Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Navies In Spaaaaaaace!

It’s official. Space is the new sea.

They’ve been interchangeable concepts for a while now, vast tracts of hostile environment which can be easily and safely traveled unless something goes terribly wrong, as it always must. Ever since Star Wars opened with lasers streaking the sky over Tatooine space has been cemented in my mind as a valid substitute for the ocean, maybe even better. After all, you can drift on the ocean for a few days on just your own power. In space it’s only a few seconds, a minute tops.

And spaceships are, by nature, submarines as well. Firefly had some of the best sub-battle moments of recent cinematic history, measured tension and the crew’s visible knowledge that the slightest mistake would be their undoing easily trumping the efforts of films like The Widowmaker. Nothing says “oppressive environment” quite like nothingness pressing all around you.

And let’s not forget that space takes a really long time to cross, and is pretty peaceful for the most part. Except when its not, and then it usually kills you.

“But Mike,” you croak, hung over from Saturday night. “We listened to the commentary for Firefly! We already know this! Why are you still talking?”

To you I say, please shut the hell up and leave my essay, sir. The rest of you bear with me. I am trying to make a point.

Naval combat has long been one of the trickiest things to manage in games, and as a result painfully few attempt to accurately recreate it. Why would they want to? It’s tense, messy and unpleasant. It’s impractical and unending, tactically tied to the control of supply lines and means of transit. No one wants to escort supply ships for twenty hours. Hell, you have trouble getting most people to watch over a single scientist for more than fifteen minutes. If you’re old enough to remember Total Annihilation you’ll remember how unpleasant it was to integrate naval forces into the rest of your army, how devastating they could be if used properly and how incredibly shitty they could be if used incorrectly. It’s no mistake that a good many maps were made for that game without so much as a lake in them. It was hard enough to form a coherent strategy without throwing navies into the mix.

This is to say nothing of how difficult it can be to make a dedicated game about naval combat. There was a time when a few of them populated the gaming market, ranging in dramatically in complexity, but they seem to have fallen off the map completely of late. While I remember everyone and their grandma playing Pirates! Gold on Sega back in the day, I can’t think of many hardcore gamers who can discuss recently released naval sims. Indeed, its hard for me, a self proclaimed huge fucking nerd, to even recall a title released in the last five years. Off the top of my head the only one that comes to mind War Plan Pacific, and a look at Wikipedia informs me that there is no article dedicated to the subject of naval combat simulators, although they’d love for me to create one. As if, Wikipedia! I’m busy!

What am I busy doing, exactly? I’m busy playing the weird ass games that have replaced naval combat simulators: the space naval combat simulators.

The first one I’ve been dealing with, which is also easily the roughest of the bunch, is Gratuitous Space Battles. GSB, or “The Game With the Single Best Title I’ve Ever Seen,” as I like to call it, is all about the lack of direct control a good naval combat simulator embraces. Even Pirates! knew that you couldn’t make a game all about posturing and give players perfect control. The sea will brook no navigator and take no master – to fight upon her is to fight her along with your foes.

GSB doesn’t really do too much with the idea of the world as a hazard, giving it lip service by forcing certain arbitrary conditions on you based on the scenario you’re playing, but it does strip out any ability you might have to navigate the world it drops you into. Instead you give your little ships orders and see how they respond to them. This layer of abstraction reminds me of the winds in Pirates!. It’s impossible to predict just how your ships will respond to your orders, although you can get a pretty good idea through study and experience, and the battle is won or lost based on how well you manage to guess just what your space captain is going to feel like doing during a given battle.

Beyond this simple layer of abstraction GSB is about big fleets clashing together and pounding the shit out of one another. It’s a refreshingly simple game with a lot going on under the hood, and the way you construct and arrange your fleet has a lot to do with just how well you’ll fare. Do you want to make zippy little bombers or zippy little interceptors out of your fighters? Should you mix the two and trust your capital ships to pick up the slack, or would that be a disaster? And what about those capital ships? Are they going to be heavily shielded beam weapon behemoths? Heavily armored, point defended auto repair sluggers? Will they have those horribly inaccurate plasma launchers affixed to them, or will they bombard the enemy with missles? Each choice can be balanced out by building another ship to accent the abilities of the other ship you’re producing, but if you lose a ship of a particular type at the wrong moment...

No game has ever driven home the importance of having a well rounded fleet of ships, each of them designed to a specific purpose, all of them working together towards a common goal, quite as well as GSB. And the layer of abstraction really does make you feel like an admiral watch your forces slug it out with the enemy. But that’s not to say that GSB is your one stop shop for all your naval space combat needs. It’s no Homeworld.

GSB doesn’t have any of the maneuvering or feigning that a great naval combat sim makes a part of its core play. It doesn’t have maneuvering, period. In fact, as far as I can tell it just has some moving bars and targets that the computer does some quick math to make decisions regarding. It rolls a 4 and your fusion beam is destroyed by an errant missle from that Empire cruiser. It rolls a six and your plucky fighter plugs that little cannon right through that thick imperial armor. It’s a game you plan and watch, not a game you play, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But players who like the delicate ballet of ships or subs in combat will come away from GSB wishing they could tell their little ships just how to fight and fire in a three dimensional environment.

Luckily there are games for those people. While I haven’t played it I understand that Star Trek Online’s naval combat system is pretty much a real time semi-cooperative version of GSB’s epic slogs, complete with nitpicky ship design and crew selection. But, like most people interested in naval combat sims, I have a job and limited money and have no desire to spend scads and scads of it on a game that insists I play it. So I’ve moved to the opposite end of the spectrum to a neat little game called Flotilla.

Flotilla is about as far from GSB as you can get without leaving space for the horrible ravages of atmosphere. There are around six ship types, each of which has pre-defined weapons and characteristics. Ships in your fleet can be outfitted with special equipment to tweak some of their numbers, to make their little missles fire more often or travel through space more quickly, but for the most part its a game about known quantities clashing in space. It should be a clinical dance around space junk wherein a rock paper scissors game plays out again and again.

But, of course, it isn’t. Flotilla is turn based in the best tradition of turn based naval combat games, wherein you plan your ship movements simultaneously with your opponent and then watch them play out in real time. This means that your every action is responding to the previous action of your opponent who is, in turn, responding to your response and attempting to anticipate your counterattack. The result is a dynamic game of cat and mouse with some of the most unexpected results possible. Choose the wrong course heading and you’ll end up running straight into a cruiser’s missles or, far more embarrassingly, straight into a chunk of debris. And most of the ships of Flotilla can’t take a whole lot of damage. Aside from the Battlecruisers they’ll fall apart after a handful of good shots, and the Battlecruisers, amazing as they are, aren’t of much use in taking down a flanking opponent. So it’s all about balancing your force against the enemy’s and jockeying for an advantage is the depths of space. Its about calculating and guessing just what your foe is going to try next and crossing your fingers that you guessed right. And let’s be frank. There are few things more satisfying than destroying an enemy fleet without taking any casualties, flooding their exhaust ports with missles and ripping through a collection of massive dreadnaughts with nothing more than a pair of destroyers, and few things more disheartening than losing your veteran ship to one poorly executed gambit.

In Flotilla naval combat is a delicate, horrible thing, accented by classical strings and nail biting sessions where your ships carry out your orders in thirty second intervals, and its one of the most profound gaming experiences I’ve had this year. A game I purchased for $10 has made me remember the appeal of games like Star Control 2 and mostly shut down by Modern Warfare 2 gear hunting sessions, and that’s nothing short of incredible. No wonder those dudes at Infinity Ward were fired. They’re getting hosed by a crazy guy in his basement.

Flotilla also takes place in a surrealist universe filled with Rastafarian cats, renegade toucans and crazed space hippos who just want to be left alone. It contains jilted navigational officers, resentful yetis and a time limit that insures that I don’t spend as much time min-maxing as I normally would. Its one of those games, like the Path, that kind of breaks gaming for me. I care less and enjoy myself more when I’m telling my destroyer how to move in Flotilla, and I find myself avoiding the “good guy” decisions I’d normally cop out with. It’s a game about accepting consequences and learning from them. It’s an amazing game.

Astute readers have likely, by now, noticed that Silent Hunter’s most recent entry was recently released and that it is a bonafide naval combat simulator. These astute readers might also be asking why I’m leaving it out of this discussion about systems representing the various elements of naval combat, and I have to admit that it is in part due to the prohibitive costs of Silent Hunter V. But the bigger part of it is Silent Hunter’s focus on interactions with the crew. Granted that is a part of a naval sim, but it’s not a part I find particularly interesting, and it’s not something I want to spend $50 on, especially if its going to be leaking all over my naval combat. Why bother with lengthy conversations with Germans when I can just blast space Reindeer out of the sky?

This is also why I omitted Silent Hunter V from my earlier list of new releases. By all indications it is a war game, but its a war game with the trappings of an RPG. Not the kind of trappings Close Combat and Myth had, wherein you were given ample opportunity to form relationships with your units and encouraged to keep them alive, but the trappings of a game like Mass Effect, where you develop your teammates largely by asking them again and again how their day was.

But this is not a time to despair. Whatever Ubisoft might be doing with the venerable Silent Hunter series, it won’t suddenly generate a dearth of naval combat simulators. You might have to look to space for some of those sims but you’ll still be able to find them, and thanks to the incredible prosperity indie developers have been experiencing in recent years you’ll be able to pick these incredible new games up at bargain bin prices. Overall it looks like indie gaming is generating something of a renaissance in quirky little titles that the mainstream developers and publishers have all but ignored, and this renaissance is nothing short of excellent for naval combat sims and people who like them, be they on sea or in space. For my money, though, I prefer the space ones.