Warship Combat – Navies at War

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles

Finally! A new wargame that doesn’t suck – and a naval game at that.

WC-NAW is a small, and while not quite perfectly formed, it’s a pretty fine game. It would be selling it short to say that if you were to imagine just the naval sub-game from some larger game, that then you’d be imagining WC-NAW. A better way to describe it would perhaps be to have you imagine most everything you’d need to represent a surface action at sea during the age of the battleship. Then you’d be close.

Integration with SAS was originally promised and may still yet happen for all I know, so that feeling of being a component of something larger makes sense, but SAS would have to be improved quite a lot to make the union worthwhile. As it is this game’s good enough on its own.

I’ve been thinking a lot about whether it’s just because I’m so starved for a new game, especially a new naval game, that’s making me like this game so much. But I don’t think so. I think it stands on its own merits quite nicely.

Getting it

Purchase is online & delivery’s by download (a tiny 8MB all up), with a simple serial number emailed manually later. My number took about eight hours to arrive I think ,which to me points to a process that should be automated. The serial number is the extent of the game’s non intrusive copy protection.

Game play

The game covers surface combat in the age of the battleship. 1890 – 1950 is what’s promised and that’s pretty much what you get.

Each turn you manoeuvre divisions of your ships to your advantage, chose targets or keep the targets you’ve already chosen, and the game grinds out the maths of the two fleets pounding away at each other WEGO-style. There’s no PBEM or network play, which is a shame cause the game would be well suited to either,but for a change the AI is up to the job. A statement which is again selling the game somewhat short – I  have a sneaking suspicion the AI cheats, it’s that good.

Most everything you’d expect to be considered in a serious naval game seems to be here.  Manoeuvring on the map is at a scale slightly higher than where turning circumferences show up, so disconcertingly at first ships seem to turn on a dime, but that’s OK once the scale makes sense. Damage is meted out separately to flotation, the hull & the superstructure, as well as to several subsystems: the bridge, propulsion, fire control, steering, searchlights, radar, the three battery groups of guns … indeed I had a problem with ships like the Bismarck having a tertiary battery of AA guns for use in surface actions, but it turns out they’re there firing under the disadvantage of local control, and if that sort of detail doesn't sell a naval wargame I’m not sure what will.

Some refinements like land masses, minefields, reinforcements, zooming the map, and all sorts of other good things all seem like possible future additions. (It’s version 1.04 that I’m writing about, which has just added changing a division’s speed amongst other things.)

One down side to the current version of the game is that when a game finishes you can only easily investigate ships that remain on the map. If the enemy disengages a ship before a game’s over it disappears, and I’m sometimes left scratching my head about just what happened to it. The game does generate a log file which gets overwritten each game, but it’s just space delimited text. If this was in XML perhaps somebody could write a parser. I suppose we still could, but it would be a hassle. (Which should put the small size of this particular gripe in perspective.) An AAR display is promised for a future version & for the moment that’s good enough for me.

Nuts & bolts

The user interface is completely non standard, and usually that would bug the hell out of me, but somehow here it works. Perhaps it’s because I got used to playing around with the demo for the game’s predecessor (WCDB). If you bought WCDB an upgrade price is offered too, which I would have thought would make getting this game a no brainer for anyone with the original, given just how much better the new version is.

The game’s not especially pretty, but it’s pretty enough. None of the wasted effort of 3D models – and I’ve got a soft spot for line drawings of ships in any case. The problem I have with the UI is having to use the right mouse button for something a return key would normally usually used for, or using F1 to mean pause rather than help (and so on). But as I said, somehow it all seems to work. Before my first game was over I was used to it. Now it seems almost normal. (Almost.)

As an aside I’m on a no-dialogues kick at the moment in interface design too, and the game ties in nicely with that meme. There are no dialogues to dismiss at all, everything happens on screen.

The game is missing several things I’d normally howl about – the manual is online (it doesn’t appear separately in the download), and it’s skimpy at best; and there are no scenarios that ship with the game. Yep, none. But ...

Random scenarios are the heart of this game. Pick an era (WWI or II, though there are some earlier ships in the database), the number of ships involved, then either get allocated or chose the ships, and you’re playing. It’s very quick and it’s completely painless. There are some refinements that could be made to the process, adding more eras or restricting ships to historical opponents, but as it is, it works very well. Rolling your own historical scenario is just as easy, pick classes of ships from the list of those available, place them or have them placed, and go for it.

And the manual? Well, it’s brief. It’s not as bad as Eagle Day /Bombing the Reich (which had the worst manual in some time, and where I think Matrix used the old Talonsoft version of the manual without updating it). Here the manual could just do with some fleshing out. There are a lot of symbols and abbreviations used in the game that take a while to work out. Once they’re learned I suppose the manual would have served its purpose, and context sensitive help would probably be even more useful. A section on strategies for players new to naval games might be useful too. (If such people still exist.) It’s an omission, but because a lot of the game explains itself it’s relatively minor.

The game’s rock solid stable. I haven’t seen a single bug or crash. Alt-tabbing, minimising, pausing, un-pausing, they all work fine, as they should. Supposedly there was an issue with the game taking up a lot of a system’s background cycles on some quad core machines, but that seems to have been fixed in a patch. (But I never saw it so I can’t really comment.)

And there’ve been a steady flow of patches, each one offering improvements rather than just fixes. This is a good game now, and I’m convinced it’s going to get better in the future.

The extra fifth star

I was originally going to give the game four stars, but I changed my mind for two simple reasons. Firstly, while there’s a lot of stuff that can be improved here, even with no improvements it’s already the best naval game going. And in conjunction with that, Mr Dean from NWS says there are going to be upgrades, and I believe him.

In conclusion

If there are no better games released this year (and hey, if there are I’m happy) then this is the 2009 Game of the Year sown up. At last.

Addenda & errata

November 4 - Some comments & explanations from Mr Chris Dean here.