Supremacy At Sea WW2
| Total score |  |
| Game play | |
| Nuts & bolts |  |
| Bells & whistles | N/A |
In SAS you get to build a fleet either from the ground up or with some starting assets, and then take it into combat in the Med, Atlantic or Pacific. It’s as simple and as complex as that. Now if that sounds tempting then this could be your sort of thing. It certainly tempted me.
By all accounts when this game first came out late last year it wasn’t even playable. Several patches later I thought I’d give the thing a go, but as of now (version 1.04.1, with 1.04.2 expected to come along any day now) it’s still more of a game to play around with, than it is a game to actually play.
NWS have rightly received some criticism for adding new features while the old ones still don’t work properly, and I’ll echo that complaint up front here too. Love the idea of this game. Like the actual game. Hate its bugs.
Naval architecture 101
Ship design is handled intuitively and semi abstractly by simply setting a choice of weightings 1-5 for a range of things like size, armour, number & calibre of guns, etc, which works quite well (when it works). You can quickly build a fleet heavy on carriers, or heavy on battleships, and try or not try battle cruisers and so on, using historical or your own designs, the choices are all yours, and you can delegate the choices to your 2IC, which also goes for most things in the game.
Most of this building process happens at the start of a game though, all in one hit, and all done in the dark. There’s no year after year of naval appropriations, with responses back & forth to imagined & actual enemy threats. You build thirty years worth of ships in secret & the bad guys do likewise and there’s much chagrin as the two forces are revealed on turn one. Surprise.
The design system is a little too abstract for me, but it is quite elegant. There’s no choice to be made between all or nothing and balanced armour schemes for example, and it’s not possible to come up with oddities like the 18” gunned large light cruiser Furious, or single gun monitors for that matter; but if you can live without the more esoteric stuff it handles the mainstream of ship design well. (When it works).
All at sea
The game comes with some canned campaigns (Med, Pacific and Atlantic) and also the ability to roll your own, matching any two of the navies present, so you can have a US-UK battle, or a UK-French battle and so on, if that’s your sort of thing you can go for it.
Alas the game comes with the caveat that the campaigns that are included are not meant to be “fully historical”. There’s only one country on a side in each campaign for a start, so in a campaign of Britain vs Germany in the Atlantic there’s just Britain & Germany, there’s no great & powerful friend across the pond. Which makes that whole campaign kind of pointless for me. No Americans means no point to convoys, which when you run them are at least as likely to go from Britain to its bases in North America as the other way around. German surface units breaking out into the Atlantic? Well just wait, there’s no rush, they’ll need to break back in again and they’ll be easier pickings on the way back, and it’s not like we need the convoys to brings supplies or anything …
Another thing seemingly broken by design is the way the campaign files work. The game only holds one copy of each, so if you start fighting in the Med as the Brits say, then quit and start another Med campaign later as the Italians, you’ll find yourself playing a hot seat game against yourself from the old game. This will go on till the game runs out of your old moves & only then will it ask if you want the AI to carry on. To wipe your old British moves you need to start another Brit game before you start as the Italians, do any one thing like build a ship then save and quit again, thus overwriting all of the later things you did the first time around. Sound stupid? Yes, it is. According to NWS this is so you can play PBEM, but every other game system out there seems to manage that quite nicely without this sort of weirdness.
Not everything that’s broken was designed to be that way though. Some things are just plain broken. Air warfare seems more broken than naval war, and land war is very abstract but seems broken too. OK, it all seems at least a bit broken to some degree.
At sea: after a battle a fleet will often just sit in place losing track of what it was meant to be doing, it defaults to doing nothing at which point it usually becomes a magnet for enemy a/c. Ships seem to be able to absorb way too much shellfire. Prinz Eugen took upwards of 40 (I lost count) 16" hits from down to around 2000 yards before the British lost interest (or ran out of ammo) and sailed off. There were destroyers present but none fired a torpedo. Critical hit after critical hit came up, everywhere including magazines, but the Eugen survived it all. By contrast ships hit by planes seem to sink with often very few hits (1 bomb
will often sink a destroyer or small cruiser straight off). There are no easy-to-disable but hard-to-sink destroyers here, and land based air is generally way too effective in terms of hits scored & damage inflicted. The first turn anyone sails out into the Med is a massacre.
And of course sometimes the game will just freeze up, and sometimes ships, sometimes even major fleet units, will just plain disappear. I told a CV to avoid combat once and it promptly vanished! (Thus avoiding combat I suppose ...) There are lots of similar Grigsby-esque memory management issues: The ship building screen will sometimes run out of suggested names & the class I just custom built will disappear from the available list, once I supply a ship name & build another ship the original class reappears and there are more suggested names again ... I've been on the ship transfer screen & had no way to leave it. Supposedly the exit button is still there just not displayed at my bog standard resolution. Whatever. I’ve also renamed fleets which seems to have cloned them. Whatever.
In the air: aircraft don't seem buildable after turn 1, with valuable assets having gone into swarms of Lysanders (and if you also need to take a moment to refresh your memory as to just what Lysanders were I’ll wait, I had to look them up). Spitfires by contrast, that little known plane, don’t seem to make an appearance at all.
Air combat seems broken. I’ve had 37 hurricanes intercept 20 Me 110s and 20 Italian Falcos plus some bombers. All 37 hurricanes promptly got shot down, with no Axis losses (which is the exact opposite of what I'd expect). Next turn a slightly bigger combat of fifty something Hurricanes against the same sort of numbers of Axis planes resulted in no losses to Britain and all of the intruders shot down. Better, but it all seems a bit too random.
On land: combat seems to be tied strangely to supply, also in some sort of semi broken way. I’ve had the Italians land a lone company on top of an Australian division in Tobruk, which is strange to start with, but then the combat dragged on and on with the Italians having zero troops left & both sides taking zero additional casualties each pulse. That went on till I realised the Australians had used up all their supplies killing off the Italians (also strange, but at least remotely possible). When I sent them a small merchant the conflict promptly ended with the Australians victorious. (Yay). I have the feeling if I hadn’t intervened the Italians might have won, or at least the kept on fighting forever.
All of which is a shame. The actual structure of the game’s turns is good: you build any more stuff you can, you reassign ships to fleets & fleets to missions (and or you get your 2IC to do all that for you, editing it if you wish) and then you press play the game runs WEGO style, with a replayable turn that you can drill down into then or later, with battle summaries becoming detailed reports, becoming the actual battle replayed. The battles are ships in a line moving slowly from left to right with other shifts in a line moving the other way, but hey, it’s not a tactical game and I rarely bother to watch these. That said …
Through a glass darkly
The interface is something of a shocker: Clunky, non standard, Java. Some parts of it are quite cool, like the chalkboard of things to do that you can click on; but as an example of the uncool: sometimes you can select more than one item in a list, sometimes you can’t. You can’t use a mouse wheel to scroll lists, in fact you can’t even use a scrollbar to scroll them, instead having dumb old fashioned faux DOS up & down buttons (which aren’t even mapped to arrow keys). I could go on but you get the idea.
It could just be the particular shade of dark blue that’s used in the background that reminds me so much of those DOS crashes of old, but I don’t think so. Lots of bugs plus a generally subpar interface means zero stars for Nuts & Bolts for now. But please don’t change the interface on my account, just fix the bugs …
So why’s it getting two stars?
My reviews have been called idiosyncratic -- which I suspect was polite code for stupid, but even so -- but of course they’re idiosyncratic, they’re just a reflection of what I like in my games. Every review always is, no matter how objective they claim to be, which is why you need to read a range of them. No two gamers are going to think alike about everything and every game will have a lot of different things in it that will irk some people and be completely overlooked by others, depending on whether the game punches buttons for them on some other front or not.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that for me a game about designing ships and fighting them is so much exactly the kind of game that I’ve wanted for such a very long time that I’m willing to overlook its many (many, many) flaws. Probably more so than most people. Your mileage may vary, but when I’ve taken my battle cruiser fleet into the Med only to be greeted by a heavier battle line, whoops, for me it’s all been worth it. And once the bugs get fixed I’m very much looking forward to this engine being used on the relatively aircraft free two sided conflict of WWI, which is the slated follow up game. SAS Jutland and SAS cruiser hunting scenarios should be a great fun.
As for now, I assume the patching will continue, with a few bugs fixed and a few more features (and bugs) added each time. It’s a strange way to run a railroad but that’s what’s on offer. If bugs infuriate you I’d strongly recommend waiting, maybe even for a different game altogether. But if you want a sort of strategic, sort of naval, sort of game about sort of WW2, then by all means jump aboard. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
