The third game in the series confirmed for release on May 18th. Truly excellent games for anyone remotely interested in 20th century naval warfare (and now covering 1890-1970). Main differences seem to be:
- Addition of officers:
Every ship above the size of a destroyer will have a captain, while all divisions get a divisional commander.
Officers have ranks, and can be promoted; they have personal traits that can evolve as they age. Officers get a detailed personal history. They can be re-assigned, sacked, retire and expire from old age or die gloriously in battle (or be rescued from their sinking ship). They can be experts at maneuver, engineering, rate of fire, accuracy or diligently work to improve ship morale, but they can also be terrible administrators, lousy motivators, overly devoted to exercise or music, have a tendency to have ill-advised affairs or even fight duels.
Depending on your inclination you can exercise intimate control over promotions, assignments and sackings or you can ignore the entire system and let the AI handle it for you.
Apparently their personality will also influence their behaviour when (presumably) out of direct control what tends to happen a fair bit in this game.
- Improved AI. More aggressive destroyers, less suicidal carriers, less shooting at already sinking ships when other foes are about. AI will generally build more destroyers and take note if you start building behemoth battleships and attempt to counter with their own similarly overgrown designs. Importantly AI nations now fight each other too. AI will generally avoid fights in constricted waters once air power gets serious and there's a morale system that will influence the behaviour of fleets.
- More post-WW2 tech (the game continues to 1970 now). A variety of different style of jet fighters (though old carriers will require extensive refits to operate them), helicopters useful for ASW, radar-directed AA guns, missiles (both air-to-surface, surface-to-air and air-to-air) which will start to dominate combat by the 60s and ship point defence
- Expansion backwards to the 1890s with combat in this era being short-ranged and highly inaccurate, very short ranged torpedos and compound, nickel-steel or Harvey armour. Sounds like battles in this time will be very up close and personal (it's hard enough to sink anything in the first ten years of the previous game due to general inaccuracy and guns having not yet caught up to armour).
- Reworking of submarines to allow you to move them between regions (though this can be automated) and making long-ranged submarines more useful. Missile subs are in but no nukes unfortunately (presumably these conflicts are limited conventional wars)
- Addition of China and Spain. New Baltic region too (the previous North Sea region did feel a bit too large)
- Treaties now have negotiable tonnage limits with the player having input into these
Very excited, easily one of my favourite games of the past few years that is a lot of fun and produces some white-knuckle tension from seeing your carefully designed ships chucked into the fray with shells and torpedoes flying.
Now available on Steam too!