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Originally Posted by CaptHawkeye
Do you guys ever intend to do a naval sim with direct ship control? Jutland with aspects of a naval FPS per se? I've been waiting for another Task Force 1942/Destroyer Command for years. Directors and primaries and flooding compartments oh my.
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Jim and I have discussed the idea, but if he's made a definite decision he hasn't told me.
It would be very hard, if not impossible, to introduce FPS elements into Jutland. It's not a matter of fleet size, which of course can easily be made as small as possible. It has to do with the AI and game balance, both of which would have to function very differently than they do now.
In our games, you're the top brass, so your main function is maneuvering huge fleets in a well-choreographed manner. Your impact on gunnery is indirect--you put your ships into advantageous positions for numbers, guns bearing, and with regard to the sun, wind direction, etc., and you designate targets. But actually aiming and firing the guns is done by the AI. Both sides, whether human or AI, use the same AI routines for shooting, so are equally accurate (apart from situational variables, ship-specific fire control differences, etc.).
In an FPS-type game like TF1942, however, the player's high level command role is very limited and he spends the bulk of his time aiming guns. The game forces the player to do this, because when he's not aiming his guns himself, his AI gunners are rather worse shots than the enemy AI gunners. Thus, to win, the player must jump to the critical point of the battle, man the most important weapons, and take out the most threatening enemy. Repeat for the next critical point in the battle, with a quick glance at the map in between to give some simple order to his rather small fleet.
Both types of games are quite fun on their own merits. However, they don't mesh well. In the FPS games, fleet size is limited not only by the limited time the player has to command it, but also by the rate at which the AI gunners can destroy the player's ships without the player intervening. The bigger the fleets involved on both sides, the more losses the player is going to take elsewhere while he's focused on 1 duel, meaning that the odds rapidly get overwhelming against him.