Matrix Games Forums

well if i read the forum description right this is the place to post this suggestion.

Given the debacle of Fighting Steel and SSI's decision to cut their losses by pulling the plug, the future looks bleak for a worthy and modern WWI/II tactical surface combat wargame to succeed the ancestor of FS, Warship and its sequal Battlecruiser.

IMO, these games are arguabley the best computer examples ever put out on the market, rivaled only by Action Stations.

My question to Matrix (and the board) would be, is there any chance that the company might address this large gap in the wargaming community. We've got plenty of land and strategic land/sea wargames coming, mostly from Matrix themselves, but what about good old tactical surface combat?

If so, i would strongly suggest following Warship and BC's turn based format. To me the obcession with real-time wargaming and fancy graphics were what doomed the Fighting Steel project. Lets face it, trying to sit through an entire WWI or WWII skirmish in real time can be downright boring along with not allowing the gamer to really acess whats going on.

Opinions?

Don't despair too much. The good news is that Fighting Steel still lives! If you haven't already done so, you should visit the Naval Warfare Simulation (NWS) site at www.navalwarfare.net. The site a a link to their Fighting Steel area. After all that had happend to SSI, these guys received permission to extend and improve FS. They recently release v3.5 and are working on a v4.0. The NWS guys have demonstrated a sincere dedication to naval wargaming and plan to extend FS even further. Take a look.

Ray

Just clicked on your link and get "page can not be found"

I second your comments N. Warship & BC were great games - especially BC. Those British armored cruisers blew up with unsettling regularity. I have checked over at the FS Update site & it looks promising. You might also try an old game called Action Stations. Short on graphics , but still a very playable game. I believe you can download it for free at www.theunderdogs.org

Drex

try this www.naval-warfare.co.uk

I agree we need a new Naval Simulator, can I suggest the period of ww1 and ww2? I liked fighting steel but I agree there are problems with the real time. (course I only have the demo since I can't find a retail copy anywhere.)

Hey Guys,
Thanks for the info on Fighting Steel. As an old battleship (USS IOWA, BB-61) sailor, I was excited about that game. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my hopes. Now I'm off to download the latest patch while waiting for the Mega Campaign.

Originally posted by RayM:
Don't despair too much. The good news is that Fighting Steel still lives! If you haven't already done so, you should visit the Naval Warfare Simulation (NWS) site at www.navalwarfare.net. The site a a link to their Fighting Steel area. After all that had happend to SSI, these guys received permission to extend and improve FS. They recently release v3.5 and are working on a v4.0. The NWS guys have demonstrated a sincere dedication to naval wargaming and plan to extend FS even further. Take a look.

Ray

Yes, i'd heard that over on the warships1.com website and recently downloaded the patch and gave it a whirl.

While i certainly appreciate the time and effort put into trying to make Fighting Steel a better game, sadly i must state that the game falls far short of Warship/BC. For one, the whole "real time" thing IMO is the worst culprit. You end up sitting there drumming your fingertips on the desk waiting for salvoes to fire and land. I much prefer the turn based sequence where ships move, fire and fire resolution is resolved.

Add to that the lack of information being given to you and the experience is again diluted out. (W/BC was extremely detailed in it's battle reports....granted, FoW issues can suffer but exploring tactics is'nt what it's all about, its seeing the ships in action too!) Its better than the GNB series was but still falls short.

As for the technical merits. Many improvements have been made but the game is still saddled by assigning "Hit Points" to the ships thus they have artificial limits on how much damage they can take. Worse, once the "Structural hit points" are exhausted the game engine still uses the pool of floatation points in it's place resulting in a game that, while improved, still feels decidedly arcadish.

The firing routines also, still seem to favor the "miss" over the hit. I've found that even at short range, in calm seas with elite crews and advanced radar fire control, hits are still far and few between and medium and long range hits next to impossible to achieve.

Played several test scenerios and the results were pretty much the same as the pre-patch FS. The battleships, by virtue of their greater armor and "Hit Point" pools dont do too badly but the arcadish effect is most apparant with cruiser and DD type vessels. You can still one-two-three glug glug most of them if your slinging around a serious weight of metal.

Biggest suggestion i would offer to the team would be, if at all possible, to dispense with the "hit point" system. Hit points are great for Dungeons and Dragons but they dont work for tactical naval combat.

While i acknowledge that "Structural Damage" is a real factor and that W/BC's lack of simulation of this is not entirely realistic either, i do submit that it is "more" realistic than to give warships artificial limits on how much damage they can take.

Ships as a rule "Die hard". There are exceptions of course, ships that suffered catastrophic hits like Hood or Arizona are examples of that exception and due to the spectacular nature of their demise, they tend to overshadow the ships that have survived.

Nor are they restricted to capital ships. Laffey, Weisbaden, Franklin, Minneapolis to name a few.

What i like about W/BC is that to disable a ship, you have to actually do reallife damage to it. i.e. knock out it's weapons or disable it's propulsion or electrical/hydralic power. Either that or cause enough 'fire levels' so that it does the work for you indirectly.

To sink a ship, you have to cause enough floatation damage (and with hits specifcally in regions that can cause flooding) to cause the ship to sink.

Though it would be nice to see FS continue to evolve and improve, i seriously doubt it will ever be the wargame that W/BC are. (thank god for emulator programs!) My hope is that a new game will be created, the obcession with "real time" in naval situations dispensed with and a 'back to basics' approach taken vs. trying to substitute flashy 3D graphics for a strong wargaming base.

something in other words like SP:WAW!

Roger on the request for a new naval surface warfare sim. I remember the good ol' days running Warship and Battle Cruiser. When Action Stations! came out, I thought it was too good to be true. I wrote to Alan Zimm back in 90 (?) to see if he had any plans for a WWI game in the AS format. He said he was going to produce a follow-on to AS, tentively titled Fleet Commander, which was going to cover the entire WWII Pacific theater, but then he got tangled up with RAW down in Houston and things fell apart. I was headed for Japan for a three year stay and offered to do any leg work over there for them, but no luck. If Matrix does pursue this, you ought to find Alan Zimm and enlist him in the project!!

Battlecruiser and Warship were old favorites of mine. If you still want to play them, you can find them at the Apple Emulator Page, which is now at The Underdogs. The URL is: http://a2war.theunderdogs.org/

Alan Zimm is at the Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Lab here in the Washington DC area. I contacted him by E-mail a year or two ago to find out if he was ever going to do Fleet Commander, the aircraft carrier sequel to Action Stations. He was finishing up his PhD, but he hoped to get back to it sometime.