Naval Campaigns - Jutland 4.04

Gary McClellan is our guest author today, and is our lead scenario designer for the Naval Campaigns series. I (Rich) will interject a few things here and there as well.

Generally, update cycles are driven by major program changes or a new game release. The Naval Updates this time around are largely content based, rather than programming. That said, there are some engine changes included to align with the company-wide changes and one exceedingly important change that we managed to work in, which I’ll talk about at the end (as well as a few quality of life improvements elsewhere.) Note: This will require a full clean install. Further details at the end of the blog post.

For the Naval Games, I’ve had three “someday” projects in mind, and this gave us an opportunity to turn someday into today.

1. Database fixes (primarily for Jutland and Tsushima)
2. Campaigns
3. Tsushima Expansion

So, let’s take a look at each of those in turn.

Database Fixes: While there are a few tweaks to individual ships, the key update to Jutland and Tsushima lies in the way that torpedoes are handled. In those two games, torpedoes were relatively generic. The game fundamentally dealt with torpedoes as salvos instead of individual tubes. Also, there was no meaningful distinction between the different kinds of torpedoes that were used by a side. However, when NC 3 Guadalcanal came out, a new system was introduced. Each ship was rated by the number of torpedo tubes and the individual characteristics of the torpedoes were modeled (such as range, speed and explosive power.) However, the older games were never retrofitted, until now.

All ships (including the ships from the expansion pack) are now rated for torpedo tube locations, and also for torpedo types. No longer are all torpedoes from a given side identical. Some ships carried larger launchers, and some ships of the same nation had smaller launchers (18” and 21” were common.) Each of those torpedoes is rated to its own characteristics.

In doing this, some rather interesting things about these ships came out of the woodwork. For instance, in the picture below, the British Pre-Dreadnought has torpedoes firing in three different arcs. The usual and expected port and starboard, but also aft. There are even some ships that have both fore and aft torpedoes.

Aside from bringing the two oldest games more in line with the more recent offerings, it also gives a fair bit more flavor to all the ships.

Note: A portion of the next section applies to Jutland, but also to the other games in the series which will be getting their 4.04 updates in a couple of weeks.

Campaigns: The Campaign feature was introduced to this series pretty late in the JTS development cycle, with the release of Wolfpack in 2019. Kriegsmarine came out under the WDS banner and included campaigns upon release, but the other games in the series only included the programs to make running a campaign possible. No actual campaign files had been built. The intent there was to allow a player to build their own if they were so inclined. With the 4.04 updates that is all changing, so every full game in the series will have at least one campaign to play.

I’ve been working on what I call “Random Campaigns” for all the games, though that is a bit of a misnomer. They are not really campaigns, but instead a way for players to fight semi-random battles using the campaign interface. One challenge I’ve always felt with our games is that players are just too familiar with what’s going on out there. If you’re playing Midway, you know that there are 3 USN CV out there (or 4 IJN CV and 2 CVL). Admirals didn’t always have that good of intelligence, Nagumo certainly didn’t!

So, the purpose of these campaigns is to put you into a situation where you honestly don’t know what’s out there. If you’re playing Wolfpack, you might be commanding a convoy against a single U-Boat, or a group of them. Or, if you are the German there just might be a CVE lurking to make your life much more interesting. If you’re a US commander in Guadalcanal, your battleships might be facing the Japanese battleline, or pretty much every last Japanese Cruiser, complete with enough Long Lance torpedoes to ruin your whole day.

There was already one of these in Kriegsmarine, but I’ve added them for the rest of the games. Now, there’s actually two random campaigns in Guadalcanal. One using 1942 and earlier ships. The other is based on late 1944 ships, so you just might have that Iowa vs Yamato fight you’ve always wanted. The other game I wanted to mention was Jutland. Because of all the different fleets in the expansion, I actually created 40 different scenarios. You may get a fairly standard Britain vs Germany. Or you may get Austria-Hungary vs Italy. Or Turkey vs Russia. You get the idea. Have fun!

Tsushima Expansion: This is probably the biggest single item in the updates. Tsushima is the smallest non-demo game in the WDS lineup, with just a handful of scenarios based on 3 actions. Rich and I have talked for years about the need for some kind of expansion for the game, and I’d even started to set some ideas down. However, when Rich mentioned the update to me, I looked harder at the Russo-Japanese War, and lo and behold, options began to open up to me. Honestly, there was a lot more going on in the war than the initial game dealt with. The original game focused on three battles: Yellow Sea, Ulsan and Tsushima.

However, the naval aspect of the Russo-Japanese War was considerably busier than those three battles. One of the most important aspects of the war is that both sides were on rather dubious logistical lines. The Russians had the Trans-Siberian Railroad, but it was very new at the time, and not entirely finished. They could send men and supplies to the war, but it was always going to be fairly slow going. On the other hand, the Japanese could get troops and supplies to the front lines much more quickly, but the vulnerable point was the sea transit from Japan to Korea. In fact, that was highlighted in one action where the Russian Vladivostok Squadron nailed an unescorted transport heading to Korea which was carrying reinforcements for the Imperial Guard Division as well as a battery of super-heavy artillery for the Siege of Port Arthur. Sinking that single ship delayed the fall of the city for months.

So, when the war started, the initial Japanese goal was to neutralize the Russian Fleet in Port Arthur, and then sweep the Russians out of the area before the full weight of Russian reinforcements could turn the war against them. The failure of the initial attacks on Port Arthur (Scenarios #1 and #2, as well as the Port Arthur Mini-Campaign) left the Japanese in a difficult position. They needed to blockade the Russians in the port, while still detailing enough forces to keep an eye on the Cruiser Squadron based at Vladivostok.

>>> We're going to snip this segment right here and leave that as a teaser for what is to come. There will be a lot more content about what's included in that expansion with the next blog post when the balance of the updates are released.

Other items: I mentioned that this patch cycle is not primarily about programming changes, but there are a few. In testing, we noticed that secondary guns can set off Critical Hits, so we corrected that. Also, we’ve made some small changes in the way aircraft are handled in Midway and Kriegsmarine. The big one there is that you can now manually aim your torpedo plane’s launches, instead of just relying on the AI to do it for you.

You can read the changelog for this 4.04 update here. And see the updated Jutland Design Notes.

Critical Hits: We did work one major update into this patch cycle however. Ever since the release of Jutland, the way Critical Hits has worked has been controversial. In game terms, a “Critical Hit” is a hit that causes a magazine explosion, leading to the sudden destruction of the ship. Warships of the era carried enormous amounts of ammunition and propellant, and fire and explosion was an ever present threat. It’s not difficult to find examples of ships that exploded in the wars.

Of course, one of the first examples that comes to mind is Jutland, and the loss of three British Battlecruisers. As Jutland was the first of the Naval Campaign games, John had this very firmly in mind in creating the game. Unfortunately a “one size fits all" system was implemented to replicate this. Each side was rated to its vulnerability to this kind of hit, and that applied to all their ships in the battle.

That is not entirely accurate. For instance, Battlecruisers are generally going to be more vulnerable than Battleships because they tend to have less armor, including over key spaces such as turrets and magazines. However, the Battleships of the Grand Fleet were saddled in game with the same vulnerability as the Battlecruisers, which led to considerable comment back then, and still does now.

In this update, we are introducing a new system. Now, each class of ship is rated for Vulnerability to Critical Hits. So, a British Battleship is much less prone to receive a Critical Hit than a Battlecruiser. There is always a risk, but it’s much, much lower now.

In looking at this, one of the things that jumped out at me is the number of ships that exploded after a torpedo hit. For instance, in the picture above, the HMS Barham is seen exploding after being torpedoed by U-331. So now, torpedo and mine strikes are also capable of causing magazine explosions.

As the new values are in the ship database, it won’t be as easy to mod them to your own taste, but we will listen closely if you can give us good reasons why you think that values are off (especially with specific design details of a given ship class.)

(Images can be clicked for full size viewing.)

The Future: Following this update cycle it will be a bit before we circle back to the Naval Campaigns games, but I assure you that we’re not abandoning them. For instance, I mentioned earlier that I was already blocking out an expansion idea for Tsushima when Rich approached me. Well, guess what, this expansion isn’t what I had been thinking about. No promises here, but as the opportunity arises, I’d still like to circle back to that one. And, we likely have another full game or two up our sleeves...

I hope that you enjoy the expansions to our naval games, and look forward to the future. 

Beginning with the Squad Battles updates, then progressing through most of our catalog and now the Naval Campaigns updates, we have been requiring a complete clean install of your games to get the new version. There's a variety of reasons for this - core changes to file formats (moving to PNG files in some cases), new infrastructure for future A/I enhancements, Windows 11 compatibility changes and the enormous size many of the updates have grown to be. (Jutland was over a 300 MB update -  Guadalcanal was going to be almost 570 MB!) Regarding this last point, many of the updates were retaining backwards compatibility with ancient installers, in some cases back to the HPS days. This required inclusion of a huge amount of files, and in some cases an additional batch file to reorganize everything into the new file structures. It was getting problematic on several points, not the least of which was some security software packages were blocking the batch files from running.

So, these fresh installs will resolve all of those problems in one fell swoop. You uninstall your existing copy of the game using the built in Windows "App Management" feature in the Control Panel. You then do a clean install of the game and everything is in its proper place and completely up to date. 

We will be doing this for every game series we publish, in time - if all goes well during the course of 2024. Once the new "base line" is established we will begin to offer incremental updates again on the site. These will only include files changed since that new baseline for that series. Accordingly, you must do the newest clean installs if you intend to use future updates, as they will not work with older sets of files. With that said, you can ALWAYS do a clean install at any time, and the installer linked in your Store Account is the most recent version.

So, again, how do you get these new versions? 

Log in to your Store Account to download a new full installer. 

Notes regarding Store Accounts.

1. If you go to login using one of the above links and it tells you "no account found" - don't worry! Just send us an email at the Help Desk and we will locate your records. It's just a matter of completing the account setup process.
2. When you login you will see all your orders listed there. Under each order number is the word (Downloads). If you click on that it will take you to a page where you can do a new download of the game and it will also display your serial number. Again, each of the installers is fully up-to date with the latest patches already included.

We will close today with a sampling of screen shots from the latest version of Jutland. This package brings 5 new stand alone scenarios to the mix and an additional 40 scenarios that are pulled for the Random Campaign feature. 

If you would like to discuss this update or any of the games in this series, head on over to the Naval Campaigns section of the WDS Forums.

Remember, log in to your Store Account to download new full installer of Jutland 4.04. Or, if you don't already own it, head on over to the Jutland product page to pickup a copy!

We hope you enjoy this update. Barring any major problems, the rest of the series will be updated within the next two to three weeks.