HighFleet is a strategic survival roguelite Simulation Game created by developer Konstantin Koshutin
and published by MicroProse. Spiritual prequel to Hammerfight, the game released on July 27, 2021. It marries side-on combat with Diesel Punk airships with a strategic overmap, where the player is tasked with traveling through hostile territory to capture a strategically vital city, and adds onto that a card-based speech minigame where you influence potential allies into siding with you. The player will need to manage morale, fuel, munitions, fighters, electronic intelligence, and more besides.
The game takes place on the planet Elaat, thousands of years after an apocalyptic event known as the Catastrophe destroyed the moon, Kharu, which wiped out Elaat's original advanced human civilization and all of its knowledge. The people of Elaat managed to rebuild, but the technology of the present-day nations remains far less sophisticated than that of their forebears. For the past seven years, the Romani Empire, once the most powerful nation in Elaat, has been riven by civil war, as the client-state of Gerat rebelled and was joined by the Gathering of Great Houses, the Romani nobility. While the bulk of the Imperial Fleet fends off the rebels in the Empire's heartland, an expeditionary force commanded by Grand Duke Mark Sayadi Salemsky, heir to the Romani throne (and the player character) is dispatched to capture Khiva, Gerat's capital city. Khiva is rumored to hold one of the last surviving pre-Catastrophe nuclear reactors, and if the campaign is successful, the Empire will regain the upper hand in the war.
HighFleet contains examples of:
- After the End: According to the manual, everything went to hell when the moon, Kharu, exploded - fragments fell to surface of the planet, Elaat, causing devastation and unleashing an electromagnetic wave that wreaked havoc on electronic systems around the world. The whys and hows of Kharu's explosion are unknown, unsurprisingly.
- Attack Drone: Your ships can mount runways for launching drone-planes, which allow for cheap long-range attacks against unsuspecting targets.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Laser Guided Ammunition. It fires to where your mouse is,making aiming a breeze, however it costs a fortune and barely does any damage to armor.
- BFG: Ships can mount various sizes of artillery, ranging from a rotary 37mm autocannon to a hex-barrelled artillery piece that requires a special capital-scale section all to itself.
- The Chosen One: Alongside the combat, management, and social minigame elements, there's also a mysterious prophecy surrounding the player character to unravel.
- Cool Airship: The ships of Highfleet are certainly unique. Instead of being Zeppelins from Another World or something even remotely resembling maritime vessels, the airships of Elaat more essentially massive metal gantries with engines, fuel tanks, avionics, and weapons bolted to them, with little if any care taken to the laws of aerodynamics and more closely resembling sized-up lunar landers than ships. In fact, the only visible method of keeping these contraptions airborne and hurtling through the air are the massive methane-powered rockets. Above all, however, the Sevastopol takes the cake, its a flying Mighty Glacier with enough firepower to level a city and enough durability to take on a squadron by itself. If that weren't enough, it also has Anti Air capabilities, most, if not all, long range sensors a fleet will need and enough fuel to act as a tanker for an entire squadron.
- Despair Event Horizon: The morale of your crew is something you will need to take into consideration, as entering combat lowers it, retrying a failed combat lowering it further, and various story events can result in your entire fleet losing morale, with them abandoning your fleet if it runs out.
- Design-It-Yourself Equipment: Both during the course of campaign and from the main menu's Shipworks, airships are fully customizable using various structural and mechanical components. You need to balance thrust power, weight, fuel, weaponry, crew, electrical power, and more. It's easy to make underpowered - or overpowered - killing machines. The Shipworks allows you to save whole designs and use them at the beginning of new campaigns.
- Diegetic Interface: While on the overworld, the map and other interface elements are presented via fairly-realistic representations of their functions, including radar, electronic intelligence, infrared tracking, radio systems, and a clock.
- Downer Ending: Capturing the Khiva reactor doesn't resolve anything. If anything, it actually makes things worse as the Rebels immediately escalate to nuclear war, as they would literally rather see the world burn then let the Empire win.
- 11th-Hour Superpower: Once you reach Khiva, the game changes to "total war" - fuel and ammo is free, and cities will have free ships available. You'll need them.
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Imperial Russia and Mughal Afghanistan are two main basis for the game's setting with many Arabic cultural aspects and terms sprinkled around.
- Game Changer: The tutorial/prologue ends with a ship arriving that reveals the capital of the Empire was hit with a nuclear attack by the rebellion. Your options are thus fall back to the capital and fight a losing battle, or push on against all odds and try to capture Khiva as originally intended. The latter route is taken, of course.
- Godzilla Threshold:
- The loss of Khiva is considered dire enough that the Rebellion will start the nuclear war as a last-ditch attempt to force the Empire out.
- This is also a gameplay feature to make players think twice about deploying nukes: as soon as you do, your (likely better armed and much better supplied) enemies will immediately respond in kind.
- Guide Dang It!: Many Players complained about the ingame tutorial and PDF Manual being insufficient to explain some of the more obtuse systems, and had to rely on people who brought with them outside knowledge about Aircraft Electronic Warfare systems, Radar, Target Motion Analysis and various other real world military concepts most normal people wouldn't be familiar with.
- Hollywood Encryption: Averted with a vengeance. In order to decrypt the encrypted radio messages, you’ll need parts of an actual cipher key which can be gained by looting the radio rooms of fallen enemy ships. Or alternatively, you can try your real world skills at breaking the code manually, saving you the hassle of looting the radio rooms in the first place provided you can pull it off!
- Interface Screw: Putting too many G’s of force on your crew (either by driving too fast or using the boosters to quickly change direction) will result in your audio being replaced by heavy breathing and ringing, and the screen going black with only the bare minimum of info being shown as green dots. This even extends to parts of your hud, with the ammo/ship status tracker being blacked out as well, requiring you to use audio cues to determine if your fuel is running low or if there is a missile locked onto you.
- Macrogame: Win or lose, a portion of your successes are saved and paid forward towards your next campaign; the better you do, the more cash you'll have to start with for your next attempt.
- Made of Explodium: Airships, by virture of essentially being massive flying buildings filled with ammo and liquid methane, and which might have some armor protecting it. Destroying a fuel tank or ammunition feeder tends to cause a chain reaction which can deal serious damage to larger ships, and utterly vaporize smaller ones. But watch out, because the enemy can do the same to your ships if you're not careful.
- Mutually Assured Destruction: The rebellion you face has access to nukes, but they will adamantly refuse to use them unless either you manage to take Khiva or you use nuclear weapons first. They have a LOT more nukes than you, so think twice before starting a nuclear war.
- Nuclear Option: You have the option of employing nuclear weapons during the course of your campaign, but be warned; should you do so, the enemy will not hesitate to retaliate in kind.
- No Hero Discount: Averted. In the final part of the game, you receive fuel, ammo, and ships for free, because the people of Gerat support you and know what's at stake.
- Nonstandard Game Over: You main goal of the game is to take over Khiva, which is a generator the size of a city that provides the world with its power. If you nuke Khiva (which the game explicitly tells you not to do) the generator gets destroyed, and the entirety of Elaat loses power, along with any hope of survival… Oops."The Khiva reactor was destroyed in the explosion. After the shockwave hit, the reactor was buried beneath what remained of its colossal dome. The people of Gerat lost all hope of surviving the calamity."GAME OVER
- Persuade Like A Card Player: Certain encounters will see you dealing with potential friends or enemies using a card-based minigame in which you must give a speech that appeals to the recipient. You can also give them gifts - though giving the wrong kind of gift may be seen as an insult instead!
- Reading The Enemy's Mail: Essential to staying one step ahead of the numerically superior and mightier enemy forces. You'll need to use electronic intelligence to hijack the signals in the first place, codebreaking skills to decrypt the messages should they realize your getting their signals, radar systems to make use of the info your given, and more.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: Grand Duke Mark Saiyadi Salemsky, heir to the largest empire Elaat has ever seen, also happens to be a devoted airship officer who takes a direct approach to leading his forces.
- Rule of Cool: Ships bigger and heavier than transatlantic tankers with combustion-based VTOL systems running on small methane tanks. Fantasy counterpart of Imperial Russia-Afghanistan where Afghanistan-expy, Gerat, has cities and fantastic mountain warlords armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles, fleets of ships larger than the cities, hundreds of incredible heavier-than-air battleships running on humble methane combustion to fly like zeppelins. And if the reading of the in-game map is taken seriously, Elaat has to be the size of a Saturnnote . Artistic License – Physics does not even cut it.
- Shmuck Bait: You get invited to 'resolve your differences' by the enemy commander. It cuts both ways: he will actually attend the meeting in person, but he believes your differences are best resolved with you in a pine box. If you have enough spiritual reputation, you can actually talk him down into joining your cause. Alternatively, you could run the bastard through with your sword, resulting in both transport fleets revving up their guns and preparing to fight…
- Unsafe Haven: Think you can rest and catch your breath as you resupply in the various towns and settlements across the map? Think again. The longer you stay in any one town, the higher chance that a loyalist will recognize you and alert the Rebels. Averted in secret cities, which can house you indefinitely, but require that you find them first.
