RtW3 life hacks

[ewaldvonkleist]

A thread to collect little tricks that make playing RtW3 easier. This is not about strategy, but UI tricks and other neat tips. You are invited to add to this thread!

1) You can't exit a battle without saving. But sometimes bugs ruin your experience. Use taskmanager to kill the RtW3 application. You can then leave the RtW3 battle without overwriting your save file.
Attention: There may be a risk that your save file is corrupted this way, so be cautious.

2) Name your DD classes in reverse alphabetical or numerical order. This way, your newest DDs will always be on top of the list.

3) Add at least one torpedo tube to every capital ship. This way, you can always activate the blue torpedo range circle. The enemy's torpedo range is close to yours, so if you keep the enemy out of your blue circle, you easily know when you are safe*

4) Use shortcuts to play the game. You can do most things outside of battle mode and ship design with shortcuts. 
See this thread and the updated shortcut section in the manual coming with the next game versions.
nws-online.proboards.com/thread/7477/undocumented-keyboard-shortcuts-ui-tricks
With some practice it is quicker and better for posture since you are not sitting asymmetrically with one hand on keyboard and one on the mouse.

5) The matchmaker will often mess up the role settings and positioning of your divs, or spawn divisions on top of each other. Run your divs on full AI control for a few ingame minutes, it often sorts out the worst OOB abominations.

6) Listening to Rule Britannia while playing UK increases ship speed by 1kn.

7) You can't detach slow or slightly damaged and speed reduced ships from your divs. Run divs on max speed of fastest ships (don't use div max speed, use the numerical speed entry box) for a while, and you get a decision to detach slower ships when the distance to lead ship is sufficiently large.

8) If you have two screens, you can have one screen with RtW3 and the other screen with something to do while the battles are in the not-so-interesting moments, e.g. long destroyer chase-escapes or time running down until you can end the battle.






*Caveats apply. If you are running towards the enemy, he will have a solution on you even if outside of the blue circle.

[bigchina]

1,2,7,8 are definitely ones I make use of often. 8 especially, can't imagine not having another screen to do stuff on while chugging along with RtW. Its definitely a luxury though.

[wlbjork]

For 6, you can also add Hearts of Oak, Drake's Drum, The Leaving of Liverpool and Spanish Ladies.

Pretty sure there's a few others as well, but can't bring them to mind right now.

[garrisonchisholm]

I hardly ever play RTW without having Drachinifel's sonorous intonations as a backdrop.

www.youtube.com/@drachinifel

[ludovic]

Aug 25, 2023 11:43:03 GMT -6 wlbjork said:

For 6, you can also add Hearts of Oak, Drake's Drum, The Leaving of Liverpool and Spanish Ladies.

Pretty sure there's a few others as well, but can't bring them to mind right now.

If you're Soviet Russia, wearing a red shirt will make you go 1" faster.

[wlbjork]

Aug 26, 2023 9:12:45 GMT -6 ludovic said:

Aug 25, 2023 11:43:03 GMT -6 wlbjork said:

For 6, you can also add Hearts of Oak, Drake's Drum, The Leaving of Liverpool and Spanish Ladies.

Pretty sure there's a few others as well, but can't bring them to mind right now.

If you're Soviet Russia, wearing a red shirt will make you go 1" faster.

When I tried wearing a red shirt, all my ships sunk without a shot being fired

[asdfzxc922]

Closing the RTW window from the taskbar will also bypass the save prompt.

You can quickly cancel move orders by selecting a ship, pressing shift-M, and selecting the region it's currently in.

You can make course-corrections and perform manual torpedo attacks mid-turn, if you're playing at a slow enough speed. I like to set my speed to "slower" whenever I'm performing a torpedo run (or trying to weave my way past a swarm of enemy DDs), and I'll usually drop it all the way down to "real time" when I'm actually ready to fire.

When performing manual torpedo attacks, you can click on the target to "reroll" your firing solution. Combined with the above technique, this lets you exploit some firing opportunities that you'd otherwise never even see.

If the lead ship in a division takes enough damage to take it out of the fight but not enough to let you detach it, you can use the "turn together" checkbox to force the rest of the division to go around it. This has the side effect of making them somewhat less responsive to rapid course changes.

[wlbjork]

Aug 26, 2023 23:52:40 GMT -6 asdfzxc922 said:

When performing manual torpedo attacks, you can click on the target to "reroll" your firing solution. Combined with the above technique, this lets you exploit some firing opportunities that you'd otherwise never even see.

Note that this doesn't change the likelihood of the torpedo actually hitting, only the crew's estimate of hit chance.

If you're told there's no solution 90% of the time - trust the crew, there is no solution.

[stevethecat]

You don't need to use task manager to kill the game, just right-click the icon on the windows bar and hit 'close window' makes save-scumming... Sorry, 'bug recovery' much faster.