RULE THE WAVES 2 PRE-RELEASE DISCUSSION THREAD

[axe99]

Jul 11, 2018 17:37:07 GMT -6 williammiller said:

Jul 11, 2018 12:47:39 GMT -6 cheetar said:

How many planes did he have.

I just added an update to that Developers Journal post that adds some basic info for the carriers involved in the engagement. Enjoy!

Enjoyed .  Thanks .

[jeb94]

I got to looking at those two converted CAs and I’m thinking even without the armored belts they probably couldn’t carry much more than 16 aircraft. They’re about the size of the first HMS Hermes. She could carry around 20-24 aircraft but she was also designed to be a carrier rather than a conversion. Then there was the 8000 ton Hōshō. She carried 15 aircraft but again was designed for the purpose. Oh, that brings up another question. Hōshō was too small to operate modern aircraft like the A6M, B5N, and D3A. Will advancements in aircraft effect the old small carriers such as the two CA conversions seen in the Dev Journal?

[britishball]

First off, really excited for RtW2, getting time off from the actual RN to play simulate a 1900-1950 campaign as them is another matter altogether...

I've read through everything posted and found various answers to questions I had but I have a few more and any input from anyone will be appreciated. Here we go;

Will legacy war be a thing? My proposal is given a 1900 start the UK should be deep into the Second Boer War, whilst a largely Army action the Navy were present carrying troops and supplies, commitment was so minimal that it makes sense it is largely abstracted from RtW1, however perhaps a historical increase in tonnage on foreign stations for the duration of it would be a fun little addition? Equally the USA was involved in the Philippine-American War, in which the USN was a bit more involved, and of course a "Who's who list of countries not to f*** with in 1900AD" are at war with China during the Boxer Rebellion, all of these should result (in my opinion) in a small amount of flavour text event popup with a demand for increased Naval presence in their respective areas.

Assuming the idea of smaller legacy wars is or becomes a thing in RtW2, what about random style event wars, small independent nations, formally taken quickly by the "dispatch a Battleship" style events, against countries are like the Rebel nations in Total War, they don't operate in the game until the event spawns them a small, insignificant fleet for you to turn up and destroy. Just like Rebels in the golden age of Total War (Rome 1 and Medieval 2) they would be a way of training units and alleviating mid game monotony with a nice quick war. We all know about the "Crisis in the Balkans" event, but how about a little something to actually do with your task force when it gets there. In my opinion I don't want every war I fight to be a large WW2 style pitched battle, sometimes I'd like something a little closer to the Anglo-Zanzibar war, where you turn up and show the locals exactly why you possess a Battleship and what it can do to their village. My proposal is, rather than "event in Balkans click send BB and inherit new land" you get "event war in X country, send small task force to country, fight one battle where you overwhelm some generic small spawned (independent X country) Navy and then one or two turns later, inherit new land" sometimes I think it would be nice to go into a battle or a war where you completely outnumber and outgun the enemy just so you can see what your Iron Behemoths are capable of, and if for some reason, somehow, over confidence, bad luck, you did lose (or otherwise lost a sizeable contingent so that the war was a tactical loss) then what a compelling, organic moment of storytelling it would be!

I'm happy to see that Nazi Germany won't just be a scripted event, I like the idea of trading prestige off for more than just budget increases, my final question is based off my (less than I wish) play time with RtW1, I noticed (possibly only from lack of experience, small sample size, confirmation bias etc.) that wars seem to be fairly regular in RtW1, that they are almost forced on you sometimes. Anecdotal this may be but once I experience a series of 3 or 4 +3 tension events one month after the other that forced me into war with the USA, which made little sense given their isolationism and my Pro-USA foreign policy til then. Is this a deliberate feature to keep tension? Was I just unlucky? I know I got a war roughly every 4 years, which became unrealistic given some of the losses taken and the lengths of some wars. My proposal is that war should be avoidable for 10 or so years sometimes, sometimes you want a little downtime, to rebuild to appreciate your successes, to construct new ships, to develop new technology and because the preferred state of the Country should always be peace. The little event wars against independents every now and then, putting down an Irish rebellion with a Battleship or seeing off a Indochinese revolt with your new French Carrier group should serve as entertainment enough during the quiet years that give context to the larger wars that are inevitable. As a random aside, not that I'd want this, is it possible to never go to war? If you deliberately try to lower tensions constantly can you actually avoid war? Is there some kind of hard coded timer to force a series of tension up events?

My final question, one already asked but I found no answer for, could we have a tickbox option to always show the names of enemy ships rather than just the class they belong to? I know it isn't realistic and could be used to exploit the game, "oh no is that another battleship? *checks name* nope same one few..." but I like to see who I'm fighting and it helps build a story, that one ship that sunk a few of yours but always got away, now you know that it is just one ship, the same ship, finding famous historical ships in battle Kongo, Bismarck etc. Much like a single player board game we could cheat, but that is on us if we do, certainly as an option it would allow people to have the best of both worlds, I imagine RtW2 has to be tracking the names of all the enemy ships all the time too, so it should be possible right?

Thanks in advance for any response, can't wait to see you all in the Fleet!  

[akosjaccik]

Land based aviation has been confirmed, as has constructing air bases. Based on that, it sounds entirely viable for AH to focus on those, although I'm sure a small strike force might be useful for fast-reaction missions.

Thank you for clarification! It will be rather interesting to see how it will end up, and even more so - how we'll end up with it.   Of course, no doubt I'll try to work with the flattops, given the chance.

This feature is already working in RTW1. For instance, if you sort by "Speed" and then sort by "Type" your dreadnoughts will be at the top of the list but within the dreadnought category they will be sorted by speed (rather than by year, which is the default).

Oh, I did not remember that, my bad!


Meanwhile, reading your comments about hangar capacity made me think: Will the game work with the different doctrines when it came to storing aircraft on the deck / strictly just in the hangars?

[rimbecano]

Jul 13, 2018 3:24:14 GMT -6 britishball said:

My final question, one already asked but I found no answer for, could we have a tickbox option to always show the names of enemy ships rather than just the class they belong to? I know it isn't realistic and could be used to exploit the game, "oh no is that another battleship? *checks name* nope same one few..." but I like to see who I'm fighting and it helps build a story, that one ship that sunk a few of yours but always got away, now you know that it is just one ship, the same ship, finding famous historical ships in battle Kongo, Bismarck etc. Much like a single player board game we could cheat, but that is on us if we do, certainly as an option it would allow people to have the best of both worlds, I imagine RtW2 has to be tracking the names of all the enemy ships all the time too, so it should be possible right?

Thanks in advance for any response, can't wait to see you all in the Fleet!  

In RTW1 you already have this in a way that doesn't detract from realism in combat: you can't see enemy ship names during the battle, but in the after-battle reports you can. 

[bcoopactual]

Jul 13, 2018 5:23:37 GMT -6 rimbecano said:

Jul 13, 2018 3:24:14 GMT -6 britishball said:

My final question, one already asked but I found no answer for, could we have a tickbox option to always show the names of enemy ships rather than just the class they belong to? I know it isn't realistic and could be used to exploit the game, "oh no is that another battleship? *checks name* nope same one few..." but I like to see who I'm fighting and it helps build a story, that one ship that sunk a few of yours but always got away, now you know that it is just one ship, the same ship, finding famous historical ships in battle Kongo, Bismarck etc. Much like a single player board game we could cheat, but that is on us if we do, certainly as an option it would allow people to have the best of both worlds, I imagine RtW2 has to be tracking the names of all the enemy ships all the time too, so it should be possible right?

Thanks in advance for any response, can't wait to see you all in the Fleet!  

In RTW1 you already have this in a way that doesn't detract from realism in combat: you can't see enemy ship names during the battle, but in the after-battle reports you can. 

Yes even down to which ship fired the shot that caused a magazine explosion or which ship torpedoed which if you want.  

I apologize britishball if you were aware of the following already but here is a post scenario screen.  




In the Scenario Results window click on 'Details'. 
That will bring up the Statistics spreadsheet which will give actual ship names (although not the class so sometimes you have to use the almanac). 
Double-clicking one of the ships' names will bring up that ship's information window (thanks to aeson for pointing this trick out to me).
From there you can bring up the individual ship's log which will track who hit the ship with what ordinance from what range and if the hit was a penetrating one (*) and if there was any critical damage.   

The one bad thing is once you close the Scenario Results window you can't bring it back up unfortunately.  I'm hoping that is rectified in RTW2.   

[britishball]

Thanks bcoopactual , I was aware of post battle results, I was just badly over explaining (as usual) that I'd prefer an option for during regular running mode to see "Tirpitz fires on Warspite" rather than "Bismarck class fires on Queen Elizabeth class" because my feed gets clogged up really quick thanks to building lots of the same type of ship, making looking for a particular one mid battle a slow process, if I could keep just half a weather eye out for "HMS Grenville scores a hit with torpedoes on Scharnhorst" its a lot easier than checking every hit message, every minute for every G Class.

Should be noted though this is super unimportant and a really minor thing that I'm honestly not that fussed about it was really the flavour text, minor wars and possibility for longer peaces (perhaps punctuated by minor wars) that I was more concerned about, I'm usually on for hours at a time anyway; so what's another five minutes... maybe just one more turn...

[rimbecano]

Jul 13, 2018 10:03:29 GMT -6 britishball said:

Thanks bcoopactual , I was aware of post battle results, I was just badly over explaining (as usual) that I'd prefer an option for during regular running mode to see "Tirpitz fires on Warspite" rather than "Bismarck class fires on Queen Elizabeth class" because my feed gets clogged up really quick thanks to building lots of the same type of ship, making looking for a particular one mid battle a slow process, if I could keep just half a weather eye out for "HMS Grenville scores a hit with torpedoes on Scharnhorst" its a lot easier than checking every hit message, every minute for every G Class.

Should be noted though this is super unimportant and a really minor thing that I'm honestly not that fussed about it was really the flavour text, minor wars and possibility for longer peaces (perhaps punctuated by minor wars) that I was more concerned about, I'm usually on for hours at a time anyway; so what's another five minutes... maybe just one more turn...

You don't need to check the logs every minute, you can just pull them up in the post-battle results.

Anyways, in the in-battle reports, you do get specific ship names for your own ships, just not for enemies. 

[bcoopactual]

Jul 13, 2018 10:03:29 GMT -6 britishball said:

Thanks bcoopactual , I was aware of post battle results, I was just badly over explaining (as usual) that I'd prefer an option for during regular running mode to see "Tirpitz fires on Warspite" rather than "Bismarck class fires on Queen Elizabeth class" because my feed gets clogged up really quick thanks to building lots of the same type of ship, making looking for a particular one mid battle a slow process, if I could keep just half a weather eye out for "HMS Grenville scores a hit with torpedoes on Scharnhorst" its a lot easier than checking every hit message, every minute for every G Class.

Should be noted though this is super unimportant and a really minor thing that I'm honestly not that fussed about it was really the flavour text, minor wars and possibility for longer peaces (perhaps punctuated by minor wars) that I was more concerned about, I'm usually on for hours at a time anyway; so what's another five minutes... maybe just one more turn...

I understand.  There have been times I wish the ship names were posted on screen as well in "real time".  

[fifey]

This is great, I saw the update at the end of last month and I thought "oh well, it might be a while before there's any news", and you've dropped a AAR report with functional carriers. This has to be the game I've been the most excited by for years.

[largo4545]

Suggestion for Ship building features:

A check box to manufacture MS class ships below 1000 tons out of wood. Perhaps increasing construction time, maybe increasing/decreasing cost depending on the nation and lowering its already low available damage points.

However, the point of this would be to bypass the steel shortage issue during wartime. Like this:

[zeta]

I do not know if somebody said before, but it would be nice if we have the option of select squadrons to not be reequiped with new aircrafts or select squadrons to be equipped with newest aircraft as soon as possible ( like Hearts of irons saga).
If I have a Squadron in India and another in London, I prefer modern aircrafts in London for example.

[bakara]

Also have any measures been taken to dial down the AI's spam of battlecruisers?

[Spaghet Shipwright]

Jul 18, 2018 15:01:08 GMT -6 bakara said:

Also have any measures been taken to dial down the AI's spam of battlecruisers?

I was under the impression that the AI would tailor its construction in response to the player's fleet.

[dorn]

Jul 18, 2018 15:35:23 GMT -6 Spaghet Shipwright said:

Jul 18, 2018 15:01:08 GMT -6 bakara said:

Also have any measures been taken to dial down the AI's spam of battlecruisers?

I was under the impression that the AI would tailor its construction in response to the player's fleet.

Not at all. I played as Russia last time and built only 3 battlecruisers till 1920 and at any time had not more than 2 but AI had a lot of battlecruisers and several nations even had more battlecruisers than battleships. 
If it is well armored battlecruisers with almost battleship armor but larger it could have some sense but they were battlecruisers with a lot of guns and paper armor.