Games like Distant Guns, but not Distant Guns?

[MengJiao]

What about Silent Hunter 2 ? Wasnt there an option to play as a Destroyer as well? Perhaps couplet with another game?
Destroyer Command? My memory is failing me.

  I resort to board games for good WWII big ship battles.  I play Command at Sea in a modified hex board form.  Works well.

  The best WWII ship game ever (as I remember it) was TaskForce 42.  But a quick game of Command at Sea still is better than that.

  I may get a blog going some day about how to have fun with Command at Sea on a flying colors map.

[SgtRock]

Sadly Naval games are a dead gene in PC/computer gaming.  Funny, considering Computer Bismark was the first Computer War game. With all the success Matrix Games has had with WITP/WITP AE/Harpoon it's surprising they haven't funded development of a good WWII naval game or help bring back old games like TaskForce 1942, SSI's Great Naval Battles Series and/or Warships. Maybe World of Warships will help spark more interest in the gene.

[Sir Slash]

SH 4 Had mods that allowed you to play in command of surface ships including BB's, CA's, and destroyers, with the U-Boat add-on, German & Brit ships too. I never tried it as it required several mods to be installed and I never heard anything very positive about it. By now there should be at least 1 good WWII 3-D game out there. A new Fighting Steel maybe.

[MengJiao]

Sadly Naval games are a dead gene in PC/computer gaming.  Funny, considering Computer Bismark was the first Computer War game. With all the success Matrix Games has had with WITP/WITP AE/Harpoon it's surprising they haven't funded development of a good WWII naval game or help bring back old games like TaskForce 1942, SSI's Great Naval Battles Series and/or Warships. Maybe World of Warships will help spark more interest in the gene.

  Naval games are a bit problematic.  It's hard to know what level of abstraction works.  With air games you can model the airplanes fairly well one way or another and all is well.  But in naval games you are going to have planes and obviously they are going to be somewhat abstract.  And if planes are hard to model as machines, any warship bigger than a PT boat is going to be much harder to model in many ways and so far no way of modelling warships (except for maybe in FOTS where they are strangely convincing) has really been very much fun.

   An obvious way to go: take simple ships and work up from there is pretty much precluded by the general need to have the most advanced versions of everything modelled right away...BUT...if the audience could stand it ... you probably could adequately model a limited world of floatplanes, barges and PT boats (with a Patrol boat of some kind as the ultimate weapon).  True, it would not resemble  the average view of what a naval war might be, but the modelling would work and could be expanded.  So part of the problem is that people are happy with dogfights with Airplanes, but any small battles with small boats don't seem to excite much interest.

   But I'm beta testing CMANO which will be able to present any kind of naval battle you'd like for the period 1946 to 2020 -- but at a certain level of abstraction of course.

[Nefaro]

Sadly Naval games are a dead gene in PC/computer gaming.  Funny, considering Computer Bismark was the first Computer War game. With all the success Matrix Games has had with WITP/WITP AE/Harpoon it's surprising they haven't funded development of a good WWII naval game or help bring back old games like TaskForce 1942, SSI's Great Naval Battles Series and/or Warships. Maybe World of Warships will help spark more interest in the gene.

Nahh.  S&I did better than expected a year or two ago.  A lot of people are looking forward to Command. 

They're doing just fine.  Sounds like the problem is that there isn't many of them with fancy 3D gfx, but that doesn't bother everyone.

[Herman Hum]

Nahh.  S&I did better than expected a year or two ago.

I thought SaI did quite well, but not as well as hoped.

They're doing just fine.  Sounds like the problem is that there isn't many of them with fancy 3D gfx, but that doesn't bother everyone.

Naval War: Arctic Circle included 3D images.  (It was the first thing I turned off!)  Global Conflict Blue 2 continues to use them (and I think that their lack of 3D model makers is holding them back.)  IMO, every hour spent/wasted on 3D images is one less hour spent on making the game better.

[Nefaro]

I certainly don't need 3D graphics if the game itself is good.  I often find jockeying the camera annoying since not many developers can make one that isn't burdening. 

The DG/Jutland 3D camera is a good example of having to wrestle with the UI more than we should.

[Herman Hum]

The DG/Jutland 3D camera is a good example of having to wrestle with the UI more than we should.

I quite agree.  I kept using the tiny 2D tactical map to fight battles in Jutland instead of the much larger 3D map simply because I couldn't be bothered with the camera.

[Skoop]

^ not to get too off topic, I just got the histwar game and the camera controls have me feeling the same way.  From what I hear alot of people play from the 2d map on that one as well.

[Grim.Reaper]

^ not to get too off topic, I just got the histwar game and the camera controls have me feeling the same way.  From what I hear alot of people play from the 2d map on that one as well.

Not to get too far off topic, but has histwar improved at all recently?

[Skoop]

They just came out with a big patch a couple weeks ago, the graphics actually look great on my new 2560x1440p 27" monitor.  They high res really spruces it up.  I'm still fumbling around with the UI, they have 2 different UI to choose from, just wish they had went with the standard RTS camera controls instead of the funky ones they have now.

I do love the insane historical detail they used in the uniforms, it's like a 3d osprey book or something. You can choose from 1/10, 1/2, or 1/1 soldier to icon representation.  It's crazy to see the 1/1 battlefield, probaly the only game doing that scale.  Unfortunately the 1/1 ctd after 5 min of play, so only 1/10 is stable for me.  Hopefully that gets ironed out cuz the 1/1 is kind of the main reason to play this.

I just got wargame alb as well so I'm going in 2 different directions at once.

[Grim.Reaper]

Thanks for the info...too bad he never puts his game on sale, $50+ is still a little high for me to take a chance.  Do you know if demo includes the latest updates?

[Skoop]

No, The demo is a 2 year old version. 

[Grim.Reaper]

No, The demo is a 2 year old version.

k, thanks...I also see a version 2 is in the works...I wonder how far away that is....