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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 6, 2019 2:04:57 GMT -6
Aside from being a high quality niche product, this is quite possibly the last game in existence without lootboxes. So... Yay! Haha, you've jinxed it now. No doubt they will be confirmed shortly and there is going to be a March of Loot Boxes thread.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 5, 2019 7:59:07 GMT -6
shadepiece , if you are looking for more historical designs, I can recommend their previous game Steam and Iron. The battle scenario system was essentially ported over from SaI to Rule the Waves 1. SaI is now less than $20.00 ($19.99) including the WW1 campaign between Germany and Great Britain. It lacks the more open world sandbox strategic layer of RtW but it will give you an intro to the battle system (RtW made a few minor quality of life improvements in the interface but you wouldn't notice if you haven't played RtW) and you can fight a number of scenarios using historical ships or you can even custom design ships for custom scenarios without having to worry about the randomized tech tree progression of RtW.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 4, 2019 8:10:49 GMT -6
I can't believe that I only just now noticed this, but what exactly does "AI Advantage" do?
Connects your PC to IBM's Watson. Possibly Skynet in a later patch. About your secondary turrets and increasing the chances of explosions. I'm not against the idea necessarily but historically 2.5 inches was pretty average for battleship secondary mounts. At least by WW2 standards. I haven't looked at WW1 battleships yet but most of those ships had their secondaries in casemates. American fast battleship twin 5 in/38 twin mounts had 2.5 inch shields; KGV had 1.5 inch shields for its 5.25 inch twin mounts; Bismarck had 3.9 inch faces for its 15 cm twin mounts; as best I can find, Yamato only had 1.1 inch faces for its 15.5cm triple mounts that it received from the Mogamis, and Richelieu wins with 5.1 inch faces for its 152mm triple turrets.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 1, 2019 17:23:09 GMT -6
It would but you don't really notice it in the small, game version so I didn't fix that.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 1, 2019 16:57:14 GMT -6
Yes it all depends on when the design was finalized (saved) and the ship file was created in the gamesave# folder. If a ship design with triple/quad turrets was saved before the the improved turret tech was researched the reliability penalty is recorded in the ship file so any ship built using that file, even a ship started as new construction after the improved turret technology has been researched will have that penalty. You have to create a new ship file, either through refitting the existing design or saving a new design. The resulting ship file will not have the reliability penalty and any ship built or refitted to that design won't have the reliability problem.
Same applies to ROF penalties for secondary turrets.
So for example if you design a battleship with early triple turrets and save it as Mississippi.10d and you start building ships using that file they will have the reliability penalty. Part way through their construction, you research the improved triple turret tech however, those ships are still being built to the old specification because that's what was specified in the contract (Mississippi.10d) that you signed with the shipyard. You have to create a new contract to fix the problem (Mississippi [R 1916].10d) and have those ships refitted. Any new ships would have to be built using Mississippi (R 1916).10d or a new design, Connecticut.10d and they would have the improved turret design. If you went back and ordered a new Mississippi.10d ship, it would be completed with the older, unreliable turret design.
You may think that that sounds kind of stupid that you can't change the specification mid construction but that is the way it actually happens in real life. I witnessed it myself during New Construction on PCU New Hampshire (SSN 778). Once the shipyard gets a contract they would rather build it to that contract and then get a new contract to rip out the old gear and install the new gear post completion because it is more money for them then it would be to agree to change the initial contract and install the new gear in the first place.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 1, 2019 16:45:41 GMT -6
Besides, there are much easier ways to tell the AI how to use the ship without limiting the design. I look forward to the day when you have released your own game in this genre and I can hand you my money to play it.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 1, 2019 9:14:59 GMT -6
This for example is a legal design in RTW1. Although I might question the sanity. I can only imagine this ship rolling like a kayak if that gun fired along the broadside.] The devs stated that they allow that design so the Japanese Matsushima-class cruiser could be properly represented. I actually attempted a playthrough with my starting force consisting primarily of them, to rather poor results. However, due to the way that RtW refits work, I could swap out the single 13" gun with a pair of 10" guns. Those worked quite a bit better. I remembered someone had discovered that you could build these things a while back on the forum but couldn't find the post to credit them so I just built an example of my own. The funny thing is the wikipedia entry for the Canet gun those ships were equipped with states they couldn't be fired on the beam because they would roll over. LOL, see. Kayaks.
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Post by bcoopactual on Mar 1, 2019 8:50:50 GMT -6
Here are the main quotes from Fredrik regarding Long Range and Reliability from the Tidbits File. Most of it just confirms what those above have stated.
"To clear this up:
Ships with long range will: * Have better chances to escape interception as raiders. * Better chances of sinking merchants if raiders. * Better chance of intercepting raiders. * Less risk of being interned or scuttled from lack of fuel. * More fuel when a scenario starts (rarely of importance).
Ships with reliable engines will have: * Less chance of engine problems in scenarios. * Less chance of needing to return to base area when at sea (getting a *). * Less risk of being interned or scuttled from engine problems." -----------------
"You can move [Short Range Ships] between adjacent home areas. The manual should have been more specific"
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Post by bcoopactual on Feb 28, 2019 18:46:35 GMT -6
In a comparison of speeds, Arethusa could do 32.5 MPH and Derfflinger could manage 30.5 MPH. I would not want my cruisers survival to rest on a 2 MPH of speed, a long range 12 " 50 cal. gun could easily make up that difference. Also, in the heavy seas in the North Sea, a battlecruiser has a much better chance of maintaining that high speed than a cruiser. Point taken. Light cruisers of the time are small, maneuverable ships and hard for capital ship main guns to hit at a distance though. If I recall, none of the British light cruisers suffered significant damage during the runs to the South and North at Jutland. Not that they were the main targets of course but they would still have been taken under fire as circumstances allowed and I don't believe that any were hit by the German battlecruisers or battleships.
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Post by bcoopactual on Feb 28, 2019 18:19:54 GMT -6
The British light cruisers of the Arethusa-class and C-class were as fast or faster than the German battlecruisers. It would be difficult to pin them down. And the battlecruisers would have to retreat when the Grand Fleet arrived. So the Grand Fleet would be in a positioning disadvantage against the High Seas Fleet in another Jutland due to the German battlecruisers dominating the scouting and intelligence gathering phase of any fleet battle but the firepower advantage of the Grand Fleet is more than enough to overcome that. The British would still control the North Sea and be able to maintain their blockade. Like I stated above, I think their biggest difficulty would be preventing raiding strikes by the German battlecruisers on coastal towns and such. If it got bad enough the Grand Fleet might need to spread out and that might allow another fleet action with the Germans having the advantage but they would still need to sink a disproportionate amount of British battleships compared to their own losses to break the blockade.
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Post by bcoopactual on Feb 28, 2019 17:57:58 GMT -6
I agree with this wholeheartedly; having designs limited by the class has always felt stupid to me. For example, why shouldn't I be able to make a cruiser with a single large-calibre gun, or a destroyer with no torpedoes? Sure, it wouldn't be historically accurate, but that's the point; historically, nations built plenty of experimental ships (for example, the Russian "Novgorod." Come to think of it, another example is HMS Dreadnought; the only difference is that the experiment was a success). Why shouldn't I be able to build experimental designs, just to see how well they work? The classifications exist so the AI can use the ships properly. A 40,000 ton 21-knot "destroyer" armed with 16 inch guns would be run straight at the enemy fleet and into the teeth of a torpedo barrage by the AI when you ordered Flotilla Attack because that is what the code tells the AI to do with destroyers. [Edit - that's obviously an extreme example but it serves the point. The AI has to be coded for each ship class to perform a certain way for it to make any sense and look like a reasonably realistic response when we observe it during game play. And part of that is the ships need to fall within certain parameters of speed, weapons, etc for that to work. Destroyer programming would be uselessly fatal for a ship that is too slow or does not carry torpedoes and conversely, a similarly sized but slower gunboat or peace cruiser's (both could fall under the MS class catch-all) programming probably doesn't involve making torpedo runs so allowing them on the ship is wasted tonnage. Plus, there is still room for experimentation, particularly in the early game. This for example is a legal design in RTW1. Although I might question the sanity. I can only imagine this ship rolling like a kayak if that gun fired along the broadside.]
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Post by bcoopactual on Feb 28, 2019 17:51:29 GMT -6
Not that that kind of victory was going to happen with the presence of the 5th Battle Squadron but the short answer is no. As long as the Grand Fleet controlled the North Sea then they could blockade Germany. The German battlecruisers could run around pretty freely conducting raids and such for a couple of years until the British built their battlecruiser force back up (and realistically it would have only taken a couple of years, three at the most for the British shipbuilding industry to accomplish that.)
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Post by bcoopactual on Feb 28, 2019 17:16:07 GMT -6
In-game you can beat the AI with all BC. The scenario generator makes battlecruisers more useful than battleships in general and you can design "fast battleship"-style battlecruisers that can hang well enough with battleships that in the few fleet encounters you can hold your own and even win. That's mainly because you seldom see a nation's entire battleline used in any one scenario like what happened at Jutland.
If you were referring to actual real life, neglecting aircraft carriers and keeping it to a RTW timeline, the problem with an all BC lineup is it can't stand toe-to-toe with a line of full battleships. That means that the US can slowly but inexorably advance under the protection of its battleships and all the Japanese battlecruisers can do is steam around ahead of it retreating and burning coal. Eventually, the US will come upon a target that the Japanese feel they must defend and then they fight and, assuming the Japanese don't have some technological breakthrough that allows much more accurate long range fire than the Americans, they will lose.
Battleships are the benchmark until carriers mature. If the other side has battlecruisers then you need them as well (The USN would have done quite poorly against either the High Seas Fleet or the Grand Fleet in 1916) but they can't replace battleships. When carriers come around though the battlecruiser is more useful because they, and faster battleships, have the speed to act as escorts.
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Post by bcoopactual on Feb 28, 2019 14:33:26 GMT -6
dorn 's right you could combine caliber and quality to make them whatever you can justify in your head based on what you know of their historical performance. For what it's worth, SAI classifies the main guns as 7 inch Q0 and the secondaries as 5 inch Q1. ![](//storage.proboards.com/5448234/thumbnailer/qEAbdLQZdpsZeiytjbaM.png)
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Post by bcoopactual on Feb 28, 2019 14:25:34 GMT -6
I wish I could add more to the scenario generation myself but that isn't my strong suit. I've made a couple of more versions of the Triple Alliance flag because I wasn't really happy with the way the first one turned out. I'm partial to the second one (actually the one on the left below next to the third on the right) but here they are. It's not really my artwork, I'm just cutting and pasting and filling in the stripes. ![](//storage.proboards.com/5448234/thumbnailer/eKaqgVIqRDBsGppMVdTf.png) ![](//storage.proboards.com/5448234/thumbnailer/WExHOlLbHIleJvmUwkfB.png) drive.google.com/open?id=1OGeIu3qMlml9PJnsvGInA15gx4J8ooOA I think 3 looks better full sized but 2a looks better when shrunk down to game size. Less negative space and with 3 at game size, you can barely make out the stripes for the Italian flag so if you didn't recognize the coat of arms you might not even know it was Italy. They are both included in the download for people to use as they will.
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