Harpoon 2 Screenshot #1

March 8, 2006 · Posted in Harpoon 2

Scenario start. Harpoon II uses a very flexible windows system to display tactical information, staff messages and so on. You can also create new map windows, called Zoom Maps, and position them anywhere on the screen. The maps can be resized, zoomed in and out, and you move around by right-clicking which centers the map where you clicked.

There are usually one to four playable sides in a scenario. Often also included is neutral shipping, civilian air traffic, false acoustic contacts and so on. But there is really no limit on the number of sides that can be simulated, and some scenarios on the Harpoon 3 Scenario and Database Download Page have more than ten, each with unique relations with the other sides – friendly, neutral or hostile.

The simulator is played in real time. That means one second in real life is one second in the simulator. But there is a very nice feature called ‘time compression’ that allows the simulator to run faster. You can choose between 5 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minutes, 5 minutes, 15 minutes and 30 minutes time compression. The simulator is very CPU intensive and an average-sized scenario will usually run smoothly in up to 15 second compression on a 450MHz PII. The new and vastly improved Harpoon 3 (Harpoon II ported Windows and Macintosh) runs much faster than the old DOS simulator, and a scenario that ran in 1:5 second time compression in Harpoon II will easily run in 1:1 minute time compression in Harpoon 3.

The simulator has a very flexible map system. It is possible to activate all kinds of map preferences, including water depths, land elevation, polar ice, weather and many more. The scenario editor allows you to make a map anywhere in the world simply by entering longitudes and latitudes. This way you can make smaller maps for simple gunboat scenarios and larger maps for big CVBG vs CVBG battles. Harpoon II also has a complete country border database going from the 1960s to 1994.

Click on the thumbnail for a full picture: