Thunder Fleets is a world war 2 naval real time strategy game focusing on pacific warfare. The game has just been released and is available on iPad, PC Windows and MacOS. You can also download a demo.
Price is as low as 4,99$ (+ vat tax) for a Windows/MacOS version and 1,99$ for iPad.
Buy The Game: Visit our website Orator-games.com to buy the game you can also purchase it on Desura.
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DEMO: If you want to try it out first visit our downloads section at Indiedb.com
Looks cool, abit Battleshipsy though.... thats not a word ... you know what I mean.
Downloaded the demo and liked it, the combat between ships is entertaining and allows for good micro control and tactical maneuvering. The strategic element is also there as well in terms of capturing and holding the different regions.
It looks like quite an enjoyable rts, but I do have a few problems with it, they are all mainly to do with the controls and information the player has, these are things that could probably be fixed without much effort so hopefully you will consider patching them in.
The bar at the left side of the screen is completely unnecessary in my eyes, rts games have long just used shift+number key to define groups so I don't know why you need a bar, the same with zoom, this could just be mapped to + and - keys (it is already mapped to mouse wheel). The zoom with the mouse wheel would be much better if it would use strategic zoom like used in supreme commander (and plenty of other games and applications since). This would mean a player could zoom in on an area with just a single scroll of the mouse wheel, not the zoom + pan, zoom + pan arrangement needed now.
Knowing what orders your ships have is also a little unclear, it wasn't really explained in the demo but the nice graphics on the right side bar make it clear what each button does (that's not to say that tooltip's wouldn't be unwelcome). The issue is there is no way (as far as I can tell) to see what status the ship is currently at, i.e. can it use torpedo's or not?
Rather than having individual buttons for this it might be better to have a toggle button which will switch to show whether torpedo's can be used or not for the selected ship. If multiple ships are selected with different settings then it can simply show a split icon between allowed and not.
Continued->
The building bar at the top is also a little confusing, it says I am building one particular type of ship yet the other types progress bars continue to be built as well. Not sure if this is a bug or a gameplay feature of some sort but I thought it was a bit strange.
Finally the last little thing concerning controls is the rally point, there should be a visual indicator as to where this is when you select a HQ or shipyard.
The graphics could also probably do with a bit of a boost, the ship graphics aren't very detailed and it would be nice if the images were higher res than they are. Also if you could add some wakes behind the ships that would help a lot as well.
Sorry most of my post is about improvements but I honestly did like your game a lot, it's just these few things would very much improve it I think. There certainly doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the core gameplay which is by far the most important bit.
hmm well i enjoyed the demo but i just dont think its worth 12$ when i can find plenty of other naval rts for a cheaper price my suggestion 5$ at most
Thank you for your comments, we will take everything under consideration.
"The issue is there is no way (as far as I can tell) to see what status the ship is currently at, i.e. can it use torpedo's or not? "
You can hold ALT key or press the status bar button (the one above the map on the right) you will see small icons on each ship. Those icons inform about unit's gun and torpedo status. Green is ready to fire. Yellow means reloading. Red means that the unit will hold fire.
Alright, i just tried the demo, and here's my verdict:
*The UI is a mess and uses up much more screen space than needed. Why would you have two separate buttons for turning on/off torpedoes/cannons? Just have a single toggle button for each instead. The group buttons are also quite redundant, and they could all be made much smaller, with a more compact design.
*The demo was too short to show how the game would really play out. Even on expert, the enemy made no effort to capture any bases, and they only ever sent one ship at a time to me, which was not much of a challenge once i had a fleet of three ships or more. Also, ship classes only range from PT-boat to cruiser, i think you should have let us try some heavy cruisers, or maybe battleships too, that would have gotten me more hooked.
*The terrain is very dull and could use some more detail, such as rocks, threes or vegetation in general. You could also make more smooth beach translations in the tiling instead of steep cliffs. Perhaps, you could also make non-square zones so that you wouldn't force the terrain to consist of ugly pockets of sea surrounded by thin beach strips.
*This game really need some subs!