TNW: The Naval Wargame

[cabalamat]

I've recently been making some notes on what a naval wargame, similar to RTW2 or Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts might looks look like. I'll post them here and if the team at NWS want tro use any of the ideas in RTW3, they can go ahead and do so.

This is a series of ideas for a naval wargame in the spirit of Rule The Waves 2 (RTW2) or Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts (UAD). For the sake of concision I'll call it "the naval wargame" (TNW).

Scope

Summary: Play naval battles and campaigns. Design your own ships and fight the enemy. Play against the computer or other humans.

TNW will cover naval warfare in the period 1890-1950; this includes the First Sino-Japanese War of 1984-85 to WW2. It might make sense to move the start period back to the first ironclads in 1860.

There are 3 components to TNW:

- the Ship Design module, which lets you design ships
- the Battle Module, which lets you fight battles. There may also be a Campaign Module, which lets you fight extended campaigns such as the Guadalcanal campaign
- The Grand Strategy Game ties the whole thing together: a player commands a nation's navy, designing ships and fighting battles

In scope of military engagements it will go from single engagements with small numbers of ships (e.g. Denmark Strait 1941) to larger engagements such as Jutland or Tsushima, campaigns such as Guadalcanal or the Battle of the Atlantic, and wars such as the Pacific War of 1941-1945.

TNW will include a Grand Strategy Game where the player is the head of a country's navy, determining the naval grand strategy of that country. The player will have to design and build ships with constraints of time, money, continual increases in technology, bearing in mind what rival nations have or are building, all over a background of a changing geopolitical situation where alliances may change. The player will also decide what technologies to research, and recommend to the government who to fight, ally with, or trade technologies with.

Playable factions will include all countries that operated, built or planned to build capital ships during this era, including Britain, Germany, USA, France, Italy, Russia, Japan, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, China, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Sweden, Netherlands, Greece.

As well as a single player game against computer AI opponents there will also be a multiplayer game where you fight against (or maybe alongside) other human players. This will be true both for the campaign game and for battles.

Scenarios

The game will come with historical and hypothetical scenarios for battles and campaigns. There will also be scenarios for the Grand Strategic Game. Users will be able to write their own scenarios and exchange them.

Moddability

TNW will be extensively moddable, with documented file formats and APIs. TortugaPower has written an auto-resolve battle simulator for RTW2 and something like this would certainly be possible. It would also be possible to write AI computer players, at both the strategic and tactical levels.

[cabalamat]

# Ship designer

At the heart of TNW is the Ship Design Module.

The ship designer will be a bit like the one in RTW2 mixed with features from SpringSharp. It will include, for example the dimensions of the ship.

Ship design will include a level of flexibility in where you can place turrets, what sort of armour you can have and how thick. In the design of the ship designer, certain ships will be designated as models, and it will be a requirement that the ship design process can include their characteristics. For example:

- Yamato had a 3x6" turret in C position, behind the 2 front main turrets.
- Nelson had at the front 3x3x16" guns, with the B turret raised and the with the C turret at the same level as the A turret.
- Atlanta also had 3 turrets before the forward superstructure, with the C turret above the A and B turrets.

(Note that RTW2 cannot model the 1st and 3rd examples, only the 2nd)

## The Ship Designer Visually

The ship designer will show a side and top view of the ship in a manner similar to the line drawings that naval architects of the time made, or to old issues of Jane's Fighting Ships or Brassey's, or. Guns, rangefinders and fire control, torpedo tubes, and armour will all be shown. It is intended that this will be both visually pleasing and informative.

For the shape of superstructure, the ship designer will contain a library of what this looked like in various actual ships of the country in question (there would also be generic superstructures). So if the player is designing a British battleship the superstructure might look like *Hood* or *Nelson*. If designing a German ship it might look like *Scharnhorst* or *Bismarck*.

From the design, the ship designer will produce a 3-dimensional model of what the ship looks like, that can be rotated etc and will be used in the Battle Module.

## Parameters

Key parameters the player can change are:

* main, secondary and tertiary armament: what turrets, where, with what guns in each
* anti aircraft armament
* torpedoes
* ASW armament (depth charges, hedgehog, squid, etc)
* armour thickness: belt (main, magazines, extended), deck (main, magazines, extended), main/secondary armament (front, sides, roof), barbettes (main, secondary)
* type of armour (e.g. Harvey, Krupp)
* thickness of torpedo defence system
* rangefinders & fire control systems
* AA fire control
* radar (for surface search, AA search, gun control, AA gun control)
* torpedo protection including bulges
* how well the ship was subdivided internally
* type and power of engines, e.g. reciprocating steam, steam turbine, diesel. This together with displacement determines speed
* amount of fuel stored and type (coal, oil). This together with engines determines range
* displacement will depend on what is put in the ship
* level/quality of crew accomodation. Lower will reduce morale and efficiency, especially on long voyages.
* for aircraft carriers, hangar space & how any aircraft it can carry
* for amphibious assault ships, how many troops, tanks, etc they could carry
* specialist equipment such as for minelaying or mineclearing
* doctrine

### Doctrine

Doctrine is how a ship is intended to be used. For example a ship might be designated an "AA cruiser" with a doctrine of protecting aircraft carriers. An attack destroyer with a role of massed torpedo attacks on the enemy. A battleship might be designed to fight other battleships at a range of 12,000-20,000 meters,
in which case when under AI control it will attempt to keep within those ranges.

Doctrine is most important when auto-resolving battles or when the AI chooses the composition of fleets; the AI will attempt to use the ship according to doctrine.

## Technology

The years 1890-1950 saw great technological change with new technologies such as the steam turbine being introduced, and also regular incremental improvements to existing technologies. This will be modelled in the ship designer: it will know what technologies a countries has and only allow those ones to be used on the ship.

In historical scenarios starting various years, the player will be able to use the technologies the country historically had at those times. This means that TNW will include a list of what technologies each country had when.

## Standalone ship design

It will be possible to design ships in a standalone fashion (i.e. not as part of a full game), i.e. call up the Ship Design module with a country and a year (e.g. Germany in 1930) and being able to build ships that that country could at that time. This will be useful for doing counter-factual scenarios.

There will also be a mode where two players can each design a fleet up to a certain cost and have the fleets fight (with one of both commanded by humans, or as an auto-resolved battle).

## Catalog of ships

As well as letting the player design their own ships, TNW will contain a catalog of ships build by the naval powers over the period 1890-1950. For each ship it will give their displacement in-game (i.e. according to what TNW's parameters thought it ought to be for the ship's spec) and also the ship's actual displacement in real life.

This library will eventually include every ship build over the period and also proposals that weren't such as the G3 and N3 classes. The ship designer can therefore be used as a catalog / reference work on actual ships.

[cabalamat]

# The Battle Module

The battle module lets you fight battles.

The battle module is make up for three components:

* the Game Engine determines how fast ships can travel and turn, whether shells hit, how much damage they do, etc.
* the AI gives orders to a computer-controlled fleet (similar to how a human player controls a human-controlled fleet)
* the User Interface is a program that lets the user play human-vs-AI and human-v-human battles.

## The AI

The AI will decide orders for computer-controlled fleets.

If both fleets are AI-controlled, then there will be an AI on each side making the orders, and the game engine executing them. This will thus be an auto-resolver.

## The User Interface

The User Interface will look a bit like the User Interface for RTW2.

One difference is there will optionally be 3D graphics. This will not be like in UAD, where the player sees a view hovering above his or his opponent's ships, which is deeply unrealistic because helicopters hadn't been invented for most of the period in question, and when they had it would have been far too dangerous for the commander to fly about the battlefield in one.

Instead, the player will see what an actual commander at the time could could see from the bridge of the flagship, and will have the same amount of information a real commander would have had, complete with fog of war.

Want to know how badly damaged an enemy ships is? Train a telescope on it, and be able to visually see if it is on fire, listing, how fast it is travelling, which guns are firing, etc.

## Orders

Fleets will be divided into flotillas, which may in turn be divided into sub-flotillas, etc. If an order is given to the flagship of any flotilla, it an all its sub-units will attempt to obey the mission given in the order.

Orders will generally be towards some mission, e.g.:

* attack enemy battleships
* pursue enemy ship
* withdraw
* defend convoy
* defend CV from air/surface attack
* bombard land target
* rally toward flagship

In this way it will be possible to command large fleets without being bogged down in details of having to micromanage individual ships. In general, during the time period, communications technology was not advanced enough for a commander to be able to micromanage an entire fleet anyway.

Where a battle is being auto-resolved a human commander will give general objectives and how aggressive/cautious the fleet should be.