The early access of the WW2 strategy simulation game Task Force Admiral – Vol.1: American Carrier Battles is now in full swing, and the developers are already at work to address feedback.
Specifically, they are aware that the game needs ways to onboard players who may not be super familiar with its fairly complex gameplay concepts, and they have promised to add help in a series of stages
Specifically, here’s what we can expect in due time:
- The introduction of a video-based instructional layer, providing short, focused explanations of interface elements at each station.
- These videos will form the basis for multilingual support, with the goal of enabling future interface localization.
- Video scripts will be reused to build a structured knowledge base for the manual.
- Manual development will continue in parallel.
- Interactive tutorials will be introduced later, once all major systems are finalized, to ensure their long-term relevance and reliability.
On top of that, a FAQ thread will be added in the game’s forum on Steam, while community help on Discord remains available.
Tutorials and onboarding aside, the developers have already published a couple of patches to address launch bugs and feedback.
Here’s a list of changes.
29/01/2026
- Fixed carriers not retrieving aircraft despite being undamaged and having available deck space.
- Improved torpedo bomber trajectory planning.
- The TBD + Mk13 combination has been refined to reduce the risk of “aberrations” when finding an attack angle. Feedback, both good and bad, is welcome.
- The ruler now also displays the bearing relative to true north.
- Fixed bearings in contact reports.
- Fixed incorrect radio messages.
- Slightly increased TBD-1 range.
- The TBD remains the limiting factor for strike missions, but now has a small range increase.
- Reworked SOC-1 flight model.
- The Seagull is now much less viable as a long-range naval search platform. Please be mindful of its limitations, especially speed. Proper mission types for US seaplanes will come in due time.
31/01/2026
- Fixed spotting bug placing aircraft over the edge of the deck. Please test several strike configurations in-game.
- Fixed planes getting stuck on Midway’s runway. This mainly occurred during second strikes. Feedback welcome.
- Fixed missions disappearing from the AIR panel when a carrier is destroyed. Yorktown can now sink — but its air group will live on!
- Pilots will now redirect to the closest available carrier from another Task Force or to an airbase if their original carrier (or fleet) is unavailable. This is an important change and needs testing. Note that rerouting to Midway currently means you’ll lose control of the squadron once they land for the remainder of the scenario, though Midway will make good use of them.
If you’re unfamiliar with Task Force Admiral – Vol.1: American Carrier Battles, it’s one of the first strategy simulation games revealed under MicroProse‘s umbrella when the historical publisher was officially revived in 2019
It’s available in early access for PC, and no other platforms have been announced at the time of this writing.
Full disclosure: the author of this post backed Task Force Admiral as soon as the Kickstarter campaign was made available.