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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