Dear players, supporters, and friends of Task Force Admiral,
We are thrilled to announce that the player base for the Task Force Admiral demo has surged past 40,000 downloads and activations. Yes, more than 40,000 people have tried our game. According to Steam's data, out of 30,000 users with measured playtime, the average duration was 2 hours and 23 minutes. Impressively, 18% have played for more than 5 hours, which is remarkable considering the limited content available!
We will not let you down. We are currently developing several improvements and surprises for the demo. To start, we will continue to support it by squashing as many crashes and debilitating bugs as possible. The latest changelog can be found at the end of this post.
Current state of the demo & kickstarter
The demo is being patched almost daily and will soon enter a phase where we start adding small, incremental content all the way until the end of the trial period. Yes, Next Fest was a fantastic time for us as we celebrated the Steam festival with you. Just as the demo was available before the festival proper, we are keeping it online until March 22nd, coinciding with the end of the Kickstarter campaign.
Regarding the Kickstarter campaign, it is going exceptionally well! We are nearing 1000% completion of our original goal and are well on our way to reaching the next stretch goal, which includes native support for Tacview. We explain here and here why this is not just a minor, inconsequential addition. It serves a greater purpose, and we're excited to achieve this milestone within the next few days. Once we reach that point, brace yourselves for the next step - it will be quite cool, believe me!
Need some cues on how to play? Worry not! Besides Wolfpack's excellent early video now featured on our steam store page, have a look at these vids - his part 2, of course, but also the fantastic contributions of RAMJB, Ryu1940 and The Warsimmer who will walk you through every single function in the demo - some you might not even know existed in the first place!
As for the limitations of the demo, it's important to clarify a couple of things. Two features are currently unsupported (even if, under the right circumstances, they might seem viable): maneuvers near land masses (due to the absence of actual pathfinding for our AI) and surface combat (which is currently only implemented as a token defense system for your ships). There's no need to report issues with these; they are intentionally not fully implemented yet. To the question, "Will they be supported?" I can assure you, "They certainly will!" Just not in this demo, not yet. And for those who might be tempted to venture too far north, be aware that you might get a "bloody nose" when our content update hits Steam sometime next week...
Bring out the big guns and damn the torpedoes!
About that, if you really want to use guns, allow us to show you an alternative that happens to be already available in the line-up of our publisher: Boat Crew!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1633370/Boat_Crew/
Back in the day we were pretty happy to introduce the team to our publisher, and so far it seems it was a great match indeed. Ever since then, Boat Crew has improved, found its public, and grown a fond community receptive to its easy-going - yet comprehensive approach to the topic.
Boat Crew now has it all, including big friendly guns and aircraft carriers, for more and more extreme violence in the Slot. We'll get to revisit the era & the area soon enough in our own way in Task Force Admiral, but until then don't hesitate to give the game a chance, the team sure deserves some love, and is on its way to accomplish even greater things, as one can easily see in their choices of gameplay modes & units.
Demo Changelog
Last but not least, here are the latest changes made to the demo over the past days.
LATEST UPDATES & BETAS CONSOLIDATED CHANGE LOGS : 05-03-2025
Note: changes made to both build (stable & beta).
STABILITY
- Another array of 10 different crashes has been identified and solved
- Fixed a bug that divided a task force into smaller chucks when speed was set too high
USER INTERFACE
- Added a small widget on the left of the air ops timeline to improve feedback about the air ops status aboard the selected carrier. A fly-over info tooltip will provide you with context on demand
GAMEPLAY
- Greatly improved timing of scout missions landings. Aircraft from these missions will land back on carrier at least three times faster
- Improved ship-to-ship avoidance logic
- Clamped waypoint max speed to the fleet's slowest ship, outside of damage. Note that a damaged ship will fall behind the formation until it is detached by the player, as designed
- Improved fighter AI behavior
- Improved large strike package formation keeping and behavior
IMPORTANT NOTE
- Some of the changes brought to the aircraft AI mean that older saves are unfortunately no longer compatible with the current build. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Big thanks again to all the players who provide us with the vital intel allowing us to catch 'em bugs & hunt down 'em crashes. Everybody have a great time!
For a complete changelog updated regularly, please refer to this topic in the relevant Steam discussion forum.
Thank you all for your time and friendship, and see you up there in the skies over the Coral Sea!
The DDG Team