Scenes from Atlantic Fleet

Stock Battle of the Denmark Straits, playing as Royal Navy...

...Prince of Wales and Hood separate to divide the enemy's fire and clear their own lines of fire:



'Shoot!' Hood has opened her 'A' arcs and lets fly with a full broadside:



'Short!' Prince of Wales fails to straddle with this salvo from A and B Turrets:



Bismarck, steaming in Prinz Eugen's wake, wastes no time returning fire, taking Hood for her target:



Later in the battle, Prinz Eugen sinks as Bismarck steams past her, also on fire. Prince of Wales is about to let go with a full salvo:



Bismarck's main armament is still fully operational, though, although her accuracy has fallen off a bit:



Seen from Hood's forward fire director, Bismarck makes smoke in an effort to escape:



Hood is fighting fires in the background, but Bismarck's Atlantic sortie is clearly now over:

Nice shoots, thanks!

Thanks!

Some random scenes...

The next few seconds are going to be interesting...



..as in, this sort of 'interesting'...



Nelson is having a good day, Scharnhorst or Genisenau not so good, in this campaign battle...



'Happy Scharnhorst' on a different occasion, under a Hunter's Moon...

Some destroyer surface action...

There goes the bridge crew...



Different RN class, happier times...





That was close! Dodging an 8-inch salvo from a heavy cruiser...



Two pics of the big German Narvik Class destroyers at sea...





And a pair or RN destroyers hunt a U-boat while an oil slick marks where a merchantman has just gone under...

Convoy action! From a typical mission in the dynamic campaign, played from the German side, if I recall right.

With the battlecruiser Renown in the escort, this convoy might have felt safe from enemy surface action...



...but the U-boats showed up, instead...



...and the big ship was one of the first to go...





After that, it was the turn of the merchantmen...







The destroyers did their best...





...but all they could really do was cover the escape of the survivors...

Some studies of big ships. In Atlantic Fleet, differences within classes aren't replicated, one ship represents the whole class.

Scharnhorst, which also represents Gneisenau whose mainmast was stepped against the funnel. One can see why an RAF pilot out during the Channel Dash and not expecting to see such a ship in the English Channel, said when he saw Scharnhorst, 'I never knew the Navy had such a lovely boat':



Under attack from a Sunderland, in a campaign mission:



One of the sisters, dubbed Salmon and Gluckstein after a comedy duo, with 11 inch guns trained to starboard in poor conditions:



Renown in action against one of the German battlecruisers on campaign. Renown doubles for her less-modernised sister Repulse, famously sunk along with Price of Wales by Japanese aircraft early in the Pacific War:



The view from the other end of 'the two-way range', during the same engagement. The enemy is down by the stern and starting to make smoke:



Bismarck and Tirpitz out together in a campaign mission. The Atlantic Fleet model better represents the former IIRC, the visible differences being mainly down to detail amidships on the placement of the main cranes and the 105mm AA guns there.



Queen Elizabeth class battleships about to open fire. The AF model is based on the name-ship of the class I think - they all started in WW1 with two funnels and ended up as quite a varied class in WW2 after one or more reconstructions between the wars:



Bismarck again. This I think is how she looked during her Atlantic sortie after the dazzle markings were overpainted. Nice that they got the detail right of the optical rangefinder removed from turret Anton due to issues with spray, the gaps at the upper rear sides being plated over.



USS Washington or North Carolina, both having served in the Atlantic for a while, the former for a significant period:



And we finish this post with a return to Salmon and Gluckstein, operating together as they famously did in the real war:

Ships in trouble...


Graf Spee lost this particular play-through of Atlantic Fleet's stock Battle of the River Plate:



This used to be a three-funnelled County Class heavy cruiser:



The ships in trouble here are the merchantmen in a convoy about to be attacked by a Hipper Class cruiser:



These Kriegsmarine light cruisers have been caught by a British battleship in the Baltic and are making smoke in an effort to get away:



This destroyer was a victim of the U-boat whose periscope wake is visible in the foreground:



A Queen Elizabeth Class battleship slips under the waves:



A destroyer falls victim to an air attack from a Do217:



Cornwall is losing this fight with German heavy cruisers:

Air power in Atlantic Fleet...

Dornier 217 on a torpedo run:





Focke Wulf 200 Condor makes a bomb run on a convoy:



Swordfish rocketing a German destroyer:



Barracudas on the flight deck of an Illustrious Class fleet carrier:



Liberator on a bomb run:



Glorious tries to scramble Swordfish to fend off Scharnhorst and Gneisenau:



This one didn't make it:



A Lancaster has a go at Bismarck or Tirpitz:



Another Do217, this time attacking merchantmen:



Some LRMP people at work:







AF's Dorniers do level bombing, too:



Stuka attack on a Royal Sovereign/Revenge Class battleship:

On campaign...Graf Spee destroys a luckless convoy...

Typical merchantman in happier times....

Graf Spee (or Scheer) again, looking for trouble...

Type VII U-boat sinks a freighter by gunfire...

Type VII in its natural element...

Battle of the River Plate - Exeter about to engage Graf Spee...

Torpedo treffe!

And again...

Hipper, illuminated by starshell from Berwick...

Battle of the River Pate again - Ajax at the start of the battle...



'Enemy in sight!' - Exeter spots the pocket battleship...

On campaign - Scharnhorst and a Hipper class heavy cruiser, on the prowl in mid-ocean, prepare to engage a convoy at sunset...

33Lima . Nice pics. I checked out your very in depth review of AF at CombatAce- well done! I don't usually play surface naval sims. Last one I guess was old Destroyer Command. This looks like fun. Downloading AF from GOG. Any other advice? Thanks...Vox

Hi Vox and thanks for the positive feedback. Sadly Killerfish moved on (to Cold Waters) after AF and there's little more than the game itself. The good news being that it has more content than sims or games that are much more expensive, including the many historical battles (subject to ship availability eg no Hunt Class DEs which played a big part in the German torpedo boat night ambush at Sept Iles) plus the two types of campaign, each playable from either side, plus a battle generator.

All I would say is that players just need to put up with what we can't change - the turn-based approach, the area ambushes from subs whose torps you can't dodge if they are within the fatal range (set torp reliability to 'allow duds' to help compensate), the fact that no merchantmen carry guns, the simplified representation of smoke screens, the lack of land in the 3d world, the inability to use secondary and main armament in the same turn, the very simplified aero-naval elements, and the generally simplified but quite decent mechanics. Think of it as a wargame with superb 3d elements for fighting battles, and it works very well indeed - it's not a warship simulator like DC nor is it Fighting Steel 2.

A KGV class battleship narrowly misses taking a Type IX U-boat with her...

A Type VII has surfaced to finish a merchantman with gunfire...

On campaign - a Swordfish takes off into a smokecreen as her escorts protect Illustrious from a surface threat.

One of the Kriegsmarine's Hilfskruezer merchant raiders has been hunted down by RN warships - note the flaps dropped to reveal her concealed armament, now silent...

Z4 engaging her British counterparts in a night action - the size of the tracers on shells was much reduced in an update after this pic was taken.

Stuka attack on Nelson or Rodney...

'Lucky Scharnhorst' lives up to her nick-name...

Journey's end for Lutzow. The same 3d model (Graf Spee) is used for all three pocket battleships in Atlantic Fleet, even though Lutzow always had a quite different bridge structure from her sisters...

A Royal Sovereign/Revenge class battleship lands at least one hit with this salvo from A and B Turrets...

Line of battle - a Royal Sovereign, Nelson or Rodney, and a KG V class are about to come into action...

Convoy battles - Atlantic fleet's simplified sub and ASW elements aren't really strong points in purely simulation terms, but they're effective and engaging nevertheless...

Closing in...



Some choice targets, there...



First victim goes to U-109...



U-269's periscope is shelled!



And then we're depth-charged...



...but slip away...



...and have another go...



Torpedo treffe!

I played and have this game the Subs are over powering. Aside from that its a neat little game with the shell fire being well done.

The worst thing about AF's subs is the way a battle with them involved most often starts with two or three subs in a ready-made 'area ambush'. Vaguely credible when the target is a slow convoy, but completely wrong when as often happens, the target is warships which subs, submerged or surfaced, would almost never be fast enough to catch in this fashion.

The ability for a torp to reach the target in a single turn if within a certain range, without the target being able to take any evasive action, doesn't help, but can be mitigated to a limited degree by turning on 'duds' which sort of allows the target an 'evade move' in wargame terms.

That a spread of torpedoes is much the most effective ASW weapon, is another big minus. But you don't have to do that and AFAIK, AI escorts will not do this when you're playing a sub.

Not being able to use secondary armament at the same time as main is the big minus in surface combat. A slightly longer maximum opening range in battles would help - now, if you come up against a superior force, avoiding battle is next-to-impossible. An AI gunnery officer would also be good so you could play the captain and concentrate on manoeuvring and ordering targets, if you wanted to.

Still, it's a heck of a package, just a pity it didn't get some updates and some DLC; I would have bitten their arms off to get that.