I do think there’s some stuff you could do to make the RTW spreadsheets more readable, but I do think as a game with some fairly intricate details in ship design, the use of spreadsheet techniques is warranted to convey this information. As as been said before, the RTS summary stuff is great in that context, where you can quickly learn the symbology and glean that the same units are the same.
Of course, i’m not sure RTW is ever going to be the game for someone looking for incredible immersion, Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts is going for graphical fidelity, but has a significantly smaller scope than the top-down MSPaint-type graphiced Rule the Waves.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each situation requires a different approach, at least at first. The goal is the same, though. You want to present information in the manner that best suits the user’s needs. Depending on the situation, that can range from raw data streams to highly massaged abstractions.
I will say, for example, that the ship listing in RTW could probably be improved by using subtle background color shading to distinguish between different ship classes.
Embargo dropped on gameplay - not that there are any real surprises! I like Tortuga’s videos - he played a lot of RtW2 and made mods for it that have been incorporated into 3.
This is off-topic but it reminds me of something I was wondering: When CMO is used in a professional training setting, are the “players” typically running their own command and control procedures, with the software only used to model the platforms and weapons? If that’s the case it would make sense they would be primarily interested in robust hardware simulation and data tracking, and not really care about presentation or modelling the human and organizational factors.
You can do a sterile hardware contest with CMO (and some CPE users do this consciously, when they need to evaluate this or that system with every other nuance taken completely out of the loop), but soft factors are indeed there and can be used to dramatic effect.
On the original question, the usage case of CPE in training/exercise environments varies significantly with the user. Sometimes it is used as an isolated White-Cell ingesting orders and info from all players, processing them, advancing the sim clock and presenting the common situation back to everyone. At other cases individual players control their own segmented forces with minimum ability to see and intervene in the commands of others. There are also other more elaborate usage scenarios. It is very much a case-by-case thing.
Yeah, I’m not sure what the deal is with the release date and why they didn’t announce it earlier. But, yes, this is out on Steam on May 18th and it’s pretty darn awesome!
I moseyed over to the Steam page and had a gander. After thinking about it real hard, I decided “nah”.
Something more spreadsheety than CMANO does turn me off. The RTW games really have a pure grognard heart, but it’s buried under a Windows 3.1 interface and presentation.
The “great up until 1970!” turns me off. I mean, I liked this series when it was ships lobbing chunks of explosives and metal at each other. I have CMANO for all my stick-it-on-the-end-of-a-rocket needs, and I have the sneaking suspicion (but totally uncomfirmed!!) that the RTW designers maybe don’t get how complex and different naval combat became post-WW2. It’s not just sticking jets and rockets to things.
I do wish the game a bunch of success. RTW2 was pretty cool for its time although to be honest I preferred the “simplicity” of Steel and Iron. Nothing like sending Craddock to his watery grave over and over!
I’ll be very interested to read a head to head comparison between Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts and RTW3. I’m interested in the idea of designing ships and then using them in a campaign in the early 20th century. If I design the ships, I don’t know how much detail I want. I probably want one or the other (and that on sale), but not both.
People have soured on UAD because the devs slapped a “1.0” sticker on a game that was still buggy and incomplete and future development seems unlikely. If sales have dried up and it’s simply not feasible to keep working on the game, who knows. But yeah, lots of salty players.
I bought UAD back during EA because I want an approachable game doing something like Rule the Waves. While I still haven’t actually gotten into it I do follow the updates. They’re in beta for version 1.3 and have been dropping updates for that pretty frequently. After that I don’t know where the game goes but they’ve definitely been active since they released 1.0. They have definitely had an issue with bugs and this long beta for 1.3 may be their attempt to address that.
I own UA:D and from the direction the game has gone since it hit Steam it seems like UA:D is aiming to basically recreate Rule the Waves, but with actual graphics, a greater emphasis on player control of individual ships, and a steadfast conviction that planes, rockets, and missiles fundamentally changed naval combat for the worse so we should pretend they don’t exist. I don’t entirely agree (I think Midway is a pretty cool battle, and like the cat-and-mouse aspects of WW2 carrier warfare), but I do see their point. We never really got a battleship version of Trafalgar (a decisive, all-out battle between two battlefleets; neither side was willing to force the issue at Jutland), and the UA:D design is oriented towards generating as many opportunities for battles like that as possible, in all their complexity and spectacle, while also making gameplay out of being your country’s chief naval minister.
As an early adopter of UA:D (I bought it back when it was in alpha and was nothing other than some scenarios, a ship builder, and the ability to set up custom battles), I am not disappointed with it and don’t feel like they’ve given up. At least some of the development team lives in Ukraine and I think were affected a bit by the invasion.
(Hopefully all this doesn’t sound like someone who bought into Star Citizen on the ground floor and has doubled down. It was only $40 or something and they keep releasing updates of various sizes and significance; in fact they just released an update on May 9th.)
Yeah Richard (the R in RvT) has a great style for Rule the Waves videos; he takes the subject seriously with charts, graphs, and PowerPoint analysis of his thinking, decisions, and gameplay results, but still keeping a good humor about things and sharing gameplay insights. I learned a lot from his RtW2 France series.
