We have often emphasised realism when we explain what Naval War: Arctic Circle will be all about.

Your units are not mere abstractions of existing ships and aircraft; we will model the actual capabilities of existing military units to a quite high degree. Large surface ships like the Arleigh Burke class destroyer carry a virtual arsenal of weapons and sensors capable of targeting any platform, while smaller corvette or costal patrol craft have a much more narrow application.

When you launch aircraft, you will already have fitted them for a specific objective. If you equip your F-35s for an air superiority mission, they will be incapable of taking on surface targets before you land and refit them. There is no way in real life that a strike plane could carry a dozen anti-ship missiles (it’s a simple matter of weight ratios!), and in Naval War the same fact applies.

Still, we should always be hesitant to speak about realism in a game. If you lose in Naval War, you’re not going to find yourself swimming in the North Sea. And there are many, many aspects of modern naval warfare that we think is not going to be very fun in a game that is primarily an entertainment product.

We love the fact that a game like Dwarf Fortress actually exists, but I doubt many players would be thrilled at the prospect of having to ensure that the toilets on the aircraft carrier were regularly cleaned and resupplied with toilet paper, that routine maintenance was carried out on every technical component on a ship, or that sailors and crew were supplied with varied leisure activities and entertainment.  Most of you are probably happy we left this out of Naval War.

There are also a lot of aspects of naval warfare that we are currently deciding to leave out, even though these issues are easy to implement and will add to realism, simply because they will make playing more of a chore and less fun. For example, aircraft take off into the wind. Thus, in real life, an aircraft carrier will have to be manoeuvred before launching planes.  This inconvenient fact of physics is, in this version at least, eliminated for the sake of gameplay.

Aircraft readiness is another issue. On an airfield or a carrier, aircraft can be in varioues readiness levels, ranging from standing at the start of the runway with idle engines to being mothballed and stored deep inside some remote part of the hangar with no fuel or munitions. Obviously, this seriously influences how much time it will take to get this plane airborne. And, in fact, we have implemented such a system with four levels of readiness in the game engine, only to discover upon some further thought that this will be a chore for the player and, most importantly, a user interface nightmare. A Nimitz-class carrier can carry almost a hundred aircraft! There is no way to make a slick, intuitive user experience with managing the readiness levels as well as the current load out on so many units, moving them between states, all the while realising that any change will further delay launch. So, in this version of Naval War, all planes are either ready to take off at quite short notice, or they are still being fuelled and refitted.

Designing a game like Naval War is a continuous trade-off between realism and gameplay.  As we strive towards a reasonably realistic experience for players, we always keep in mind that gameplay is king.