Sea Power News

Hi Everyone,
You join us on an extremely exciting day! We are thrilled to end the speculation and confirm that Sea Power will be launching in Early Access this November (2024 if you have tried to block the year from your mind like me).

We really need to thank all of you for your incredible passion and support for what has become a massive project over the last few years. We know the wait has been longer than you anticipated, it’s been a long time coming for us too! Thank you for sticking with us and we can’t wait to get the game into your hands very soon!

To celebrate today’s announcement of the November 2024 release, we have partnered with the incredibly talented J.P. Ferré (after obsessively watching his DCS content) to prepare this all new ‘Release Announcement trailer’. All the footage is recorded in the game, and we hope after the little teaser last month it is a fun sneak peek of what’s around the corner.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Early Access Approach
Sea Power will be entering Early Access with a broad amount of content, namely:

• Over 20 Scenarios: Including both historical and fictional encounters
  
• Dynamic Campaign (Alpha coming in Q2/2025): An evolving theatre-scale campaign that will grow throughout our Early Access development.
  
• Mission Editor: An intuitive and flexible tool to recreate any conflict of the 60’s to 80’s Cold War era around the entire globe.
  
• Massive Cold War Arsenal: over 150 naval units, more than 60 aircraft, 130 weapon systems, and 50 different ground objects
  

We thought long and hard about Early Access, but we hope that it will allow us to foster continuous improvement together with you in this amazing community, with regular development updates and community feedback shaping the games' future.

It would really support us if you could wishlist us on Steam and if you want more informal updates, come and join us on MicroProse’s official Discord. We tend to chat on a less formal basis there, and some of you might enjoy the nerdy places the history corner explores.

It’s been massively important for us to ensure a stable and content-rich experience from Day 1 of Early Access. We really hope that the Mission Editor in particular allows your creativity to go wild (Steam Workshop integration is a planned feature, we want you guys to share your missions!). You’ll be able to create your own ‘take’ on historical Cold War era encounters or simply recreate famous battles from beloved Hollywood blockbusters. One Ping Only Pleash Vashilly!

We will have a wide array of pre-made historical and fictional Scenarios to dive into this November, with an early ‘Alpha’ version of the Dynamic Campaign also available for early playtesting and ongoing feedback.

November Roadmap
On day 1 of Early Access launch, we are going to share a production roadmap which will outline upcoming features and content for the Early Access period. It will cover off both short-term, mid, and longer-range plans. Our ongoing development will incorporate your ongoing feedback, while driving towards our intended feature goals.



Game Recap for Newcomers - Dynamic Campaign, Strategic Depth, and Immersive Cold War Realism

For new players who have recently joined our community, we thought it useful to give a quick recap on the scope of Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age.

The game brings a mix of strategic and tactical depth in realistic naval engagements across multiple global theatres including the North Atlantic, Persian Gulf, Gulf of Tonkin and the Mediterranean. Players will control ships, submarines, and aircraft; balancing the needs of local tactical combat missions and strategic theatre-scale operations.

The game’s attention to detail and historical authenticity includes advanced ship and weapon physics, sensor modelling and dynamic weather systems, all combined with richly detailed 3D graphics that bring the Cold War atmosphere to life. The entire planet is your combat playground – so our hope is to provide you with a near-endlessly replayable experience for many years to come.

Our small but super hard-working team have accumulated many years of naval simulation game experience. Our experience with designing the core gameplay of Cold Waters (and modding it until it very much broke!) has heavily influenced how seriously we take the quality and polish of Sea Power.

Get ready for an adrenaline-fueled Cold War experience and thanks for joining us on this journey!

The Triassic Team (Nils, Martin, Mek, Ivan, Daniell, Ben, Matt, Noah, Victor and Ian)

Hello Everyone, welcome to another Sea Power Dev Update. This week I join you from a suddenly autumnal UK as we gear up for September.

In a nod to summer being over Victor rejoins us from his holidays. The French really have that nailed down! Speaking for France I hope you are checking out the Paralympics, some astounding records have been broken, and a family friend of mine has picked up 3 medals so far.

One of our major focuses over the last few weeks has been finalising some exciting announcement plans with MicroProse. That kicked off this week so keep your eyes peeled over the coming weeks for the results of that! This has kept Nils, Mek, Martin and Aleksi (our fantastic music composer) amongst others really busy.

Speaking of Mek he really got his teeth into ports, two weeks ago we had 6 unique ports in two countries, those numbers are significantly higher and spread significantly further now! The ports are used by background data files to populate the world, spawn civilians, and generally make it so that the world of Sea Power feels more alive than you might have seen before.







Along similar lines Ivan and Danill have been digging their teeth into the campaign, really rationalising the stuff I started. They have the mission generation system kicking in and are going to link up with Victor for the mission finalisation and saving back to the campaign. A lot of work to do still but things are progressing.

I have been focused on UI updates, along with Ben, and also on aircraft, slowly bringing old and new systems to a good state that is pretty solid. Along the way we have updated a lot of infrastructure and got a few bugs smashed.

While we were all too busy to notice Ivan also managed to get mobile land units working. And then promptly managed to make them player controllable as well. I am not sure if that function will make it to release but I think it means that we can have moving convoys available as mission targets, which is really great news.



Then Nils got in on the act too, deciding that there really is no kill like overkill and added some custom modifications to this oil tanker. While we know it is pretty silly I think it hopefully showcases the flexibility of the vessel system and give you some ideas on the potential moddability (is that a word? Spellcheck says no) of the game.





That’s all for this week, hopefully we see you again soon in a few weeks time with lots of exciting updates!

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Sea Power: 7 Drunk Guys and a Dream (we did discuss this and we found that more of us are non or occasional drinkers than not. So I think it’s actually 7 Over Caffeinated Guys and a Dream)

Davide Pessach from MicroProse is at Gamescom 2024 showing off some of the hard work that we have put in with the MicroProse marketing team, we know that a number of content creators have been invited to have a look at the game, we have created a few bits of unique media for them to see and we really look forwards to making some more connections and showing off a bit more of our work.



Created for Gamescom 2024 this video provides a brief look across the world of Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age. Featuring air, surface, and sub-surface combat set to music composed by Aleksi Aubry-Carlson:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Ben has been working with Ivan and Nils to add some really useful drawing tools to the map, these allow snapping to tracks, points and other things, allowing you to carefully plot out what you want to do. At times it feels like we are really maybe giving you guys the tools of a modern Combat Management System in a game about the 1980s. But on the other had you don’t have a command staff of experienced officers to help you!

Mek has been making great use of the terrain modification tools, here for example you see Dublin Bay before and after the custom modifications to the base terrain data combined with the 3D Object placement tools and the background data files we use to populate global ports.





Here is another of the custom created ports that sit around the British Isles, the aim is to custom create important ports, and then provide some generic port templates that help to populate the rest of the world with a bit of life. I think this gives a pretty good impression of one of the UK’s more recognisable ports.



Mek is also working with Nils to correct the balance of power when it comes to SAMs and AAA for the NATO side. We have had a lot of Warsaw Pact units to date so in the pipeline is the build out of some of the more numerous assets used by the US, UK, and other NATO partners. The level of details these guys put into their models continually astounds me, Nils has spent time this week making sure that the IRIAF F-14As all have their unique serials in the correct Farsi script!

I have been doing some work with Air Combat Manoeuvres, updating the states that are run through by the aircraft to allow them to do some of the real manoeuvres that are used by aircraft in reality. The next steps are implementing some of the real attack states like dive bombing (and maybe toss bombing) to get things looking really pretty in the attacks. This did lead to a few interesting situations like a head to head crash and explosion.



We have also been doing a few updates to terrain, check the trees shading and shadows introduced by our shaders wizard Ian, and the European camouflage of aircraft. Here you can see the updated F-4 variants patrolling over the skies of Western Europe.



Of course with NATO forces on patrol there also comes the Warsaw Pact forces that they are patrolling against!



In related news heads up! We are looking to bring on an additional beta tester to the team, ideally with quite a specific hardware setup. If you are interested in participating, and are over the age of 18, please drop us a line through this form.

Hello Everyone, welcome to another Sea Power update. This one written while enjoying what feels like the first sunny week in months in the UK waiting for the wind to fill in for another day of yacht racing in Cowes Week.

As per our last update we are still focusing on some core functionality around save/load functionality while playing missions, and the campaign. I spent some time last week briefing other members of the team on the campaign and the aircraft flight physics so that we have a broader span of knowledge. This week I have done some updates to the GUI, giving the chance for flexible mission briefings (I am sure you will remember Cold Waters UI there!) driven by modern XAML UI Code which you can specify in a file associated with a mission. We will give you some templates but you will have the ability to do basically whatever you please in briefing people on the missions you create, from maps to pictures to potentially even videos! On the debrief side Ivan, Nils and Noah have been working out a scoring system for missions which should give you the tools to evaluate your performance at the end. I have been making the UI to support it around the racing at Cowes.

Victor has really got his teeth into the save/load system and is identifying areas where we have redundant code, a peril of having developed a bunch of systems in parallel, but a real benefit of having a fresh pair of eyes! This should help us move towards a more supportable code base which is really helpful!

Martin has been smashing out updates on the camera system, adding new modes, new camera tools, terrain collisions, and making sure that it is really slick. Alongside this he has been slowly transitioning us from the old Unity Input system to the new Unity Input System. Obviously this is a bit in the weeds for most people but the new system is a more modern and supportable tool that lets us activate and deactivate control sets, and hopefully in the future add some controller support (we’ve seen a lot of people playing Cold Waters on steam deck for example).

Danill has been developing new tools for the UI, really getting into the WPF format that we use. He is adding tools to let you see how much fuel and battery planes and diesel electric submarines have left. There has been some collaboration with Ivan here to add AI functions to make the enemy automatically Snorkel to recharge their batteries.

Mek has been heavily supporting the Microprose marketing team, there is some really cool stuff coming that we are aching to tell you guys about but cant yet!

And now … drumroll please … screenshots!

Good Morning/Evening/Time is an Illusion Everyone!

Welcome to another Sea Power update blog. You join us as we work hard to finish the remaining core components of the game, improve performance on core features, and support Microprose’s marketing team in preparing fun things (keep your eyes open for us popping up here and there in the near future).

The biggest core parts of our work at present are: the save/load functionality while playing missions, and the campaign. However, as always bug fixes and improvements abound (though I think Nils will insist we stop adding new features to break unless they involve the campaign in the very near future).

Victor, supported by Ivan’s extensive knowledge and capricious memory, has been getting acquainted with the code base over the last two weeks and has been tightening up the INI file handling systems. I think it has been said before, but Sea Power is highly modifiable with all the features controlled through INI files that you as the player will be able to modify. We have stuck to this format rather than switching to the more common JSON as we feel it is easier to read for players and hopefully makes new features more accessible. Ivan has also been really focused on setting up new units, especially airfield variants, and ground units. After all Close Air Support is no fun without things to explode!

Speaking of new features be aware that we do read all the messages on the Discord, Steam Forums, and elsewhere. So, if you are really interested in any particular feature there is a good chance we have it logged away in our fan suggestions box, and at least a few have been included already! We really want to make sure that this game is a success, and we have a serious plan for making sure that it has longevity!

In the art team Mek and Nils continue to generate new models, variants, and improve our existing work with little features like unique serial numbers for aircraft (I’m not sure how they managed to get us to program that one in!). In line with the survey we are not releasing as much info on new models as that was not seen as a point of focus. However, Steam, you guys have let the side down here; Discord is far outstripping you on replies!





I’ve spent most of the last few weeks focused on my day job, but also on aircraft, improving the flight models to be a little more natural, along with (this week) making some updates to formation flying. I’m hoping that we can add the ability for you as a player to “Assume Direct Control” of the aircraft and really let loose.





On the campaign front I have been integrating the way that background data like cities and airfields is displayed into the Mission Editor, and hopefully into the live missions so that your scenarios can have realistic background traffic in them. Danill (who had a lovely holiday) and Martin will be joining me in working on this in the next week or so. This should let us really parcel out the work packages and ensure that we chunk through what remains to be done.



In the midst of this Noah has been hard at work testing and stress testing all of our fixes, he does want to remind you what happens when people touch America’s boats though!



Thanks for visiting, we really appreciate your comments and support! Enjoy some extra screenshots!











And some 1980s inspired post-processing







And here is one that Nils found from very early in development, before most of the systems even existed! But you can see even then how much wizardry the art team is able to get out of these!