Looks like they have raised their prices a bit. GMG has it up for $40.
As soon as I logged in, it changed to Coming Soon. I wonder if it was an error.
Hmm, me, too. I wouldn’t be surprised by the price, though. These games have been $35 from the start, a move to steam might have induced them to bump it up a tinge.
I don’t think we have an Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts thread, but this thread made me finally dig into it a bit. I’m figuring it out, but the UI could really use love. The screens are barebones and kind of the worst combination of a spreadsheet and a more gamey UI. Things like not being able to see your shipyard capacity when ordering construction, a real lack of high level fleet mission ordering(you seemingly have to find their port on the map and do it), or the port assignment only being a ship at a time. That last one isn’t too bad for battleships but for things like torpedo boats it’s a nightmare.
But with that out of the way, I’m enjoying it! I’m playing my learning game as the US in the 1890 start. Fell into the trap of “one more tech” before I would design and build out new ship classes. So my initial war with Spain my fleet was seriously outmatched. Result was major loss with Spain taking Panama and part of Alaska in the peace. So I went to work going full tech research and designing a new fleet that was heavy on TB swarms, with some fancy new pre-dreadnought battleships screened by light cruisers. Battleships were all about the big guns with the light cruisers built only to take out ships their size or smaller. Pretty standard setup. With that built up I went to work antagonizing the Spanish again.
I also designed a CA version of the light cruiser. Bigger main armament but focus on small guns everywhere. And just before the war started I laid down my first dreadnought designs. I’m really enjoying the in depth tech(much like RTW) that really sells the pace of advances in this age. Then being able to see how that impacts what you can build is neat. Although I think I’m actually more advanced than the real HMS Dreadnought. 13" guns and I have a super firing setup in the front.
So I’m waiting for those next generation ships to arrive but it might not matter. Just before I put the game away I saw what my more advanced ships could do against an obsolete Spanish fleet. My 1 pre-dreadnought, 4 CL, and 5 TB vs their 1 “BB”( less than half the tonnage of mine), 4 CA(equivalent tonnage to my 4 CL), 10 CL(less than half the tonnage of my CL), and a few TB.
Result was their whole fleet sunk except one TB at the cost of 3 of my TB and 1 CL. Sent my torpedo boats after their big ships and they were too fast for the enemy to get them easily. Their torpedoes took down a couple light cruisers and two of the heavies. My CL screen held off the rest, with I think one of their cruisers managing to get into torpedo range of my battleship. But those 13" guns just absolutely wrecked their fleet. One good volley would pretty much doom any of them. Long battle but felt like proper revenge. Combat could use a little more spectacle, the ships lose some heft on the battle map, but those 13" guns felt suitably devastating.
I suspect RTW3 will be a better game but actual graphics are also nice!
I suspect RTW3 will be a better game but actual graphics are also nice!
This is pretty much my view. The games would benefit from a merger of UA:D’s graphics and RtW’s already solid design. You’d have to figure out planes and carriers…but now we’re just recreating Task Force Admiral with a larger scope of time. :)
I actually found the battles in the first Rule the Waves more evocative than about any 3D naval game. But I confess I bought a bunch of books about dreadnoughts with tons of pictures to look at with a magnifying glass in hand to support it!
Also, I don’t think the ship design would work as well with better graphics: I just loved to add bits and little things here and there on top of designing my ships, but doing it in 3D to have something that would look remotely evocative and not silly is probably akin to ordering a ticket to insanity.
Rule the Waves UI is about as sparse as you can get - instead of explosions you get a single line of text that just says “hit”. But once your imaginiation catches up with it, those bone dry hit reports turn into super tense, edge of your seat gaming. Great stuff!!
This started as a very hardcore fighting simulation, didn’t it? Steam and Iron was the game before the series with only the combat part. Rule the Waves then added the campaign mode on top.
While RTW has many, many, oh so many weaknesses and annoyances that campaign mode it really good and a very engaging experience with a lot of depth. I wish they would focus even more on that part instead of adding huge complexities like planes to the battles.
One thing of note especially looking at SamS’s screenshot above, you can play with medium and small fleet sizes enabled, which will cut down on the total number of ships. Makes the whole game more manageable and individual ships and their sinkings more memorable and impactful.
One of the advantages of not having good 3d graphics is it’s much easier to have robust customization and all the features that Rule the Waves has- it’s extremely unlikely Ultimate Admiral will ever get aircraft of any kind implemented, because it’d have to show up graphically and the game just isn’t set up for that. But yeah, this was originally a little lark of turning the Steam and Iron scenario designer into a game and it turned out to be really influential and interesting.
Steam and Iron got a campaign expansion which the “expandalone” Russo-Japanese War game included by default, but yeah the original release of S&I was only individual battles.
The best games do that for you, don’t they. I remember I bought a bunch of football coaching books when I was really into the FPS Football series, and these days I often go to wiki to look up cold war era hardware I’m not familiar with from WARNO.
Anyway, looking forward to this game.
Tomorrow’s the big day! I was hoping Slitherine would have posted the manual ahead of the release – it’s a pretty bad-ass manual! – but no sign of it yet.
There have been a few updates to the review copies that were sent out last month, so I’ve held off playing since I’d rather wait for version 1.0. And I only peeked briefly at the aircraft and missile stuff. The aircraft stuff in particular seems like an odd fit, but it apparently worked well enough in Rule the Waves 2 to be carried forward to Rule the Waves 3.
I have been checking daily hoping they would - they did for Shadow Empire and some other of I remember, but no luck so far indeed!
And to know it’s a good read: I recall the documentation for the first game to be lackluster: it was pretty much a “double-click the icon to start the game up” manual, bundled with an outdated steam and iron one. I had to figure (or sometimes make up) what all those various deck types where, why i should encase little guns or not, and i remember never figuring why I should ever not check autoloading guns.
Something of a tangent, but this channel popped up in my feed recently. This is a proper English gentleman’s channel about all things sea warfare going back to the 1800’s. Very long dissertations on ships and design.
Yeah, that’s guy is pretty awesome. I’ve found myself sitting for twenty minutes watching him explain supposedly boring stuff like the evolution of boiler shapes for steam engines. Definitely the kind of detail Rule the Waves expects you to love!
Matrix have been posting samples of the manual.
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11936&t=395018
I hate laptops but I just got a new one to play this…and try and learn Godot on the side. Really enjoyed their other games and can see wasting a lot of time on Fridays when my boss is out!
I hadn’t kept up with much of it all and I learn there are officers!
But
This means that the player can deal with officer assignments in detail if he wants to, but there is no requirement to do so. It is perfectly feasible to let officer assignments run their own course and only remove the occasional idiot now and then.
I love the game already. Love the designer’s comments in those manual excerpts too. They even got nice pictures!
Yeah that manual is a huge step up from the original. Excite.
We can’t play this multiplayer, but it might be fun to have a thread where we all have to pick the same country and design our ships (and choose our research) by committee (where everyone agrees to abide by the designs so chosen) and see how it plays out in our various wars.
I am in for this.