Guide to the Rule the Waves 2 economy

[RvT (Dickie)]

Hello!

I've released a new video looking at getting the biggest bang for your buck/quid/pfennig/etc though all the multitude of factors that impact your money, going underneath the hood to look at: 

• What does Bang for Your Buck mean?
• Economics model - how you gain and lose money
• The race for economic dominance - 1900-1955
• Resource stability vs Budget volatility
• Factoring cost into ship design
• 30-year ship lifetime cost calculation
• 30-year ship utilisation by months
• Counting your pennies and making a 3 Year Plan

youtu.be/Qp-FKgVkV8Y


I am also editing episode 09 and recording episode 10 in a Let's Play series on France, starting in 1920.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLezw_SV-XtA2RdI5ke45av2hiRGizTWsS

Dickie

[jwsmith26]

This video is great, as is usual from RvT. The overall complexity of the economic system in the game is a bit mind-boggling, but Dickie has a way of tweezing out the details and somehow making it easy (well, easier) to understand. I've been a playtester for the game for four years now and I've played hundreds of games, but the analysis in this video has substantially altered how I will view my economy going forward. It's well worth a look.

[gurudennis]

Thank you for the great video.

[arminpfano]

Nice video, gives a good overview!

One addition: I understand your 3-year-planning approach as a calculation of opportunity costs. For real planning within the game I would propose a "savings/deficit"-strategy:

1) First save your money, until you have nearly so much savings that the budget will be swapped to the army (+50 to +100 Mio, depending on game size).

2) Then build only ONE class of ships with the money, capitals or cruisers or DDs. Build so many of them that you use up the saved money over the building time, but don´t have to pause building for financial reasons.

This gives you a generation of ships with similar stats (most important speed) to be used as a homogenious fleet (most important for capitals). This way you are fixed to your decisions for 1 to 3 years, depending of the size of the ship type.

Side effect: It gives you clean points for savegames, if you want to try out branching realities. Sometimes I go back for 5 years or so and try out a different capital ship setup, if my last generation sucks at the first war encountered.

[maxspee]

Love your videos, and this one is another treat. I've watched it twice now!

Really interesting stuff around reparations that I was entirely unaware of.

Do you know if reparations reduce the size of your vanquished enemy's budget? I ask as essentially I am trying to play as Japan and end 1955 with the largest naval budget - something i am not even sure is technically possible unless i am able to take chunks out of the USA's budget.