Wot I'd like to see in Jutland
 

1. The ability to have a view from a ships bridge using binoculars or telescope.

2. To mimic the sending of orders to individual ships, divisions or fleets by wireless from the bridge of a ship (without the gods eye view). Obviously there would need to be set instructions available that an Admiral could use. example would be to select a ship from a list and have a drop down menu for course change and speed etc.

Do you think it would be possible in future upgrdes?

You can already do this. Put the camera in follow mode so it tracks the ship whose bridge you want to stand on. Then move the camera to that ship's bridge. Then hit F5 to bring up the bino view.

In WW1, they didn't have realtime radio. Radio messages were sent in code in Morse, so usually took about 20 minutes to arrive in the hands of the intended recipient. The officer wrote the text on a pad and gave it to a runner, who carried it to the wireless room. There another officer had to put it into code by hand, then give it to the radio man to type out in Morse 1 letter at a time. IF (a big if) it was received, it had to be written down letter-by-letter, then decoded, and finally carried to the bridge.

Thus, realtime ship-to-ship communications were done visually, with signal flags and blinking lights. These had very limited range in daylight, couldn't be used at night due either to being invisible or giving away your position, and the means were quite subject to destruction by flying shrapnel.

If we were to implement WW1 communications methods in the game, you'd be stuck on 1 ship for the duration. You'd only be able to give it direct orders, could only control other ships that were within visual signalling distance in daylight, and your ability to do even that would disappear quickly if your flagship got hit or even near-missed. For news of the enemy over your horizon, you'd have to rely on very lagged, often insufficient, and certainly inaccurate wireless reports from ships you couldn't control at all.

This doesn't sound like a lot of fun, so we decided not to do that. When you jump around giving orders to distant ships, consider yourself the local commander acting on your own initiative. Because there's no way the real C-in-C could tell you anything.

:rotfl:

The above is all true. So true that when I was working on my tabletop WW1 game one of my players wanted to have his column do a 180 about-turn. I pointed out that Scheer's battlegroup was the only division at that time to have actually practiced it and made it work, so If he still wanted to do it each ship after the leader had to roll a pair of dice: on a 7 or better they got the message. Anybody rolling a 6 or less had to go straight for another turn before they figured out what was going on.

It was a real mess.

Sounds like.

The Brits COULD do something similar IMHO. Turn 90^ 1 way or the other, division leaders together and the rest in the succession, and do this a 2nd time once the 1st turn was complete. These were just the standard moves to 1) get out of line back into parallel divisions, and 2) deploy into line again, only on the other wing than previously. The GF knew how to do these moves very well so I figure they could have pulled it off had they wanted.

This would result in the whole line going 180^ to its previous direction in a different arrangement than with the German method. In this version, the divisions would all be in their original order with their leaders still in front of all their subordinates, whereas the German version reversed the order of all divisions. Also, this way would take rather longer to execute. But I still think it would have worked.

Frankly, it amuses me when people try to make an already challenging game even harder to play by breaking the user interface. I mean what's the point? Why just assume that everyone else is as into masochism?

First person views in Jutland would ultimately feel kind of hollow to me, since the game engine just doesn't handle itself for that sort of thing. Sea Dogs had a cool "walk around on the deck" camera that moved with the ship. You could even control the ship from it. Now I miss that game.

Yeah, Sailor Steve, You mean doing a 180 degree "Gefechtskehrtwendung"?

Is it possible to execute this move in the game? Haven't tried it yet, but seems you would just select a division that is in line-ahead, drag the turn pointer in the opposite direction, and select "Turn Immediately" ?

yup,

command is "Division turn immediatly and reform"

Z.

Oh, absolutely. I was referring to the one where they all turn at the same time, and the lead ship then becomes tail-end Charlie. The Germans had the command ship in the middle of the column, so there it stayed no matter which way they turned.

Those crafty Germans!!

I am a masochist and proud! Anyway I still like playing the demo was just wondering if it would be possible in future to have a Bridge or deck view. I like to imagine I am Beattie or Jellicoe!

Maybe this got lost in the shuffle, but in my 1st reply I said this was already possible.

1. Select the ship whose bridge you want to stand on. Really needs to be a CL or larger because the camera doesn't go low enough for most DD bridges.

2. Put the camera in Follow mode for the selected ship. You can now deselect the ship if desired.

3. Move the camera to the bridge of your ship, or a searchlight platform, or whatever. It will now stay there due to being in follow mode. It also helps to disable ship-bobbing in the misc. display option because the camera doesn't roll with the ship.

4. Hold down F5 to bring up the binocular view. You have to be aimed at least slightly above the horizon or the binos don't come up for some reason.

5. While holding F5, use the numpad to rotate your view around as desired. As soon as you release F5, the binos go away.