The Glade 4.0

$90 on steam with the expansion pack

There's also an extensive free download of community-based scenarios.

If you remember Harpoon, this is a successor. While similar in a lot of ways, the UI is much easier to use and more self-explanatory - it may not look it at first, but once you start using it you figure out its really much less obtuse than Harpoon. The automated functions that your "staff" can do for you are also much better done and avoid a lot of the illogical and annoying "harpoonisms", such as a carrier launching all of its strike-loaded F-18s for CAP leaving you with all the air-to-air loaded ones sitting on deck, or spamming SAMs at sinking surface ships until they actually go under, especially if you set the (very intuitive) Doctrine and ROE settings correctly. Air refueling is an area that's very easy to manage now; if you order a plane to refuel in the air it will intelligently seek out the best tanker - maybe not even the nearest as tankers will automatically reject refueling requests they can't support.

The game has significantly improved AI and much finer resolution in terms of tracking effects - for example, fighter ACM (dogfighting) is actually simulated and modeled and a lot more factors are taken into account in determining the effects of weapons.

The game also avoids the endless database mismatches of Harpoon. The database itself is not editable by the players - you can edit the properties of units within a scenario, but the edits stay specific to that scenario. The database is left alone, and the game automatically sets the database version to the appropriate one for a scenario so database mismatches are Not A Thing. Even better, the database has a very extensive collection of hypothetical platforms in it so you can, for example, experiment with things like "What if we'd selected the YF-23 over the F-22?"

Ground combat is also simulated much more accurately than Harpoon, although the game is not primarily about ground combat, so doing things above the battalion level, maybe brigade if you have a very land-oriented scenario probably isn't advisable. Still, it will model the fighting fairly well and avoids silliness like "I wipe out a tank company with one bomb" like Harpoon would sometimes have.

Overall, I'm very pleased with it. If you want to try out real combat, I highly recommend it. The databases go back to WWII, so its perfectly possible to fight scenarios like "What if Halsey had formed Task Force 34?" I'm planning to do the "final countdown" scenario - 1980's-era USS Nimitz gets sucked back in time alone and must fight off the Japanese attack force before they hit Pearl Harbor.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I played a ton of Harpoon and Harpoon II back in the day (The one H1 scenario where you are unexpectedly granted nuclear release was one of the bestest tensest video gaming moments I've experienced), and this looks friggin' fantastic. I wish I still had the time to put into sims like I used to.

They've been significantly more free with the nuclear weapons in this game than in Harpoon, and the game logic has criteria for scenarios to escalate or de-escalate, so "avoid going over the brink" is quite possible.

Also, since it's always played on the entire globe, it's quite possible to do everything up to and including a full, global thermonuclear war scenario if anyone is willing to do the sheer amount of scenario building it would take. Things like ICBMs, SSBNs, and ABM systems are in the database and will work as advertised.

They've also put in a large number of hypothetical platforms; ones that were proposed, or never got beyond testing, and versions of current platforms for years beyond 2015. Here's a list of cool airplanes I've found so far that can indeed see the light of day in this game:

YF-12
XF-108
XB-70A
YF-23
YF-24 (I don't even know what this one is supposed to be)
F-14E Super Tomcat
TSR-2
Avro Arrow

That's just a few off the top of my head from the US, UK, and Canada. I haven't had time to dig into the database yet for other countries, but a lot of the Luftwaffe "wonder weapons" might be in there and who knows what the Russians have?

It is rather expensive on Steam. I recommend waiting for a sale.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."