Battleship Management Game Idea

[SckizoBoy]

One thing, and it bugs me every time people do it... but tactics =/= strategy. Naval strategy as a game is remarkably boring, especially when talking about WWII... naval tactics, on the other hand...

But anyway, pedantry aside...

I'd rather this was a pseudo-roleplay as a progressing officer (culminating as being the most senior flag-officer-at-sea). Starting out as a lt-cmdr (commanding a single ship, tutorial level, basically), and moving through cmdr/capt/cdre/various levels of adm with the potential of going through a couple of different routes whether it's remaining as an escort commander (a la Spruance before Halsey outed him) or going straight for capital ship command, with increasing levels of ship complexity and ship numbers, or staying with just the one ship in simpler campaign modes (serving as a flag captain etc.). This can go with 'retinue' officers (chief engineers, CAP commanders, gunnery etc. etc.) to affect the ship handling aspect in question.

Ship management (at least on the level that you want to have it), I don't think, is sufficiently compelling to grab a wide enough audience, but naval combat in the vein of Total War (Empire/Napoleon/FotS) can be somewhat dry with chances of blowing up or suffering crit hits being a dice roll and pausing to repairs being the only real 'management' thing. While of course it'd be impractical to implement a ship level combat system similar to Black Flag/Odyssey/Skull & Bones without a dual control mode for top-down view to monitor tactical situations. Complexity is great, but it can turn a lot of people away when it is, on the face of it, magnificently banal. A simple system interlinking the various working parts of a ship could very well work without being too intrusive to the main intention of the game for you to evolve a ship or fleet into the scourge of the oceans and trashing people in open sea battle.

The one downfall of all this, though, is that WWII was the advent of aircraft carrier combat, and by 1941, battleships ceased to be relevant. So fuckers like me who know about naval history will just gun for four ship types and screw everything else (fleet carriers, heavy cruisers, destroyers and submarines and standardise all task forces into two carriers, four to six cruisers, six to eight destroyers and maybe a dozen submarines with half of them acting independently) well aware that were I to play as anything remotely Japanese, I'll take one look at the Yamato-class of ships and go 'nope, CONVERSION TIME!!' or just never play as anything German (Graf Zeppelin, you poor poor bastard), so there needs to be some balance around this or the management takes a back seat to going 'how the fuck do I make my airgroups absolute bitches?!'

[Pominator]

It certainly seems like an idea that would have a lot of interest in a niche market, as you mentioned FTL, which is the first thing that came to mind, I could easily see subset work on something like this, perhaps with timed turns as different issues on the ship have to be fixed in a limited amount of time as you perform minor interface tasks, such as unscrewing, riveting and patching parts of the hull as you perform movement commands to keep the ship afloat.

I would like to see an idea like this expanded on, especially as a roguelike, with several problems compounding as more and more systems begin to fail.

[oddvikingstudios]

Hello, Odd Viking Studios here. I like your idea a lot and I agree; there just simply aren't enough good WWII games - and certainly none of the genre you're eluding to, which I'm seeing as a battleship-esque game. I enjoy it, definitely. I like the choice you're giving, the depth of decision making and it has the possibility to be quite simple to program despite being such a complex idea. I certainly am thinking about gathering the team and talking about this idea, because it's a good one. I've always been morbidly fascinated with WWII for the history behind it (no, not just the dreaded part we don't name here), and I think something like this would really have the potential to put players in the mindset of the soldiers that had to go through such a time, especially when at war at sea. Realism and branching dialogue/decisions seem to be key here. I hope you keep this one and see about working on it for yourself, I guarantee you can do it! There are plenty of free resources out there if you're genuinely wanting to learn and I'm more than happy to help you out in finding them. Cheers!