War on the Sea Free Download

War on the Sea Free Download Unfitgirl

War on the Sea Free Download Unfitgirl Fundamentally, a good game is one which is easy to play whilst simultaneously offering compelling choices. The game itself should be easy, it is the decisions that should be hard. Killerfish Games’ latest release: War on the Sea succeeds in one sense but fails in the other. Like the Japanese after Midway, this failure is one that War on the Sea cannot recover from. Midnight. August 10th 1942. 30 nautical miles east of Guadalcanal. Four old Japanese destroyers go into action against an unknown enemy force. Their commander assumes he faces a superior force. The plan: as soon as the enemy is spotted, launch torpedoes and then make good their escape. Their commander assumed wrong. The “superior” enemy force is in fact two destroyers and four transports. A good night for the Imperial Japanese Navy. When War on the Sea works, it really works. Throughout the above engagement, I felt like I was playing something out of Tameichi Hara’s Japanese Destroyer Captain. My plan was written by my (possibly faulty) recollection of one of Hara’s own engagements. Such considerations are what War on the Sea could be – in a few more months or even a year. Unfitgirl.COM SEXY GAMES

War on the Sea is the ultimate evolution of Killerfish Games’ previous offerings. Its submarine warfare mechanics are more or less lifted from Cold Waters. Surface combat likewise owes much to Atlantic Fleet. With such an excellent pedigree, War on the Sea is a dream game for many. Naval combat in the Pacific theatre in “real” time? Who could ask for more? With the scope, scale and variety of actions on offer, I suspect it has been Killerfish’s dream all along. The design of the campaign suggests to me that Killerfish hopes to offer more campaigns in different theatres as well. As it is, the single campaign currently on offer, Guadalcanal, playable from either side, is more than enough. One need only watch Drachinifel’s excellent series on that campaign to see why it is the perfect introduction to the format. Unfortunately, it is the campaign where War on the Sea’s problems begin. It is too much of sandbox whilst simultaneously hamstringing player choice. At the start of a campaign the player has nothing. It is up to them to choose their ships. Great right? To an extent, but how is the new player meant to know what they should choose? For the veteran meanwhile, the decidedly unhelpful user interface means that organising your fleet is far more effort than it needs to be, especially when it comes to organising scouts.

Over 50 classes of playable ships

So much for freedom, what about limitations? Put it this way. Your scouts are shadowing an enemy force. You send your torpedo bombers in. But they can’t engage. As far as I can guess, since the enemy fleet has already been identified and the game has given you a choice to attack, the game now decides that you don’t need that choice again. You’ll have to wait for the enemy to be lost in the fog of war again (a matter of hours) before you can attack. It would appear that War in the Sea somehow manages to discourage scouting. The same issue means that enemy scouts, once contacted, can’t be shot down by scrambling fighters. Similar issues occur in organising your fleet. Whilst aircraft and ships in the same area will take part in the same battle, two groups of the same type (i.e. ships and ships or aircraft and aircraft) won’t. Possibly I’ve been unlucky – but it’s hard to argue with two formations being right on top of one another and then entering battle to find only one formation present. Specialised formations (say, having a flotilla of destroyers supporting your squadron of cruisers) thus appear to be not only useless but outright dangerous – as a cruiser squadron that is caught by an ambushing submarine will be sitting ducks. Similarly, while the AI has had no problem organising combined strikes of fighters and bombers, I for the life of me cannot order up more than one type at a time. Why it is impossible for an airfield or carrier to launch multiple types, together or separately, is unclear. Rugby 22 PS5

War on the Sea’s campaign holds so much promise. Its scope, format and freedom should make it the holy grail of naval wargaming. Yet these problems – and I’m cutting out a great many more – say to me that somewhere along the line things went very wrong. I cannot know whether time ran out, problems were not identified, beta testers were not attentive, the engine was too limited or some other fault, but the result is a campaign that, between glimmers of brilliance, is critically flawed. War on the Sea’s campaign could have been saved by tactical combat. Although the battles are indeed a stronger experience, it’s not enough. The good first. The spirit of Cold Waters makes the submarine combat great fun. Hunting enemy fleets with destroyers circling makes every action exhilarating (though your submarine coming under air attack is dull as ditch water and needs a look at – see above – ahem). Similarly, the fundamentals of surface combat: gunnery, detection, damage control, feel right. Pretty, though not amazing, graphics hold up well. The smoke and star-shells of night battles are particularly impressive. Likewise, damage effects are also suitably impressive for what is happening below decks – but ironically are in some ways a come down from Atlantic Fleet.

Dynamic campaign

With the fundamentals of naval combat so strong, it’s too bad it’s let down by all the clicking. One example: every ship, even ones in a formation, must be given a target individually. In order to fire, I must then order each and every ship individually. If a formation is ordered to fire – only the first ship will open up. The rest will sit and watch. In a game like Atlantic Fleet, where battles were turn-based and small, this was fine. In real time, with much larger forces, not so much. These issues extend to how the player directs gunfire and even into how air combat works. Exciting as it is to have bomb-skipping and other techniques in a naval game, at heart War on the Sea is weighted down by far, far, far too much micromanagement. Even with generous use of the pause button, it just isn’t any fun. I am left with the distinct suspicion that War on the Sea was designed and tested by a culture that plays these kinds of games in a very specific way – one alien to everyone outside the club. All the issues described above can be solved. Maybe in a year, maybe in six months, the odds are that every issue I’ve covered will be fixed. I sincerely hope they are. Paradise Lost

Since I began writing this review at least two small updates have appeared. The fundamentals are there. War on the Sea has the power to be a very good game, but I can only review what I have in front of me. For the moment, a critically flawed campaign and naval combat that is complicated for the sake of it makes it a game that, I cannot recommend at full price. The only consolation I can offer is that, if Cold Waters is anything to go by, War on the Sea can look forward to a lot of work going forward. It needs it. Points are gained for sinking ships, and lost forever if your own hit the seabed, making each victory feel significant, and every loss a real injury, especially early on. Each week your major ports are resupplied with troops, oil, engineering tools and generic ‘supply’ needed to maintain armies, and all this must be shipped to smaller ports and airfields, or those you’re fighting over or have just conquered and need to rebuild. Naturally this means spending precious command points on cargo vessels and whatever escorts you prefer (you can risk going without of course, but it only takes one scout plane to spot them and tell a submarine about it), so each port costs a big upfront and ongoing investment.

Real time naval combat

But if you can hold them, gosh they’re handy. The opening contest is near inevitably about the central Guadalcanal, but there’s nothing to stop a US player from building a staging point in Rennel Island first, then using planes to scout and submarines to block and harass the Japanese from the centre, while their fleets take advantage of the dramatically shorter route to drydock to rearm and repair. Or perhaps you’ll downplay the East, and attempt a buildup and surprise invasion from Port Moresby in New Guinea. It’s this open, two-layer structure that originally tempted me. Submarine games in particular tend to have somewhat dynamic campaigns, but something about the sea suggests that total strategic freedom is a natural fit. It’s all water, right? There’s an obvious limit to where you can send your land armies, and thus where the fights can happen, but the sea is a free for all once you’re no longer reliant on the wind. The second part of that structure is the battles themselves. Like X-COM or JA2 or Achtung Panzer, when fighting forces meet, they duke it out in a local battlefield under your total control. This takes the game away from the abstraction of numbers and specifications that often puts me off an oceanic war. Sure, I might have arranged my fleet poorly for this fight, but if I can sail the ship myself and time my own depth charges, I’ll get some satisfaction out of avenging my oil tanker when I watch its killer’s engines grind to a halt, and hear the terrible groaning of its cracked hull as the precious air abandons its crew. Christ, what a horrible way to go.

War On The Sea also boasts a fairly equal representation of ships and boats (aircraft are secondary but still vital, and a solid bombing/aerial torpedo run on a carrier is a sweet, sweet hit of fiery command points), and the control it gives you of your own forces means you can experiment with ship roles and fleet compositions. This latter point is another reason I historically bounce off naval wars. The terminology. Modern warfare is complicated, and sailing is already a jargonous affair before you bring combat into it. If you’re going for even a semi-realistic naval wargame, you’ll have to face that barrier somehow. Typically, wargames and sims assume that the player already knows the basics about ship classes, gun calibres, navigation and so on. While I like to half-joke that nobody really knows what a cruiser or frigate is, that’s not an unreasonable approach for a niche interest. But it does sort of paint your game into a corner, especially if you expect a player to build a fleet from scratch. I’ve always found these games an uphill battle. Parasite In The City

Let’s be clear: this is a me thing. I’m no stranger to detail – I spend more time organising and admiring my Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 armory than I do using it, and each of my X-Piratez has a dozen weapon types on her kill sheet. But when it comes to seafights, the differences just don’t sink in. I bang on about all this because accessibility is a big strength of War On The Sea. The tutorials are succinct and the open structure gives room for errors, inefficiency, and the occasional foolish risk to learn from without losing everything. If you’re sailing into a losing battle you’ll usually know it before it’s hopeless, and so can pull out and come back another day with a better ship (repairs take time, but once fixed, you can send back an unwanted vessel for a full command point refund at any major port). The technical details of fighting are pared down too, and gunnery can take care of itself to keep a heavy carrier busy while you steer a secret submarine up its propellor. It does come at some inevitable cost, though, and hardcore simulation fans will find its level of detail wanting. Even manual firing is simply clicking a point on the map rather than calculating headings and speeds (automatic fire does improve as the AI calculates a firing solution, which is affected by visibility and detection technology as you’d expect), meaning you can sort of eyeball it, letting your crew pound constantly with the smaller guns while you watch the map and fire the big cannons yourself.

Add-ons (DLC):War on the Sea