Possible to play without aircraft?

[kelseyeek]

Is there a way to play the campaign without having aircraft present in the game?  Either as an option, or by modding?  All of my games end with the natural result that the best course of action is to flood the seas with flat tops, and that all other capital ships are best reclassified as LSTs (large, slow targets).  I get that this is a reasonable outcome (i.e. the historically inevitable one), but I cannot help but be curious about the "what if" scenario where airplanes did not become the dominant means to dropping stuff on people.  The start option of reducing the speed of the development of aircraft only delays it a little bit.  I'm much more interested in a scenario where we just weren't able to miniaturize high power engines adequately to make heavier-than-air aircraft a viable means of delivering ordnance.  I'd love to play through with only float planes and AVs, though no aircraft at all would work as well.  

The best approach I can think of would be to delete all of the CV templates from the AI folders, and to limit the airbase size to 60.  Will that work?  Even if it does, it still leads to more aircraft than I'd ideally like to see, and the AI would still waste resources researching airplanes, right?  

Any other suggestions?  

Thank you!

[cv10]

I feel like this question is more suited for the RTW II forum. There is an option in RTW II to reduce aircraft development to slow down their introduction.

It was possible to turn off submarines in RTW I by editing the first submarine tech to activate after the game ends. You might try the same thing for aircraft in RTW II by editing the techs that provide for certain plane types to activate at a point when the game ends (say 1980). However, this may result in errors, so it is an 'at your own risk' type of thing.

[williammiller]

...thread re-directed here from RTW board...

[Serenissima]

Rule the Waves 1 would also suit this fairly well as it has no aircraft.

[zoomar]

For what its worth, I'm a big gun fan and always play with the "slow aircraft development" option turned on in preferences. This has the effect of virtually eliminating aircraft as a meaningful or decisive element in the game until the early 1950's. I just finished a US campaign and fought a war with Japan in the late 1940's whose AI decided to go full bore into aircraft and carriers, while I kept building battleships, battlecruisers, cruisers, subs, and airbases (mainly for recon planes), and only a few carriers mainly because I had enough money left over. Japanese carrier based torpedo planes and dive bombers were a nuisance (a few torpedo or bomb hits here and there) but I lost no capital ships to air attack in the whole war, while on the other hand my battlecruisers and cruisers were sometimes able to run down enemy carriers and sink them with gunfire, which was great fun.

[kelseyeek]

I usually play with the slow aircraft option turned on as well. I haven't had as much luck in avoiding aircraft becoming dominant by the early 40s, though. By that point I'm starting to de-emphasize my main guns and focus on secondaries as a means to protect my capital ships, and immediately adding SAMs (which seem to be by far the most effect ship-born AA, meaning I know CAP is still more so). At which point I'm starting to crowd by centerlines, reducing barrel count still further. Then the battle distances start shooting up, and I find it's hard to close with the enemy without a significant air contingent of my own. Hell, just finding the enemy seems to depend on aircraft, at least until more advanced surface search radar comes in.

Part of my interest is that I'm an enormous fan of the tactical ship-to-ship combat inherited from Steam and Iron. I love the battles, and the ships. In Rule the Waves I was very attached to my ships, and was sad whenever one sunk, and sometimes very irritated when one did not do what I expected it to do. I've been known to convert battleships into seaplane carriers as punishment when they've disappointed me.

The aviation mode, not so much. I find it's just a lot of clicking, and a map that's suddenly blossoming with so many sightings I cannot see my ships (without deleting the sightings, but I think I'll leave those comments for a different post), and swarms of small colored dots that I lose track of. Maybe if it was a bit more like Carriers at War, where the aircraft state was shown more graphically (as in the squadrons being in one of several boxes, moving from parked to ready, to launching/forming up, to on mission, to holding/landing, etc). Actually, that made me curious and I just went and launched CAW and I'm really confused. I can picture that old interface in my mind, but it's not what I'm seeing. I remember them being parked in the lower left box, and then a box on the lower right that was ready, and another above that for launching forming up, or maybe CAP was right there. But it doesn't look like that when I run it. Am I trying to develop 30 year old GUI's in my sleep? This COVID thing must be getting to me. I know coding something like RTW would be my dream job, but this is ridiculous.

Regardless, I find that once I have large carriers it's a game of rush to spot the enemy, now start clicking launch (or get a little confused if I'm out of torpedo bomber range and want to equip bombs but instead order them to bomb land targets - not sure yet), then as soon as I have a few back, do it again, ignore time of day because pixel lives don't matter, and lather rinse repeat. At that point I start spamming my cheap-build carriers, with no protection whatsoever and 24 knots with low freeboard, all maxed to 100 airplanes. Then I load them out with only minimal fighters and mostly torpedo bombers, and suddenly every battle is just click the space bar, then click through thirty pop-up message boxes of torpedo hits (which I never turn off because I don't want to be unaware if one of my ships eats one).

The surface battle experience is absolutely lovely. But I just lose interest when I have to start managing aerial strikes.

So instead I find myself wishing Mitchell had never sullied the fine traditions of the German Imperial Navy by bombing the Ostfriesland, or maybe we just didn't have nearly the success historically in getting the high power-to-weight ratios that we did, and airplanes didn't make steel obsolete so quickly, and that I get to see what Super-Battleships would have come out of an arms race in the early 50s. I want a reason to hit 90,000 tons displacement, or to use 20" guns. I want to reconfigure my cruisers back into ship-killers, instead of designing them all around twin-turret dual-purpose main armament. I want to strip the SAMs off my destroyers and get them back to being the suicide-squad torpedo-haulers that Mahan intended. I don't want to stick with RTW, though, because I want to see just how much of the world I can conquer by 1970, and not be cutoff by the hard stop at 1950. Although I do miss the extra freedom modders had with RTW before the DRM made the hex editing unworkable. Maybe we can move just a few more hard-coded values out to text files??? Please???

So yeah, if there was a way to have a version of the "slow airplane development" option that was "really, really slow airplane development", that'd make my day.

In the interim I'm trying to figure out how to modify the tech for airplanes as cv10 (my uncle served on her!) suggested.

Oh, and thank you from moving this from the wrong forum! Apparently I'm an idiot. Who knew?

[seawolf]

Sept 10, 2020 17:10:37 GMT -6 kelseyeek said:

I usually play with the slow aircraft option turned on as well. I haven't had as much luck in avoiding aircraft becoming dominant by the early 40s, though. By that point I'm starting to de-emphasize my main guns and focus on secondaries as a means to protect my capital ships, and immediately adding SAMs (which seem to be by far the most effect ship-born AA, meaning I know CAP is still more so). At which point I'm starting to crowd by centerlines, reducing barrel count still further. Then the battle distances start shooting up, and I find it's hard to close with the enemy without a significant air contingent of my own. Hell, just finding the enemy seems to depend on aircraft, at least until more advanced surface search radar comes in.

Part of my interest is that I'm an enormous fan of the tactical ship-to-ship combat inherited from Steam and Iron. I love the battles, and the ships. In Rule the Waves I was very attached to my ships, and was sad whenever one sunk, and sometimes very irritated when one did not do what I expected it to do. I've been known to convert battleships into seaplane carriers as punishment when they've disappointed me.

The aviation mode, not so much. I find it's just a lot of clicking, and a map that's suddenly blossoming with so many sightings I cannot see my ships (without deleting the sightings, but I think I'll leave those comments for a different post), and swarms of small colored dots that I lose track of. Maybe if it was a bit more like Carriers at War, where the aircraft state was shown more graphically (as in the squadrons being in one of several boxes, moving from parked to ready, to launching/forming up, to on mission, to holding/landing, etc). Actually, that made me curious and I just went and launched CAW and I'm really confused. I can picture that old interface in my mind, but it's not what I'm seeing. I remember them being parked in the lower left box, and then a box on the lower right that was ready, and another above that for launching forming up, or maybe CAP was right there. But it doesn't look like that when I run it. Am I trying to develop 30 year old GUI's in my sleep? This COVID thing must be getting to me. I know coding something like RTW would be my dream job, but this is ridiculous.

Regardless, I find that once I have large carriers it's a game of rush to spot the enemy, now start clicking launch (or get a little confused if I'm out of torpedo bomber range and want to equip bombs but instead order them to bomb land targets - not sure yet), then as soon as I have a few back, do it again, ignore time of day because pixel lives don't matter, and lather rinse repeat. At that point I start spamming my cheap-build carriers, with no protection whatsoever and 24 knots with low freeboard, all maxed to 100 airplanes. Then I load them out with only minimal fighters and mostly torpedo bombers, and suddenly every battle is just click the space bar, then click through thirty pop-up message boxes of torpedo hits (which I never turn off because I don't want to be unaware if one of my ships eats one).

The surface battle experience is absolutely lovely. But I just lose interest when I have to start managing aerial strikes.

So instead I find myself wishing Mitchell had never sullied the fine traditions of the German Imperial Navy by bombing the Ostfriesland, or maybe we just didn't have nearly the success historically in getting the high power-to-weight ratios that we did, and airplanes didn't make steel obsolete so quickly, and that I get to see what Super-Battleships would have come out of an arms race in the early 50s. I want a reason to hit 90,000 tons displacement, or to use 20" guns. I want to reconfigure my cruisers back into ship-killers, instead of designing them all around twin-turret dual-purpose main armament. I want to strip the SAMs off my destroyers and get them back to being the suicide-squad torpedo-haulers that Mahan intended. I don't want to stick with RTW, though, because I want to see just how much of the world I can conquer by 1970, and not be cutoff by the hard stop at 1950. Although I do miss the extra freedom modders had with RTW before the DRM made the hex editing unworkable. Maybe we can move just a few more hard-coded values out to text files??? Please???

So yeah, if there was a way to have a version of the "slow airplane development" option that was "really, really slow airplane development", that'd make my day.

In the interim I'm trying to figure out how to modify the tech for airplanes as cv10 (my uncle served on her!) suggested.

Oh, and thank you from moving this from the wrong forum! Apparently I'm an idiot. Who knew?

I can disable them pretty easily, I'll pm you some files, sorry I didn't see this earlier

[seawolf]

kelseyeek

No Aircraft V1.0.zip (78.56 KB)

Drop the folder under "Install" in your RTW2 directory

To note, this doesn't disable airships or aircraft carriers, just aircraft

I'll see if I can disable the AI's building of aircraft carriers when I have more time

[dorn]

I think that if you set up all aircraft related technologies to date in far future, it can work.

[seawolf]

Sept 11, 2020 0:20:31 GMT -6 dorn said:

I think that if you set up all aircraft related technologies to date in far future, it can work.

All you have to do is disable it the same way its disabled for China, just remove the aircraft manufacturers

However, I will try moving the dates for CV techs around to disable those

[captaintrek]

Sept 11, 2020 0:20:31 GMT -6 dorn said:

I think that if you set up all aircraft related technologies to date in far future, it can work.

From my recent experience playing a 10% research Austria-Hungary campaign with slow aircraft development, I'm here to tell you this won't work. There came a point where the AI was happily building CVs and sending out swarms of dive bombers from land bases despite not having unlocked the technologies for either of these. I was just barely able to keep winning with my traditional navy up to 1955, but my last battle involved sailing through a veritable hailstorm of Russian dive bombers to sink two of their many, many carriers, after which they mercifully gave up and handed me six points on a silver platter. And there were issues with Italian land-based torpedo bombers in previous wars before that as well. It was a near-thing.

I'll probably give Seawolf's workaround of deleting the aircraft manufactures a try some time. If I do, I'll delete the AI's carrier and seaplane tender templates as well and let you guys know whether it worked.

[BathTubAdmiral]

So it is not only me who thinks that maybe, just maybe, it was not a very good decision to add CVs, aircraft and missiles to the game, instead of improved divison handling (set up, lead ship designation by the player), ship AI and division AI, maybe some UI improvements on top of it, and making sub/asw warfare work per area instead of global?!

[sittingduck]

Sept 11, 2020 15:15:54 GMT -6 BathTubAdmiral said:

So it is not only me who thinks that maybe, just maybe, it was not a very good decision to add CVs, aircraft and missiles to the game, instead of improved divison handling (set up, lead ship designation by the player), ship AI and division AI, maybe some UI improvements on top of it, and making sub/asw warfare work per area instead of global?!

Yep. No Brown Shoes in my closet... Aviation is interesting and vital for those who like it, but give me an improved surface game.

[kelseyeek]

Sept 10, 2020 19:43:33 GMT -6 seawolf said:

kelseyeek



Drop the folder under "Install" in your RTW2 directory

To note, this doesn't disable airships or aircraft carriers, just aircraft

I'll see if I can disable the AI's building of aircraft carriers when I have more time

Thank you for these files.  I placed them in the Data folder, and then also went to edit the technology dates for each of the aircraft types (and carriers) to be post 1950 (I didn't want to break something by putting them too late, so I figured that was an easy enough test).   I went all-in on a pure surface navy as Austria Hungary, and now in 1924 I'm seeing naval aviation budgets increasing for all other powers, and captured airplane data during wars.  It appears to have successfully prevented ME from building aircraft.  I also tried to move submarine technology out into the 50's, but while I cannot build submarines, the dastardly Russians have done so in spades.  

So at least for version 1.22, I think I can confidently say that moving technology dates only affects the player (which seems weird, but maybe there's a nuance I'm not picking up on), as does removing the aircraft manufacturers.  

[brygun]

Sept 11, 2020 15:15:54 GMT -6 BathTubAdmiral said:

So it is not only me who thinks that maybe, just maybe, it was not a very good decision to add CVs, aircraft and missiles to the game, instead of improved divison handling (set up, lead ship designation by the player), ship AI and division AI, maybe some UI improvements on top of it, and making sub/asw warfare work per area instead of global?!

My own version presented on the forums not quite that list but to correct some core problems rather than add missiles.

Mine were the "detach to go home" (posted complaints and offered suggestions several times) and CV related controls before adding missiles.

Planes have missiles and in a way missiles are planes from planes so you need the up to planes alone working very well first.


I have never yet gotten a game into the missile age since it came in and do not think the core mechanics and local formation handling is a proper format for overlapping AA defense structures and formations. See the computer games of harpoons for examples of that and we just don't have the "relative to a vital ship" station keeping.