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Rule the Waves III
Asid:
Rule the Waves III is a simulation of naval ship design and construction, fleet management and naval warfare from 1890 to 1970. and will place you in the role of 'Grand Admiral' of a navy from the time when steam and iron dominated warship design up to the missile age.
Product page
Single-Player
Manual: PDF
Editor: No
Theatre: World
Turn Scale: Monthly
Unit Scale: Individual (a person, a plane, a tank, etc.)
AI: Yes
Multiplayer: No
Difficulty: Expert
About
Build Your Navy, from pre-Dreadnoughts to Aircraft Carriers and Missile Cruisers!
Rule the Waves III is a simulation of naval ship design and construction, fleet management and naval warfare from 1890 to 1970 and will place you in the role of 'Grand Admiral' of a navy from the time when steam and iron dominated warship design up to the missile age. Rule the Waves III will let you design and build the ships of your navy, and lead them into battle when war erupts.
You will guide your navy's deployment, construction and operations during a period of great technological innovation and political tensions. While the game derives much of its technology and events from 'actual' history, you will find that you forge your own new history each and every time you play!
Main features
• Campaigns start in either 1890, 1900,1920 or 1935 and can run through 1970.
• Monthly strategic turns with Battles resolved in a realistic tactical naval battle resolution system.
• Manage your naval budget, and deal with interfering Kaisers, presidents or navy ministers as well as a variety of historical events including naval treaties.
• Realistic design of ships ranging from corvettes to battleships and aircraft carriers.
• Research and technical development will determine ship design and tactics.
• Espionage will keep you up to date on the progress of competing navies
• Submarines, airships, aircraft and missiles will all appear and change the naval balance of power.
• Build, train, maintain and fight with your own 'ideal' navy.
• Construct coastal fortifications, airbases and other defenses
• Play as USA, Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, Spain, Austria-Hungary, or China.
Asid:
NWS and Matrix Games join forces to launch Rule the Waves III
August 29th, 2022
The naval sim will hit stores in Q1 2023
Epsom, UK, August 29th, 2022
Matrix Games and Naval Warfare Simulations are partnering to release the upcoming grand fleet management, design and battle simulation Rule the Waves III. This new cooperation between two of the most renowned brands in the wargaming community will bring new life to a franchise recognized as the best-in-genre by thousands of players worldwide.
“We are thrilled to start a new collaboration with NWS,” said Erik Rutins of Matrix Games.“ We strive to give more visibility to key wargaming franchises and make them available to a broader public, and Rule the Waves has always been one of our favorite series in naval wargaming. We look forward to working with NWS to expand its audience and allow more players worldwide to enjoy this title’s depth of gameplay and accuracy”.
NWS is a US-based developer and publisher of both digital and physical naval simulations. The release of Rule the Waves 3 is the first collaboration between Matrix Games and NWS. The game will release on the Matrix Games store, Steam, and other third-party stores by the end of the first quarter of 2023.
The beta testing phase is starting today and interested players can sign up https://www.matrixgames.com/beta/rule-the-waves-3
Rule the Waves III is a simulation of naval ship design and construction, fleet management and naval warfare from 1890 to 1970. and will place you in the role of 'Grand Admiral' of a navy from the time when steam and iron dominated warship design up to the missile age.
Rule the Waves III will let you design and build the ships of your navy, and lead them into battle
when war erupts. You will guide your navy's deployment, construction and operations during a period of great technological innovation and political tensions. While the game derives much of its technology and events from 'actual' history, you will find that you forge your own new history each and every time you play!
Asid:
Rule the Waves 3 - Dev Diary #1 - "What is Rule the Waves?"
Fri Apr 21, 2023
Rule the Waves III is a simulation of ship design, fleet management and naval combat that depicts the period from 1890 to 1970, covering eighty years of naval history with changing technology and tactics.
Rule the Waves III places you in the role of 'Grand Admiral' of one of the leading navies of the time. Playable nations are USA, Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Austria Hungary, Russia, Spain and China. The game will let you design and build the ships of your navy, and lead them into battle when war erupts. You will guide your navy's deployment, construction and operations during a period of great technological innovation and political tensions.
Playing as Italy, tensions are heating up with Austria-Hungary. Best to take a look at what we know about their ships.
The player will have to deal with interfering Navy ministers, Kaisers and Presidents, as well as other aspects of politics and economics. You can influence but not decide foreign policy, so to some extent you and your navy can be subject to the turns and twists of changing politics. While there will be periods of higher or lower tensions, you can never know for sure when your navy will have to stand the test of battle.
Rule the Waves is not a simple game. Ship design, battles and the limits of command and control of the time are portrayed realistically. Some grasp of 20th century naval warfare and warships is not necessary, but certainly will be helpful for players of the game. The game focuses on realistic ship design, technical development and naval combat and tactics. If you are genuinely interested in naval history, warship construction and the way navies fought and manoeuvred in the first half of the 20th century, this is a game that will keep you engaged for many hours. If you want quick action packed battles with ships exploding in 3D graphics and no complications, this game might not be for you. Be aware that graphics in RTW are adequate for the purposes of the simulation, but not cutting edge.
There is an in game naval almanac to keep an eye on the opposition. Here we take a look at the British fleet.
You will design and build the ships of your Navy. The game includes a detailed and comprehensive ship designer where you can design your own ideal ship, from dreadnought battleships down to the lowly antisubmarine corvette or minesweeper. However, if you do not want to design ships from the keel up, there is an autodesigner that can design the ship for you, and you can just change any details you might want to alter.
Once designed you need to build your ships. A battleship can take several years to build, and as technical development in the period covered move quickly, this means that ships can be obsolete by the time they are commissioned. As a player, this might be frustrating, but it affects the opposing nations as well. You will have to learn to live with it and learn how to plan ahead.
Designing a battlecruiser for the US Navy in the ship designer
There is a temptation to delay the design of that battleship you are planning, to take advantage of the latest technology. But you must keep in mind that as construction times of major warships are several years, you may find yourself in a situation where you have to fight with the navy you have, and not the one you are planning that will be ready in two years' time.
At your disposition you will have a naval budget. The budget will vary with political decisions, in times of high tension it will tend to rise, while in times of low tension, the politicians will tend to want to cut down on naval expenditures. You will often be consulted on foreign policy matters by the Kaiser, Prime Minister or President. Hawkish answers will tend to drive up tension and increase the navy budget, while more measured responses will keep tensions manageable.
When war erupts, you will coordinate the operations of your fleet and lead it on the seas of battle to further the ambitions of your nation. You can deploy your navy in sea zones across the globe. Battles are generated semi randomly depending on where your ships are deployed and depending on amphibious operations or other activities.
When tactical battles occur, they will be played out on the tactical map where your ships will deploy and fight according to the doctrine and technology of the time, which will change gradually over the ages of the game.
Battles are simulated with realistic tactics, formations and limited by weather and visibility. You can select varying levels of realism in command and control. On admiral’s mode you will only control your flagship, while other formations will be given roles in relation to the flagship. On lower levels of realism, you can control all divisions of ships in your fleet and even the gunnery of individual ships.
Gunnery, torpedoes and later bombs and missiles and their effects will all be simulated in realistic detail. Armour penetration is of course covered, modified by current shell and armour technology. Damage to ships is realistically applied, including progressive flooding, fires and critical hits.
Later battles will include aircraft, both carrier-based and land-based, as well as missiles.
It is in war the ships that you have designed will have to stand their test in battle. Was that new battleship design such a great idea? And that cruiser that sacrificed armour for speed, how did that work out? Only the crucible of real naval combat will give the answer.
There are options to start the game in 1890, 1900, 1920 or 1935. When the game starts, you will have an existing legacy fleet at game start. The legacy fleet is normally generated automatically, but can optionally be built manually in the 1900 start. The game ends in 1970, but there is an option to continue the game until 1980, though technological progress will trail off after the regular game ends.
Starting a game as France
Note that Rule the Waves centres around the campaign game where you design, build and fight with your own Navy. There are no historical scenarios and the starting fleets do not recreate historical orders of battle. The starting fleets for the various start dates are realistic ships for that time period and the various navies, but are not the exact ships that composed those navies at that time.
Rule that Waves is single player only, but with a competent AI that will design ships and fight naval battles in a realistic manner.
In the upcoming developer diaries we will take a look at how Rule the Waves III differs from RTWI and II, ship design and also tactics and battles in the different time periods Rule the Waves III covers from 1890-1970.
Asid:
Rule the Waves 3 - Dev Diary #2 - What is new in RTW3?
Fri Apr 28, 2023
Rule the waves 3 has a number of improvements over its predecessors. The most obvious one is the extension of the time period covered to allow for a truly epic scale. RTW3 starts in 1890, which means that the early game includes some really weird ironclad designs. The game mechanics have also been adapted to cover technology and tactics in that period, mainly shorter combat ranges and armor being stronger relative to gun penetration.
In the other end of the game in the post-WWII period up to 1970, the missile age has been incorporated. Where RTW2 had only the most modest beginnings of the missile age, in RTW3 you can design fully fledged missile cruisers with a wide choice of missile armament and missile defences. Various types of Anti-ship missiles and Anti-aircraft missiles are included, as are more modern light and medium AA guns. The technology of AA defences changes dramatically as the massive WW2 arrays of light and medium AA guns that are so distinctive of late WW2 battleships and aircraft carriers are replaced by fewer but more accurate radar directed weapons.
Jet aircraft are also now handled in more detail, and carriers have to be rebuilt to handle larger jet aircraft. Two new aircraft roles have been added, Heavy Jet Fighters and Jet Attack aircraft.
No other naval wargame allows for such a wide range, starting in the pre-Dreadnought era, progressing through the advent of naval airpower and continuing well into the missile age. Guiding your fleet through these major strategic and tactical revolutions makes for a lot of interesting and fun decisions.
But RTW3 is not only about increasing the time span. There have been many other improvements and additions.
For example, you can now group your ships into permanent divisions, and assign them roles relative to other divisions. In effect, you can set up the structure of your entire fleet. This will translate to battle, obviously with some modifications depending on the size of battle and the circumstances.
In RTW3 you can also now assign officers to command your ships. The officers will vary in quality and are differentiated by traits that can influence their behaviour, in battle and ashore. These traits are initially unknown but will show themselves gradually as officers progress through their careers.
Ship graphics have been improved in RTW3. Turrets have a national style, and it is now possible to make more detailed ship designs with visual adornments like ship’s boats, gratings and light AA guns being added. These will not affect the combat performance of the ship, but if you like creating beautful little ships, you will enjoy them in combat so much more.
Apart from these major changes there have been lots of smaller improvements:
* 8 nations are now in play.
* There can be AI vs AI wars without the player nation being involved.
* There is a new Baltic region.
* Treaties now have tonnage restrictions, and the player can affect treaty negotiations.
* Submarines are less abstracted and can now be moved on the strategic map.
We have also included a host of other improvements to the damage model, hit chances, air attacks, air combat and other aspects of the simulation. There have also been a number of UI improvements, many suggested by players of previous editions of Rule the Waves.
Asid:
Rule the Waves 3 - Dev Diary #3 - Ship Design
Thu, May 4, 2023
As Rule the Waves 3 is a game with a large focus on the evolution of naval ship design, the ship designer is at the heart of the game. RTW3 lets you design any ship from a small corvette up to the mightiest super-battleship. And not only does it cover a large range of ship sizes, it handles over 80 years of technological development in naval history, from 1890 to 1970. The technologies used to build ironclads powered by reciprocating steam engines in the 1890s were of course vastly different from the gas turbine powered missile cruisers of the 1970s. Technological development is realistically covered in the game and will set the limits for your ship designs.
Designing a French ironclad in the 1890s
When you design a ship, you should try to think of its role within the context of your navy. Take cruisers for example. If you have a nation with widespread colonies and interests around the world, you might consider a colonial cruiser. This would be equipped for colonial service, it would probably be best to optimize engines for reliability, and you would want it to have long range. That will cost weight, so it probably won’t be very fast, but you will get a sturdy workhorse that can show the flag in the colonies and still be useful when war comes.
A scout cruiser for the Imperial German Navy
On the other hand, there might be a need for dedicated fleet cruiser as a scout for the battle fleet. High speed is desirable, of course, but we can live with cramped accommodation and short range, as it will only be operating in home waters. We can even be bold and optimise engines for performance, accepting the risk of the occasional breakdown. This is the opposite of the workhorse above. Here we have the temperamental racehorse, optimised for one mission, but sensitive and picky.
Yet another cruiser type might be the raider. We would want reliable engines to be able to operate for long periods away from friendly bases, and long range is desirable. Speed should be enough to avoid heavy enemy patrolling ships, but we could build her strong enough to defeat what she cannot run from.
These considerations are similar for larger ships. If you are playing Austria-Hungary for example, you have no colonies and no interests outside the Mediterranean. You can go for smaller battleships with low range, cramped accommodation and low freeboard, thus saving weight to make them compact but capable. Keeping down the displacement keeps down costs, so you can build more of them, and you will hopefully be able to fight nations with far larger resources who have worldwide obligations that require them to equip ships for service anywhere in the world.
A British G3 type battlecruiser in the 1920s
There are some specialist ships that you should not neglect. The lowly 400-ton corvette is actually an essential unit in any navy. It can patrol the coasts against submarines and its presence in an area will reduce the risks of mine strikes for larger ships. Having a decent number of small corvettes avoids having to use destroyers as ASW patrols, which could denude the battle fleet of destroyers.
Another ship to consider for nations with large colonial interests is the colonial gunboat. This will be a corvette with 1500 tons displacement or so, equipped for colonial service. This makes it good for fulfilling obligations to have tonnage on foreign stations, freeing up cruisers. If equipped with a couple of 5 or 6 inch guns, it can even put up a fight against an enemy raiding light cruiser.
The Light and heavy cruiser types will morph into missile cruisers from the 1950s as missiles will start to dominate naval combat. Missile cruisers usually specialize in either the anti-aircraft role or the anti-surface role.
A missile cruiser for the US Navy
But new construction is not all that the ship designer can do. Old ships might need modernization to be able to extend their service life in your Navy, and the designer lets you rebuild ships, within realistic limits of course. You can modernize fire control, change the secondary battery to dual purpose guns, add light and medium AA guns, floatplanes and other similar equipment.
Ship design might seem complicated looking at the screenshots above, but do not worry, you need not design ships from scratch. The ship designer has a powerful auto-designer that will design any ship type for you. A usual method is to press the auto-design button until you see something that you like, and then modify that ship design to your taste. Another way is to start with an existing ship design and modify that to take advantage of new technology or adapt it to new threats.
Ship design in RTW3 sees you continuously develop your ships to give your Navy the tools it needs to prevail on the high seas. Naval combat will be the ultimate test of your designs.
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