Anime Her Majesty's Ship - 18th century warship management

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

http://www.everysinglesoldier.com/hms.html

Her Majesty's Ship sails out of alpha.... and into Port Beta

HMS recreates the life aboard an 18th century Royal Navy warship, with the player assuming the role of master and commander.
The primary objective of the game is to be promoted to Admiral of the Fleet, without having any mutiny nor losing the vessel.
The player will receive tasks from the admiralty which will need to be executed in order to get the desired promotion.
Along the way, the player will be challenged with various tasks and tempted with targets of opportunity, whilst keeping the crew happy and not ending with a mutiny.
The game is set in a fictitious world, based largely on the Caribbean, with the player commanding a British ship of the line, the arch enemy being Spain. In addition, the neutral power of Holland is also present as well as the hostile Portuguese.
The narrative unfolds in real time on your PC and iPad, adding drama and tension into this themed naval simulation.
The boardgame narrative wil be card driven.

The player starts as a Lieutenant aboard a frigate , as the player progresses through the higher ranks the ships will get bigger as well as the tasks more complex.

The boardgame and digital version of the game can be played as Co-Op, whereby each player is in the same navy and compete to get to Admiral of the Fleet or Multiplayer mode whereby they can actually attack each other along the journey to being first to Admiral of the Fleet.

Features :

• Progress from captaining a Frigate all the way to a first rate Ship of the Line
• Outplay on Co-Op or Mutliplayer to become Admiral of the Fleet
• Fight the Spanish and Pirates on the high seas
• Real time ship and crew management
• Take Midshipmen onboard and make them Officers in the Royal Navy
• Train your crew and promote them to to increase effectiveness
• Keep the crew from mutiny and at the same time ensure your career is on track
• Raid towns, build forts and press gang new sailors into service
• Manage your stores of food, rum, gunpowder and gold

 

[Zarniwoop]

Sounds interesting.

if they make a Franklin Expedition scenario.

Although it does seem pretty much EXACTLY like the Port Royale games...

 

[Haba]

Will it include realistic buggery simulation?

 

[BrotherFrank]

Disappointed, the true path to becoming an admiral should involve never actually sailing, spending all your time sucking off politicians and investing your money into fancier uniforms and the shiniest paint for making your ship and crew look pristine come inspection time.



Seriously though, idea sounds cool, let's see how it goes.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Arrowgrab]

I want to point out that the the captain in the video was giving the order "Ship to ladeboard!" instead of "Ship to port!", which suggests the developers actually did some research. I liked that little detail.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Would be blast if not so fictionalized and devs made some research and not put XIX century union jack onto XVI ships, not to mention nobody even dreamed about blue navy uniforms then. Portugal was an ally not enemy of perfidious Albion since 1640 (shame on them) and so on. Would love to play game when you are valiant Captain of Spanish Galleon and blow to hell the Drake and his heretic pirate cohorts but what can you expect.

 

[Storyfag]

RN at it's best? Gimme.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/688660/announcements/detail/3495260503246396440

Beta Access
18 Feb @ 6:21pm - HMS_DEV1
Hello!

While we're doing our best do deliver the game for you as soon as possible, we could use your help! If you'd like to support the game and become a beta tester for HMS, please fill out the form below. For the next few days we'll be collecting your applications and very soon we'll start sending over access codes.
https://goo.gl/forms/EuYcIKcXbxPRpzkE3

Thank you,
HMS Dev Team

 

[Space Satan]

How many of those "ship simulators" we already saw? How many of them reached 1.0?

 

[Nutria]

This is the guy who delivered Vietnam '65 and Afghanistan '11. He knows what he's doing.

 

[Burning Bridges]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Will it include realistic buggery simulation?

https://pelit.fandom.com/fi/wiki/Åkesoft

Spoiler

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/06/21/the-flare-path-invisible-hulls/

The Flare Path: Invisible Hulls
HMS previewed. Steel Beasts 4.1 discussed

Tim Stone

Contributor

21st June 2019 / 1:00PM

There was a nasty moment early on in my relationship with HMS when I thought me and Johan Nagel’s latest weren’t going to get on. In my first hour with the beta of this highly original turnless Hornblower-em-up I experienced five game-curtailing mutinies. Even on the lowest difficulty setting I couldn’t make progress. Baffled disbelief was fast becoming sulky defeatism when the doubloon finally dropped. An email exchange with the designer and a second look at the tutorial and suddenly I was out of the doldrums and surging ahead.

Small changes to that tutorial prompted by my experience should mean your first sixty minutes with the due-on-July-12th HMS aren’t dominated by frustration. Unlike me you should realise very early on that the hammock is far more important than the rum barrel or the galley stove when it comes to keeping sailors chipper. Keep your crew up all night tending sails, manning cannons, scrubbing decks or doing any of the other myriad duties an 18th Century warship generates, and their mood will sour faster than sun-warmed milk. Grasp this simple, logical fact and HMS should grow on you the way weed grows on an unsheathed frigate hull.

Pacy and taut, HMS is no historical simulation. Although the events and dilemmas that come thick and fast regularly bring to mind Hornblower, Bolitho, and Aubrey novels, the ‘Caribbean’ charts you crisscross are complete fantasies and the speed of actions like repairs and fort-building massively accelerated. Your aim is to climb to the top of a greasy career pole faster than an AI-controlled captain of an enemy nation. You gain promotion points by completing a succession of randomly-generated Admiralty and ship-related tasks, and through opportunistic privateering and port raids. Failures in any these areas haemorrhage PPs as quickly as successes garner them.

Admiralty missions take various forms – interceptions, escort details, port visits, fort construction expeditions… – all of which require relatively time-consuming voyages on the chart screen. Ship tasks – maintenance, cleaning, punishments, men overboard, gun drills etc. – are set in motion with single mouseclicks in the cutaway ship view and are usually done and dusted in under a minute assuming you have the requisite manpower available. An ingenious system of flags makes keeping track of in-progress and outstanding jobs easy.

If the competing pressures of time-limited chores and missions weren’t sufficient mental stimulation, Nagel also packs the decision space with a host of less clear-cut distractions. Your vessel needs to be kept supplied with food, rum, and gunpowder. Crew morale must be monitored and bolstered, combat and accident casualties healed or replaced, officer training attended to. Boredom has about as much chance of surfacing during an HMS session as a wayward cannonball had of surfacing during the Battle of Trafalgar.

The intensity – the myriad competing concerns – come close to overwhelming at the start. Until I got my sea legs – until I realised that it was madness to try to execute every Admiralty order – I remained rooted to the foot of the six-rung career ladder. Once I learned to pick and choose directives and indulge in a little privateering when opportunities arose, my fortunes steadily improved.

Last night I made commodore for the first time and was rewarded with a new ship. Larger and better-armed, HMS Unnameable (Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a way to christen craft or pick and choose paintjobs and figureheads) has sufficient room for marines, musket-armed redcoats who assist in engagements and permit certain actions like port capturing, raids, and fort building. Not long after this pleasing development I had the equally gratifying experience of seeing one of my officers, carefully trained over several hours of play, gain his first command, the ship appearing as a commandable RTS-style unit on the chart screen. Significant progression-linked changes like these bode well for the long game.

Combat is one area where the colourful HMS feels a tad insipid. When two hostile ships meet on the chart, a simple dice duel is triggered. Tactical input basically boils down to “How many cannons do you want to fire?” (Each cannon adds +1 to your roll). The choice is complicated by personnel and gunpowder availability, and the results can include interesting situations like mutual maulings, but many of the factors that influenced Age of Sail scraps are ignored. In a game dominated by warfare, unengaging engagements would be a major issue. Because HMS battles are brief interludes in far more colourful peaceful passages of play, their simplicity is, I would argue, no great handicap.

For every minute you spend trading iron spheres you probably spend thirty studying the storm and wreck dotted chart, purchasing provisions and pressganging sailor in ports, and working to keep your ship happy and efficient. Is it worth antagonizing the currently neutral Dutch by seizing another one of their merchants (When sufficiently riled the Netherlanders unleash The Flying Dutchman, a fearsome first-rate ship of the line)? Should you forego a flogging so that your ship is sure to reach a rendezvous in time? Is morale sufficiently high to withstand some nocturnal repairs prior to a brush with a pirate tub – a pirate tub that is hopefully still suffering the ill-effects of a clash with a Spanish warship (At times AI ships attack each other)? In HMS a captain’s bicorn hat invariably encloses a busy cranium.

In early prototypes, the player’s ship and crew were grubby and gloomy. The switch to a 3D Playmobil aesthetic wasn’t universally popular – not in these parts anyway – but over the past couple of days I’ve warmed to the bright colours. The day-night cycles, details like circling sharks, and some nicely written and performed vocal cues, contribute to atmosphere not obvious from the screenshots. The way some of the cues are delivered is pure Ioan Gruffudd and all the better for it. Unfortunately, Every Single Soldier couldn’t stretch to nation-specific utterances (Spanish and French cues may come later) or a period soundtrack rich in hornpipes and shanties.

While HMS definitely isn’t the gritty weevil-sprinkled captain sim we brainstormed back in March 2017, it channels Hornblower better than anything else I’m aware of, is rammed with tough, interesting choices, and has the kind of natural momentum seldom seen in Flare Path fare. By mid-July I hope to have made Admiral of the Fleet at least once, so should be well-placed to proffer a helpful Wot I Think.

 

[Haba]

Still not playing it if I can't have my crew flogged for buggery.

 

[Nutria]

They're English though, so that goes without saying. You might as well just flog them for being English.

 

[Nutria]

It came out today. I think it's pretty good. It's got some rough edges still, like anything on day one.

The main thing to watch out for is how if your sick bay is full, then anyone who gets wounded automatically dies. This can be a major pain in the ass early on if your one officer dies that way.

But in general this turned out pretty much how I expected from everything I'd read about it. They got the pacing right, where you're under just the right amount of pressure to decide what to do in the short term and what to do in the long term.

 

[zool]

A shame they decided to go for those mobile game, cartoony graphics. Would've been interested otherwise.

 

[Nutria]

A shame they decided to go for those mobile game, cartoony graphics. Would've been interested otherwise.

Wow, we've got ourselves a fucking art critic here. Do you write for Cahiers du cinéma by any chance? I can't see real good, is this Francois Truffaut over here? Do you do appraisals for items on auction by Sotheby's?

Exactly what were you expecting? You wanted them to spend $100 million on using the Frostbite engine to make every wrinkle on the old sailors' manboobs show up in crystal clarity? Or you wanted them to make it faux-1980s pixel art so that you could identify it with your childhood, the last time in your life when you didn't hate yourself?

What kind of graphics is a game with this budget supposed to have? If you've got a better idea, you could probably make a lot of money out of it.

 

[Jack]

Exactly what were you expecting? You wanted them to spend $100 million on using the Frostbite engine to make every wrinkle on the old sailors' manboobs show up in crystal clarity?

Aesthetics doesn't require much of a budget, when you can afford to hire someone to make assets and aren't limited to programmer art and stock assets then the visual style is more or less up to the artist. Certainly the standard small indie game couldn't hope to achieve photo-realism or hand animated cartoon sprites, or any such extravagances, but that doesn't mean it can't be pleasing to the eye.

And yes, this game does have the look of a phone game. Even the UI is as if straight from some obscure free-to-play phone title.

 

[Nutria]

Even the UI is as if straight from some obscure free-to-play phone title.

The game is only being sold on Steam. The UI clearly is intended for using a mouse. Anyone who has actually played the game knows that. The developer previously made Vietnam '65 and Afghanistan '11 which were obviously not mobile games.

So what is your agenda here? Why are you so extremely butthurt? Are you yet another failed indie game developer and you're trying to tear someone else down in your impotent rage?

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

The developer previously made Vietnam '65

Vietnam '65 had a mobile port and it initially used that horrid mobile UI on PC too.
Also their game Carrier Deck has mobile version.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/carrier-deck/id1225196417

Afganistan'11 got removed from Apple store because some bullshit "no games where antagonists are real world organisations" -rule.

 

[Agame]

As Burning Bridges said, it looks like they are trying for "lego aesthetic", but the shitty knock off version that your parents bought you cos they cant afford real lego.