There is a game called ultimate admiral:dreadnoughts which seems to be very similar gameplay wise but has better graphics and seems to be more accessible.
I'm incidentally playing it right now. It's clearly alpha and it remains to be seen how well they manage to deliver the final product, but it's promising.
I've spent maybe few hundred hours on RTW and RTW2 combined. So can't really wait until they deliver the campaign for UA.
Look at those glorious Win32 controls! Brings me back to the Windows 95 days.
Wargaming is one niche where you can get away with really basic graphics, if the gameplay is good. And looking at the amount of detail exposed by this game, I shudder at the thought of the art budget it would take to bring this up to even mediocre 3D graphics.
Grognard wargames are one area where you are almost forced to make old school interfaces like this, because the core playerbase has a large paying contingent that continue to use 15 year old bare bones systems running obsolete OSes.
I can only agree with this quote: "RTW2 might look [...] perhaps a little too much like the work players hoped to avoid by firing up a video game at the end of a long day" - you'd have a hard time convincing me that an application with so many tabs, list views, select boxes, radiogroups etc. etc. could actually be fun to use.
Plus, I wonder if it was a concious design decision to keep the "good old" (shudder) Windows 95/NT 4.0 look or if they simply forgot to include the required manifest for getting the updated look & feel?
That's the entire Hard Simulation genre. It's not your cup of tea, but there are lots of people who only play those sorts of games. Football Manager sims are basically nothing but this. Hell, even Eve Online is not much more than this, especially when you get into some of the massive battles that get reported on in the tech media.
I've messed around with Aurora 4x before and I don't think the UI concept is that bad. In a game as complex as this, the UI is going to have to reflect that complexity in some way. I think the worst thing about the game's UI is how it eschews basic usability and makes everything ridiculously tedious to use. If I made a game like this, I'd probably come up with a similar UI, but I'd pay way more attention to how players interact or want to interact with the game on a moment to moment basis.
I'm the guy who enjoyed Rule the Waves, and even I found CMANO to be a bit of a slog. There's a ton of interesting data and scenarios, but it's just... so... clumsy to play.
There's something to be said for providing a very simple interface to allow the core game to be iterated on much quicker. This doesn't work for every game (specifically, some games rely on the interface much more), but in a turn based tactical game (whether it be this, or the excellent post-apocalyptic RPG Neo Scavenger[1]) I imagine it can be quite freeing for the developer (especially single or small team developers).
1: Neo Scavenger's interface actually looks better in screenshots than it plays in game, but none of that matters, because the game itself is quite good once you play for a bit and learn the idiosyncrasies of how you do things.
Dwarf Fortress, one of the most complex simulations in existence has an ungodly character-based UI, with a mapping of keys to commands which is not very consistent across various screens.
Thanks for pointing out the broken link, I hadn't realized NWS had finally ditched their Yahoo store (which they apparently only got around to last month - !).
You are correct that nwswargamingstore.net is the place they're selling from these days. I've updated the link to point to the general landing page for Rule the Waves, which will lead you there if you decide you want to buy it.
> I only occasionally saw bugs, like the Royal Navy laying down a ship with a complement of anti-aircraft guns in 1902. Highly suspect, Admiral Nostradamus.
I LOLed.
One downside of these hardcore milsim games is that the companies that make them are garage shops and it is far from uncommon for bugs like this to fester for years, or even never be fixed. On the flipside, sometimes the bugs are hilarious, like third cousins in Crusader Kings that murder themselves and then have to run away because they are kinkillers.
I live overlooking the Firth of Forth across from Edinburgh and I'm always amazed when I read of the surrender of the German fleet to the British Grand Fleet in the Forth:
A Type 45 destroyer is almost 10000 tons though, a WWII destroyer would have been 2 to 3000. It’s probably difficult to come up with an accurate cost comparison, but I suspect the difference is even greater than for tonnage.
In a straight up battle the 1918 Navy would definitely lose just because of radar directed fire and anti-ship missiles. For the big battleships standard sea skimming anti-ship missiles might not be super effective because of the amount of armor, but I'm guessing the entire Royal Navy has at least some modern missiles that are designed to pop up and plunge through the deck.
How many Harpoons does a Type 45 have though? I could see details online of how many launchers they have but not how many missiles are actually carried.
All 13 type 23 frigates also come equipped with Harpoons. And the modern navy is so much faster than the 1918 Navy that firing their entire complement of missiles, retreating, and reloading is an option.
Even pre-missile refit Iowa (yeah, non RN) would absolutely trash the 1918 Royal Navy. Automated radar controlled fire control is ridiculously good compared to the fire control solutions they had in 1918.
The only saving grace for Royal Navy would be that a single Iowa would not have enough ammunition.
Today's Royal Navy would blow yesteryear's RN out of the water before the latter crossed the horizon. Modern naval combat generally isn't conducted by sight. Never mind that modern naval warfare is about air superiority as much as anything.
Or really, who knows what real modern combat between naval powers would look like. Let's hope we never find out.
Each destroyer and frigate has 8 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, for a total of 152 ships down. The 4.5" gun (http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNBR_45-55_mk8.php) probably doesn't have the heft to penetrate the armor, although you probably wouldn't want to be in the superstructure of a 1918 era ship.
According to https://www.naval-encyclopedia.com/ww1/royal-navy-1914, in 1914 the RN had 82 battleships (pre-dreadnoughts, dreadnoughts, and battlecruisers (dammit, those are cruisers, not battleships)), 136 cruisers of various flavors, 142 destroyers, and 80 torpedo boats. (The WW1 RN has a significant advantage in torpedo numbers, anyway.) During the war, they built 21 battleships, 32 cruisers, and 232 destroyers. (And I am too lazy to add up the losses.)
So on the theory that 1918 battleships and cruisers are immune to 4.5" guns and that if you throw enough shells at something, you'll eventually kill it, in the surface warfare front, I'm going out on a limb and give 1918 the nod. The modern Royal Navy doesn't really look like it's set up to take on a large surface fleet.
On the other hand 2019 has the Queen Elizabeth with 24-36 F-35Bs and 14 helicopters. Each can carry, say, 6 AGM-158 air-to-surface cruise missiles, for another 216 hits assuming that 1000lb warhead can penetrate armor. I'm sure they'll figure something out. (Worst case, they use the helicopters to ferry marines over and take the ships the olde-fashionede way.)
We won't talk about WW1-era aircraft carriers (or planes for that matter).
Submarine-wise, 1918 had 80 + 156 submarines, including the M class "sub-cruisers". (If you mounted that 12" gun on something modern, we could talk armor penetration.) Unfortunately, most of the 2019 RN helicopters and surface ships are built around submarine-killing and 1918 submarines aren't going to make too difficult targets.
2019 has 4 ballistic missile submarines, each with 4 torpedo tubes (but no indication of how many torpedoes, thank you Wikipedia) and 16 missile tubes, and 6 fleet submarines, with 6 tubes and up to 30-38 torpedoes.
Approximately 300 torpedoes would be a problem for the 1918 fleet. (But it would likely take more than one torpedo to sink a battleship.) However, consider that fleet command and control is a big problem in 1918; they're passing orders with signal flags and lights and attacking in battle lines with a thousand yards or so between ships. With them bunched up like that, those ballistic nuclear missiles begin to get appealing, and 2019 has plenty of 100-500 kiloton warheads to throw around.
The thing is that a battleship is huge. You can kill a tank with a modern subcaliber penetrator because a tank is literally an armored box. Penetrate that and the splinters etc will kill anything inside.
Shoot something like it to a battleship and you make a tiny hole and maybe break a laundry machine. Sure with enough shells you could disable it but that requires a ton and more of shells.
To damage a ship you don’t only need to penetrate the armor you also need to deliver substantial amount of explosives inside said armor.
Don’t get me wrong. The fleet would be wiped out. But against a BB puny 4.5” does nothing, except maybe when delivering incendiaries to the superstructure. Modern fire control allows it to absolutely wreck all destroyers and smaller though combined with autoloaders.
EDIT: More importantly in order to even have that reasonable penetration chance with 4.5” gun you need to be within few kilometers. And at that distance the 1918 RN is really dangerous. Ideally stay farther than maybe 20km.
> I suspect modern armor piercing rounds on a 4.5" gun might do better than you expect against 1918 battleship armor.
Not sure they would. The standard RN small ship gun in WWII was 4.7". The standing orders if a Captain of a small ship sighted a German battleship was to load armour piercing rounds and aim for rangefinders or radar antennae, there wasn't any expectation of doing much damage to elsewhere on the target. His relatives would get given his posthumous VC some time later.
There are youtube videos of using modern torpedoes on ships. One should be enough to sink anything, particularly if it detonated under a battleship magazine.
You could also compare the effects of early guided bombs on battleships [1], they were comparable in weight and warhead to modern guided bombs and to things like the Harpoon missile.
The problems are less that they don't have armor piercing rounds (which they don't), but that the shell only travels ~870 meters per second and only weighs ~20 kg. The projectile doesn't have the momentum to go through more than a few inches of armor. The British 15"/42 from WW2 had a muzzle velocity not much lower, ~750 mps, and weighed ~870 kg. That could penetrate about 10" of armor at 25,000+ yards or 12.5 miles.
The real change would be the ~20 rounds per minute rate of fire plus modern fire control.
The issue is power projection. What the US Navy needs more of are cheaper, less powerful ships. Sending Arleigh Burke-class destroyers to protect ships from Somali pirates is a waste of resources, both in terms of what is committed to the effort and the need to build more Burkes to fill the inevitable gaps elsewhere.
Unfortunately, we seem to be incapable of actually producing such vessels, as too many of the people advocating for naval expansion are advocating for more of the big, over-capable ships (often for selfish reasons).
They tried with the Littoral Combat Ship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littoral_combat_ship), but even when explicitly trying to design a ship that's cheap, easy to build and relatively disposable, they couldn't restrain themselves from larding it down with features until it was fat and expensive. And of course most of those features ended up not really working right anyway.
If we're talking anti pirate roles, we're talking jobs suitable for patrol boats. If we're including those, then we have way more than 300 ships already.
A Zumwalt-class destroyer would have violated the treaty-era [1] restrictions for heavy cruiser, and is larger than many pre-deadnought battleships [2]. Size inflation is very real in naval terms; the size of modern naval craft is often much, much larger than their historical counterparts.
[1] 1920s and early 1930s, for those who don't know their naval history.
[2] HMS Dreadnought being launched in 1906 and essentially making all existing battleships obsolete on launch.
> The first limitation is the quality of the graphics and the user interface, which, as you can see from the screenshots above, are pretty bare-bones. The UI is straight out of the Windows 3.1 era, all vanilla Windows radio buttons and lists and drop-downs.
That is sincerely one of my favorite things about games from that era.
The screenshots immediately reminded me of the original computer version of Harpoon when it was updated for Windows 95. I still find that game's interface to be one of the easiest ways to manage a complex amount of information.
Incidentally, these screenshots aren't too far off what actual console UIs look like for complex military systems. I think CDE is more common than Win32, though.
You're correct that CDE used to be the standard for GCCS, run on HP-UX.
I think it's mostly Windows based for that particular thing now (the actual real time consoles use a Unix but with a custom UI - not CDE -- as I recall), but it's been a few years since I was in that world.
Same. I love the fact that games like Minesweeper or Chip's Challenge are literally just grids of button-controls with image labels.
I'd love to see "using non-behaviorally-overridden native OS UI-toolkit elements as the game's only mechanical affordances" adopted as a theme for a modern game-jam.
More towards the modern era is the Harpoon successor Command: Modern Air and Naval Ops. It diverges from the game in question by implementing only extant platforms and weapons, making it perhaps less interesting as a replayable game but more interesting for modelling past and future encounters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%3A_Modern_Air_Naval_Op...
This is a really great game, if you can get past the ancient interface. Has a surprisingly tight core loop and a nice, pared down approach to 'grand strategy'.
Despite all the buttons, it's actually got very little simulationist cruft going on. You're mostly making interesting decisions.
From the article, which otherwise was good, this line "Both nations had spent so much money on their battle-fleets that they could never bring themselves to put them fully at risk" really doesn't capture the mindset of the antagonists. It was largely true that the Germans were determined to hold on to their fleet, which meant staying in Heligoland, and while the British were satisfied keeping the German fleet in port, they wanted the decisive battle. Despite the British fleet losing more ships in the first day at Jutland, the main reason the Germans fleet escaped was miscommunication in the British admiralty.
The British may have wanted a decisive battle, but they didn't want to lose any more of their fleet to submarines and mines. The Germans were the ones pronking around raiding the English coast and what-not.
"Could never bring themselves to put them fully at risk" does kind of describe the overall situation.
I remember a succession game of Rule the Waves 2 on a forum, with each successive player trashing the designs of their predecessor before designing their own class of ships, especially for the destroyers, until all ships were from dozens of different class with different performance and armements.
Rule the Waves 2 covers a wider time period, since you can go until ~1950, with aircraft carriers, radars, ground-based planes and submarines.
The author also didn't touch the spying that can be done on other nations, which will then increase tension and bring new tech and information, and the military treaties, which will force allied nation to go to war together.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadhttps://www.dreadnoughts.ultimateadmiral.com/
Have not tried it yet due to the game being in development.
It is in early access which i tend to avoid but it looks quite ok so far.
I've spent maybe few hundred hours on RTW and RTW2 combined. So can't really wait until they deliver the campaign for UA.
There's apparently a sequel out, here's one review: https://www.wargamer.com/reviews/rule-the-waves-2/
Wargaming is one niche where you can get away with really basic graphics, if the gameplay is good. And looking at the amount of detail exposed by this game, I shudder at the thought of the art budget it would take to bring this up to even mediocre 3D graphics.
Plus, I wonder if it was a concious design decision to keep the "good old" (shudder) Windows 95/NT 4.0 look or if they simply forgot to include the required manifest for getting the updated look & feel?
http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
[1] https://www.matrixgames.com/game/command-modern-air-naval-op...
[2] http://www.warfaresims.com/?page_id=3822
1: Neo Scavenger's interface actually looks better in screenshots than it plays in game, but none of that matters, because the game itself is quite good once you play for a bit and learn the idiosyncrasies of how you do things.
It is still a wonderfully interesting game.
You are correct that nwswargamingstore.net is the place they're selling from these days. I've updated the link to point to the general landing page for Rule the Waves, which will lead you there if you decide you want to buy it.
I LOLed.
One downside of these hardcore milsim games is that the companies that make them are garage shops and it is far from uncommon for bugs like this to fester for years, or even never be fixed. On the flipside, sometimes the bugs are hilarious, like third cousins in Crusader Kings that murder themselves and then have to run away because they are kinkillers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-46273928
43 British battleships and battlecruisers and 120 destroyers escorting 14 German battleships and battlecruisers and 49 destroyers.
The current Royal Navy has 6 destroyers and 13 frigates.
Edit: Of course it would lose, I had forgotten about submarines!
Even pre-missile refit Iowa (yeah, non RN) would absolutely trash the 1918 Royal Navy. Automated radar controlled fire control is ridiculously good compared to the fire control solutions they had in 1918.
The only saving grace for Royal Navy would be that a single Iowa would not have enough ammunition.
Or really, who knows what real modern combat between naval powers would look like. Let's hope we never find out.
Each destroyer and frigate has 8 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, for a total of 152 ships down. The 4.5" gun (http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNBR_45-55_mk8.php) probably doesn't have the heft to penetrate the armor, although you probably wouldn't want to be in the superstructure of a 1918 era ship.
According to https://www.naval-encyclopedia.com/ww1/royal-navy-1914, in 1914 the RN had 82 battleships (pre-dreadnoughts, dreadnoughts, and battlecruisers (dammit, those are cruisers, not battleships)), 136 cruisers of various flavors, 142 destroyers, and 80 torpedo boats. (The WW1 RN has a significant advantage in torpedo numbers, anyway.) During the war, they built 21 battleships, 32 cruisers, and 232 destroyers. (And I am too lazy to add up the losses.)
So on the theory that 1918 battleships and cruisers are immune to 4.5" guns and that if you throw enough shells at something, you'll eventually kill it, in the surface warfare front, I'm going out on a limb and give 1918 the nod. The modern Royal Navy doesn't really look like it's set up to take on a large surface fleet.
On the other hand 2019 has the Queen Elizabeth with 24-36 F-35Bs and 14 helicopters. Each can carry, say, 6 AGM-158 air-to-surface cruise missiles, for another 216 hits assuming that 1000lb warhead can penetrate armor. I'm sure they'll figure something out. (Worst case, they use the helicopters to ferry marines over and take the ships the olde-fashionede way.)
We won't talk about WW1-era aircraft carriers (or planes for that matter).
Submarine-wise, 1918 had 80 + 156 submarines, including the M class "sub-cruisers". (If you mounted that 12" gun on something modern, we could talk armor penetration.) Unfortunately, most of the 2019 RN helicopters and surface ships are built around submarine-killing and 1918 submarines aren't going to make too difficult targets.
2019 has 4 ballistic missile submarines, each with 4 torpedo tubes (but no indication of how many torpedoes, thank you Wikipedia) and 16 missile tubes, and 6 fleet submarines, with 6 tubes and up to 30-38 torpedoes.
Approximately 300 torpedoes would be a problem for the 1918 fleet. (But it would likely take more than one torpedo to sink a battleship.) However, consider that fleet command and control is a big problem in 1918; they're passing orders with signal flags and lights and attacking in battle lines with a thousand yards or so between ships. With them bunched up like that, those ballistic nuclear missiles begin to get appealing, and 2019 has plenty of 100-500 kiloton warheads to throw around.
Overall, yeah, 2019 has an extreme edge.
I wouldn't underestimate the morale hit from having entire fleets blowing up with no enemy in sight, either.
Shoot something like it to a battleship and you make a tiny hole and maybe break a laundry machine. Sure with enough shells you could disable it but that requires a ton and more of shells.
To damage a ship you don’t only need to penetrate the armor you also need to deliver substantial amount of explosives inside said armor.
Don’t get me wrong. The fleet would be wiped out. But against a BB puny 4.5” does nothing, except maybe when delivering incendiaries to the superstructure. Modern fire control allows it to absolutely wreck all destroyers and smaller though combined with autoloaders.
EDIT: More importantly in order to even have that reasonable penetration chance with 4.5” gun you need to be within few kilometers. And at that distance the 1918 RN is really dangerous. Ideally stay farther than maybe 20km.
Not sure they would. The standard RN small ship gun in WWII was 4.7". The standing orders if a Captain of a small ship sighted a German battleship was to load armour piercing rounds and aim for rangefinders or radar antennae, there wasn't any expectation of doing much damage to elsewhere on the target. His relatives would get given his posthumous VC some time later.
There are youtube videos of using modern torpedoes on ships. One should be enough to sink anything, particularly if it detonated under a battleship magazine.
You could also compare the effects of early guided bombs on battleships [1], they were comparable in weight and warhead to modern guided bombs and to things like the Harpoon missile.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_X
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXk8JAQ-370
The real change would be the ~20 rounds per minute rate of fire plus modern fire control.
Unfortunately, we seem to be incapable of actually producing such vessels, as too many of the people advocating for naval expansion are advocating for more of the big, over-capable ships (often for selfish reasons).
Sigh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_VI_patrol_boat
[1] 1920s and early 1930s, for those who don't know their naval history.
[2] HMS Dreadnought being launched in 1906 and essentially making all existing battleships obsolete on launch.
That is sincerely one of my favorite things about games from that era.
Incidentally, these screenshots aren't too far off what actual console UIs look like for complex military systems. I think CDE is more common than Win32, though.
Bunch of screenshots here in case anyone is interested: http://armchairgeneral.com/harpoon-ultimate-edition-pc-game-...
I think it's mostly Windows based for that particular thing now (the actual real time consoles use a Unix but with a custom UI - not CDE -- as I recall), but it's been a few years since I was in that world.
I'd love to see "using non-behaviorally-overridden native OS UI-toolkit elements as the game's only mechanical affordances" adopted as a theme for a modern game-jam.
"...You Brexit, You Fix It (war in the Baltic States)..."
I may have to do something I very rarely do: buy a computer game.
Despite all the buttons, it's actually got very little simulationist cruft going on. You're mostly making interesting decisions.
"Could never bring themselves to put them fully at risk" does kind of describe the overall situation.
Rule the Waves 2 covers a wider time period, since you can go until ~1950, with aircraft carriers, radars, ground-based planes and submarines.
The author also didn't touch the spying that can be done on other nations, which will then increase tension and bring new tech and information, and the military treaties, which will force allied nation to go to war together.
The Wine Database[1] results are encouraging as well.
[1] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
And if you're interested in this sort of thing, you'll probably also appreciate the rest of navalgazing.net - e.g. https://www.navalgazing.net/Top-Posts, https://www.navalgazing.net/Jutland-Part-1.