Task Force Admiral - Vol.1: American Carrier Battles

[Asid]

[EA SITREP #6] Weekly News: Steel, Reefs, Patch Notes & Staying the Course
Sat, March 7, 2026



Your weekly news on Task Force Admiral, courtesy of the dev team!


Note & credit: Action screenshots were provided by players on the game's Discord — today featuring Ferda1947, Hood & Ram399. Big thanks to them!

Greetings, admirals — and welcome back to the bridge.

Six weeks in. The coffee is cold, the paperwork is stacking up, and JB's screen has probably forgotten what sunlight looks like. But the ship is still underway, and that's what matters.

Before we dive in: we know some of you are waiting for new scenarios. You've been patient, and we owe you both an explanation and an honest accounting of where things stand. We'll get to that. First — the recent patches, the pretty things, and a few words about what's been happening below decks.




Latest Patches

Two more beta builds went out this week and were consolidated in a public release. Here's what was in them, with a bit of context for each entry.

Midway Map – Sand Island & the Surrounding Atolls

•     Improved Sand Island topography.
•     Added Kure, Pearl and Hermes atolls.

We've pushed the Midway theater closer to how it actually looked from above. Sand Island's topography has been reworked to better reflect the real terrain — which matters more than it might seem once land-based elements come further into play. But the headline here is the addition of Kure, Pearl and Hermes atolls, lying to the northwest and to the east. These are not mere decorative additions: PBY crews and long-range patrol operations used these landmarks as reference points, and Kure in particular was to become a floatplane base for the Japanese following the invasion of Midway, as a support hub of the expected "Kentai Kessen" event. They'll be relevant once we push further into extended area operations. For now, enjoy the view from altitude — it is, we think, rather beautiful.






Deck & Air Operations

•     Fixed bugs with multiple wave strikes.

This one was a proper edge case, and a nasty one. The scenario goes roughly as follows: you have a strike mission already scheduled for a future launch window. In the meantime, you pull aircraft out of storage — reassigning them, repositioning them, whatever the reason. The system, at that point, was not correctly accounting for the fact that those aircraft were already spoken for by the upcoming mission. When you subsequently planned a new strike using the available pool, the scheduling logic would get confused about what was actually available, leading to conflicts, phantom assignments, or outright broken strike packages. It is exactly the kind of bug that only surfaces when you are doing three things at once — which, in a serious game, is more or less constantly, but needs precious user feedback to get resolved. Fixed.

•     Fixed damage detection code being too sensitive and sometimes preventing air operations on carriers.

This one was subtle but maddening. Under certain conditions, the damage system was interpreting minor hits — or even near misses — as sufficient grounds to lock down flight deck operations entirely. In other words, you could take a single 100 lb bomb glancing blow and find your entire air group grounded as if the ship had just taken a Nagumo-style funeral pyre to the face. That is no longer the case. Damage thresholds have been recalibrated to behave more sensibly. This might affect the AI too, which might strike back on a more regular schedule.

•     Fixed aircraft sometimes circling forever above an airbase during landing ops.

An somewhat embarrassing infinite loiter problem. Some aircraft, having been recalled, would simply orbit their destination airbase indefinitely rather than committing to a landing — apparently unable to decide whether they wanted to go home or keep flying until the fuel ran dry. We have resolved this identity crisis. They will now land.

•     Fixed CAPs taking off after sunset if takeoff had been delayed because of deck operations.

Let's say that night CAPs were not something the Imperial Japanese Navy or the US Navy were eager to improvise in 1942 — and they shouldn't be something TFA cheerfully generates on your behalf because of a deck scheduling conflict.

Read on....