[neilbyrne]

Lexandro, thanks for the rec on Victory at Sea. I finally got around to looking at it on Steam. It doesn't appear from the reviews to be what I'm looking for tho.

The largest departure from reality appears to be the gunnery accuracy which is the mistake the surface games that I've played have made. Naval gunfire is the furthest thing from a death ray you can imagine. Hit probabilities at what you would normally think to be mean hitting ranges run in the single digits percentage wise.

This was one of the issues with the gaming folks when we talked a realistic WWII surface game. "No one wants to fire a half dozen broadsides and come away with one hit or none." One of their solutions was to have three modes of play. An arcade like GUI where the player aims himself and is rewarded with hits based on his hand/eye coordination similar to the way SH handles gunfire. The second mode would be probabilistics driven via a data base populated with actual stats where available and then a third mode which would allow the player to determine by what percentage increase he wanted to corrupt the second mode to feature more hits than would be historical. Of course we never got that far.