games like Navy Field and World of Warships, plus older stuff like Battlestations Midway/Pacific. Sure, we still have the Silent Hunter series for submarine operations and other titles for surface action in earlier and later eras. World War 2 naval action with Evil Twin's 2014 releaseįor a long time, many of us have been tied up at our home ports, fretting at our virtual quaysides with varying degrees of impatience waiting for the launch of a decent simulation of naval surface action in World War 2.
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