Rule the Waves III

[Asid]

Rule the Waves 3 History Series Episode 2 - Dreadnoughts: 1906-1918
Tue, 20 February 2024



With the launch of Dreadnought and Invincible the race for naval supremacy intensified. Ships ballooned in size, cost, speed, and armament. From 1906-1914 the navies of the world built a combined 63 Dreadnought Battleships in a naval arms race that helped bring about the First World War. Submarines made their debut as a practical weapon of war, and destroyers grew in size and displacement with multiple torpedo launchers. After the war the cost of these fleets was so ruinous a new innovation in international diplomacy was adopted to curb spending, the Washington Naval Treaty.




Special thanks to Drachinifel for lending his voice to this project.

You can expect Episode 3 out in March.

[Asid]

Rule the Waves 3 - Update v01.00.37
Mon, 26 February 2024




Hello RTW3 fans.

Beta testing on the next update is completed, and we are now live with v01.00.37.

You can download this update either automatically via Steam or directly from the forums here.

This update has several big changes that will improve gameplay and functionality. The first of these is a change of save file locations. Specifics are listed in the changelog below but the key points are that this new save system is considerably smaller and streamlined, fixing most of the issues previously found with syncing cloud saves. Upon loading an old campaign the old save file will be converted to this new format, which may take some time and lead to some errors with any old campaigns you are loading. Going forward all new save games will automatically use this new, streamlined save format.

Besides a better save file system, we have also made some significant gameplay changes at the strategic layer. Victory Point losses for declining battles distant from your home port have been greatly reduced. Home ports with at least 200 basing capacity will now also be able to rebuild ships. You can also now occasionally get the option to sell a ship to another nation when you select it for scrapping. In addition to all these changes there have also been...



Improvements to the User Interface



The creation of an import/export ship system so you can share your designs



Improvements to battle generation, with area commanders now influencing the chance of unexpected battles

With the ability to share ship files, this opens up a whole new level of collaborative ship designing. We look forward to seeing all the warships the community will be able to come up with.

The full changelog is posted below, happy hunting Admirals.

v01.00.37

Save Games
Games are now saved to the directory "C:\USER\Documents\My Games\Rule the Waves 3". Old saves are loaded from the old save directory and saved to the new save directory.
Refurbished the saving of design files. All designs for each nation is now saved in one file. A saved game will now consist of fewer files, and the total save game size is reduced considerably. This should mitigate problems with saving to Steam cloud. It will also mitigate problems with some ship names on some (mainly Asian) language operating systems.
Important Note: The first time an old save game is opened, loading will take considerably longer as old style design files are converted. Also note that there might be errors from inconsistencies in existing saved games. There are functions for the player to manually rectify these during the save conversion.

Strategic Level
Penalty points for declining battle is now reduced for battles far from friendly bases.
Adjusted some inconsistencies in the actions of allied nations in a multi nation war.
There is now a chance that scrapped ships can be sold to small nations (less than average economy), including to the player if the player is playing a small nation.
Adjusted submarine build times.
Ships being rebuilt will now be automatically moved to the closest home area with a rebuild yard.
There will be rebuild yards in home possessions with at least 200 base capacity. (That means US West Coast and Russian Far East will not have any initially on some starting dates, but by expanding base capacity, they will get the capability).
Increased the maximum number of ships that can be built at one time in the build ships screen to 25.
Nations at war with you will now not ask to buy a license for your aircraft.
Increased the cost of missile systems and missile maintenance.

Battle Generation
Removed some occasional quirks in force selection in battle generator, for example having a BB subordinated to a CL flagship.
Allied forces can now appear as support force.
Added ship speed and displacement to ship list in battle preview screen.
Background color now changed in battle preview screen.

Controls and Preferences
Added an option to convert some characters in German ship and officer names, for example ö becomes oe, ü becomes ue etc. This is for the benefit of users with Asian language OS which can have problems with these characters.
Added an option to see submarine sinkings in aggregate only. (Useful if you have many submarines and want to bring down the number of after turn messages)
The space key will now only pause the game. This is to prevent inadvertently restarting time when you want to pause.
The alt key will run the game one minute (or longer if auto play is switched on).

Ship Design
Added an export/import function for ship designs. The export function for ship designs is located on the graphics tab in the ship design screen. It will let you export any ship design as a file. The design can then be shared with other players or reused in a later game. Exported ship designs are located in the folder "My Games\Rule the Waves 3\Save\Ship Designs".
Moved the auto carrier conversion button to the box for flight installations.
Added a function to auto change carrier graphics to angled flight deck.
Curbed the tendency of the AI designer to overuse triple turrets on ships.
Fixed a problem with rebuilding ships transferred from other nations.
Fixed a problem with multiple classes being generated when fire control is upgraded for ships under construction.
Further adjustments to secondary gun placement on cruisers and destroyers.
Improved the autodesigner to avoid illegal triple turrets in A or Y position.
The upgrade guns button will now be available when opening an existing design that has worse gun quality than available.
Adjusted the automatic secondary gun placement on cruisers to avoid having them placed outside the hull. (It is better but not perfect)
Using auto design in the design screen will now force a different template.
Improved the British name list to produce more appropriate ship names from the 1920s.
Prevented fitting V turret on ships that couldn't have X turret.
Fixed a bug with the gun quality of the rebuilding nation not being taken into account for gun upgrades.
Fixed a bug with the autodesigner sometimes building ship with AON armor when it isn't researched.
Fixed a bug with ammunition weight calculation in the 80-85 rounds per gun interval.
Fixed a bug where a CA could have protected cruiser armour configuration.

Map Changes
Updated the Chinese coastline with shallow water.

Battle Resolution
Adjusted HE penetration and splinter damage on armored areas.
Some adjustments to the tactical AI.
Some adjustments to mission data.
Prevented avoiding battles by closing the battle preview screen.
Field batteries will now only have HE ammo.
Radar blind fire range reduced to 80% of radar sighting range.
Gyro Stabilizer will now reduce the gunnery penalty for sea state.
Improved go to base behaviour for divisions following the force flagship into friendly port.
Improved AI convoy defence decisions.
Ammunition expenditure is now spread more evenly across turrets. (Previously, A and Y turret tended to use somewhat more ammo than X and B).
Reduced SAM hit rates (they were a little too good).

Aircraft
One floatplane squadron of up to 12 aircraft may now be based at any airbase without counting against capacity. (This is to increase the utility of floatplanes at land bases in the early game).
Before 1930, a floatplane scout with bomb + bomb priority will have torpedo capability and can be used as strike aircraft from AV without catapults.
Reduced the rate of aircraft production and added a column for production in the aircraft types screen. (The intention is that heavy aircraft losses should hurt more).

Officers
Area commander ability now influences the chance of unexpected battles.
On auto assign of officers, rear admirals might now be auto-promoted to admirals to fill an empty slot, just like the case with empty division or ship commands.
It is now possible to manually promote the senior officer of a rank for free (no prestige cost), You can only do this once per turn.
The ROF enthusiast will now give -10% accuracy in addition to the +10% ROF (or 20% at shorter ranges).
Adjusted officer promotions and retirements to reduce the risk that a nation should have too few admirals available.
Fixed a bug with admirals not being removed from an area command when they were assigned to another.

AI
The AI will now be better at replacing floatplanes on ships with helicopters and helipad.

User Interface
Research breakthroughs are now also shown in the turn message summary.
Made sure the commander text is visible in the ship status screen.
Obsolete ships are now clearly marked as so in ship status screen.
Officer list now remembers sorting and filter options.
On the missile control panel, renamed the Fire Salvo button to Manual fire to better describe what it does.
Added a button to exit the battle from the results screen and a button to view the map.
Added a button to go back to the results screen from the map after battle.

Doctrines
Added doctrine choices for AP shell design.

Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug that prevented AI nations from taking territory from each other in AI wars.
Fixed a bug in Fleet Exercise setup where a ship removed from a division would lead to all the ships in the division being duplicated in the available ships list.
Fixed some typos in tooltips.
Fixed the height of the ship status window.
Fixed problems with some corrupted save files.
Fixed a bug with divisions with Land CAP were not saved.
Fixed some misspellings in Spanish officer ranks.
Fixed a bug with the AI rebuilding ships occasionally producing error messages.
Fixed a bug where having no fire control used more crew than intended.
Fixed a bug with occasional miscount of free shipyard capacity to build ships.
Fixed a bug with helicopters on recon sometimes going in the wrong direction.
Fixed a bug with showing ship details from the build screen.
Fixed a bug in scenario info that led to France having no convoy in one of the convoy defense missions.
Fixed a bug with background sound not changing on weather change.
Fixed a bug with magazine explosion sound playing even if sound options were set to No sound (I guess this one could have been somewhat jarring if you expected silence).
Fixed a bug where in some cases a CL with 4 in B armor was classed as a CA.
Fixed a bug where submarines could engage in gunnery duels with enemy ships in another area.
Fixed a bug with ships not having missile or torpedo reloads in battles.
Fixed a bug that could make the choice of scout force flag division ineffective in cruiser battles and other battles smaller than fleet.
Fixed a bug that could lead to an error message when a peace breaks out.
Fixed a bug with numbers of missiles not being included in the short ship description.
Fixed a bug with getting the correct name of the nation whose aircraft sinks a sub.
Fixed a bug with the number of reloads for missile launchers.

Other
Miscellaneous minor improvements

[Asid]

Rule the Waves 3 - Update v01.00.40
Wed, 20 March 2024



Hello Admirals, Captains, and any newly commissioned midshipmen. We have an update today for Rule the Waves 3. Update v01.00.40 brings us several new fixes and some new QoL features that should improve player experiences. Pre-battle, players will now have access to a forecast that projects how the weather will evolve during the engagement. This is subject to error, improvements in tech will gradually make forecasts more accurate as it did historically.

The really big change with this update was classification of CA and CL to make pre-1900 designs more historically accurate. This may cause some issues with designs as you update from 1.00.37 so please keep that in mind. A full rundown of these changes is available in the changelog below. Good luck and happy hunting everyone.

This update will automatically download via steam or is available on the forums here.

Reversed the "CA cannot have protected cruiser armour configuration" change.

Important Note: The earlier change to early CA in 1.00.37 proved to be ill considered. As some players have correctly pointed out, the main difference between pre-1900 in game CA and CL should be size, not armor configuration. Early cruisers have now been refurbished in the game and CA are now cruisers that have an armored belt or have a size over 8000 tons, others are CL. Templates and design logic have been updated accordingly. France and Russia have been given belt and sloping armor deck as bonus techs to reflect their early adoption of armored cruisers. This might cause transient issues in already started games with 1.00.37, in which case we advise continuing to play until this resolves itself or starting new game. The end result is that the treatment of pre-1900 cruisers is now much more historical and consistent.[/list]

Added an option to have spacebar both pause and run the game.

Added weather forecast to pre battle screen. Note that this is unreliable, just as the real weather forecast. It will improve with tech and time.

Prevented some cheesy tricks in officer assignment, for example assigning bad officers to empty divisions.

Added possibility to manually change aircraft type of an air unit.

Added save path info on main screen.

Fixed a bug where the default settings were not used if the preferences file was not found.

Fixed a bug that could set the year of ship designs to 1899 in an 1890 start.

Fixed a bug where a Lieutenant commander could be promoted directly to Admiral in some cases.

Fixed a bug with the free manual promotion per turn not resetting after the turn.

[Asid]

Rule the Waves 3 History Series Episode 3 - The Washington Naval Treaty: 1919-19
Fri, 22 March 2024



The First World War was ruinously expensive. Dreadnought construction had drained the coffers of competing fleets. To help limit this reckless spending the naval powers agreed to limits on capital ship construction. Cruisers and Carriers would be the main focus of naval spending in the interwar period.




Special thanks to Drachinifel for lending his voice to this project.

You can expect Episode 4 out in April.

[Asid]

Rule the Waves 3 History Series Episode 4 - The Second World War: 1939-1945
Mon, 29 April 2024



Rule the Waves 3 Episode 4 is out now. The Second World War saw the carrier usurp the battleship as the king of battle, radar allowed ships to detect targets beyond visual range, and the first use of remotely guided weapons. It began with biplanes and ended with jet aircraft. Find out some of the key naval warfare innovations of 1939-1945




Special thanks to Drachinifel for lending his voice to this project.

This series will wrap up with Episode 5 later in May, next month.

[Asid]

Rule the Waves 3 - Update + Dev Diary
Fri, May 10, 2024



Hello everyone. RTW3 has officially been updated to v.1.00.46. The patch is available either via Steam or from the download link here.

The full changelog is posted below, but before we get to that - we have a dev diary for you. Some players have had issues with how officers and their appointments are currently modeled in game. To help with that we have introduced some new changes to how officers are assigned, and clarified why officers are modeled the way they are.


Dev Diary - Officers and Assignment


As always, we appreciate constructive criticism and suggestions from players. They help us make Rule the Waves III better for you. We have read the feedback on the officer system and have made some adjustments to address these concerns.

First off, the officer system is intended to provide flavor and variation in the game. It is also intended to reflect the uncertainty about peoples’ true administrative and leadership abilities until a crisis arises.

This is intentional – as anyone who has served in a military organization knows, or really in any large organization, both capable and not so capable people can get promoted. The game aims to simulate this.

In RTW3, the player has the role of grand admiral, and as such this position would usually not interfere with individual appointments of ship commanders. The game lets you do so, but at a cost of prestige, which is intended to put a brake on extensive interference in appointments from on high.

When officers are promoted or auto assigned, the system considers time in rank and battle experience as the main factors. Ability is also factored in but to a smaller degree.

There has been some feedback that the officer system is either pointless or encourages micromanagement. We have tried to respond to this, and as a result, there are some changes and adjustments to the officer system in our most recent update.

In this update officer abilities are less likely to be revealed in peacetime than previously, as most officers’ true traits will be unknown in peacetime. We hope that this will reduce the incentive to micromanage.

Having a Naval Academy will increase the quality of officers, and slightly increase the likelihood that officers’ abilities will become known.

Also, if the player chooses the option to have officers assigned automatically to empty slots, this will be done immediately when a slot becomes vacant, instead of after the player has pressed next turn. Thus, if you choose this setting, there will usually only be a few occasional free slots that the player will have the opportunity to fill without prestige penalty after every turn, which should further reduce the incentive to micromanage.

Of course, player’s still have the option to let the game auto assign officers for a turn at a time, or, if you’d like, you can opt for full manual control and try to handle officer appointments yourself.

And now for the changelog...


v.1.00.46 Changelog


Strategic Layer

Fixed a bug that made surprise attacks very unlikely.

Fixed a bug which could in unusual circumstances make nation base resources go negative.

Removed Hereditary enemy from Spain vs USA. They have plenty of conflicting interests as it is, and the additional enemy status led to too high likelihood of early wars.

Battle Generation

Fixed a bug where clicking on a division in the pre battle screen could show an error message.

Fixed a missing objective in an Italy vs France mission.

Fixed a data error in a mission for the Ceylon possession.

Battle Resolution

HE penetration had been inadvertently lowered in a previous update. That has now been readjusted.

Officers

A Fleet exercise will now have a chance to reveal the ability of ship and division commanders.

Dissolving a division with a commander will no longer cost prestige. (Reshuffling ships and creating new divisions will impact crew and division efficiency, so should be a sufficient downside to cheesy ways of getting rid of bad commanders).

Officer ability will now be more likely to be revealed in wartime and less likely to be revealed in peacetime.

There is now a chance that poor ship and division commanders will reveal their deficiencies in battle, giving a chance to dismiss them for free after a lost battle.

Fixed a rare error in officer events that could pop up if there were too few officers.

UI Improvements

Added years in rank and battles fought to the select officer dialog.

If Auto assign officers is selected in User preferences, then all vacant positions will be automatically filled as soon as they become vacant, thus leaving no incentive to micromanage.

Rebuilt ships will now only have the last rebuild year after the class name.

Made sure the flotilla attack flag is not behind the missile control panel, even on a small screen.

Added a button to set preferences from the load/create game screen.

Special characters in officer ranks and place names are now converted when that option is selected.

Added notifications when largest ship of type in the world is built.

UI Fixes

Fixed a UI glitch with maintenance cost when a game is loaded. The number shown could be slightly wrong as it omitted effects of officer attributes. This was a UI thing only and did not affect the actual calculations.

Fixed a bug with torpedo range data not showing in the ship status screen.

Fixed some minor UI issues.

Fleet Management

Fixed a bug that generated error messages when the last ship was removed from a division in the division editor.

Fixed a bug with clearing all ships from a division in the division editor.

Ship Design

Speed limit for triple turrets in A & Y and TPS > 1 changed to 21 knots. This is to fix an issue where some legacy ships could not be refitted.

Aircraft

Later Jet Attack and Heavy Jet Fighters can now carry 2 ASM.

Slightly raised the production rate for jet aircraft.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that could generate errors when checking if shipnames are used.

Fixed a bug that capped AP penetration on higher AP tech levels.

Fixed a bug with coastal artillery occasionally being placed at sea when loading a saved game.

Fixed a bug with the space bar restarts game setting not being remembered when the game is restarted.

Fixed a bug with bombardment ammo loadouts.

Fixed an unusual case where the auto run battle could get hung up on a message box.

And that is everything we have for now. Enjoy the Update and Dev Diary, and happy hunting everyone!