When I told you about my playing of Atlantic Fleet I explained how I never tried the Battle of the Atlantic dynamic campaign. Now I have and, as it turns out, it’s this feature that gives the game some (sea) legs. It seemed my duty to wrap up from where I left you hanging at the beginning of November.
The strategic level adds substantial play value
The full campaign involves building up a fleet for either England or Germany and then deploying it to the Atlantic. Each turn, representing half of a week, allows the opportunity to move any ships from one area (the light-blue squares, above) to an adjacent area. If that area contains a port, those ships may be sent for resupply or repair.
After movement, combat may take place in any of the squares which contain both friendly and enemy ships. The combat is essentially the same as the individual scenarios but you determine makeup of your side through your strategic-map movement. Each new battle also starts with the carrying over of any previous results (minor damage or expended armaments) from previous turns. Any ship sunk or severely damaged is lost while the remainder live to fight another day. Damaged ships that make their way back for repairs can be refurbished and resupplied, coming back in as good as new a few turns on.
Sinking of unescorted merchant ships happens automatically
Your own fleet is maxed-out at 30 ships. Victories give you “renown” and renown can purchase you more ships. Once you’re topped off, you can use those points to trade up to a better fleet. The enemy fleet is entirely unknown to you. The total makeup is a mystery and the locations of individual ships are only revealed if there is some kind of combat (see the blue ship in the first screenshot). The time between turns means that it rarely works to chase down a thus-spotted enemy. The “fog of war” means that just because enemy squadrons share the same space doesn’t mean they’ll meet each other. If your ships don’t engage the enemy then you won’t even know he’s there. That is to say, most potential meetings with the enemy never take place; squadrons pass each other, unaware, in the night.
Another nice feature is that “uninteresting” encounters – attacks on escorted convoys or interdiction by land-based aircraft – are automatically executed an summarized in a very pretty splash screen (see second pic). In this way, there seems to be a bit more to the war than the battles that you fight.
In the end it isn’t all that different from the random campaign I played earlier, although both the fleets and the squadrons are bigger here. Managing your fleet by moving about the Atlantic is far more engrossing than just managing a list. The persistence of victories, losses, and logistics provides a sense of purpose. Historically speaking, Atlantic Fleet is still an ultra-light wargame no matter how you slice it. Beer and pretzels, as we used to say. The scenarios are good for a 10-20 minutes distraction before moving on to something more important. Building this “story” of the Battle of the Atlantic, however, makes me actually want to return for another episode the next night.
Something occurred to me the other day. Let me regale you with how it happened.
o, the Steam Halloween sale came and went and one of the games that was discounted was something called, rather generically, War on the Sea. I knew this because War on the Sea is on my Steam Wishlist. Despite that fact, I had no memory of what this game was about… so I started looking into it.
What the game is about (for those as in the dark as I was) is the Second World War in the Pacific focusing (and in this the title is very helpful) on naval warfare. This includes not only surface ships and submarines but also carrier air wings. The game is tactical and not entirely fantastical. It’s not meant to be the simulation that, say, CMANO strives to be and definitely doesn’t put you inside your machines in the mode of a Silent Hunter or a flight simulator. It is (remembering, I’m saying this without having bought the game) something a little more realistic than your typical RTS or on-line World-of-Whatever battling, but not tremendously so. One of its most appealing features is a 3D rendering of naval combat combined with a turned based interface that adds a bit more sense that strategy is more important than those quick-clicks and combo-moves.
This was particularly interesting to me because I was in the middle of reading a book about the War in the Pacific and submarines. Well, it was kind of about that anyway. Enough that I started to look at War on the Sea with one hand reaching towards my Steam wallet. I read a few reviews and learned a few things that surprised about this game.
War on the Sea is a fully released game. That is, it is not an Early Access title nor is it restricted to a group of testers. In many ways, however, I read that it is being treated as a beta program. With that understanding, comparisons were made to the (presumably) finished titles by the same developer; namely Cold Waters and Atlantic Fleet. Clicking to read more about these other two games I realized that I’d actually paid for them as part of a Humble Bundle package and they are sitting, unplayed, in my Steam library.
Doh!
Cold Waters was the second of developer Killerfish’s similar-looking naval warfare titles and it came out in 2017. It deals with hypothetical submarine warfare that might have resulted from hot flashes during the Cold War. We will have to come back to this one later.
The first of the trio is Atlantic Fleet, a 2016 title, down to $5 in the Halloween Steam discount which, unfortunately, has passed us by during the time it took me to write this post. Of the three, this one’s title is the most informative. Atlantic Fleet deals with the Battle of the Atlantic during World War II. Did I mention that it has been sitting here in my Steam library?
The Prince of Wales and the Hood spot Bismark and Prinz Eugen through the fog. Let the battle begin!
Now, during my earlier cogitation I had pretty much sold myself on the idea that the Battle of the Atlantic was a battle of information and information technology. More recent reading has further cemented that idea. Nonetheless, the fact that I am sitting on a tactical/operational game that deals directly with Operation Rheinübung was an oversight that I am duty-bound to correct. That this is a “beer and pretzels” treatment rather than a hard-core wargame (although I have one of those* too) doesn’t mean I can’t have some fun with it.
Prinz Eugen has the Hood pretty much dialed in. Fortunately for me, the Bismarck never managed to get it together.
I guess the key to that enjoyment is to moderate one’s expectations. The graphics are nice to look at and the interface works well enough. There just may be a little less under the hood (aha – get it? – Hood!) than meets the eye. Graphically, the game feels centered around its physics engine. Waves and reflections aside, this is dominated by the gunnery model. The camera follows a shell’s trajectory and you can see how it will hit its target differently depending on all sorts of factors. You can impact near the rudder or on the superstructure. A distant shot will penetrate the deck at a very high angle while close shots will hit the armored belt. Sometimes the projectile explodes spectacularly and other times there is a disappointing thump. Is this all factored into how a ship takes damage or ultimately sinks? It could be, or there could be a simple “die roll” that allocates “hit points.” I must point out there is a “subsystem damage” function, whereby certain functions of the ship can be damaged in combat and then repaired by damage control teams. For myself, I’ve witnessed a loss of rudder control during one of the tutorials – rather an important tactical factor during the Bismarck’s sinking. What I don’t know is if my loss of control was because I took a hit on a rudder or was it just damage selected from a probability table?
While this may be an interesting discussion, I’m not even sure what the “right” answer should be. The graphics show a handful of shells being launched with each volley. Are these literally meant to simulate a shot-for-shot performance of a ship’s guns? Maybe this all a bit abstracted – in which case, a better game might want to fuzzify the damage model and thereby reduce the gaminess. So far I’ve scanned the manual but have not tried to seek out on-line discussion of how these factors are implemented.
Just as the game straddles genres, lying somewhere between the “simulations” of a Silent Hunter and a more grand-tactical treatment (see the aforementioned*Steam and Iron for one** example), the requirements on the player do as well. While the action is presented as smooth and continuously moving (broken up, of course, into turns), the discrete choice of speeds, angles, etc. introduces some aspects of the hex and counter game. Similarly, much information is provided by the “crew” which lifts you out of the action and into your god’s-eye-view player role. From the interface, you know the speed and distances to enemy ships and, when you select one as a target, the gunnery folks calculate a firing solution for you. It is, however, an incomplete firing solution that can be, and in many cases needs to be, second guessed through an arcade-style aiming interface. Windage and relative movement between guns and targets, for example, seem to require manual correction even after the crew has the enemy pinned down.
This is even more obvious when you factor in the air strikes. After a, let’s say, mid-level planning state where you chose an attack vector appropriate to the ship’s speed, wind, etc, you get a third-person camera view of each plane’s attack run. The actual launch of weapons is manual. True, it is also a “manual” press of the fire guns button with each salvo but for aircraft this is done in “real time” mode during a non-pausable bomb run. As the player, you’ve got to eyeball the bomb-release window while watching your aircraft approach the target, relying on your gut to estimate altitude and speed – not to mention the angle at which the camera is looking down towards the ocean. It results in a lot of misses, which is probably fairly historical, but also a level of frustration. It feels that your prevented from even having the simple cues that you would get if you were flying the plane (either in a flight sim or relative to the experience of WWII pilots).
It all begs the question. Who are you? You command all the ships in your task force, making you something like an admiral (I would think). At the same time, you’re looking over your gunner’s shoulders, second guessing their firing solutions. Then you’re looking over your pilot’s shoulders, shouting in their ears at the moment of bomb release. And if you don’t tell them to drop, they’ll just fly over with bombs still on their rack. From a “things to do while playing this game” standpoint, it actually gets the interface about right. At the same time, the choices tend to push Atlantic Fleet away from the naval wargame genre towards the casual games’ waters.
His Majesty’s ships will limp back to port but we have destroyed Hitler’s “terror of the seas.”
If you look at the screenshot above, you’ll see I did pretty well with my first shot at this (after the tutorials, that is). While the Royal Navy took some licks, we managed to sink both of the German warships before they could make their way out into the Atlantic. The whole “hunt for the Bismarck” drama has been avoided.
The game actually offers four different scenarios detailing different portions of Bismarck’s final voyage. Having eliminated the enemy in the first one, it just doesn’t feel right to move on to the next scenario – where we would find that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen are both alive and well. Instead, I thought I’d give some other portions of the game a try.
I first tried the Campaign game. This consists of a set of ordered encounters where you build up a “fleet” purchased with “renown.” Successfully sinking enemies earns you more renown, with which you can expand your fleet. Rinse and repeat. There is a limit of 10 ships per fleet and 3 ships in any one battle. It’s a nice enough way to extend the fairly short experience of a single battle into a longer-running game. Beyond that, there isn’t much of a historical thread. You just keep fighting battles until you win or lose.
There is also a Battle of the Atlantic dynamic campaign which I did not try. It seems to be geared so as to focus more on an operational strategy as opposed to simply carrying units forward from battle to battle. Until I play with it, though, I’ll say no more.
As the morning sun peeked over the horizon, my convoy was attacked by two U-Boats. Merchants started going down almost before I knew they were there.
What I did try next was to use the “custom battle” to create something that, while not included in the actual historical battles, did feel more historical. To get myself a quick-and-dirty trial I set up an escorted convoy under attack by a pair of U-Boats. I took on the side of good and right by playing as the British Empire.
The good news is that the interface let me do pretty much what I wanted to do. I’ve gotten frustrated with “quick battles” that use a point system to pick the armies. That is great for balance but it is problematic if your goal is reproducing an order of battle (real or hypothetical) without going through a weeks-long scenario design project. A few more or less light horsemen may be a minor annoyance to you but, if you’re trying to create a “what if” scenario for the Bismarck after a breakout, having an algorithm hand you the wrong ships would be annoying.
Atlantic Fleet‘s custom battle interface avoids the issue. You pick the ships you want, by class and then by name. You do this for both sides and then go to it. For the set-up that I chose, the controls have a nice nod to the realities of convoy battles. Intended as a time-saver, the interface allows “fleet moves.” This is a way that all ships in the fleet are given the same movement orders. Better yet, this can be invoked at any time. So if you (as I did) create your task force with the destroyers listed first and then the merchant ships after them, you can plot individual moves for your submarine hunters while executing a group move for the convoy itself. I remembered some rules for the old Avalon Hill Submarine game, and self-limited my convoy’s change of direction moves to no more than once every two or three turns.
In the not-so-good category, the custom battles are also limited to 10 ships per side. That means that you can’t really build yourself a realistically-sized convoy to protect. Again, to rely on Submarine as a touchstone, that game’s most basic scenario (#1) is a single U-Boat attacking a convoy of a dozen, unescorted merchant ships – already not reproducible in Atlantic Fleet. I might also complain that upon starting my scenario with everything in contact and close-in, it felt a bit too frantic. That might be addressable in the game’s settings. I’ll have to go back and fiddle some more.
There also is no way to apply a level of “fog of war” to your computer enemy. Naturally, this is not at odds with Submarine, where the scenario setup is printed for all to see. But this is a computer game. It would provide a bit of excitement to keep some of the enemy’s information secret. Did you find all the U-Boats that are out there or might there be one more sneaking up on you?
If it isn’t obvious by this point, I’ve long thought the genre of submarine simulations would be enhanced by the availability of a simpler game; something like Submarineconverted to computer. By that measure, Atlantic Fleet feels durned close. Alright, maybe a little too lightweight although I suspect even a strict conversion of AH Submarinewould as well. Atlantic Fleet even does my board game a little better, adding surface combat between capital ships and airstrikes to the mix. One might even figure that it is the submarines that should be considered the add-on – that Atlantic Fleet is fundamentally a surface ship game. Still, it is a shame that you can’t set up a full-sized convoy in it. Even with that handicap, there remain plenty of historical fights that fit within this 10-on-10 restriction.
Especially if you find it in the “bargain bin,” this is a game that has its place. I’m sure I’ll be spending some more time with it now and again.
*Well, sort of. I have a copy of Steam and Iron, which I haven’t played in quite some time. Although there are newer products from its developer that address WWII and even take it into the Cold War, Steam and Iron is a WWI-and-surrounding-decades game. Nonetheless, it demonstrates how a high-fidelity tactical game of naval surface warfare should look.
**The blurb and some reviews for Cold Waters mention Red Storm Rising, the 1989 game by Microprose. That’s obviously far more relevant when talking about a Cold War game. The point often made is the intermediate-level of simulation. Better than your typical RTS, nowhere near a submarine simulator. The standard for North Atlantic surface ship combat that sticks in my mind is SSI’s 1999 Fighting Steel and the various community-developed enhancements. Unfortunately with that too, I was often tempted but never bit on buying and playing the game.