Bret Devereaux

All of this forces the player to work under situations of uncertainty. You can't leave the radar on, because strike groups will just lob radar-seeking cruise missiles at unknown radar signals. Enemies that spot you will try to report your location...

...which brings strike groups to try to engage you directly, but also potentially long range missile and air-strikes. Its often best to avoid until you can fight on ground of your choosing, but to avoid you have to know where the enemy is!

So you are left guessing, trying to correlate that ELINT contact with the radio intercepts you are getting, trying to keep a mental map of the intel you have (all of which becomes more dated by the second) to process the intel you are getting.

Every so often you might get some quality human intelligence (HUMINT) from a settlement, but that too begins aging from the second you get it. Worse yet: stick around too long repairing or refueling and the locals will sell you out to the enemy.

In short, the game actually simulates a fog of war.And it's kind of brilliant. In most games, the 'fog of war' is just a binary: you can see perfectly where your units are and not at all where they aren't. Highfleet forces you to deal with variable and uncertain information.

Just about the only thing it doesn't do is feed you actively wrong information (though you can do this, for instance, by detaching a fast ship to intentionally get spotted going one way and break contact - the AI will rush after the ghost you just created, while you slip past).

So you are constantly forced to make decisions (do I have time to repair here? refuel? where should I go next?) based on incomplete, fragmentary or dated information.

The limitations of the campaign also make you think in terms of task forces with specific purposes and fuel economy, rather than just bashing around in one big blob as in most 'strategy' games.