I bought into the alpha for this and it’s pretty good.
Right now none of the campaign modes are available, so it’s a set of “Naval Academy” scenarios where you’re told what the situation is, then left to build ships to deal with it.
Admittedly the situation is almost always “sink these ships” but it’s a Dreadnought game, that’s to be expected.
The range of those scenarios right now goes from trying to swarm an enemy Battlecruiser with a collection of Destroyers or Torpedo Boats, to trying to sink a large undefended convoy under a short time limit with Light Cruisers, to taking on an advanced WWII Battleship with less advanced ships of your own.
Design is done in a drydock view where you start with a set amount of cash, then pick hull type and add components to it to fit your task. If you spend less than half your money, you’ll get two of whatever ship you built and so on.
The other limiter is weight, which really piles on when you add inches of belt armour, advanced engines, multiple bulkheads, citadel and flooding protection and advanced loading mechanisms, but can be mitigated somewhat by changing fuel types and armour - Advanced versions of Krupp armour are much lighter than earlier tech options, but eye-wateringly expensive at the same time. This is where the compromise game comes in between weight and cost.
Once in game control is pretty low key. You pick speed and heading, formation and ammunition type and… that’s about it. There’s an art to using these options to get your fleet/ship into the best position to fire on the enemy fleet/ship while minimising damage, and this will become more important in the career game where the ship you’re in won’t be built exactly to meet the situation you’re in, but it’s not exactly an intensive clickfest in combat.
It is real purdy though and it’s always cool to see your ship’s terribly-placed secondary turrets unable to lay on a target because on interfering superstructure and go “that’s my fault!”
Or, you know, your design work perfectly or whatever.
Link for when the forum inexplicably breaks streamable again
https://streamable.com/atoao
There are plenty of videos on youtube right now showing the power of the ship designer for both realistic designs and those a bit more fantastic - 48 torpedo launchers on a Battleship… or fifty inches of armour… and I’m excited to see where this goes when the Ultimate General people stick a campaign mode on this.