About
Naval Estimates: The Dreadnought Age is a free naval grand strategy wargame about the ships themselves - how they are designed, argued over, paid for, built, and sent to sea, from 1900 into the dreadnought age. The front page makes four promises. Here is what each one means.
Design the ships
A ship is the sum of decisions you made years earlier: guns forged, turrets assembled, hulls drafted, each feeding the next. Real ballistics, real hydrostatics, and a paper trail behind every class in your fleet.
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Build the fleet
A fleet is an industrial act. Designs live lives of their own - concept, drawing board, tooling, service - and your navy inherits all of it: modify an old gun, copy it, or start fresh and pay for it.
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Balance the budget
The name comes from the real thing: the annual Naval Estimates laid before Parliament. Every battleship began not on a slipway but as a line in a budget. Sea power was won in committee rooms as much as at sea.
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Face the consequences
The world starts historical, then goes where decisions take it. The gun you rushed in 1903 is still arming your cruisers a decade later. Every fleet is the sum of its compromises - and you will live with yours.
Read more →Who's building this
I'm Elouda, and Naval Estimates is my passion project - the game I have wanted to play for most of my life.
Decades absorbed in naval history and warship engineering led here, through the hobby's deep end - designing warships in SpringSharp, fighting fleet actions under miniatures rules like Seekrieg, reading the armour and ballistics research of experts like Nathan Okun - and through modding the games that came closest, Hearts of Iron, Rule the Waves, War in the Pacific, War At Sea amongst them. All of it chasing the same thing: a game that takes the design board and the budget as seriously as the battle. In the end, the only way to play it was to build it.
You can reach me at contact@navalestimates.com, or find me on the Discord as Elouda.
Where it stands
Development began in December 2025. The first free public build launched on 24 July 2026: the complete design suite - guns, turrets, and ships - set in 1905, designing the Royal Navy's first dreadnought. The strategic layer is in development alongside it, and tactical combat is planned beyond that.
That order is deliberate. The design systems are the game's foundation, and putting them in players' hands early - before the war is built around them - means the community's designs, feedback, and arguments shape what the game becomes. The invitation is not to wishlist and wait: play, test, share designs, report problems, and help shape the simulation as it grows.