Review: Jutland: Map Pack 1 - Falkland Islands

"Cat" reviews the latest add-on to the Jutland series of Naval Combat simulations.

http://SimHQ.com/_naval/naval_039a.html

Good review...for what its worth, I've been a big fan of Storm Eagle Studios for a long time....despite the relatively minor issues noted, the Map Pack is well worth the purchase if you own Jutland.

If you don't own Jutland and have an interest in this period...you are doing yourself a disservice. Not cheap...but well worth the money.

Nice and fair review Cat.

I have really enjoyed Jutland, but I have to say I didn't install it on my new PC when I got it. The whole Stormpowered thing and their strange customer service approach put me off. I never had a problem with their DLC approach, its just the need to have the Stormpowered wrapper to play the game added an unnecessary layer of complexity to the experience for me.

A pity, because Jutland is such a great game (though I understand its campaign been broken pretty badly by latest patches) and it was my first game-related youtube video

Hi Cat,


Thanks for the Review.

When you say, .. "I did get my issues sorted .. ", did that include the problems with the Scenarios wherein some ships have delayed starts?

.. if so? How?

I only purchased Pack 1 about a month ago. I never logged a ticket with SES, but from reading various forums, it seemed the problem was well known, and I assumed that, as the Pack had been out for some time, it had been 'logged' with SES. I have yet to see a resolve to the Scenario problems.


Thanks and Regards
Tom

Nice Review,

I haven`t bought this pack so far, as I haven`t played Jutland in while. I lost my well developed campaign due to a HDD failure and was so frustrated I only reinstalled the game and test-played it. My main complaint is the problem with the discrepancy of the positions between the strategic and the tactical map, which often leads to have you ships "teleported" back after battle end and results into an endless series of battles.

Btw. Cat, the problem with the Brits turning around when you lost Monmouth is easily explained: The AI acts agressive as long the combined battle-value of its ships is higher than the players`. Some scenario makers overcome this issue with placing f.e. some monitors into one edge of the map were they don`t come into action.

As for Stormpowered, yes, can be confusing at times. Transferring the games from the old machine was smoother than with the old DRM though.

Am I the only one who thinks there is something wrong with the last two chapters of page 1? Seems like an editing mistake. A repeated sentence and another starting with lower case letter n, what's going on there?



Back to reading, the beginning seemed otherwise good.

No, there's an editing mistake on page 1, you read it right. It happens. Just ignore that bit.

As for the issues I had, I never did see a patch that fixed the scenario issues. SES did get on the stick the following Monday and fix my password issues, that's what I was referring to.

Thanks, guys. I don't do as many reviews these days as I used to, but I enjoy the ones I do.

Thanks for the alert. I should have caught that before publishing. It has been corrected.

This kind of stuff sometimes happens, when they change something in the Matrix....

Yes, this is also a gripe of mine. Went already through several of those in my current first 1916 campaign.
Just yesterday I had a great battle with HSF + Scout BCs (16BBs + 8 Pre-Dreads +4BCs) vs GF (19 BBs, no PreDreads), resulting in 10 Brit BBs sunk with just light damage on my ships!
Most BBs ran out of ammo in this and some minor subsequent scraps. So now I am retreating home, but I don't get quite away and get continuously engaged by GF. That is even though there is one brit BB with moderate damage, slowing the BBs down to 13knots in combat, while my slowest ship still does 16knots.So I easily run away till the combat ends, but they always manage to quickly catch me on strategic map...
Maybe I have to wait for the next night to dispose the point AC that usually triggers the engagements.
In this case I even manage to make some slow crawling progress toward home, but navigating around the big static minefield like that is a chore - last time I was already around, when in the next "iteration" it put me back north and running straight into the minefield

In a previous "instantiation" of this problem (in the same campaign) I was step by step warped back to the coast near Hull, even so the initial engagement was many miles away and I kept running away from it...

Disrespect to costal batteries on behalf of the AI is another problem - about half the Entente combat shipping in the Channel must have succumbed to the Ostende and Zeebrugge batteries...

And while I am at it, is there any way to fight subs? I would love to somehow deal with those pesky minelaying subs - lost already at least one BB to their mines. The only way I currently see is counter-mining - mining the same areas and approaches - worked at least against FL Abdiel.
Well, at least it works both ways - ~1/3 of the GF BBs were already damaged before the above mentioned battle by mining Scapa Flow.
And they will be up for some nasty surpirse when their remnants head home, as my HSF sortie was covering three minelaying TFs, mining the surroundings of Scapa.

Bought the game a few weeks ago in a sale, incl. the Dogger Bank expansion. That one I consider worth the price tag, adding 1915 ships, scenarios and campaign - not so sure about the Falkland pack, maybe in a future sale.

I fully agree with the assessment of the Stormpowered client. It took me almost one week from the purchase to actually being able to play the game. Tested the trial a few years back (before Stormpowered), and despite Stormpowered indicating that I own the full license, the game still told me that my trial period has expired. Well, their no refund policy made me quite persistant in harrassing the support to get it running instead of just refunding it. Took about a week, and several (most likely unneccessary) re-downloads/installs (~800MB each) - in the end they made a Stormpowered update that got it running.
"Funnily" enough, similar problems occured to others that just tested the demo before the purchase...