Thursday, September 20, 2012

Steam and Iron The Great War at Sea - Patch V1.30 and Baltic Campaign Beta - Released

The developers of Steam and Iron continue to improve their great naval wargame, which now is updated to version 1.30. I haven't quite followed the recent developments and I was floored when I got news about a campaign system.

The beta Baltic campaign features the Germans against the Russians. Here is the main screen where you deploy your warships and spend your operation points (fuel and other logistic assets) by activating them. You then have to assign objectives to these ships and the engine will create scenarios for one week worth of operations.
In this campaigns I got a very limited amount of assets and had to rely in light cruisers to accomplish my objectives. I could only bombard some land targets during my first week of operations.

From the manual:


The Campaign Simulator puts you in command of a theatre in WW1 under a number of years. You
plan the operations of the fleet under your command, select objectives and decide on what ships to
employ out of the available forces, and how to organize and employ them. You will then command
them in SAI scenarios and hopefully bring them safely back to port.

The campaign takes place in weekly campaign turns. Each week, you will get the opportunity to plan
an operation and compose the forces with which to carry it out. You do not have to conduct an
operation, and can stay in port, for example to save operations points (see below). However, even if
you stay in port, it is entirely possible that the enemy will conduct their own operation, and that you
will have to react to it by sending out ships from port (see Emergency activation below).

Each turn you also have the opportunity to train ships or send them to dockyard for maintenance.

When you are finished with your operational planning, press ‘turn’ to start the scenario.

Note that campaign scenarios cannot be ended before all your ships are back in port or sunk.

When a campaign scenario is finished, you have the opportunity to study the results and track charts.
When you are finished, just close the main scenario window. You will then get notice of any
reinforcements, and then be sent back to the campaign planning screen.


It is a beta and it will require a lot of love (some un-handled exceptions spotted today) but this game is heading in a very exciting direction.

Cheers,

2 comments:

Jerry said...

JC, how are you liking Steam & Iron? I am very tempted to pick it up.

JC said...

Absolutely fantastic game. The value of this game is on realistic WWI naval warfare, tactics, damage and command. As you have seen in the screenies, there are no 3D graphics or other flashy stuff.

I wish I would have the time to review it. I am playing this over the weekend and I will post some more.

Cheers,