7 ms·

“Rule the Waves”: a game of naval strategy (2016)

113 points by smacktoward 7y ago

LordHeini 7y ago
There is a game called ultimate admiral:dreadnoughts which seems to be very similar gameplay wise but has better graphics and seems to be more accessible. https://www.dreadnoughts.ultimateadmiral.com/ https://www.dreadnoughts.ultimateadmiral.com/ Have not tried it yet due to the game being in development. It is in early access which i tend to avoid but it looks quite ok so far.
- sharpneli 7y ago
  I'm incidentally playing it right now. It's clearly alpha and it remains to be seen how well they manage to deliver the final product, but it's promising. I've spent maybe few hundred hours on RTW and RTW2 combined. So can't really wait until they deliver the campaign for UA.
senko 7y ago
Post is from 2016 and the link to the game (from the post) doesn't seem to work. However seems to be available from https://nwswargamingstore.net/shop?olsPage=products https://nwswargamingstore.net/shop?olsPage=products (haven't tried buying). There's apparently a sequel out, here's one review: https://www.wargamer.com/reviews/rule-the-waves-2/ https://www.wargamer.com/reviews/rule-the-waves-2/
- thrower123 7y ago
  Look at those glorious Win32 controls! Brings me back to the Windows 95 days. Wargaming is one niche where you can get away with really basic graphics, if the gameplay is good. And looking at the amount of detail exposed by this game, I shudder at the thought of the art budget it would take to bring this up to even mediocre 3D graphics.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Grognard wargames are one area where you are almost forced to make old school interfaces like this, because the core playerbase has a large paying contingent that continue to use 15 year old bare bones systems running obsolete OSes.
- rob74 7y ago
  I can only agree with this quote: "RTW2 might look [...] perhaps a little too much like the work players hoped to avoid by firing up a video game at the end of a long day" - you'd have a hard time convincing me that an application with so many tabs, list views, select boxes, radiogroups etc. etc. could actually be fun to use. Plus, I wonder if it was a concious design decision to keep the "good old" (shudder) Windows 95/NT 4.0 look or if they simply forgot to include the required manifest for getting the updated look & feel?
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    That's the entire Hard Simulation genre. It's not your cup of tea, but there are lots of people who only play those sorts of games. Football Manager sims are basically nothing but this. Hell, even Eve Online is not much more than this, especially when you get into some of the massive battles that get reported on in the tech media.
    - tomatotomato37 7y ago
      Auroa 4x is another good example. Very deep and detailed but also requires a lot of menu fiddling and micromanaging with a GIMP-tier UI. http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Main_Page http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
      - jplayer01 7y ago
        I've messed around with Aurora 4x before and I don't think the UI concept is that bad. In a game as complex as this, the UI is going to have to reflect that complexity in some way. I think the worst thing about the game's UI is how it eschews basic usability and makes everything ridiculously tedious to use. If I made a game like this, I'd probably come up with a similar UI, but I'd pay way more attention to how players interact or want to interact with the game on a moment to moment basis.
    - JoeDaDude 7y ago
      I'd recommend Command Air and Naval Operations [1]. It even includes a professional version [2], used by military forces to simulate engagements. [1] https://www.matrixgames.com/game/command-modern-air-naval-operations-wargame-of-the-year-edition https://www.matrixgames.com/game/command-modern-air-naval-op... [2] http://www.warfaresims.com/?page_id=3822 http://www.warfaresims.com/?page_id=3822
- smacktoward 7y ago
  Thanks for pointing out the broken link, I hadn't realized NWS had finally ditched their Yahoo store (which they apparently only got around to last month - !). You are correct that nwswargamingstore.net is the place they're selling from these days. I've updated the link to point to the general landing page for Rule the Waves, which will lead you there if you decide you want to buy it.
- jandrese 7y ago
  > I only occasionally saw bugs, like the Royal Navy laying down a ship with a complement of anti-aircraft guns in 1902. Highly suspect, Admiral Nostradamus. I LOLed. One downside of these hardcore milsim games is that the companies that make them are garage shops and it is far from uncommon for bugs like this to fester for years, or even never be fixed. On the flipside, sometimes the bugs are hilarious, like third cousins in Crusader Kings that murder themselves and then have to run away because they are kinkillers.
arethuza 7y ago
I live overlooking the Firth of Forth across from Edinburgh and I'm always amazed when I read of the surrender of the German fleet to the British Grand Fleet in the Forth: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-46273928 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-46273928 43 British battleships and battlecruisers and 120 destroyers escorting 14 German battleships and battlecruisers and 49 destroyers. The current Royal Navy has 6 destroyers and 13 frigates.
- achamayou 7y ago
  A Type 45 destroyer is almost 10000 tons though, a WWII destroyer would have been 2 to 3000. It’s probably difficult to come up with an accurate cost comparison, but I suspect the difference is even greater than for tonnage.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    I wonder if there is a wargaming app where I could find out whether the Royal Navy of 1918 would win against the Royal Navy of a century later? ;-) Edit: Of course it would lose, I had forgotten about submarines!
    - learc83 7y ago
      In a straight up battle the 1918 Navy would definitely lose just because of radar directed fire and anti-ship missiles. For the big battleships standard sea skimming anti-ship missiles might not be super effective because of the amount of armor, but I'm guessing the entire Royal Navy has at least some modern missiles that are designed to pop up and plunge through the deck.
      - arethuza 7y ago
        How many Harpoons does a Type 45 have though? I could see details online of how many launchers they have but not how many missiles are actually carried.
        7y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> The first limitation is the quality of the graphics and the user interface, which, as you can see from the screenshots above, are pretty bare-bones. The UI is straight out of the Windows 3.1 era, all vanilla Windows radio buttons and lists and drop-downs. That is sincerely one of my favorite things about games from that era.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  The screenshots immediately reminded me of the original computer version of Harpoon when it was updated for Windows 95. I still find that game's interface to be one of the easiest ways to manage a complex amount of information. Incidentally, these screenshots aren't too far off what actual console UIs look like for complex military systems. I think CDE is more common than Win32, though.
  - MR4D 7y ago
    I had the same exact thought! Bunch of screenshots here in case anyone is interested: http://armchairgeneral.com/harpoon-ultimate-edition-pc-game-review.htm http://armchairgeneral.com/harpoon-ultimate-edition-pc-game-...
  - jki275 7y ago
    You're correct that CDE used to be the standard for GCCS, run on HP-UX. I think it's mostly Windows based for that particular thing now (the actual real time consoles use a Unix but with a custom UI - not CDE -- as I recall), but it's been a few years since I was in that world.
- derefr 7y ago
  Same. I love the fact that games like Minesweeper or Chip's Challenge are literally just grids of button-controls with image labels. I'd love to see "using non-behaviorally-overridden native OS UI-toolkit elements as the game's only mechanical affordances" adopted as a theme for a modern game-jam.
- xurias 7y ago
  Serious question. If I want to build a game that looks like this today, what are my options? Anybody know?
howard941 7y ago
More towards the modern era is the Harpoon successor Command: Modern Air and Naval Ops. It diverges from the game in question by implementing only extant platforms and weapons, making it perhaps less interesting as a replayable game but more interesting for modelling past and future encounters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%3A_Modern_Air_Naval_Operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%3A_Modern_Air_Naval_Op...
- mcguire 7y ago
  "-Command/CMANO has had the following downloadable content released: "...You Brexit, You Fix It (war in the Baltic States)..." I may have to do something I very rarely do: buy a computer game.
alerter 7y ago
This is a really great game, if you can get past the ancient interface. Has a surprisingly tight core loop and a nice, pared down approach to 'grand strategy'. Despite all the buttons, it's actually got very little simulationist cruft going on. You're mostly making interesting decisions.
bwanab 7y ago
From the article, which otherwise was good, this line "Both nations had spent so much money on their battle-fleets that they could never bring themselves to put them fully at risk" really doesn't capture the mindset of the antagonists. It was largely true that the Germans were determined to hold on to their fleet, which meant staying in Heligoland, and while the British were satisfied keeping the German fleet in port, they wanted the decisive battle. Despite the British fleet losing more ships in the first day at Jutland, the main reason the Germans fleet escaped was miscommunication in the British admiralty.
- mcguire 7y ago
  The British may have wanted a decisive battle, but they didn't want to lose any more of their fleet to submarines and mines. The Germans were the ones pronking around raiding the English coast and what-not. "Could never bring themselves to put them fully at risk" does kind of describe the overall situation.
baud147258 7y ago
I remember a succession game of Rule the Waves 2 on a forum, with each successive player trashing the designs of their predecessor before designing their own class of ships, especially for the destroyers, until all ships were from dozens of different class with different performance and armements. Rule the Waves 2 covers a wider time period, since you can go until ~1950, with aircraft carriers, radars, ground-based planes and submarines. The author also didn't touch the spying that can be done on other nations, which will then increase tension and bring new tech and information, and the military treaties, which will force allied nation to go to war together.
aww_dang 7y ago
Perfect candidate for a browser game.
smacktoward 7y ago
If you want to read more about Rule the Waves, I wrote a follow-up post after this one that goes into more detail on the strategic challenges that face each playable nation: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/05/a-brief-consideration-of-various-strategic-problems-in-rule-the-waves/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/05/a-brief-consideration-of-...
aidenn0 7y ago
Can anyone comment on how well this works in wine before I drop $25 on it?
- jandrese 7y ago
  There's a decent chance it will work well in Wine given the basic WinForms interface it uses. The Wine Database[1] results are encouraging as well. [1] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=17174 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
JoachimSchipper 7y ago
There is a "group game" of sorts going on at navalgazing.net: https://www.google.com/search?q=rule+the+waves+site%3Anavalgazing.net https://www.google.com/search?q=rule+the+waves+site%3Anavalg.... And if you're interested in this sort of thing, you'll probably also appreciate the rest of navalgazing.net - e.g. https://www.navalgazing.net/Top-Posts https://www.navalgazing.net/Top-Posts, https://www.navalgazing.net/Jutland-Part-1 https://www.navalgazing.net/Jutland-Part-1.

113 points by smacktoward 7y ago

There is a game called ultimate admiral:dreadnoughts which seems to be very similar gameplay wise but has better graphics and seems to be more accessible. https://www.dreadnoughts.ultimateadmiral.com/ https://www.dreadnoughts.ultimateadmiral.com/ Have not tried it yet due to the game being in development. It is in early access which i tend to avoid but it looks quite ok so far.

sharpneli 7y ago
I'm incidentally playing it right now. It's clearly alpha and it remains to be seen how well they manage to deliver the final product, but it's promising. I've spent maybe few hundred hours on RTW and RTW2 combined. So can't really wait until they deliver the campaign for UA.

senko 7y ago

Post is from 2016 and the link to the game (from the post) doesn't seem to work. However seems to be available from https://nwswargamingstore.net/shop?olsPage=products https://nwswargamingstore.net/shop?olsPage=products (haven't tried buying). There's apparently a sequel out, here's one review: https://www.wargamer.com/reviews/rule-the-waves-2/ https://www.wargamer.com/reviews/rule-the-waves-2/

thrower123 7y ago
Look at those glorious Win32 controls! Brings me back to the Windows 95 days. Wargaming is one niche where you can get away with really basic graphics, if the gameplay is good. And looking at the amount of detail exposed by this game, I shudder at the thought of the art budget it would take to bring this up to even mediocre 3D graphics.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Grognard wargames are one area where you are almost forced to make old school interfaces like this, because the core playerbase has a large paying contingent that continue to use 15 year old bare bones systems running obsolete OSes.
rob74 7y ago
I can only agree with this quote: "RTW2 might look [...] perhaps a little too much like the work players hoped to avoid by firing up a video game at the end of a long day" - you'd have a hard time convincing me that an application with so many tabs, list views, select boxes, radiogroups etc. etc. could actually be fun to use. Plus, I wonder if it was a concious design decision to keep the "good old" (shudder) Windows 95/NT 4.0 look or if they simply forgot to include the required manifest for getting the updated look & feel?
- moron4hire 7y ago
  That's the entire Hard Simulation genre. It's not your cup of tea, but there are lots of people who only play those sorts of games. Football Manager sims are basically nothing but this. Hell, even Eve Online is not much more than this, especially when you get into some of the massive battles that get reported on in the tech media.
  - tomatotomato37 7y ago
    Auroa 4x is another good example. Very deep and detailed but also requires a lot of menu fiddling and micromanaging with a GIMP-tier UI. http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Main_Page http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
    - jplayer01 7y ago
      I've messed around with Aurora 4x before and I don't think the UI concept is that bad. In a game as complex as this, the UI is going to have to reflect that complexity in some way. I think the worst thing about the game's UI is how it eschews basic usability and makes everything ridiculously tedious to use. If I made a game like this, I'd probably come up with a similar UI, but I'd pay way more attention to how players interact or want to interact with the game on a moment to moment basis.
  - JoeDaDude 7y ago
    I'd recommend Command Air and Naval Operations [1]. It even includes a professional version [2], used by military forces to simulate engagements. [1] https://www.matrixgames.com/game/command-modern-air-naval-operations-wargame-of-the-year-edition https://www.matrixgames.com/game/command-modern-air-naval-op... [2] http://www.warfaresims.com/?page_id=3822 http://www.warfaresims.com/?page_id=3822
smacktoward 7y ago
Thanks for pointing out the broken link, I hadn't realized NWS had finally ditched their Yahoo store (which they apparently only got around to last month - !). You are correct that nwswargamingstore.net is the place they're selling from these days. I've updated the link to point to the general landing page for Rule the Waves, which will lead you there if you decide you want to buy it.
jandrese 7y ago
> I only occasionally saw bugs, like the Royal Navy laying down a ship with a complement of anti-aircraft guns in 1902. Highly suspect, Admiral Nostradamus. I LOLed. One downside of these hardcore milsim games is that the companies that make them are garage shops and it is far from uncommon for bugs like this to fester for years, or even never be fixed. On the flipside, sometimes the bugs are hilarious, like third cousins in Crusader Kings that murder themselves and then have to run away because they are kinkillers.

arethuza 7y ago

I live overlooking the Firth of Forth across from Edinburgh and I'm always amazed when I read of the surrender of the German fleet to the British Grand Fleet in the Forth: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-46273928 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-46273928 43 British battleships and battlecruisers and 120 destroyers escorting 14 German battleships and battlecruisers and 49 destroyers. The current Royal Navy has 6 destroyers and 13 frigates.

achamayou 7y ago
A Type 45 destroyer is almost 10000 tons though, a WWII destroyer would have been 2 to 3000. It’s probably difficult to come up with an accurate cost comparison, but I suspect the difference is even greater than for tonnage.
- arethuza 7y ago
  I wonder if there is a wargaming app where I could find out whether the Royal Navy of 1918 would win against the Royal Navy of a century later? ;-) Edit: Of course it would lose, I had forgotten about submarines!
  - learc83 7y ago
    In a straight up battle the 1918 Navy would definitely lose just because of radar directed fire and anti-ship missiles. For the big battleships standard sea skimming anti-ship missiles might not be super effective because of the amount of armor, but I'm guessing the entire Royal Navy has at least some modern missiles that are designed to pop up and plunge through the deck.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      How many Harpoons does a Type 45 have though? I could see details online of how many launchers they have but not how many missiles are actually carried.
      - 7y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

> The first limitation is the quality of the graphics and the user interface, which, as you can see from the screenshots above, are pretty bare-bones. The UI is straight out of the Windows 3.1 era, all vanilla Windows radio buttons and lists and drop-downs. That is sincerely one of my favorite things about games from that era.

vonmoltke 7y ago
The screenshots immediately reminded me of the original computer version of Harpoon when it was updated for Windows 95. I still find that game's interface to be one of the easiest ways to manage a complex amount of information. Incidentally, these screenshots aren't too far off what actual console UIs look like for complex military systems. I think CDE is more common than Win32, though.
- MR4D 7y ago
  I had the same exact thought! Bunch of screenshots here in case anyone is interested: http://armchairgeneral.com/harpoon-ultimate-edition-pc-game-review.htm http://armchairgeneral.com/harpoon-ultimate-edition-pc-game-...
- jki275 7y ago
  You're correct that CDE used to be the standard for GCCS, run on HP-UX. I think it's mostly Windows based for that particular thing now (the actual real time consoles use a Unix but with a custom UI - not CDE -- as I recall), but it's been a few years since I was in that world.
derefr 7y ago
Same. I love the fact that games like Minesweeper or Chip's Challenge are literally just grids of button-controls with image labels. I'd love to see "using non-behaviorally-overridden native OS UI-toolkit elements as the game's only mechanical affordances" adopted as a theme for a modern game-jam.
xurias 7y ago
Serious question. If I want to build a game that looks like this today, what are my options? Anybody know?

howard941 7y ago

More towards the modern era is the Harpoon successor Command: Modern Air and Naval Ops. It diverges from the game in question by implementing only extant platforms and weapons, making it perhaps less interesting as a replayable game but more interesting for modelling past and future encounters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%3A_Modern_Air_Naval_Operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%3A_Modern_Air_Naval_Op...

mcguire 7y ago
"-Command/CMANO has had the following downloadable content released: "...You Brexit, You Fix It (war in the Baltic States)..." I may have to do something I very rarely do: buy a computer game.

alerter 7y ago

This is a really great game, if you can get past the ancient interface. Has a surprisingly tight core loop and a nice, pared down approach to 'grand strategy'. Despite all the buttons, it's actually got very little simulationist cruft going on. You're mostly making interesting decisions.

bwanab 7y ago

From the article, which otherwise was good, this line "Both nations had spent so much money on their battle-fleets that they could never bring themselves to put them fully at risk" really doesn't capture the mindset of the antagonists. It was largely true that the Germans were determined to hold on to their fleet, which meant staying in Heligoland, and while the British were satisfied keeping the German fleet in port, they wanted the decisive battle. Despite the British fleet losing more ships in the first day at Jutland, the main reason the Germans fleet escaped was miscommunication in the British admiralty.

mcguire 7y ago
The British may have wanted a decisive battle, but they didn't want to lose any more of their fleet to submarines and mines. The Germans were the ones pronking around raiding the English coast and what-not. "Could never bring themselves to put them fully at risk" does kind of describe the overall situation.

baud147258 7y ago

I remember a succession game of Rule the Waves 2 on a forum, with each successive player trashing the designs of their predecessor before designing their own class of ships, especially for the destroyers, until all ships were from dozens of different class with different performance and armements. Rule the Waves 2 covers a wider time period, since you can go until ~1950, with aircraft carriers, radars, ground-based planes and submarines. The author also didn't touch the spying that can be done on other nations, which will then increase tension and bring new tech and information, and the military treaties, which will force allied nation to go to war together.

aww_dang 7y ago

Perfect candidate for a browser game.

smacktoward 7y ago

If you want to read more about Rule the Waves, I wrote a follow-up post after this one that goes into more detail on the strategic challenges that face each playable nation: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/05/a-brief-consideration-of-various-strategic-problems-in-rule-the-waves/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/05/a-brief-consideration-of-...

aidenn0 7y ago

Can anyone comment on how well this works in wine before I drop $25 on it?

jandrese 7y ago
There's a decent chance it will work well in Wine given the basic WinForms interface it uses. The Wine Database[1] results are encouraging as well. [1] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=17174 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

JoachimSchipper 7y ago

There is a "group game" of sorts going on at navalgazing.net: https://www.google.com/search?q=rule+the+waves+site%3Anavalgazing.net https://www.google.com/search?q=rule+the+waves+site%3Anavalg.... And if you're interested in this sort of thing, you'll probably also appreciate the rest of navalgazing.net - e.g. https://www.navalgazing.net/Top-Posts https://www.navalgazing.net/Top-Posts, https://www.navalgazing.net/Jutland-Part-1 https://www.navalgazing.net/Jutland-Part-1.