Sea Battle
Sea Battle is a casual 2D real-time strategy game inspired by the unit customisation mechanics of Warzone 2100. In the game, you must research components and build ships from them at a frantic pace in order to out-gun the computer-controlled enemy player. You win by destroying the enemy base, and of course you lose if the enemy manages to destroy yours.
Screenshot
Play Sea Battle now!
Sea Battle is available for various platforms, all of which require an up-to-date Java runtime. Download the appropriate version for your platform below:
How to Play
First off, select your difficulty level and click Start Game. Easy difficulty is selected by default – this setting should be beatable once you have a little practice, or first time if you get the hang of the game quickly.
Once you’re into the game, the right-hand side of the screen contains your build and research options. You start with no ships, so building is where you’ll want to begin.
Each ship is constructed from four components - Hull, Weapon, Engine and Radar. You can see the tech tree for each on the right, mostly in grey. You are given the first of each for free, which are currently displayed in yellow.
Better hulls have more health, but they are also slower to move and slower to build. Weapons have varying damage levels and fire rates, but in general the later ones are better. Engines increase ships’ speed, very important for the larger hulls. Radars set the weapons’ range (outranging your enemy will be a big advantage).
You’ll probably want to begin by building a few of the most basic ship, in order to fend off the enemy while you research and build better things. Clicking on the “Build” button in the bottom-right builds one ship of whatever configuration is currently shown in yellow. You can click it multiple times to fill up the build queue.
While your ships are building, pick some components to research. This is done by clicking on a grey box – it will turn green for the duration of the research. Once complete, it will be white – available, but not selected. You can click white boxes to turn them yellow and select that new configuration.
By this point, the enemy will be throwing some ships at you. Your base is at the bottom of the game window, where your (blue) ships are appearing. The goal of the game is to destroy the enemy base at the top of the screen, but first you have some ships to deal with. Left-click on your ships to select them, then left-click again somewhere else to set their destination. You can also drag a box to select multiple ships. Right-clicking at any time cancels selection. You don’t have to select individual enemy ships to target; your ships will attack anything in range.
To begin with your ships will be evenly matched, but the enemy never stops researching, and neither should you. Having the technological edge is the key to winning the game.
The best research / build priorities, and advanced tactics on the game field, are up to you to discover!
Development Status
Sea Battle is currently at version 0.5. It’s basically complete, although it could probably do with a few more balance tweaks and a better route following algorithm before I’m finally happy with it.
The development of Sea Battle was documented as a series of blog posts:
- Game Idea Spam Time!
- Sea Battle, now with more Processing
- Sea Battle: That’s what Guns are for!
- Sea Battle: Here Comes the Science Bit
- Sea Battle: Of Ships and Submarines
- A Sea Battle Update?!
Licence
Sea Battle is released under the terms of the BSD licence.
Bugs and Feature Requests
If you find a bug or would like to request a feature for a future version of Sea Battle, please use the Issue tracker for this Github project.