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As stated in the review the british side is to easy, but the german can also be easy.
Make sure you move out with the heaviest guns with exception of Bismark and Tirpitz...
Check the convoys and take on the convoys with 1 CC and 2 destroyers and only take on the destroyers and then the CC's and transports...
Keep doing this untill you suddenly see messages the every transport ship in the convoys have been destroyed by u-boats while protected with only BB's or CC's... :bleh:

Any manual for the commands?

Great game. Absolutely first-class. These ships are like old friends.

Couple of things though; the AI is nowhere near aggressive enough. In the Gneisenau vs Rodney scenario I opened the ball with a torpedo run on the Rodney (look; there were no destroyers around, and we were already heading in the right direction. OK?), whereupon she turned tail and ran. Which meant, of course, since Gneisenau is faster and Rodney has no stern armament worth a damn, I got to take her apart in detail. I just can't see any real Royal navy commander doing that.

The Ramilles also runs in the defended convoy action; leaving you pretty much unmolested to destroy two tin cans and six transports. And most weirdly, at the end of the Jutland II battle the Rodney, Hood, Prince of Wales and some crap just sailed away without finishing off a crippled, out of ammo-and-torpedos, and immobilized Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen. And after I pulled a lovely last act of defiance putting Scharnhorst's last torp into the Rodney too.

Which brings up the other thing. The ships run out of ammo rather fast. It's actually really hard to sink one battleship with two of your own before you run dry. In the Jutland II action I had no trouble dealing with the Warspite-Repulse-King George group, and was comfortably putting the boot into the Hood-Prince of Wales group when I realised I only had about six salvos left and hadn't even started on the Rodney and her associates. Ultimately, I had to call it good work for the day and run for it, which was kind of awkward since the Scharnhorst, Prinz Eugen, and Z 24 had all suffered major engine hits (in fact, that's the only place Scharnhorst had been hit). We won the battle, but we had to leave some of our best ships behind, and it was only AI weirdness they weren't sunk. The Germans suffer from this ammo problem the most, as they're generally outnumbered. All the British have to do is keep one ship fresh and they can sweep the field.

The game seems to get lost at the end of some battles, when not all ships one one side are sunk. Even when all ships have left the board the scenario will keep playing and you'll have to quit manually. On one occasion I even started seeing secondary calibre hits being registered on some random surviving ships at battle's end, although there was no enemy nearby.

I'm not convinced, either, that the game has taken into account the low level of armor protection on the Repulse, Renown, and Hood. These ships seem just as hardy as the full battleships.

But, other than that (and it would be weird if there wasn't some weirdness); brilliant.

Oh, and in the Kriegsmarine it's S-Boat, not E-boat.

The reviewer stated that the patched version could not be run in dosbox. However I have successfully ran gnbna ver 1.2 (the final patched version) in dosbox so for those interested in enjoying this game, you should get that version. It fixes plenty of gameplay issues and bugs, including the truly horrible mouse clicking sensitivity, and adds new campaigns and scenarios.

For those not knowing how to start, i think there should be a tutorial.txt file in the game package.

Have fun!

For the record, full names of the german destroyers, in no particular order:

Leiberecht Maas
Georg Thiele
Hans Lody
Paul Jakobi
Bernd Von Armin
Richard Beitzen
Dieter von Roeder
Karl Galster
Dieter Kunne
Friedrich Ihn
Friedrich Eckhold
Georg Schultz
Wolfgang Zenker
Theodore Riedel
Hermann Schoemann
Bruno Heinemann
Erich Koellner
Erich Giese
Erich Steinbrink
Wilhelm Heidkamp
Hans Ludemann
I can't remember the Schmitt one. I think she was the Hans Schmitt, but I may just be thinking of that because it sounds right.

Most of these people were (apparently) German flotilla leaders from the First World War, although the only one I can place is Maas, who was killed at the battle of the Helgoland Bight in 1914. It's interesting that they chose to immortalise these people and not some of their more memorable WWI heroes like Nerger of the Wolf, Muller of the Emden, or Hartog of the Defflinger. It's possibly that since none of these latter guys were actually destroyer commanders they were saving the names for later, bigger, ships.

I've always liked these names, and thought it a bit of a pity that they reverted to simple Z-numbers for the later Narviks. The German destroyer force never achieved the same distinction as the cruiser and battleship arms. The ships themselves were designed for the Baltic, and although solid designs didn't deal with the open atlantic waters very well (a weakness that also effected the German light cruisers). Like all destroyers, their full endurance wasn't great, and the Germans didn't have the luxury of being able to reliably resupply at sea. On top of this the German destroyers took terrible losses in the Norwegian campaign (as did the light cruisers), and by the middle of 1940 12 of the 22 listed above were lost.

Out of interest, I don't know what on earth Christian IV is talking about when he says destroyers can take too much damage in this game. In the first place, and contrary to his version of reality, there are a number of accounts of destroyers surviving repeated heavy calibre hits. But most relevant is that destroyers in this game are very fragile. They take one heavy hit to the lower hull and they flood quickly and sink. I threw 8 German destroyers against 2 cruisers and lost all of them (sank the Manchester, but couldn't finish off Sheffield). I have major problems finding jobs for them that won't get them killed.

1)Wich is the best way to sink a BB?
2) How do i know where the torps will be launched?
3)Where i can find patch 1.2?

1, Depends on which BB. And frankly luck.

The damage system in the game could use some serious tweaking. 6" shells can get lucky and get a flooding hit on a battleship, sinking it in minutes, while the same battleship some other time might withstand a full hours bombardment from an entire battle group, plus torpedo hits, and survive. It's all in where you hit, and that comes down to luck and constant application of firepower.

I'm tempted to say that the best way would be to bombard an enemy battleship until it's barely moving, then send in the DDs to torpedo it. In practice even a crippled battleship usually has enough firepower to shred destroyers, and I usually use torpedos only as a last-ditch weapon.

2, You can fire torpedos manually, otherwise they tend to be fired only when fairly close. Turn on the torpedo circle (the "T" by the side of the tactical display) and assume you'll have to get well within the yellow circle before the torps get fired.

3, God knows. The official webpage for this game is a pop-up-laden nightmare and none of the links on it seem to work.

Well, wich is the strongest BB in the game?, i though it was Bismarck, but after a while i realizng that the strongets are the ones with triplets turrets because they deal more damage, and well, the oficcal page is almost dead, any link were can we find 1.2 or the update( PAcific, etc)

Mike.

Bismarck & Tirpitz probably, then the British K G Vs. Firepower is actually pretty hard to use as a reference point as most of them (bar the 11" gun German ships) are about on a "level", but these ships seem to generally be able to absorb much more damage than the others, and are fast to boot.

As to the triple turret ships:

The Nelson and Rodney have big guns, but they're slow, can't fire astern (HUGE downside when the AIs using them, as it reacts to damage by turning the ship away from the enemy), and are not that hard to sink. I don't think the 16" gun fires very fast or very accurately either.

Scharnhorst and Gneisenau are fast and reasonably tough, unless you get the lucky-flooding-hit bug, but the 11" guns in spite of good accuracy don't hit other battleships hard enough. Lowest ammo capacity of any battleships in the game as well.

The Panzerschiffe (Graf Spee, Lutzow, Scheer) aren't really battleships at all. They're cruisers on steroids, and get damaged and sunk like cruisers. Two or three of them can take a real battleship, but it's a risky business.

And where are the germans light cruisers like the Konigsberg or the Emden??? It was sunk in 1940. And the Hannover Schleswig-Holstein and Schlesien??? THE KRIEGSMARINE IS NOT COMPLETE!

Mike.