In search of a Quasi-Realistic RN Campaign
Aug 7, 2021 3:13:25 GMT -6
RvT (Dickie), kiankier, and 1 more like this
Post by cormallen on Aug 7, 2021 3:13:25 GMT -6
Greetings All.
I've been playing RTW for a couple of years or so now, started with RTW1 as I'm more interested in the earlier stuff but now been on RTW2 for a while. I love the games approach to tactical command and like the crunchy style of admin as it reminds me of all those pen and paper naval wargames I've played (and written) over the decades. I have played all nations but generally return to my first love, the great and glorious Royal Navy.
I'm happy with "low level" modding (though I'm no code wrangler) and delighted to find much of RTW so accessible to players with time and Notepad.
I've been slowly creating a more "Historically Realistic" (ish) game to play myself, with an historically far larger RN and opponents with close to realistic fleets (at least at the start of the game). Many others have created their own takes on "Historical Navies for 1900/1920/1936/1939 etc" and they are all splendid pieces of work but I really enjoy doing my own ship designs in game so I wanted to try and do my own version of these and play with, and against, them in my own campaign.
I've been running through my variations on a theme with these (up to RN 1900 mod.15 currently) and thought I'd share for your interest and amusement/derision!
I have modded every nations start funding (you have to in order to allow anything close to the real fleets in most cases) and increased economies to allow major powers to approach their historical naval strengths over time.
I have also tweaked a few location stats a bit (I forget entirely where now but you may spot changes) for various reasons.
As my start RN is attempting to mimic the real one it has a LOT of ships (esp. Cruisers) and almost never has any trouble meeting it's In Game (IG) FS commitments but In Real Life (IRL) they had WAY more on foreign stations. 500,000 tons plus in 1900, so I'm happy to over-do the ships on station stuff. My start fleet comes from a super-size : Fleet Size 8 iirc, game but in order to allow closer to real world naval strengths I edit the turn one game start to Fleet Size 12.
I've created similar "over-sized" start fleets for all my opponents, modding their Turn.1 games and adding extra in their yards as needed and I then replaced the In-game opponents for my RN game with the bigger (and more Historically accurate) ones from all these "opponent" games. This did take a fair while, and I probably only managed it due to last years "Lockdown" giving me acres of "Stay-at-home" time I'd not normally have had. (so "Hoorah for Pandemics!"? too soon?).
I've also added a lot of new ship designs into the lists the AI picks from IG to try and keep the game at least looking slightly more historical as it went along. One of my pet hates from my earliest games is the vanilla game's tendency to have a period when "Everyone builds Dreadnought now" followed a few years later by an "Everybody builds Gangut now". This aspect is very much a work in progress still as my version still picks "Historically unlikely" options rather too much... for example I added in a lot of "Export Specials" using designs for minor powers that were, at least notionally, available to anyone not actually at war with their manufacturers. These are currently French, British and American style Pre-Dreadnoughts plus ditto plus German and Italian Cruisers of various sorts. This works Ok for the more minor shipbuilding nations but it can be a little odd to see Great Powers buying their next whole class of Battleships abroad (which basically never happened).
I generally run low research and tend to have it at just 10% for the first year to allow some of the changes to "bed in" before cramping it up to the heady heights of 30% for the next ten years or so (to prolong the joys of the transitional pre to post Dreadnought days I dearly love) before grudgingly allowing it to rise to the insane levels of 40 and, just maybe, 50%! I sometimes also dip into the Save game to poke nations that are falling behind too obviously.
Anyhow, the next few posts (I'll break it up a bit for ease I think) will start with class info sheets that I've made for my own latest RN (v.15) game.
Hope it's of interest...
I've been playing RTW for a couple of years or so now, started with RTW1 as I'm more interested in the earlier stuff but now been on RTW2 for a while. I love the games approach to tactical command and like the crunchy style of admin as it reminds me of all those pen and paper naval wargames I've played (and written) over the decades. I have played all nations but generally return to my first love, the great and glorious Royal Navy.
I'm happy with "low level" modding (though I'm no code wrangler) and delighted to find much of RTW so accessible to players with time and Notepad.
I've been slowly creating a more "Historically Realistic" (ish) game to play myself, with an historically far larger RN and opponents with close to realistic fleets (at least at the start of the game). Many others have created their own takes on "Historical Navies for 1900/1920/1936/1939 etc" and they are all splendid pieces of work but I really enjoy doing my own ship designs in game so I wanted to try and do my own version of these and play with, and against, them in my own campaign.
I've been running through my variations on a theme with these (up to RN 1900 mod.15 currently) and thought I'd share for your interest and amusement/derision!
I have modded every nations start funding (you have to in order to allow anything close to the real fleets in most cases) and increased economies to allow major powers to approach their historical naval strengths over time.
I have also tweaked a few location stats a bit (I forget entirely where now but you may spot changes) for various reasons.
As my start RN is attempting to mimic the real one it has a LOT of ships (esp. Cruisers) and almost never has any trouble meeting it's In Game (IG) FS commitments but In Real Life (IRL) they had WAY more on foreign stations. 500,000 tons plus in 1900, so I'm happy to over-do the ships on station stuff. My start fleet comes from a super-size : Fleet Size 8 iirc, game but in order to allow closer to real world naval strengths I edit the turn one game start to Fleet Size 12.
I've created similar "over-sized" start fleets for all my opponents, modding their Turn.1 games and adding extra in their yards as needed and I then replaced the In-game opponents for my RN game with the bigger (and more Historically accurate) ones from all these "opponent" games. This did take a fair while, and I probably only managed it due to last years "Lockdown" giving me acres of "Stay-at-home" time I'd not normally have had. (so "Hoorah for Pandemics!"? too soon?).
I've also added a lot of new ship designs into the lists the AI picks from IG to try and keep the game at least looking slightly more historical as it went along. One of my pet hates from my earliest games is the vanilla game's tendency to have a period when "Everyone builds Dreadnought now" followed a few years later by an "Everybody builds Gangut now". This aspect is very much a work in progress still as my version still picks "Historically unlikely" options rather too much... for example I added in a lot of "Export Specials" using designs for minor powers that were, at least notionally, available to anyone not actually at war with their manufacturers. These are currently French, British and American style Pre-Dreadnoughts plus ditto plus German and Italian Cruisers of various sorts. This works Ok for the more minor shipbuilding nations but it can be a little odd to see Great Powers buying their next whole class of Battleships abroad (which basically never happened).
I generally run low research and tend to have it at just 10% for the first year to allow some of the changes to "bed in" before cramping it up to the heady heights of 30% for the next ten years or so (to prolong the joys of the transitional pre to post Dreadnought days I dearly love) before grudgingly allowing it to rise to the insane levels of 40 and, just maybe, 50%! I sometimes also dip into the Save game to poke nations that are falling behind too obviously.
Anyhow, the next few posts (I'll break it up a bit for ease I think) will start with class info sheets that I've made for my own latest RN (v.15) game.
Hope it's of interest...