The Best Strategy Game of 2024 Officially Has a Campaign

I love a good strategy game, and like anyone who has spent a lot of time reading Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, I love the drama of naval combat with missiles, nuclear submarines, and stealth.

Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age went into early access in November 2024, and while it was impressive from the start, the first Triassic Games title was sorely lacking in a proper ongoing campaign.

All of this changed with the 4th of July festive update, version 0.8.0, which added more changes to the so-called Task Force Mode. Sea Power is still an early access title, but it’s well-suited to the grand strategy games of today.

Sea Power Pacific Vacation

The first official campaign of the Sea Power line and its new Task Force Mode is Pacific Strike ’85, which puts you in charge of a NATO group in the Western Pacific.

As the name suggests, Task Force Mode finally gives budding fleet managers the ability to customize their ships, with a deck building process that will feel very familiar to WARNO and Broken Arrow veterans alike.

Campaign missions unfold sequentially, but the status of your ships and related units continues between you, giving you that all-important sense of progression. Interestingly, that includes many granular factors such as weapon costs, so using all anti-aircraft missiles might save you today, but leave you exposed tomorrow.

Beyond the campaign mode, update 0.8.0 also adds major changes that affect almost every weapon in the game. The most important of these is the sonar rework, described in a previous dev blog here. The range of detection varies greatly now depending on the environmental and technical characteristics of the vessels involved, making the interaction more dynamic.

The AI ​​is also smarter now, with better torpedo handling and the added ability to use jammers against the player with defensive and offensive skills, depending on the engagement mode. To make this easier for you, Triassic Games has added a mini-map option so you can better see the radar’s performance under jamming.

As for the AI ​​units, Sea Power 0.8.0 releases Australian and French units, both to support the Pacific Strike ’85 campaign and the upcoming Falklands War situation. Among the new units are the F-111C strike fighter and variants of the legendary Mirage III, used by dozens of nations during the Cold War.

One of my favorite things in the changelog is the addition of binocular and periscope views, which heighten the immersion beyond belief. Pressing Z while in a unit brings out the binoculars (or periscope for submarines). Depending on available systems, such as night vision zoom levels, LShift+Z switches between modes.

Alone in the Open Strategy Ocean

Despite the huge popularity of modern naval strategy at the beginning of computer games, it seems that we are strangely left with Sea Power and only Sea Power for now.

Cold Waters by Killerfish Games made quite a splash in 2017, and Matrix Games received a strong general response with its full-spectrum command: Modern Operations in 2019, but none of them have the production value that used to be typical of the genre.

I remember growing up with classic naval combat games like Red Storm Rising and 688 Attack Sub (which you can play online for free). The latter was published by Electronic Arts, who repeated this in 1999 with Jane’s Fleet Command and in 2001 with Sub Command.

The trend towards accessible mechanics in games has done a number on the warfighting genre, but the success of Sea Power shows that part was down but not out.

As Sea Power nears full release, the door is now open for other games to bring armchair admirals back.

Sea Power is currently only available on PC via Steam.

Systems

Engineer(s).

Triassic Games AB

Publisher

MicroProse software

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