Playing the naval battles in Battlefield 1942 reminded of the game Battleship. In fact, using ships it is almost like a first-person version of Battleship, with the addition of planes and other bells and whistles. The map is in a grid system, and even with the game’s visibility set at max, you don’t see other ships until they are right on top of you. Scouts can mark targets for you, though, so you can use the incredible range of those big guns to shell an enemy ship from literally across the map if you are good enough (hardly anyone is).
Usually naval battles just descend into classic ‘ship-of-the-line’ type duels, in which the warships pass each other from close range and open up with their broadsides. Only takes about 2 salvoes to drop the other battleship though, and if they get their shot off before you, you better make a run for the lifeboats!
I’m good at indirect fire with artillery, but it’s hard to get anyone to call targets for you, and when they do they frequently don’t know what they are doing and you get an extreme closeup of where a tank was a minute ago.
You want a tricky BF1942 skill, take a look at torpedo bombing. You have to be flying very low over deep water and fairly slow when you release the torpedo, and if your nose angle isn’t right it will go too deep and go right under your target. It’s an easy way to take out ships once you get the feel for it, though.
Just to hijack this thread for a minute, does anybody know of a good naval sim with sailing ships, circa 1800? All I’ve seen around are too modern for my taste.
I’d really prefer something tactical, with ship-handling and gunnery and maybe even navigation, rather than big fleet engagements, but any suggestions would be appreciated.
I could always beat my brother at Battleship becase I learned you could place the destroyers diagonally, rather than just horizontally or vertically. (You had to remove the middle “peg” from the destroyer to make it work.)
Indirect fire takes a lot of cooperation. What also works well is using aircraft for reconnaisance.
Torpedo bombing is great. One perk about it is that often you can fly below the ship’s AA, few people can do it properly. I’ve never been torpedoed by a plane; well they drop it ON the plane but I’m the only one in multiplayer that uses them properly. And yes, they sink ships quick once you get the hang of it. Also torpedoes have infinite range in this game, just point and shoot
I spend time at LAN parties practicing my skills with the Jeep of DOOM, aka the Mobile Weapons Platform. Take a jeep, stash two guys with antitank rockets on the hood. You have the equivalent of a fast moving, lightly armoured tank that can deliver 4 players anywhere on the map.
On a sidenote, is anyone else having dreams about Battlefield 1942? The first time I went against the Japanese Navy singlehandedly was odd, but the fourth…
If I may be permitted to hijack this thread to Cuba, I’ve been wondering about this game. I’ve heard great reviews and have been thinking that we (me, my brother, and my brothers-in-law) should get it to play at our occasional LAN party, but everything I’ve read talks about how great it is with a dozen or so people.
Would you recommend it as a game for a group of four people? Feel free to expand.
We nickname Jeeps “Land torpedoes” because you can drive them into tanks and destroy them or any other vehicle that you collide with.
As far as a LAN game goes, this is the type of game that the more people you have, the funner it is. Though, there are several maps that would offer very entertaining 2 vs 2 dogfighting battles. Smeghead, the game is awesome. While some of the realism is taking a back seat for playability, I can honestly tell you that when I’m in a destroyer getting hounded by 3 or 4 planes, with the sky ablaze in tracers and bomb splashes all around the ship, it definitely feels like the real thing.
While the game is quite fun at times there are some drawbacks too.
Finding a good public server, with a decent ping and some players on it (but not full) can be hard at times. Often most servers are empty with a few being maxed out. Also you may get onto a server just to find out that someone is lagging the server out badly (teleporting tanks ect).
Plane wh@res. Some severs have nothing but players wanting to fly the planes-- even if your team is losing check points badly, they will never leave the planes. Some will even unbalance the teams on purpose just so they can fly around. These people are called “smacktards”.
Smacktards in general are the bain of this game. From friendly fire kills, to driving ships off the map, plane camping, foul mouthed drivel, racist names, refusal to play the game rather then screw around ect. . . Well you get the idea. Also annoying are the clan smacktards who don’t have a server, so they crash a pub and insist on being on the same team, even though the numbers are horribly unbalanced.
The lack of a patch for the numerous lag bugs, memory leaks and AI bugs. There is a long list of known issues for the game (it currently is a massive resource hog, and does not like less then powerful rigs) that has not been patched. While the promised patch is very, very late- there has been plenty of time for an expansion pack to be announced.
The singleplayer part is sad at times, due to the problems with the AI. Count on winning the war by yourself. Although the enemy tends to be a super crack shot at times.
Overall, this game has lots of promise, but the continued lack of support from the developers is annoying, as are some of the smacktards you will have to deal with.
To the guy looking for a naval combat game set near the early 19th century, have you looked at Age of Sail 2? I haven’t played it myself but it’s got some favorable reviews, and is supposedly very detailed - you have to assign crewmen to various jobs like repairing sales, raising/lowering anchor, etc., and you have a lot of variety in armament (i.e. grapeshot, chain shot, etc.) and ships (you can command several at once). The graphics in the screenshots look pretty nice too.
