Ground of Aces (PC) - Preview

Set on the side of World War 2 where we thought Hitler was still scum, up there with Joanne Rowling, Margret Thatcher, and one guy who lives around your place who can’t park for toffee. Ground of Aces is one of my most anticipated releases (or early access releases) of the year, as it puts you in the seat of the Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Charles Portal (yes, I know about Cyril), planning out the construction of RAF Lichfield and RAF Perranporth, manage resources, and keep The Few in the air to fight off the Boche.

Ground of Aces is focused on one of the most famous military air campaigns in history. It would be more, but you know what American education is like; the Battle of Britain (Luftschlacht um England) is the theater of war you’re caught up in. At least that’s the theory. With only two maps available at the time of writing, you’ll start in early August of 1940, two months away from the Battle of Britain as it is told ended, and maybe just a little bit off for Perranporth being operational. Currently in early access, Ground of Aces offers a basic and somewhat enjoyable management game.

Though I won’t lie, I deleted several hundred words I’d initially written, both about things that take a while to fully understand and things that have been updated. In a little over a week of play time, a few updates have cleared up a thing or two. I’ve been able to understand Ground of Aces a bit more, and generally had more time than I’d already had with what I’d already written. That kind of breaks down some of my rambling and typical moaning about certain aspects, while actually enjoying what I’ve played despite that. Yes, spoiler alert: The early access game based on one of my special interests will be somewhat recommended.

As a premise, Ground of Aces focuses on you commanding an airfield turned air base in England at this point (hopefully more North by the end of development). Effectively, it is a management game without a couple of the amenities we’re typically used to in the genre. You’re not only managing in terms of building the base but also balancing resources and morale. At such an early stage of early access, it seems there are plenty of details in some of those systems to be added. One such thing that would be nice is an improved tutorial.

Ground of Aces isn’t reinventing the rotor with the management genre, but it is doing things a little differently. Picking between Lichfield and Perranporth, you’ll have the outline of a base marked out through terrain or other design decisions, and you’ll have a select number of people. Now, one thing I’ve learned about people as I’ve studied them for all these years is that they may need three main things to stay alive: Eat, sleep, and a place to poo. I know, disgusting, who sleeps these days?

From there, you need to build accommodations, a place to poo, a place to sit and relax, make food, grow food, and if you have enough time, maybe start building an air base. The thing is, each piece takes a resource. Beds take wood and tarp, while tarp tents take lots of tarp, wooden chairs take wood, and wooden shacks take lots of wood. You see the conundrum here? With about 10 people with 20 hands and 100 fingers (give or take, thanks to hammers), building too much too quickly will spread out resources too much, and there is a choke point in the system.

So for a good while, you had to prioritize how you built things. “Why couldn’t you just set things as a priority?” Well, son, let me tell you about the time the Nazis bombed my airfield in Perranporth and there was a Spitfire stranded on the runway. Yeah, they blew up my Spitfire because why wouldn’t they? The trouble was, this was before the July 18th hotfix, which finally allowed you to “prioritize immediately,” otherwise you’d spend the better part of three days hoping one of a staff of over 35 would maybe put the plane back together. NPCs said no.

You still need to calm down and not build too much too quickly, but Ground of Aces finally has a very basic feature that made the initial launch period quite insufferable. Sadly, there are parts of the game where that can be said throughout.

The first time I broke ground in Litchfield, I’d followed the instructions the way most people would, i.e, taking in the broad strokes of the tutorial while also using my basic knowledge of other games in the genre. That’s a bad idea for a few reasons, but mainly because Ground of Aces is fairly unique when it comes to the way it goes around resources and resource management. As is typical, there are several items dotted around the map here or there, mostly seeds from wild plants, trees, sand and claypits, and water holes.

Yes, the war office is a bit skint, and you have to be resourceful. Now, say you’re feeding 40 men three meals a day, or at least that’s your target, your first thought is that the seeds are for the gardening aspect, and thus you should make a big garden area. Wrong! Small allotments produce hundreds of crops, and you don’t overwork the men, as does small-scale resource harvesting, and crafting, for that matter. A lot of Ground of Aces has been about learning to slow down and think smaller-scale. Don’t build warehouses of storage for resources you’re going to stockpile, like mismanaged funds spent on ineffectual PPE.

That’s actually something I quite like about the design, at least once I’ve been able to understand it and what Blindflug Studios is trying to do, albeit with a “meh” tutorial. Instead of stockpiling like you’re playing Total Annihilation, or strategy games like that, so you can bomb Hitler from Chipping Norton, you are working on what you have now, what you wish you had yesterday, and what you hope you’ll have tomorrow. That doesn’t make Ground of Aces a difficult game, but it makes it different and interesting to kind of battle against.

Ultimately, there are a couple of things working against you: The Nazis destroying your stuff, your own impatience, and the morale in the early game can be a nightmare. Working on a schedule almost similar to Prison Architect, you set the work hours of your crew, and currently they work off of a few metrics such as energy, recreation (happiness), and Jammie Dodgers (bravery), I think. If you don’t give them anything to do in downtime or even give them downtime, they get a bit mardy and have a bit of a strop. You know, the usual for people management.

Realistically, I don’t think you can be bombed into a game over, and it is probably difficult to be so incompetent as to let your impatience be your downfall. However, very easily, you can let the crew’s morale beat you if the other two overwhelm you. It is a nice little system that works, but doesn’t feel too easy until you’re rising up the airfield/base ranks and have lots of planes. At which point things should be running on their own, and maybe something else should come in that you need to micro-manage.

However, it’s also at that point that PC performance in this early access launch might have a little bit of a side-eye with you. As always, I’m playing on a 40 series RTX, 32GB of RAM, and a 12th-gen i7, far exceeding or meeting the system requirements as stated on Steam. Nonetheless, once you’re trying to speed things up, playing at three times speed, or you have a lot of crew running around doing odd jobs, you’ll very easily see performance dips. Sometimes sub-30 if things are busy and you’re playing at three times speed.

Oddly enough, I’ve had audio issues come through if I’m several hours into a save and just so happen to play on high graphical quality. There is little detail in the options for graphical detail, just low, medium, and high. As far as I’ve made out, that’s just draw distance and things like anti-aliasing that clean up the art style at a distance. I’ll be surprised if you can run the late-game of Ground of Aces on anything less than an RTX 6090 TI, 15th gen i9, and 124GB of RAM without issues on high at this point. I think you’re a wizard because that’s not real, yet.

The point is, Ground of Aces in its early access launch is rough, and I don’t mind that when a developer is willing to work and refine those things. Several patches have come out in a little over a week; you can easily find the roadmap, and there seems to be a decent amount of engagement with the fan base. As a game, though, Ground of Aces is a unique, fun, and interesting take on the base-building, resource management, and overall management simulator game. From the setting to its look, there is something different about it that stands out.

Ground of Aces is a weird one to recommend or talk about. Mostly because you might have several issues with the execution currently, maybe a few bugs here or there, or even how the tutorial works out, but if you enjoy management games and maybe enjoy a bit of history, Ground of Aces is fantastic. Currently, the latter game – where you’re just climbing up the air base/airfield ranks to get better supply drops and equipment – is fine but doesn’t feel all that difficult or engaging. I’m excited to see more as the team builds on Ground of Aces during this early access period.

A PC preview copy of Ground of Aces was provided by Blindflug Studios AG for this review.