It Started with a Spreadsheet
No mechanics this time - just why I’m building this, and where it all comes from.
This devlog is a bit different - no tables, no worked examples. In the run-up to launch a few people asked why I’m building Naval Estimates at all, and the honest answer is: because of a lot of other work that has inspired me over the years. So here’s most of the list, with credit where it’s due - and a note or two on where each one left me wanting a bit more.
To start, we have to go all the way back… to 2009. That’s the date on the earliest post of mine I can still find on the NavWeaps forums - and if you know the place, you can probably guess what comes next.
SpringSharp
If you were designing imaginary warships in the 2000s, you probably know SpringSharp. A free tool, half spreadsheet and half magic trick: you fed it dimensions and a block coefficient, and got a displacement. You then fitted armament, defined a speed and machinery, and it told you whether your ship could actually exist. For a lot of us it was the first time a fantasy design could be wrong - and that turned out to be the fun part.
I went one step further: I kept my own spreadsheet of the SpringSharp results - designs tabulated side by side, compared, ranked, argued over. A spreadsheet about a spreadsheet. In hindsight, the whole project was probably inevitable from that point.
Gary Grigsby
The other half of my gaming time went somewhere very different - Gary Grigsby’s stuff, mostly War in the Pacific.
To those of you unfamiliar with it, it still remains, in my mind, the wargame about the Pacific War in WW2. Played day to day, with every single ship, squadron and land formation at your command. The detail is one impressive part - what the game teaches you about logistics, thinking forward, and operational momentum is something else entirely. It’s another game that invites spreadsheets, of course.
Okun
To set the two eras above into context, this was university time for me, as I was studying for my Physics degree. Via one or the other of these channels, I came across the work of the late Nathan Okun on NavWeaps. It put a lot of things into context for me, and started an interest in ballistics, both internal and external, that survives to this day. The gun designer is a homage to that, and to his work - the penetration, shatter and other mechanics are directly informed by it.
Aurora 4x
And then there’s Aurora 4x, which people have either never heard of or can’t stop playing. A space 4X where you design from the component level up - engines, sensors, fire controls, each one an engineered object, and ships assembled out of the results. If the gun-to-turret-to-ship chain in Naval Estimates feels familiar to an Aurora player, that is not an accident.
Aurora also matters here for a different reason: it’s free, it’s a one-person project, and it’s been growing for the better part of two decades because its community keeps it alive. When I say Naval Estimates is free “in the tradition of Dwarf Fortress Classic and Aurora 4X”, this is where that comes from.
Hearts of Iron, and the modding years
Somewhere in the last decade I started modding Hearts of Iron seriously - first with my own Naval Rework Mod (and then its more successful second iteration), and later contributing to BlackICE. Modding is a strange apprenticeship: you spend hundreds of hours inside someone else’s assumptions, and it’s the ones you can’t change that teach you the most.
Both of these projects were ‘Navy First’ for me, and built (surprise surprise) with the help of a lot of spreadsheets. Unsatisfied with the simple module system HOI4 introduced for ships, I took it to its extreme, with influence taken from everything before (and some from RTW below). Then I did the same for tanks - and both projects taught me a lot about systems design, and where to sometimes draw the line. They also introduced me to git and other tools, instead of a mess of spreadsheets and text files on my dropbox.
Seekrieg
There’s one more item I’d like to mention that helped shape some of this - and that’s Seekrieg 4 and 5, a tabletop miniatures game about naval battles. Two things about it stood out to me, and almost nothing else has managed to capture them the same way. The first is the stately nature of combat, especially at longer ranges. Ships take a long time to accelerate, to turn, and to prepare to launch torpedoes. Each of these is a decision with a cost, and that means planning ahead.
The second is the damage resolution system. Seekrieg 5 has this amazing booklet of ‘what exactly went wrong with your ship’, sorted by type of impact (overpenetration, failure to penetrate, penetration and detonation) and type of round. Pulling that out when you finally got hits was always a tense and thrilling moment, because a single hit could range from more or less negligible, to completely catastrophic.
Rule the Waves
And then there’s Rule the Waves, which is the closest thing to this game that anyone has actually built. I’ve played every iteration of it since the first one for years, and it’s one of the main inspirations for this project - for both what it does well (a lot) and where I sometimes wish it went just a bit further.
If you’ve followed some of the devlogs, the answer to the latter is probably obvious - I wanted that ability SpringSharp gave to go just a little further. To use that ballistics knowledge and be able to design your own weapons - and more importantly, as Aurora and WitP both teach, the inertia that comes with committing to decisions about them.
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts
UAD proved something I suspected: people genuinely want to stand at the drawing board. Dragging turrets around a deck and watching the ship take shape under you is a real pleasure, and UAD does it with far more polish than I’ll manage any time soon.
UAD also allowed more control over guns - finally, I could have my 4.7, 5.5 and 13.5-inch guns. Unfortunately, the underlying model behind those guns wasn’t all the way there in my opinion, though several talented modders made good strides to improve it. The other part that frustrated me was the ship hulls - beautifully crafted, but still rigid in what you could do and how you could shape them.
The recipe
Put all that together and you can more or less read this game as a recipe: SpringSharp’s designer, taken seriously. Okun’s physics underneath it. Grigsby’s long game around it. Aurora’s conviction that everything should be built from components up. The modding years, learning the tools and how to design my own systems. RTW’s living world, and UAD’s insistence that you should get to see your ship. Whether that adds up to the beginning of something worth playing - well, that’s what Friday is for.
Out on Friday
The first build goes out on Friday - it includes all three of the core designers, and is set as the RN in 1905.
The game is free and playable in the browser on itch.io. A downloadable version will follow, likely next week when I fix any immediate bugs, and figure out how to bundle it for distribution.
It’s a fraction of what’s described above, but it’s the fraction everything else stands on.
Seventeen years on, I sometimes suspect it’s still the same spreadsheet I originally started. It just grew a budget.