#Silent hunter 3 torpedo bounces off cracked#
#Silent hunter 3 torpedo bounces off full#
#Silent hunter 3 torpedo bounces off free#

I'm no stranger to detail - I spend more time organising and admiring my Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 armory than I do using it, and each of my X-Piratez has a dozen weapon types on her kill sheet. 'Sin are you using the sonar or just saying 'bing' into the radio.' I've always found these games an uphill battle. But it does sort of paint your game into a corner, especially if you expect a player to build a fleet from scratch. While I like to half-joke that nobody really knows what a cruiser or frigate is, that's not an unreasonable approach for a niche interest. Typically, wargames and sims assume that the player already knows the basics about ship classes, gun calibres, navigation and so on. If you're going for even a semi-realistic naval wargame, you'll have to face that barrier somehow. Modern warfare is complicated, and sailing is already a jargonous affair before you bring combat into it. This latter point is another reason I historically bounce off naval wars. War On The Sea also boasts a fairly equal representation of ships and boats (aircraft are secondary but still vital, and a solid bombing/aerial torpedo run on a carrier is a sweet, sweet hit of fiery command points), and the control it gives you of your own forces means you can experiment with ship roles and fleet compositions.

#Silent hunter 3 torpedo bounces off cracked#

Sure, I might have arranged my fleet poorly for this fight, but if I can sail the ship myself and time my own depth charges, I'll get some satisfaction out of avenging my oil tanker when I watch its killer's engines grind to a halt, and hear the terrible groaning of its cracked hull as the precious air abandons its crew. This takes the game away from the abstraction of numbers and specifications that often puts me off an oceanic war. Like X-COM or JA2 or Achtung Panzer, when fighting forces meet, they duke it out in a local battlefield under your total control. The second part of that structure is the battles themselves.

#Silent hunter 3 torpedo bounces off free#

'There's an obvious limit to where you can send your land armies, but the sea is a free for all once you're no longer reliant on the wind.' It's all water, right? There's an obvious limit to where you can send your land armies, and thus where the fights can happen, but the sea is a free for all once you're no longer reliant on the wind. Submarine games in particular tend to have somewhat dynamic campaigns, but something about the sea suggests that total strategic freedom is a natural fit. It's this open, two-layer structure that originally tempted me. Or perhaps you'll downplay the East, and attempt a buildup and surprise invasion from Port Moresby in New Guinea. The opening contest is near inevitably about the central Guadalcanal, but there's nothing to stop a US player from building a staging point in Rennel Island first, then using planes to scout and submarines to block and harass the Japanese from the centre, while their fleets take advantage of the dramatically shorter route to drydock to rearm and repair.

But if you land three or four torpedos.Д«ut if you can hold them, gosh they're handy.

Sub attacks in the shallows are extremely reckless, since there's no sonar-disrupting tidal layer.

Naturally this means spending precious command points on cargo vessels and whatever escorts you prefer (you can risk going without of course, but it only takes one scout plane to spot them and tell a submarine about it), so each port costs a big upfront and ongoing investment. Each week your major ports are resupplied with troops, oil, engineering tools and generic 'supply' needed to maintain armies, and all this must be shipped to smaller ports and airfields, or those you're fighting over or have just conquered and need to rebuild. Points are gained for sinking ships, and lost forever if your own hit the seabed, making each victory feel significant, and every loss a real injury, especially early on.

#Silent hunter 3 torpedo bounces off full#

You have full control of a strategic layer, in which command points are used to summon forces that you then send around the map to fight enemy ships and ferry vital troops and supplies to land at hostile ports. You control either the US or Imperial Japanese navies during their war over the south pacific, establishing naval and airbases at key points in the region and using them to pump out and service real ships as you see fit. War On The Sea is their latest, and it's something of a sideways step in terms of design. Killerfish Games may not be a household name, but they established a solid pedigree in marine warfare games with Cold Waters and Atlantic Fleet.