NWS Supremacy at War-New PC War Game

[Galaril]

For anyone here who has an interest in games like Hearts of Iron or Harpoon naval warfare games this might interest you. It is a new war game thta sound slike it could be really good. It is NWS: Supremacy at Sea. I might think about picking it up evntually but it does sound well developed by the guys over at NWS. Here is alink tot he war gamers forum discussion and the game site.
http://www.wargamer.com/forums/tm.as...323214&mpage=1

website: SUPREMACY AT SEA SERIES INFORMATION - NWS ONLINE COMBAT GAMING STORE / NAVAL WARFARE SIMULATIONS FORUMS


* Command naval campaigns across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Mediterranean oceans or create your own naval campaign.
* Command and control land combat formations, amphibious operations, and air forces. Land units from company up to army group sized formations.
* Land combat is handled on a hourly basis and include mechanization, equipment, morale, training, experience, amphibious capabilities, entrenchment, and supply attributes.

Scalable Game Play Options

* Level of command - strategic, operational, or tactical.
* Game turn coverage - hours, days, weeks, or months.
* Battle management - all command options can be set to manual or AI assisted.

Overview

● Turn-based WW2 naval strategy wargame.
● With loads of tactical feel and realism.
● 2 Player or play against the computer.
● Command the navy of any of the major naval powers of the era - US, UK, Japan, Germany, Italy, France.
● Accept historical strengths and weaknesses or play with history by varying technology, resources, intelligence and more. Change the odds to make the game as easy or as hard as you like.
● Select maps for theatres as small as the Mediterranean through to as big as the Pacific.
● Face computer opponents who play aggressively or cautiously, like Yamamoto or Nagumo, Doenitz or Cunningham, Darlan or Iachino.
● Fight with Carriers, Battleships, Cruisers, Destroyers, Escorts and Submarines; run convoys of Merchants ships.
● Choose from 160 historical ship classes or design your own - up to 130,000 tonnes! - nearly twice the size of the Yamato!
● Plan convoys, raiding and reconnaissance missions, major fleet sorties, bombardment missions, mine laying.
● Make all decisions or just those you want to, delegating the rest to your 2-I-C. The 2-I-C mode makes learning a snap and playing a campaign can be done in an evening.
● Replay fleet movements hour-by-hour, surface battles shell-by-shell.
● Develop your technology in 10 key areas; gain superiority in radar, ASW, submarine propulsion and many more.
● Win the economic war by maximizing convoy trade and economic production at minimal cost.
● Control the sea lanes; gain Supremacy at Sea and retire as the greatest Admiral of all!
● You are the Supreme Naval Commander. Now, prove it!


Features:

New levels of realism

SAS-WW2 is a strategic game to command; but its highly detailed AI gives it the flavour and realism of a tactical sim:

● "Fog of war" - know your enemy and his movements through intelligence and reconnaisance.
● Dynamic weather - low pressure systems build and move; dead calm through to force 6 hurricanes.
● Detailed modelling of surface ship combat, shell-by-shell, torpedo-by-torpedo, with special damage to turrets, machinery, magazines, conning tower and other areas. Detailed damage effects, damage control, flooding and targeting are updated every minute of battle.
● Differences between countries in 10 key technologies affect fighting capabilities.
● Very challenging AI opponent -every bit as strong as your own 2-I-C. You alone can guarantee victory!

Historical and Hypothetical Ships

All the famous battleships, cruisers, escort ships and submarines are represented, including ones never launched: the mighty Yamato and Musashi, the Iowas and Montanas, the Bismarck and the 'H' class monsters, the British Lion class, and many more. If this choice is not enough, you can improve them or design entirely new ships. Aircraft Carriers are a special case in this game. In real life, they became so powerful they rendered battleships obsolete, and the Americans, Japanese and to a lesser extent the British relied on them greatly. But the Germans, Italians and French never had a viable carrier. In Supremacy at Sea, the role for the mighty battleships still shines brightly, especially given that you can build them up to 130,000 tonnes in size! But every country can also have carriers. The choice is yours.

Designing Ships

In addition to the historical ships, you can modify them or create entirely new designs from scratch. It takes only a few to set the size, speed, range, number and calibre of main guns, quantity of secondary armament, armour, and general protection and seaworthiness for a ship. This gives you nearly 2 million possible designs!

Using your 2-I-C

You have a famous Admiral as your 2-I-C, ready to take any decision for you if you are still learning the ropes, or simply speed up gameplay. The American player has Spruance, Halsey, Mitscher and King to choose from. Each has a preferred strategic approach - very aggressive, very cautious or in between - and will advise you accordingly.

Command and Control Options

To play a turn in SAS you have four areas to make decisions in:

1. Making budget decisions, including setting technology spend and priorities, and varying shares going to aircraft production - in total and to specific aircraft types.
2. Designing and building new ships.
3. Allocating produced aircraft to carriers and land based airfields.
4. Forming fleets and assigning operational orders.

The length of the turn itself is variable, but the same set of decisions faces you. The quickest way to play is to get your automated 2-I-C to make all decisions for you. For each of these areas, a single mouse click sees him make all the decisions. It takes just a few seconds for this to happen, with the exception of the forming fleets and giving operational orders. This can take up to 30 seconds but you get progress reports. The 2-I-Cs decisions are made in accordance with a pre-defined strategy - which can be varied (as explained below). Your next option is then to review any of these decisions, and change ANY aspect of any one of them, taking as much or as little time as you want. The most complex area is the fleet operational orders area so let me explain in more detail your command options here, from the simplest/quickest, to the most time-consuming and detailed:

Option a. Just one click to get you 2-I-C to do it all, as noted above. Review the orders on the map and fleet manifest.
Option b. Same as above, but change the overall strategy, say from cautious to aggressive, and get him to redo the orders. (There are four basic strategies: very cautious, cautious, aggressive and very aggressive).
Option c. Same as b. but you can edit the default mission priorities that relate to particular strategies, adding in, removing or changing the order of precedence of missions. (There are over a dozen different types of mission. The AI assigns ships to missions in the order of precedence set for them).
Option d. Same as c. but edit individual properties for one or more selected mission types, eg change the default minimum and optimum numbers of types of ships, or the ratios between types of ships, for the selected mission types.
Option e. Set up one or more fleets yourself - by creating them, assigning ships to them clicking on the map to set its movement path, time in hexes, speed, waypoints (if any), special orders (eg "lay mines here" or "load x tons of supplies here" etc), fleet engagement orders (that control the odds a fleet is prepared to face) and individual ship engagement orders (that control how aggressive/cautious the ship behaves within the fleet), etc. THEN, get your 2-I-C to assign the REMAINING ships as per your overriding strategy and mission properties. (He won't touch what you have manually created).
Option f. Do all fleets and movement orders yourself.

Your own and the 2-I-Cs decisions can be undone - in to or for individual fleets - and the orders are only locked in when you say so. Essentially this is all possible because I have exposed many of the routines that your computer opponent uses when making decisions. So you can take advantage of all this computer power, through your 2-I-C. But many players will of course want to put their own stamp on things, in whole or part. The choice is always yours. Also, when a campaign is created, your computer opponent can be given either a 'historical' or a randomly assigned strategy to follow; in the latter case you will not know what his approach will be, maybe until it is too late! We have tried to automate all the grudge work - the calculation of fuel usage etc etc and leave you with the real decisions. In this way, and given the range of command levels, making decisions for a turn can take less than a minute, or it can take a number of minutes, mainly in thinking time (as the interface is easy) - it all depends on you. Then, when the operational orders are all made and the turn is being calculated - hour by hour - you can even go in and make some tactical responses as well. There are two kinds of tactical responses:

a. Land based and carrier air strikes: abort, accept or modify recommended strikes that your AI has set up for you.
b. Surface fleet responses - accept or modify your AI's recommendations for your fleets to ignore, intercept, shadow or avoid known enemy fleets.

But again, this is a choice - you don't have to do these tactical responses. Your AI is more than capable.

[DaddyTorgo]

wow...sounds interesting from what you've posted here. will have to check it out...

[WSUCougar]

This one has been long in development, and these are folks who know what they're doing. Great support, too.

I'll be grabbing this when I free up some cash.

[Galaril]

Wow I downloaded the manual it is 580 pages! Want to talk about depth od options the game has over 400 types of naval and land based aircraft you can build and the game isn't even a air based game.

[DaddyTorgo]

580 pages?? wow!

[DaddyTorgo]

i got some gift-cash, so i might have to check this out. i'd love to see a demo or some initial first impressions before plunking down my cash though

[Galaril]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

i got some gift-cash, so i might have to check this out. i'd love to see a demo or some initial first impressions before plunking down my cash though

Daddy,

The developer has said no demo will be released but they do have a really good media pack AAR for download see LINK:
http://www.navalwarfare.info/files/S...MEDIA-PACK.zip

[DaddyTorgo]

yeah - i needta DL that media pack AAR and check it out later today. and also prolly wait for first impressions from folk here maybe