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Originally Posted by RedChico
Are you going to provide the full 1914-18 "campaign"?
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I'm afraid not. It's just too big to be done within the time, budget, and manpower available.
WW1 in the North Sea can be thought of as having 3 distinct eras: 1914-1915, 1916, and 1917-1918. In the beginning, there were a lot of predreads and old cruisers still around, very few ships had advanced fire control, and torpedoes had relatively low performance. In the middle, what Jutland covers, most of the old ships were gone, most capital ships had advanced fire control, and torps had medium performance. In the end, nearly all ships had some form of advanced fire control, a lot of new ships had come into service, most existing ships had been modified more or less extensively, torps had relatively high performance, and gun elevations were increased.
When looked at from the POV of game development, each of these eras represents about the same amount of work, at least in terms of making models and amassing ship and weapon data. In fact, while we only have to built the game engine from scratch once, there were enough technological, doctrinal, and tactical changes between these eras to warrant some rather large tweaks to it for each timeframe. IOW, making a full-year campaign would have taken nearly 3 times as long as it took to make just 1916.
Thus, we concentrated on 1916, for the Jutland timeframe. We hopefully will release expansion packs in the future that will have new ships, as well early- and late-war versions of existing ships. We don't know if we'll make campaigns including these ships yet or not, but they will at least be useable along with the existing ships in the scenario editor. Time and money permitting, we might also go to different theaters or time periods.