Tortuga's Fleet Combat Simulation Environment

[tortugapower]

With the hype building for Rule the Waves 2, I returned to my Fleet Combat Simulator project. This topic is meant to collect feedback on my current simulator.

After some testing in private with folks from my Discord (many thanks to them, in particular oaktree and alekius ), I ironed out the early bugs. I would consider this a beta version, ready for public testing.

DESCRIPTION: A fleet combat simulator that takes two lists of divisions -- with ships defined by Rule the Waves ship design files -- and pits them in combat against each other.

DISCLAIMER: This is an independent production, and not associated with NWS in anyway. It's my own thing.

What the simulator does:
+ Generates combat results (ships damaged or sunk) for the meeting of two fleets
+ Allows you any number of any type of ships in either fleet
+ Reads each ship file and generates combat performance parameters
+ Shows a round-by-round description of who wants to move where, who is targeting whom, and the damage done upon any penetrating hits.
+ Abstracts range into 1000 yard chunks; ships move only in 1-D
+ Simulate (some amount of) courage plus common sense, such that ships flee when damaged and an entire fleet retreats when they have little chance to win
+ Allows ships to withdraw if they move outside of vision range (i.e., the battle's weather conditions). This is not a fight "to the death".

What the simulator does NOT do, at least not yet:

- Calculate chance to hit very intelligently. (Currently there is no modeling of deck vs. belt penetration, no ROF decrease from weather or smoke build-up, plus other simplifications.)
- Factor ship role into target choice. The targeting algorithm is a likely area for improvement.
- Tell you the difference between an outright miss and a non-penetrating hit
- Allow re-engagements, where fleets come back into contact
- Model torpedoes properly (right now they are like powerful, short-range guns)
- Track ammunition (ships have infinite currently, including torpedoes)
- Lots of other things, I'm sure


The ultimate goal of this project is to provide an optional alternative for entering the tactical combat environment. For my follow-up program ("Tortuga's Rule the Waves Battle Event Simulator"), I plan to take in an actual RtW battle file for simulation. That said, it is not intended to replace the game's main function of ship combat whatsoever, but rather act as a optional auto-resolve for battles not of interest to the player or if a player is short on time.

I appreciate any feedback people can offer after testing!

DOWNLOAD LINK (for Tortuga's RtW Fleet Combat v0.400)

(This is an .exe and may be flagged by your anti-virus as malicious. It's not.)

INSTRUCTIONS: Please see the next post, below!

[tortugapower]

Instructions for Use:

The simulator is a Windows executable (.exe) that requires two files in the same directory: "fleet1.txt" and "fleet2.txt".

These text files contain the list of divisions and ships for each side in CSV format. Here's an example:

D,"Division Name"
"Ship Name","ship_design_file.ext"
"Another Ship Name","ship_design_file.ext"
D,"Second Division"
"More Ship Names","ship_design_file_2.ext"

Please note the D at the start of the line (without quotes), which indicates the start of a new division. You can use pathing for the design files, these lines are parsed as strings so please use / for directory structure (e.g. "./folder/file.ext").

Once the two fleet files are set with the ships and divisions you want, run the simulator! A "log.txt" file will be generated (overwriting any existing file of that name).

Confused? Download the "Tortuga_rtw_sim_starter_pack.zip" (at the bottom of this post) and unzip that in the same directory as the executable. Now you have sample files!

Still confused, or want to see footage of this in action?

Check out my YouTube video about the simulator.

** Check out an even shorter (3 min!) how-to. **

I'm working on a full GUI to improve this horrendous front end (if we can even call it that). It's a WIP.

Attachments:

Tortuga_rtw_sim_starter_pack.zip (4.79 KB)

[tortugapower]

<Reserved for future use. Possibly change logs.>

[garrisonchisholm]

Tortuga, what your description doesn't say is how this would interject itself into a RTW game. Does it in fact allow you to sim a battle rather than fight it, or is it - at this moment - simply a product that will sim a fight but is not in fact related to an on-going game of RTW?

After looking at it I perceive it is the latter. That might be the vast majority of the reason there has seemingly been little interest. When this can actually mesh with a RTW game and provide an alternative to a (for instance) "unexpected" 1000 minute battle against a foe that is already beaten down and therefore just soaking up time, then I think you'd get some responses.

BTW, you've done 100s of hours of RTW Let's Plays for a not insignificant following, so I for one appreciate that your enthusiasm has extended even into this niche! :]

[JagdFlanker]

i downloaded it, but then got confused about what to do with it

[tortugapower]

Mar 28, 2019 15:38:47 GMT -6 JagdFlanker said:

i downloaded it, but then got confused about what to do with it

Very helpful feedback.

JagdFlanker , garrisonchisholm , and anyone else: I created a 3 minute video overview

Video:  Tortuga's RtW Fleet Battle Simulator - How To 

(non-monetized = won't have ads)

If you download the .exe and the starter pack, and extract the starter pack zip into the same directory as the simulator, you can just run the .exe.  You should see a log.txt generated in the same directory. (Re-run the .exe to generate a new combat log.)

To use new ship designs, simple steps are:

1. Copy other ship designs from any of your RtW savegame folders into the simulator directory.
2. Open up fleet1.txt and/or fleet2.txt to change that fleet's ship composition.
3. Change the ship names (first column, before comma) and ship design files (second column, after comma) however you wish. Feel free to add/remove lines as well.

Let me know if there's anything I can do to make this clearer. Thanks!

[dorn]

tortugapower

I look at your Simulator.

I understand how it works but I do not find the purpose of it. It seems to me as using files from RTW giving some prediction of battle on completely differents sets of rules than RTW giving each ship offense and defense ratings.
It is not even clear how these ratings are calculated.

Eg.

Ship 1 - 10x12" Q-1 main guns (dreadnoght type), 14x5" casemates gives off rating: 1327

Ship 2 - 6x12" Q-1 main guns (all centerline), 14x6" casemates, 8x3" casemates gives off rating: 1312

So according to simulation their firepower is equal, however in reality ship 1 has 33 % larger broadside of main guns and secondary guns would have little effect, tertially none. It seems that off rating is based on linearity of gun caliber taking into considaration all type of guns so that 1x12" gun is similar to 2x6" gun.

[tortugapower]

Hi dorn , first of all I appreciate you taking the time investigating this!

Mar 29, 2019 2:45:04 GMT -6 dorn said:

I look at your Simulator.

I understand how it works but I do not find the purpose of it. It seems to me as using files from RTW giving some prediction of battle on completely differents sets of rules than RTW giving each ship offense and defense ratings.

The purpose of this, ultimately, will be to simulate RtW combat events. It will be for those battles which the player does not wish to fight.

The methodology I used was a round-based combat system, with digitized ship movement on a 1-D plane, which to me best mimicked the actual combat of Rule the Waves. garrisonchisholm had mentioned a one-off simulator (that crunches numbers and spits out an immediate result, without combat rounds). That is also possible to do -- much easier, in fact!

It is not even clear how these ratings are calculated.

Eg.
Ship 1 - 10x12" Q-1 main guns (dreadnoght type), 14x5" casemates gives off rating: 1327
Ship 2 - 6x12" Q-1 main guns (all centerline), 14x6" casemates, 8x3" casemates gives off rating: 1312

So according to simulation their firepower is equal, however in reality ship 1 has 33 % larger broadside of main guns and secondary guns would have little effect, tertially none. It seems that off rating is based on linearity of gun caliber taking into considaration all type of guns so that 1x12" gun is similar to 2x6" gun.

Is it possible to post the two ship files you spoke of? These are my guesses:

- Ship 2 has more torpedoes

- Ship 1 may have many non-centerline turrets

The Offense rating incorporates the following:

- caliber and number of main, secondary, and tertiary guns, and for main guns the value is scaled by the broadside capability

- number of torpedoes (somewhat scaled by broadside as well)

It's not a very complicated calculation, but I think it makes sense. The secondaries play a minor role in this offensive rating, as offensive power is the square of the weapon caliber. So one 12-in gun is 144, one 6-in gun is only 36.

This is all subject to change: either if you have found a bug, or if you can suggest a better way to rate a ship's offensive prowess.

#####

Sample code for gun_damage (a factor in ship's Offense)

self.num_main = broadside_value(self.turrets, weight=0.5, is_gun=1)


def gun_damage(self):
       gd = (self.num_main * self.main**2) + (self.num_sec * self.secondary**2) + (self.num_ter * self.tertiary**2)
       return gd