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Rob Zacny

Episode 375: Rule the Waves

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Three Moves Ahead 375:

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Rule the Waves
Bruce and Troy "Bury me with the HMS Niobe" Goodfellow welcome Matthew Flanagan to this week's show as they talk about 2015's Rule the Waves. Rule the Waves is a game about designing post-dreadnought battleships in the context of World War 1 great powers. Part budget manager, part ship designer, and sometimes a combat simulator, Rule the Waves is a game that has all the detail that simulation grognards expect and all the trappings that come along for the ride. Troy loves it, Bruce has his reservations, and Matthew tells us what makes the game so appealing.

Rule the Waves


 

Also, make sure to check out Matthew's Youtube channel: The Historical Gamer

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I've been looking forward to a show on Rule the Waves, thanks for putting one together. I hope you'll have Matthew back on in the future, he was a great guest.

 

I think I agree with Bruce that the game is incoherent and the information isn't presented in a useful way, but I'm still enamored with it. The way it captures the era with the technology progression, the arms race, designing ships, and even the rudimentary rising tension levels hooked me when reading about it on the GWJ forums and I still enjoy that aspect of it. The battles generally leave me wanting. especially the small actions with cruisers and destroyers. The bigger battles can be a bit of a thrill but it's a bit of a slog going through those smaller battles.

 

I like Matthew's comparison of the game with the early OOTP games and to me the first and lasting impression I got is that Rule the Waves is comparable to Eastside Hockey Manager: 2nd Generation. The interfaces both look like they're designed using Visual Basic and they have a nice strategic layer but the tactical part of the games are quite rudimentary (and in EHM's case you were better off skipping it entirely). Nonetheless I'm more fond of both games than I probably should be.

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Great show, and count me as another +1 for bringing Matthew back in future.

 

I've been looking forward to a 3MA discussion of RtW myself, and now that we have one I found it quite satisfying. The one thing I thought the panel overlooked was that much of RtW's appeal comes from managing a resource that strategy games generally don't make very good use of, which is time. So much of the tension in a game of RtW comes down to questions of timing. Another power is acting belligerently towards me -- do I take them on now, or wait to build up my fleet further, knowing they're getting stronger every day too? I've just unlocked a new fire-control technology -- do I build a new class of battleships around it, knowing that it'll take three or four years for that new class to come off the ways, or do I just retrofit it to my old BBs and wait for more techs to unlock? I've just won a far-away new colonial possession -- do I station a squadron there, cutting those ships out of my main battle fleet, or do I keep the home fleet strong and hope that if war comes the colony can hold out for the four or five months it could take for reinforcements to reach them? That sort of thing.

 

When the game serves up Sid Meier-style "interesting decisions," more often than not they're decisions about when to do something.

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Enjoyed the show & +1 for bringing Matthew back in future.

 

I was surprised no one mentioned the 'Distant Guns' & 'Jutland' naval games by StormPowered for the same period as RtW.

The interface is a little odd but both are fantastic naval games with a much better battle simulator. Your thoughts? 

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does anyone have book recommendations for this era? Both the ships and the international relations politics.

 

I like the idea of this game, but I donno whether I would like this game.

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The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism by Paul Kennedy is the definitive scholarly book on the subject.

 

Dreadnought by Robert Massie is the best pop history.

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I was unfamiliar with this podcast until Matthew told me about it, and because of my own interest in Rule the Waves, I had to watch.

 

First of all, to set the mood for the post, I really liked the episode and will be listening to this podcast again. I'm surprised I haven't heard of this earlier.

 

Since this game is a focus of my own channel, I wanted to leave my fan mail about this episode. Rule the Waves is definitely a thrown together piece of software: a one-man operation asides from the GUI that I believe they licensed from someone. I would demand a better GUI of RtW2, as I think that is one of the most obtuse things about the game. Moving a unit from one [sea] zone to another has never been so difficult.

 

 

The glory of Rule the Waves is ship design inside of a budget management simulator.  I'd say that's at least for me, but if you go to the game's forum, the majority of posts (I'd guess 75%) are about ship design. The ship design component of many space 4X games has been a real draw for the whole game, where most people lose themselves in min/max-ing or making their perfect spacecraft. I'd go one step further for Rule the Waves and say that the ship design is its saving grace, and the budget management is just a good way to give you constraints for this.  There was talk about the main point of the game in the podcast and ship design was mentioned off-and-on, but I would emphasize this. If you don't want to be a WW1 ship designer and experiment with designs, yes you can technically auto-design and just do the budget management, or just fight the combat (but then you might as well go play Steam and Iron), but I doubt anyone stays interested in those alone.

 

The developer (Fredrik) probably wanted the strategic focus to be secondary to the tactical battles based on the fact that this strategic shell was added to the Steam and Iron game, and I'd guess this was just a way to get more mileage out of an existing game. But I think most people feel the opposite -- they design a ship and go through the combat mostly to see if their design worked. In my opinion, that's why the absence of an auto-resolve function for combat shows that the game doesn't know its own strengths.

 

 

Long post, but a few more things:

- Prestige is the "victory" mechanic in name only. Nobody plays this game trying to top the high score charts with prestige. I don't mean to discourage anyone if that's their preference, but if you need the prestige as a barometer for your own success, not only will you be really disappointed by this scoring mechanic, but I doubt you'll enjoy the game. (Edit: I mention this because I think it's almost a waste of time to talk about the prestige, it doesn't really add anything to the game more than acting as a second, rarely-used currency.)

- One of the coolest things about this time period is that there are no plateaus in technology/development. No matter when you build a ship, it's almost guaranteed to be obsolete by the time it finishes. And this is what makes the budget management a perfect pairing with the design element, especially for min/max perfectionists like myself. You simply cannot wait for X technology, you constantly do the best with what you have.  That is truly genius.

- A bit of a negative, but it should be brought up: the AI will design its ships after your designs. This feels a little lazy, even if it something that happens in real life. No other nation will innovate, and when you come up with a good design, the AI will shift all their designs to match. You can test this by making an insanely bad design and watch the AI copy it as well.

 

But again I want to say that I really enjoyed the episode, even if some depth and interesting content was left out. And I'm looking forward to new content :)

 

Cheers,

Tortuga

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