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Put simply I was wondering if there were and naval games where you could customize your ship and whatnot.

I remember playing one on PS2 once...
As of now i can only remember the Battlestations Midway/Pacific games but you can't customise your ship on that...

Maybe some Sid Meier game, Alpha Centari was big on customization and had naval units, but its not a naval game exclusively.

Any ideas?


P.S. Bump

there are some older games (Age of Sail) as well as the MMO Pirates of the Burning Sea, but not much recently.

I played a few SciFi "naval" games with emphasis on ship customization/management.

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. Great game if you like Homeworld 1/2. Plus it's got three dimensional movement.

Gratuitous Space Battles. Title pretty much sums up the game. You have to design every ship you field.

Not to sure on traditional water naval games, though.

avantgarde wrote:I played a few SciFi "naval" games with emphasis on ship customization/management.

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. Great game if you like Homeworld 1/2. Plus it's got three dimensional movement.

Gratuitous Space Battles. Title pretty much sums up the game. You have to design every ship you field.

Not to sure on traditional water naval games, though.

I'll have to check out that Gratuitous Space Battles

No mention of Homeworld?

Pacific theater of operation four had a ship builder feature. You customized, kind of, what it looked like and choose armor and weapon capabilities for it. You didn't get direct control of the ship, it was a distant rts, but it might be worth a shot.

I'll second homeworld 1 and 2 more 2 with the complex mod installed, brilliant.

Avantgarde by the mention of nexus I assume you have played it ? what are your thoughts ?

Played it way back when it came out. Great game especially if you like watching space battles.

You start with one dinky ship and end up with a small fleet by the end of the campaign. You manage your ships' load out/crew before each mission and you can kit them for a specific job like long range bombardment, electronic warfare etc.

I really liked the way they dealt with movement in space. Instead of having a fixed plane with altitude like Homeworld, you use set navigation points or points of interest in the game to tell your ships where to move. So if you want to move towards an enemy ship you set that ship as the destination. If you want to approach it at a certain angle (like from behind so you get a clear shot at their engines) you move to a point that sets up the approach and then move toward the enemy ship. It seems kind of limiting at first but there's enough points on a map so that it doesn't feel that way.

Only gripe is the larger fights tend to be frustrating since you have to manage multiple ships at once. Like assigning which systems have priority for repair, which weapons get the most juice from ship reactors, movement and what to target with what weapon.

Also don't fly through minefields, they will feth you up.

Silent hunter is a great naval game. Not much on actual ship customization but every crewman has his own stats and can be assigned to different duties. Very naval, open world and very satisfying when you manage to sink a ship with your torpedoes.

Empire and Napoleon Total War come to my mind. Awesome graphics, epic, realistic battles set in the 18th century.



However, these games are not purely oriented towards naval battles. I would even say the land battles are explored more in depth. But naval combat is still epic in these games.

But you can't really customize your ships in this game.

There is also the Warship Gunner...I haven't played them myself, but they always looked interesting. Supposedly, you can completely customize your ships in the game:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ops:_Warship_Gunner

^That was the one i remember playing a long time ago... you could customise everything and its dog. Was a touch to complex for me back then since i was pretty young^

Anyone remember Silent Service on the Amstrad?

go for Online games you will get plenty.