Rule the Waves thread

Has anyone found any particular developmental/design sweetspots yet? In particular, I was the supporter during the Jap campaign of the dual-purpose secondary battery model for cruisers and up of lots of 6-7 inch guns that can slag destroyers without accuracy maluses, but also threaten to pinhole lighter capitals. Has anyone tested this model more thoroughly? How does it compare to the large secondary/light tertiary battery that is the OTL & autodesigner norm? I haven't gotten the game yet, but the design & theorycraft is very interesting to me.

I won the battle but I don't really feel like winner though.

With a similar mentality I've tried this for the legacy fleet CLs:

Short/Cramped
22 Speed
3000 displacement
Fore, Aft and 5 6'' turrets each side for a total of 12 (7 can fire at a target at a time)
150 rounds for main guns
Central firing x2
Port, Starboard and optionally a forward torp
Speed engines
2'' belt
4.5'' CT
2'' Turret
1'' Turret top

I've seen these fuckers outclass CLs from even 15 years later at a very cheap price. You could probably go narrow belt and drop a torp tube if you need to fix short/cramped/unreliable engines but I don't think it's necessary. The real trick is to dump deck armour since CLs don't need it.

Battleships are easily worth 4 destroyers.

With CLs being light cruisers ofc. The tip about any gun >6'' being unable to reliably hit DDs was very useful.

Can you give me some examples with what you mean?
CLs or CAs?
What is the autodesigner norm?
How does your proposal look?

Why not you don't have to buy it for now.

That looks a lot like win.

First pic is a cost-efficient 1899 CL. Second is the mid-game replacement. The centerline turrets let it fire so many shots everything short of a heavy BB/BC dies. Obviously both would have cost a little more and not had anywhere near as much spare weight (i.e. 1-3 instead of hundreds) but tech advanced since they were designed.

but tl;dr you are right with your basic theory-crafting

Interesting. So, the all-large-secondary or in this case more all-middling-primary ethic turns light cruisers from featherweight (for capitals) convoy raiders into exceptional mid-rangers and knife fighters? I didn't expect it to be quite that effectual, but so it is. Have you tried using larger guns for the fore & aft turrets to give them a little punch against larger ships, if they should be so unfortunate to be engaged? Just to let them potentially damage a BB on the retreat, or else advantage them versus other light capitals.

My current conception is to dispense with ships meant to face their own weight class or smaller, and instead create an advantage by creating all ships as pocket ships, to punch above their weight class whenever possible and attain qualitative superiority within it. Said pocket ships are finally organized around a fast battleship/battlecruiser core using 17 or 18-inch primary guns, armored just enough to be functionally invincible against any contemporary or likely future designs. Furthermore, if the WW2 expansion ever does come out, one would add a light/moderate AA battery and turn the dual-purpose battery into a heavy AA component, as in the original meaning of 'dual-purpose gun,' although being a fair bit heavier than the OTL dual-purpose guns, probably using beehive rounds.

By the by, is it 6 or 7 inches maximum size for anti-destroyer guns after all? I don't think it was anywhere in the manual and the original OP was uncertain. Did you try 7 inches?

What I mean is rather simple; completely doing away with the conventional turn-of-the-century tertiary batteries of threeish-inch guns and the like on capital ships, replacing them instead with an enlarged secondary battery in the range of six or seven inches. With heavier capitals like battleships, armored cruisers & battlecruisers, this allows them to sink destroyer rushes before they get into range due to the lack of accuracy malus without having to have dead weight guns that are totally unuseful against other capital ships, regardless of modernity. And for lighter capitals & presumably destroyers, it allows them to ruin everything in their own weight class in everything other than a point-blank knife fight that the smaller guns might be advantaged for in RoF, while allowing them to do more than scratch the paint of enemy capitals if they should be so unfortunate as to get caught.

The autodesigner norm in the early game, from what I've seen, is for rather inefficient dreadnought designs with a small primary battery of somewhat large gun size, a moderate secondary battery, and a very small caliber tertiary battery. If you just merge the latter two and enlarge them, the end result would seemingly be more effective. Plus, if you constrain said dual-purpose battery for whatever reason, you'll be able to pick off the less useful of the scads of turrets to little loss of combat effectiveness for considerable weight gains to redistribute to armor or the primary battery.

Also, as to why I haven't gotten it, I just haven't knuckled down to download it yet. Beside, I might end up buying it, since this seems like a cottage industry sort of team that might be worth supporting.

In the late game they're even effective against stationary/heavily damaged and so slow BCs or BBs. You can hit the fuckers 8+ times every round of shooting and you'll likely hit something important. The DDs can then come in and fuck them up.

You sadly can't mix the calibres of primary weapons. I'd have to make the wing 6 secondaries and then they'd get an accuracy penalty. Regardless larger calibres require larger displacement and thus increase cost in addition to costing more themselves. It isn't worth doing that to go to 7 or 8'' when you consider the loss in accuracy vs destroyers. Running away from a BB/BC entails losing accuracy also.

I've found something similar to this to be effective as the Austrians who are rather poor compared to most. My CL's (and superior DDs) cover enemy DDs/CLs so well that my larger ships all carry either no secondaries or, if early game, high-calibre secondaries and no 6'' guns at all.

I'm in a battle so I can't pull it up right now but my starting B design was 4x12 and 8x10 with idiotically heavy armour (~12'' belt in 1899 against the Italians as a nigh-on bankrupt nation) yet still cheaper than any other nations starting Battleship by a pretty large margin.

Sadly you can't get 17 guns until late-game but anything around 14 will remain viable for a long time. Hell even 12 is enough to occasionally explode the earlyish BCs with turret fires. Austria can't go over 10 at the start but thankfully you can build in foreign yards.

I checked the ingame hit chance and it said '-10 accuracy targeting destroyers' with wrong guns or similar. This doesn't prevent you hitting them and isn't even that big a penalty but the damage advantage of 7 over 6 isn't huge anyway. The slightly higher ROF makes up for it and the weight saving is quite large. I do believe having too many turrets makes you slightly more prone to flash-fire explosions if you get hit by larger guns but frankly getting hit by a large enough calibre to do that as a CL fucks you anyway.

user it's maybe 20mb with the patch just about as large. On a related note the latest patch doesn't come with the game so you'll need to grab it off their page.

I recommend this if you can afford it. Their support got back to me in ~30 minutes and they themselves answer it all instead of outsourcing shit to pajeet and abdul.

Also I fucked up the formatting in that last post. Ignore the italics.

That is the design concept I have followed so far and with good results.
Possible that the lack of tertiary guns are a disadvantage in night fighting because you sight enemy ships only at close range.

Later on when I switch heavily to BBs and BCs, those start lacking any small calibers so it seems my CLs and CAs have to make up for it.

I ended up buying it but only after testing it for a while.

Do you mean the secondary turret penalty, that one goes away with research doesn't it, or is there an inherent secodary penalty?

After your done tell my your displacement and speed. I don't think even with cramped, short and low freeboard I would be able to make one.

There is also one that always sticks when shooting (called 'secondary firing') in addition to the researchable penalty for putting small guns in turrets. I can check next time I get in a battle. Regardless speaking on 1899-mid game designs the researchable penalty will certainly stick around.

18 knots I believe but I'll check in a second (now in another battle, it won't last long).

Huh, I never noticed that one.

That would explain why I never managed to built battleships that heavy, I always aim for atleast 20 knots

I have apparently deleted the original design because I wanted to re-use the name (it was cool and shit).

However I have this other 1899 design that was very similar. Same main armament and displacement. Pic 2 is me modifying it to what I suspect the ship actually was (4x9 rather than 8x10). You could probably easily get 8x9 if you wanted to reduce deck armour a tad.

Note you'd need to make this in the UK.

Holy moly I've seen CAs heavier than that and you don't even have speed priority.

Alternatively something like this for a small sacrifice in armour (obviously you wouldn't have ~800 weight left over in the early game).

You can rebuild any of these three and keep using them through the mid-late game in fleet battles quite well. Alternatively you can build a new cheap design like pic 4 here (i.e. it is not a rebuild but a new ship on the same lines).

That's part of what keeps it so cheap actually. If you wanted to cheapen it even further you could go speed engines and narrow belt armour (bumping up belt extended to 10-11.5 to counteract it) which would save you another few hundred weight. Then you reduce tonnage until you either hit the limit for your calibre (game will tell you if you're too small) or go into red weight again.

The real cost-cutter is speed though. 18 knots is slow but my logic is the fucker is essentially unkillable and the AI won't bombard from range anyway (hell if they do I'll just fuck off back to port or send in my newer ships).

think again

My other starting ships. I suspect the sankt george's could have been a little more efficient. But they were partly designed to fuck up opposing raiders if they caught them.

The Maria class was designed as a raider so it is the most costly for what it does. Still cheap as fuck.

I spent 6 straight hours playing as Austria. I was shit tier until the very last two battles. I mean I fucking slaughtered a superior country's navy while being outnumbered. Only lost 1 BC and killed 3 B's, 2-3 BC's, and a bunch of destroyers.

Why do torpedoes rarely ever work? They saved my ass during those two battles, but that was the first time they were fired.

The AI won't fire them until they're fairly sure they'll hit. If you're manually controlling a unit with torps you need to move in a straight line past the target at reasonably close range. This, of course, runs the risk of you getting torped right back so you want to use the fast and disposable DDs or maybe CLs. Generally you'll only be successfully hitting things going 5-10 knots at most (15-20 late game) because if they turn at a high speed you'll miss also. Early game tech gives you short ranged and slow torpedoes so the AI won't fire them that often. Obviously they also won't fire if you shoot past the target ship and out of torpedo range (blue circle if you've got ranges turned on).

If you right click your main force in the OOB tab and order a flotilla attack your DDs will rush in to try and launch. Early game this is mostly useful for forcing the enemy to turn away (though it'll still make launching more likely) so you can escape but late game you'll likely hit any BC/BB that lacks a proper screen of its own.

tl;dr flotilla attack if you aren't controlling ships manaully or manually command ships to go past a wounded enemy in a fairly straight line and wait for better tech. Also load your destroyers up with double/triple barrel launchers late-game.

Oh and obviously if you've only got launchers on port and starboard you need to go past the target sideways rather than point at them. Centreline launchers can fire either direction.

I think you need a) that extra torpedo warfare training and b) metric shitton of platforms and launchers for torpedoes

Best success I've had with torpedoes is by just slamming a destroyer formation through a enemy formation, preferably at night. You'll end up losing destroyers, but there's dick CA or anything bigger can do when DD drops a torpedo from 50 meters.

The training helps too. I generally keep accuracy and torp training on though night firing can be useful for specialist tactics.

Also make sure to turn research funding up to max (10%) of budget. You do that from the bottom of the research screen.

I have torps on the front of the and aft of anything heavier than a destroyer. They don't fire when I'm going head on. I've tried several times when I had my CL go up against a BC.

When I give the flotilla attack order, my ships hang around for a little bit and then head off to one of my ports. Most of the ships are undamaged and have more than enough ammunition when they do it too.

I train for gunnery and torp ever other year.

Also how do you give the order to ram?

youll also need to send your torp ships on suicide runs in order to get the AI to shoot them, so put them on ships you can risk and replace.

Fore and Aft submerged torps are pretty unreliable in my experience. They have their uses but don't rely on them. Those listed (sub) are submerged and those listed as swivel are above-water. Notably submerged tubes can't fire at speeds past ~28 knots either but that won't be an issue early game.

Are you trying it when they're out of communication with your flagship or when they're on manual control? This won't work. The ships/divisions in question (DDs and maybe CLs) also need to be set to support or screen role iirc. Also play on rear-admiral mode if you aren't already.

Getting torpedoes to fire reliably took me almost 20-30 hours of playing and more to master and early-game they still have issues.

Start by waiting until you've damaged a bigger ship down to 5-10 knots or even stationary then turn a division of DDs to manual control. Slow them down to cruise (or even down lower) and order them to sail along past the broadside of the ship without turning (i.e. shift-click). Obviously you must do this at a range that would keep the target within the blue circle for a while. Note that ships won't fire at a target in front of them that is moving away quickly as that would likely miss anyway.

Once you've done this a few times you'll get a feel for how to successfully launch and things get easier from there. It is nowhere near as complicated as it sounds typed out but it's something you just need to learn as you go.

And again better tech helps.

Note that no ship larger than a DD can get swivel-mounted torps until the mid game too.

Regardless for your first game or two stick to port and broadside mounts on any ship larger than a DD

Great Britain removing the flash shields from their batteries because it slowed rate of fire during drills is up there.

So why are you guys leaving so much spare tonnage? Either reduce the overall displacement and keep the rest of the stats the same, or up the speed, munitions etc.

Basically you're wasting money on oversized ships that aren't reaching their full potential, or being more expensive than they need to be.

Is it because you get a higher chance to surpass the rated speed? I know that an overweight ship has a higher chance of not reaching its top speed, so I guess that makes sense. Maybe I'm just too autistic.

I'm sacrificing armour for speed and guns with this one. Going 21 knots will put it up to an armoured Cruiser's speed. It's a bit spendy though.

That looks like a proper scrapper.

I find there's little sense trying to "B Proof" your Early/mid Bs with armor anyways, just enough to make it 5-6 inch (CL) proof is good enough I say.

Does unarmoring the deck work? If an HE shell hits wouldn't it splinter into the hull and cause damage?

I'm interested to see how the Adria performs. Please do share if it makes it into combat.

Double Dubs with Trips on the Side.

I do not know the term scrapper. Is it a good or bad thing to be?

My heavy Battleship has 11.5" armour, 4 11" Fore and Aft guns, and 10 6" single turrets with a top speed of 18 knots. For early games it is complete shit and I regret making it.

Unarmoring the deck gives a lot of extra tons to use. It's risky at long range, but the closer I get to the enemy, the less likely their shots arcing to hit the deck become. One solid hit and it could sink.

Italy is being a pain and not accepting the battles. The best I can get is a CL vs CL match.

I can't get the PDF to upload, but look up 'The World's Worst Warships' by Antony Preston.

Yes. Scrapper usually means something that can close with and engage the enemy in close combat, which I'd say 18 6 inch guns on turrets should be able to do quite well.

Though if I'm honest I'd opt for saving even more weight and putting those guns in Casemates, but that's just because I'm autistic.

Casemates actually increase the weight. I think after a certain caliber the turrets become more efficient.

Here is my newest CA. A bit slow, but it is cheap and packs a serious punch. Only issue is that the Secondary weapons RoF mod is -40.

Single turrets are heavier than casemates, the benefit of the saved weight only comes around after your technology catches up and makes secondary turrets with more than 1 or 2 guns a viable option. That -40 RoF is a pretty big deal when your enemy is cranking out 40% more firepower onto you.

Be advised, cramped accommodations prevents you from raiding. And short range prevents your ships from moving during wartime.

Having cramped accommodations and short range is the best thing to do with Austria.

I'll just see how it holds up. It's cheap and packs a punch with the 12" guns

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I designed a nearly unsinkable ship.
Btw, I used 14 instead of 15 caliber because my 14 inch guns actually have a higher penetration due to the higher quality.

I don't know how to break it to you user, but that is worse than shit. Is it just to fill in the gaps or do you plan to use that as an actual contestant?

I just wanted to put a million six inch guns on a ship and watch it maul destroyers.

Not him, but it's a armored cruiser (CA) with 24 6-caliber guns, if you asked me, its purpose is to keep a horde of destroyers (DD) and torpedoes the fuck away from valuable dreadnoughts. And maybe torpedo any CA/BC/BB that comes close.
It can't be used for raiding because of the accommodation.

You know you could build a battleship, put 1 big gun as the forward turret, 24 secondary guns in quad turrets with 7 caliber, and 24 tertiary guns with 6 caliber? Same effect, but better.

For the same price? Nope. Notice the displacement is extremely low for a CA.

I'm not saying it's not shit, because any CA with less than 4 inches of Armour is not going to win a fight against anything with at least a 5 inch gun, but at least it's cheap.

Hue
ex dee dee dee

I have played this game for over twelve hours straight. I think I need to do something with my life.

Just imagine if it was multiplayer and expanded into WW2. I'd never play anything ever again.

What does increasing your base capacity do?

Keep more ships in that area. Without any penalties to higher maintenance.

"Ships are deployed in an area, either a home area or on a foreign station. The number of ships that can be deployed in an area is dependent on the base value of the area. The number can be exceeded, but this may cause ships to suffer from maintenance problems and reduced crew quality. If a nation has no bases in an area, only a very limited number of ships can be deployed, representing single cruisers and the like that coal at bases of friendly or neutral nations."

Straight from the manual.

The IRC-bot that would usually have that book seems to be offline for some reason, can you upload that book to >>>/pdf/ ?

Thanks.

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I'm not terribly clued in on WWI/interwar battleship design, how large were the largest guns of that era?

According to this game, 15.

inches that is

Really? I thought they topped out at 12" before the 30's rolled around

I can't fucking tell what that is but that little structure/pylons on the front looks pointless

Hood was designed around the ending of when this game takes place, and she had 15 inch guns.

Nelson was designed around the same time and she had 16 inch guns.

Iowa was designed around 1939-40 and she had 16 inch guns.

I think the biggest that were ever put on a ship was the Japanese with the Yamato with 18 inch guns.

HMS Canada was commissioned in 1915, it had 14 inch guns (10 main ones).

Queen Elizabeth, 1915, 15 inch guns.

It's a crane/hoist that needs to be able to reliably lift a 6 thousand pound vehicle out and into the water, not really pointless…

I remember reading about Warspite a while back but had forgotten they were around that early.

In the history of no other nation on earth has the navy played as prominent a role as that of the Royal Navy and the fucking cuckolds didn't bother preserving a single one of the great ships that participated in the many naval actions of the first or second world wars.

This will be the brit's eternal shame, provided they don't commit soduko on the sword of diversity.

Too late. Spain took 700 years to Reconquista and that was without 200 years of Marxist indoctrination to supplement the Mudslime invasion.

Technolgoy was moving more towards refinement, since adding more armor was reaching the practical dead end.

Case in point - the Iowa, the most advanced ship in WW2, had (on paper) thinner armor and smaller guns. Yet the guns and shells were more advanced, resulting in range and penetration that was very close. A high-quality armor with an "all-or-nothing" protection scheme yielded impressive resilience. Add to the fact that it could outrun most light cruisers, had superior fire and damage control, AA defenses and torpedo protection, the design was clearly moving away from "biggest guns and armor".
Even the proposed super-battleship Montana had 12 16-inch guns, since they were more than good enough for the job, and more guns = more hits.

This is going to be a big battle

youtube.com/watch?v=dW83U4bkC_k

Yeah, it's pretty impressive.

I do find it odd that the gunnery controls themselves were never refit with some sort of digital aiming scheme. As you can see in the video they were still having to manually dial in the analogue controls for the guns. It's just kinda strange to think they were still doing that well into the 80s.

It's so juvenile yet so goddamned perfect.

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If only French ships sank as fast as their infantry retreats :^).

Seriously, my whole navy has done a circle around this thing as target practice and it's only at "heavy damage". How about "smoking crater"?

Ouh non, zey finally cinq

Rekt. Time to give up your clay.

Thread theme

Feels good man.

The Adria performs quite well when assigned to an armoured battleship. The armoured B takes the brunt of the attacks while the Adria moves in for the kill. The Adria still takes some heavy hits, but it can keep going.

The Adria was able to get alongside a battleship and in one salvo got it to stop. It was easy pickings after that. I would have killed more if the enemy didn't go into port.

I've destroyed Italy's navy as if it was a mere fly.
They use to outnumber me. Been at war three times with them. Thanks to my BC's and B's, the enemy has nothing left. My Panther Torpedieren also helped.

What do you guys think?

Anyone willing to do a CYOA campaign as Russia?

Not sure about the torpedo armament on it, otherwise that thing looks like it would give any other Battlecruiser a good savaging.

Torpedoes really do nothing, but they might get a good hit or two in the ships lifetime.

The ship fucking ravages everything. It got hit by a torpedo and brushed it off while decimating an entire fleet. Italians only have destroyers to throw at me now.

Is there any real point to the tertiary guns? The weight savings are quite substantial, but I imagine that's because they're completely unshielded, meaning they'll be easily knocked out by shrapenl. How does an all-secondary design compare?

I had the max secondary guns already, but I needed more firepower. Without the tertiary guns I could add a bit of armour. Since the design is two years old now, the machinery costs a lot less. I upgraded both the secondary and tertiary guns in the first pic.

Firepower is more important than armour. Knock the enemy out before they knock you out.

Couldn't hurt to have ridiculous firepower AND ridiculous armour could it? I'd say drop the tertiary armament and torpedo tubes and slap more torpedo defence and armour on. I can't see 6" guns doing much to many ships other than merchant shipping and Destroyers anyway. Maybe it would also be good for lightly protected cruisers but I don't know, shouldn't this ship have escorts to deal with that?

What a horrible battle. It started at middle of night when my scouting destroyers crashed into enemy battlecruiser formation, which then just drove through my whole fleet.

The whole thing just turned into a clusterfuck when enemy battleships started showing up, and outright rout with my screening ships dropping like flies. On the positive side I lost some of my older battleships. Quickly running behind my meager coastal fortification saved me from losing rest of my battleships to enemy CL and DD swarm. I was certain I had lost the battle horribly from point perspective since I only managed to confirm one BC kill and a CA kill.

I hope the Brits will start peace talks sooner rather than later, I can't afford these kinds of casualties.

Seems like you managed to pull out okay

Those designs didn't have spare tonnage back when I made them in 1899 but this is me opening the same ship ~20 years later when tech has moved on and reduced the weight of components.

Torpedoes would fuck you easily though.

Is it not possible to force your enemy to surrender and thereby capture the ship?

unfortunately no.

Yeah well, it doesn't really matter if I accidentally win a single battle when I lose virtually my whole fleet in random encounters.

Hey, just like the real Battle of Jutland. :^)

What do you guys think?

Lovely.

Where is your German pride?

I can't waste money building my shipyard up.

You have upset the Kaiser on this day user. Could you not build other nations ships if you did build your shipyard up though?

No.

Why not?
It cost only between 1.600.000 and 2.400.000 plus private shipbuilding increases it too and there is no use in going over 52.000 tons.
You can use all of your research. Germany is technology leader giving them a nice advantage and they can't steal your ships.

Never seen anything that would indicate that

I'm always near zero in the funds. I spend a lot to rebuild my old ships. Still using my 1899 ships in 1931. Just added a bit more armour to them.

Also, why does it cost more to refit than to build from scratch?

Fuck him. Sure a war was inevitable but going out of your way to upset every major European Empire isn't a good way to win a war. Hell keeping Russia neutral alone would have been sufficient to let the German Empire survive in some recognisable form.

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The man most responsible if you prefer. I'm not saying he's responsible for the war happening just for the basic timing/situation beforehand and Germany's comparative isolation from competent allies and for wasting precious resources on areas that Germany couldn't hope to succeed (trying to rival the RN was both politically stupid and hopeless).

For god's sake successfully getting the Russians, French and British to work together against you is a major achievement. To be fair the Generals who took over control during the war are probably also somewhat to blame but realistically Germany was not winning without a lot of luck.

I know his flaws user, but I can't help but feel sorry for poor old Willy.

Why do they have a target I need to destroy in an area where I can't even see? Now Italy will get victory points and think they have a chance when they only have one destroyer as a navy.

I feel sorry for him in the same way I feel sorry for G.W. Bush: he was not actively malicious just stuck in a role not suited to his relative stupidity. However this sympathy is tempered by the fact he was dumb enough to fire fucking Bismarck and instead listen to dumb-ass generals. Even an intelligent leader should listen to the wisest of his advisers after all.

I reserve a more specific form of hatred for those who are intelligent enough to know better. A certain big-eared cunt of a PM springs to mind…

He opposed the global bankers who owned every one, of course every sold out nation would had declared war on him.

Yeah, I cannot defend him firing Bismark.

Blair should hang for treason really

After the fifth war with Italy, this is what is left of their navy. I kept sinking the ships as they made them.

There's talk of him getting taken to court in Scotland in light of this recent report. This is even more likely if/when Scotland leaves the UK. I'm not a particular fan of the SNP or Alex Salmond but he got himself thrown out of fucking parliament for calling Blair out and I have to respect that. Charles Kennedy also called bullshit

Nah, there was nothing wrong with that, Bismarck was trying to rule in his stead just like with his grandfather.
After the founding of the Kaiserreich Bismarck was one of the people defining the powers of the Chancellor, and gave himself quite some power.
During the time Wilhelm II. took over Germany was called a dictatorship of the chancellor because just like with his grandfather Bismarck always tried to get his will while defying the Kaiser.
Bismarck was either more concerned about staying in power or thought he was the only solution for all issues, more so than his priorities we with the well being of the Reich.
He actively tried to take out all possible successors so his position wasn't endangered.
I think Wilhelm's biggest issue was that was way to idealistic and optimistic in his early years.

I like how this retarded left-wing meme is still being spewed. He's got a higher IQ than Kennedy did. Especially after his brains spilled out

What Bush was is evil, not stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing and what the consequences were.

Bismarck was highly competent and really just wanted what was best for the Germany (which, by the way, he was largely responsible for forming as a country) rather than personal power for its own sake. Bitching over the fact that's your right by birth to rule should be more important that actually effective rule is just childish. Wilhelm I understood this.

Also I'll point out that removing Bismarck actually led to Wilhelm's country essentially being ruled by generals instead. Even pre-WW1 when this control was soft rather than explicit Wilhelm was easily influenced by anyone promising him a fancy Empire.

Which he used for the good of the Empire that he fucking helped make, not dick-waving.

Given that Bismarck was time and again proven right and Wilhelm II fucking destroyed everything built before him in under a generation I'd say that isn't a negative.

Have you got any evidence for this? Note that every prediction he made came true down to the cause of WW1, Russia and France allying and even predicting the end of the German Empire to within a month. And again he successfully united Germany and fought two larger Empires.

In hindsight clearly the correct move.

And he was a fucking idiot who wanted to play the big Empire/Colony/Naval game and play it now instead of doing things slowly and intelligently. And he fired Bismarck, failed to listen to his parting advice (i.e. DON'T LET THE TREATY WITH RUSSIA I WORKED SO HARD TO MAKE FAIL). And he actively pissed off the entire world. Hell the whole Daily Telegraph incident and his reaction to The Morocco Crises alone suffice as evidence for this.

Bismarck keeping power for himself was unarguably the best solution for the Empire. The fact that Wilhelm II plopped out of his mother's cunt doesn't make him a competent leader nor does it really give him the right to run a country into the ground.

The danger zone around harbors isn't instant death. If you approach a friendly port you'll see that there's only a handful of actual mines.

Well there's two immediate notes here. Firstly IQ isn't particularly reliable unless you're looking at the very highest or very lowest numbers. Even then it's a somewhat arbitrary measure with 100 simply the average of people at the current time (on a related note the Flynn Effect makes for fun reading).

Secondly being smarter than Kennedy isn't exactly groundbreaking. Presidents are generally just figureheads with smart people telling them what to do though this does vary by personality.

You cannot enter the danger zones. My ships just go around them.

You won't actually lose any VPs for not killing the bombardment target. You can either hang around until day if you've got the range to hit it or just sail around the coast/harbours until you find merchant vessels or forts to blow up.

You can also just press the exit button to automatically force a draw.

Yeah and my point is, you don't go around calling Kennedy stupid.

If we know that Bush is objectively, measurably not a stupid person, going around naively claiming he's "dumb", makes you look the fool.

Calling his policies "blunders" instead of the heinous disregard for the constitution they were, is discrediting his conscious effort to fuck America over and send boys to die for Israel.

How the fuck do you know what I do? I do, in fact, go around calling most modern presidents puppets or figureheads at best. This might not quite come out to stupid but it's up there.

If you're claiming IQ is an objective measure of intelligence you are the fool. There are many, many flaws including but not limited to silly shit like concious attempts to balance tests so both genders will score the same. IQ is arbitrary and =/= intelligence.

And I did not call him 'dumb' so the quote marks are inappropriate. I, in fact, said relative stupidity which does not imply outright retardism as much as a lack of intelligence relative to his role as leader of a world power. Try fucking reading what people say before jumping to conclusions

Again I'm not sure why you are quoting 'blunders' as I have not used that word once. This is twice now you've put words into my mouth. A blunder would imply an accident on his part out of stupidity. The truth is the much more sinister situation of established powers pushing a useful tool into doing the actions they wanted. The two-term limit means a president often has little practical power compared to what he can do on paper (which itself is rather limited by design) and leaves the real power in the hands of long-term senators and unelected officials in the military, intelligence services or big business (or the 'establishment', feel free to call this the jews if that's your thing). Controversial decisions all get blamed on the President and the public get their little victory in voting him out without the decision being reversed. This cycle repeats. A good example of this is how the federal government has sneaked powers from states over time.

That I did not know. This seems abusable as fuck though I assume you have to be out of LoS to do it or the enemy has to be hiding in port etc.

How did I not see this utterly fascinating piece of software until now?

How did you guys hear about it? Where else do people talk about it? I haven't seen a thread on halfchan about it.

I'm literally amazed at the complexity and intricacy of it. As a software dev I really admire projects of this sort (e.g. Dwarf Fortress, TempleOS) and am in the process of getting Rule the Waves now. Looking at the dude's site it looks like he really has a passion for this stuff.

God dammit.

I heard an user talking about it in the /monster/ Steam chat, picked it up for myself. A few days later, I started the "Holla Forums plays" series of thread where we played Japan.

I heard about it from someone on here a few weeks ago. They do have an older game that this grew out of that just does the battles called Steam and Iron which I intend to try too.

That someone was, in fact, this nigger right here

I'd actually say Rule the Waves has more thought put into playability than Dorffort, though I do still enjoy both. RtW just knows when to abstract and when to go into autistic details. The basics of the game are so simple both in the spreadsheets part and the battles and interestingly most anons on here have ended up gravitating towards historical designs as the most efficient using the tech available (early semi-dreadnoughts seem to a appear a lot, for example).

The only catch was that you'd still have to repair any damaged ships afterward, and wouldn't gain any VP yourself if you did manage to hit the enemy. It was mostly used for ending stalemates where one side is fast enough to stay out of the enemy's effective range, but not fast enough to actually disengage.

It can also be abused to escape unwinnable fights, which is why it eventually got patched out.

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Anyone been in contact with the devs for the possibility of adding the game to steam or other platforms?

I looked it up on the forums awhile ago. He has straight up refused to consider it because it doesn't fit with his vision or something like that. The community on the forum rabidly stands by the dev on that and shouts down anybody who tries to point out how much it could help.

No surprises there, the entire forums userbase seems to be just a small handful of posters, he would probably sperg out if he found out people were playing the game here on Holla Forums

I fucking hate night fights.

i purposely avoid them, when night battles happen everything goes wrong unless you wanna wait for daylight

I wonder how well building a ton of DDs with nothing but torpedoes and then deliberately seeking out night battles would work.

It would work, but very few DDs would survive as youd have to do kamikazi runs for them to do real damage as well as have LOTS of torpedos on each ship.

And at least one cannon just in case.

op you get sunk?

The japs did have a DD with 40 torpedoes! 40 torpedoes! And that's as many as four tens! And that's a lot of boom!

Yeah, most of my shit got sunk hard. Most of my newest battleships survived but I had no screening ships left.

By the time I rebuilt my fleet with a new plan to render all the enemy capital ships obsolete by building and maintaining atleast twice as many destroyers and CL's(armed with torpedoes) as Great Britain I unfortunately ran out of time since the year turned to 1926 and game ended.

I started playing this game since you started a thread about it and game seemed quite interesting.

You can play until 1950 if you select 'keep playing' though I'm not sure if this is a feature of a more recent patch.

How long do we have to wait to have another Holla Forums plays?
Should I start one up?

It seems to me that the combination of super-heavy battleships combined with disposable light cruisers and destroyers is the most efficient combination. Although there is a great risk of friendly fire when there's a metric shitton of torpedoes going in so many different directions.

LOSING A CA IS UNACCEPTABLE

Torpedoes, while extremely deadly are survivable if the ship is large enough. CA's clearly are not big enough.

Why not?

WHY.

You think that's bad?

I've had enemy BBs spawn on top of my lead BC.

I find the best way to night fight is just to hope your in a cruiser battle with either light cruiser or a single armored as flag and then start blitzing whatever enemy looks the most vulnerable. If you're rocking a hueg battleship fleet then just point in a direction away from where your enemy just was and hit the throttle because fuck that noise, and if you are going destroyer vs destroyer battle then strategy doesn't matter anyway cause those things on full steam don't get hit by anything less than a whole fleet of cutting-edge fire control saturating their position with shells

its an option with the latest patch which works with the pirated version.

I think ive figured out how to capture locations(?)

Basically have overwhelming control of the region and hold it and the game will attempt to invade and conquer the locations automatically.

Nippon stronk

several year old Jap BB knocks out french BC and DD screen protecting convoy, only one DD escaped.

Can somebody with a forum account please post the Byzantium mod?

Dump your best lewds ship designs and I'll think about it.

mega.nz/#!vkgQgKoJ!iMDCjaWjGwZnhE91wDQk287WN17xSehw6ehB7cDGwoY

Not that user, but wanted to show this off.

Goddamn that makes me willy silly.

No step on CSA

The best part is that the name was game generated.

Yeah, the generated names can be quite appropriate at times.

I don't understand how rebuilding works.
I follow the rules of "rebuilding" but I cant save the new design.
Wat do?

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN BLOWN THE FUCK OUT INTO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

What do you mean you can't save?
What do you change during rebuild and what does the game tell you when you try to save?

You should get an error message when you save telling you what you did wrong.

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Are you right clicking an existing ship and selecting "open design for rebuild"?

So.

Is it possible to make a scifi version of RTW?

That happened to me when my light cruiser was running away from a enemy battlecruiser. When my destroyers did a firing pass on that crippled battlecruiser it went down fast.

Probably not. Maybe if and when the ww2 version comes out with functioning carriers and combat air groups.

tfw you enemy lands an equally lucky hit on your own CA. Don't fuck with the Germans

I'm not sure if it's the same game, but I recall a couple years back playing a game with primitive graphics but modular-style building where you tack on more and more parts with different guns and shit. The main thing that made the game fun was playing against other player's designs in a tournament the devs held every week.

"Reassembly" looks like what I'm talking about, though I can't entirely remember.

I got comfortable just landing consistent hits with my secondaries and my main battery, thinking that little shitt was kapput, so I kept a constant bearing to continue the rape. FML fam

You can't ever sleep on ships with torpedoes.

Is it just me or are tertiary guns pretty worthless? I fought a big-ass battle and at the end of it I couldn't find a ship that landed more than three hits with them, and most had barely fired a shot. Seas were rough maybe that matters.

All Casemate guns are worthless in bad weather.
But since they are mounted in the hull they can tank hits.

The low hit chance was due to the bad weather.
In the mid-late game I start using ~6 in. tertiarys but only because my secondary are in the ~ 12 in. range.
Aside from that I barely use them.

Well would fighters be absolutely required? it could be similar to RTW where its the first combat space ships where everyone needs massive guns and short ranges to do shit.

How do you incentivize ships to fire torpedoes? I've not had a single ship hit anything with them even on the off chance they fire the torpedo tubes.

Already discussed itt

Thanks user

Its asking me for an activation code?

try
71PZ1L-3UNMNM6J-BRJ5B21

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Proof positive that if you use BCs in Fleet mode, you're gonna have a bad day.

i reached 1950 a few times and still want to continue.

Fug.

They really need to extend the game till 1950 and maybe even start from the ironclad era.

or make an endless mode, id buy the game in a heartbeat for that.

But back to an earlier discussion, think a limited scifi version of RTW could be possible? as i suggested earlier it wouldnt involve aircraft and would be similar to RTW being itll be the first combat ships in space doing everything

Theoretically yes, although with limitations.

>shellor whatever you use velocity matters more than gun range and I doubt that the game calculates velocity.

Some of these are revised with the implementation of aircraft or as you said simple/WWI style combat.

If it helps, Chapter Master had 2d space battles which was just very shitty images of the ships shooting rockets and torpedos at each other which did fixed damage regardless of where it hit, maybe something like that?

Wait what?

I think SAI and RTW are capable of more complex damage models, if I recall correctly you could loose the energy due to a hit so among other things your oil pumps stopped working until it's fixed, rudder can be shot too.
The main issue with torpedoes, rockets, etc are that you can't or shouldn't make them auto hit but unless they are somewhat aimed or you use engagement ranges like in naval combat.

that fucking bait in the background

What do you think about this ship? The year's 1909 and I want some massive firepower, so I put 4*3 12-inch guns on it. But to make that possible I had to cut out a lot, especially speed and torpedo defense. Would it be better to get rid of the freeboard for two more knots?
Also, how large is the effect of a gun's quality on its performance, and is it sensible to go down one or even two inches for a point of quality?

Not sure it is worth it to go down if you don't have quality 1 11 inch guns.
You can rebuild with better quality and/or higher calibre guns later.
You have a low amount of main gun round if you ask me.
You could get rid of the 6 inch guns.
Low freeboard will make it impossible to go above 21 knots when rebuilding and lowers RoF substantualy together with casemate in rough seas,if you do low freeboard you might want to put secondaries in turrets too.
My advice save the design upgrade you dock and change the design afterwards.

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I've heard that battleships became irrelevant because of

Is this true?

Any guide to help a noob git gud?

That's why you either build medium or station them in enemy territories before the war start.
Can't you just pull all your ships to your home area and let the enemy come?

battleships are huge (easy to hit with bombs and torpedoes) targets and their main guns can't elevate enough to target high flying aircraft

meanwhile, carriers have huge attack range which can be upgraded simply by fielding new aircraft, and can reliably be kitted to sink anything else that floats, even submarines to an extent.

it's simply better to build carriers and accompanying cruisers with AA capability than it is to use that metal on a slow ship that now has to move 20km to get within range of a carrier that can already strike at it.

a single aircraft with a torpedo can fuck your day up in an instant and a carrier can carry 30 or more, and thats not counting the dive bombers, and additionally fighters which can also be equipped with light bombs.

i'm no naval combat expert but to me it seems pretty obvious that the ability to carry planes on a ship severely trumps battleships in almost any job other than shore bombardment and pure fuck them up at close range.

just dont fuck up like the brits did or you will get your carrier sunk by an old BC, shits pretty weak when it does get in range.

Forgot image

Mostly yes.
Battleships are a lot more expensive than carriers and have issues with striking targets past the horizon, planes can spot and attack those targets.
They die almost as easy through torpedoes and missles and with modern technology carriers don't have as much trouble with bad weather performance as in WW2.

user is saying chapter master space combat was pretty shitty and people dealt with it, so rtw even with limited mechanics for space combat would be a step up since it has locational damage. chapter master battles had no depth and were just ships going across a 2d plane with no formations, they just beamlined shooting rockets at the closest ship then moved on to shooting rockets at the next

I just never realised chapter master had space combat, that opened a whole new world to me.

Bruv, go to preferences in top left, you can turn off pause on spotting enemy ships. Sorry that you posted this on Friday and it's Monday

I only use BCs for convoy raiding, fast enough to outrun any BB and heavy enough to stand a chance against any BC or beat any CA/CL or keep distance from DD horde.

Alright, fuck it, I'll do another.

It's the year 1900, we're Grand Admiral Lee-jun of the CSA. To our North, the USA stands with their strong navy, perhaps eager to punish us from leaving their Union. The Caribbean is our primary turf, but both Spain and Great Britain hold lands there, as well as France. The President will demand we station ships on the American East coast to hold the Northerners back, but doing so may split our forces.

How should our starting ships be designed?
What should our fleet composition be like?
What will they be named?
Does anyone even have any interest in doing another campaign?

Generally speaking yes, you could also do something more AAR like.

You have 2 home areas so you can't go wirt short range ships, but you can use cramped and speed priority to squeeze out some tonnage.
Maybe order your BBs from UK or France to get 12 inch guns and 11 inchers on your CAs?

Like so? Fairly weak armor, but should be able to scoot away from any fight it can't take, at least in the early years.

absolutely admiral-kun

Kinda like that.
4 inch armor isn't that bad fo CAs.
Those should be able to take out all other CAs and threaten Battleships.

Our fleet is designed and built. Our naval doctrine is focused on fast, lightly armored ships that pack a punch. Our Bs pack the heaviest guns they can, and as many as will fit. Our CAs follow the same tradition. The Bandit-class CLs might be fragile, but are reliable long range commerce raiders. Our DD fleet is basically the same as any other DD of the period.

What should our early goals be?
What should we prioritize as far as research?
Should we invest in coastal batteries?
Training doctrines?

Taking the spanish colonies in the carribean.

Fire control and ship design
Machinery might be useful until you get oil firing but i'm not sure if it's really wort it.
Submarine maybe because of the CSA advantage, Naval guns so you will be able to use better guns than 11 inch.
Turret tech while good, might only show it'S worth later when you loose the multi turret RoF penalty.
ASW warfare is something you can put on low not sure what else maybe HE and Tactics?

Unless modded coastal batteries are rarely worth it.

Gunnery and Night fighting.
Right now torpedoes will mostly have use to take out slow, damaged ships

Interesting designs Spain. I do not think our fleet commanders will find them intimidating though.

And our first event.

Spain it's always those evil conquistadores.

Of course it was.

But are we prepared to piss of the US?

You can provoke them pretty safely at this stage.

What does their naval budget look like right now?

Early advancements in our campaign here.

And the liberals want to take our naval guns. As usual.

You might actually be able to beat them even, just not worth it I think.

Liberals are crazy shit would kill us

And consider getting some subs rolling.

What about Great Britain?

I tend to kiss-ass with Britain as much as possible. They might be a paper tiger but I don't know if I'm ever going to find that out first hand because they're truly terrifying.

But I suppose that it's acceptable to piss the US off if it means clay?

Britain can pull crazy amounts of ships out of it's ass but they are more prone to turret flash fires, if those designs had flash fire problems the ai should be able to revise the design but still.

Generally yes prioritize clay close to your regions.

Fug

Welp at least the US now have something worth taking

Double fug.

If it weren't a battleships I would have said war but this is tough, you think you can beat him?

Yeah pretty much. In WW2 they were already obsolete because of advancements in Aircraft and Carrier technologies. Nations just didn't realize it at the time because of how seemingly indestructible BBs were. (Remember they were first called "Dreadnaughts" because they thought of them as fearless ships)

I don't however think it's fair to say they went obsolete because of Submarines. There was plenty of CVs sunk due to improper screening, showing that they're just as vulnerable as BBs to torpedos. (There was even an exercise just recently that showed American CVs were "sunk" because of that same issue by sneaky French or British subs.)

BBs are obviously still handy (even by todays standards) because they're massive floating gun platforms capable of carrying serious payload. But the problem comes into what's cost-efficient. If you need thousands of men to crew the guns and maintain the ship you need to pay those thousands of men. Navies found out quick that they'd rather pay the same amount for a ship that has the ability to launch aircraft that are battle-ready because they can reach farther and more accurately with those aircraft.

There's also RADAR and Missle technology that comes into play. As we can see from the Falklands war those can be quite devastating to a ship, and are extremely accurate and quick firing comparatively speaking.

However given all this some retards still claim that BBs have a spot within a modern fleet because everyone likes the 21st century big swinging cocks of the sea.

It was war either way.

Great Britain will be done making us a B in 3 months so if we can avoid losing badly until it works up we should be able to hold even.

Nice, time to take back Haiti from those tyrannical Federalists.

In due time.

For now we stick to the small engagements.

Noice

I'm done for today

So much to night fighting is harmless.

I got into a similar massacre in a night with heavy rain. You move around with no contacts, and suddenly there are 2 BBs and 4 CAs shooting and torpedoing you from 500 yards away. Screens are crippled within 10 minutes and capitals don't take much longer. In the end, both sides were utterly crippled, with 5 capitals and a dozen cruisers sunk.

does this have multiplayer?

No, SP only.

v1.32b1 PUBLIC BETA UPDATE
nws-online.proboards.com/thread/335/rtw-rule-waves-information-downloads

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maximum kek

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Does anyone have experiency with the AoN (All or Nothing) armor scheme? How well does it perform, and on which classes is it worth using?

I'm actually not sure I always use it after it is researched, with the exception of CLs.

Is it beautiful?

She's beautiful, user.

Amazing.

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Are there any significant effects of trade interdiction by submarines? I notice that I earn 5-20 VP each month from them sinking merchants, but that's hardly significant when an when a small cruiser battle usually results in several hundred. So is it better to use subs for fleet support, or not at all?

Like blockades and raiders subs can increase unrest in the enemy's country.
Lower unrest should make the enemy more agreeable to peace, high unrest can even lead to a revolution and auto defeat.
Subs and surface raiders are not as usefull though if you have the enemy blockaded.

can you build and design submarines as well? Muh U-Boats and nostalgia for Silent Hunter has me wanting to make subs more than ships

Nah at least not of now I doubt we will se that feature any time soon if at all.

well darn. As a wise man once said, "There are two kinds of boats: submarines, and targets."

you can do that in sub commander and barotrauma, maybe this soon

I still have ships from 1899 fighting in this battle. Surprisingly only the destroyers were sunk. My new BC's and BB's will rule the waves.