DougToss

RTW 2 with Steam and Iron's campaign layer would be just about perfect.

Turrets could definitely see some work, especially if we are going to see quads. I think RTW did a good job with the weight, cost and penalties of the different turrets as well as how different hulls can accommodate different turrets and when the tech to do so becomes available. Having said that RTW also suffers from turrets sharing the same visual footprint: As you can see, the quad 15 inch guns are displayed as about the same size as a single 6 or 7 inch gun:

Could bulkheads be gated by technology? I seem to remember that when secondaries were in the superstructure, the interior would be open or have thin, lightly armoured partitions.

@arkhangelsk RTW sets restrictions based on technology and type of hull. I think that is a smart approach - while B (pre and semi-dreads) can only have 2 centreline turrets, within that pretty much anything goes. BBs have to unlock main gun wing turrets, or 3 centerline turrets and eventually cross firing and more centerline turrets. Similarly to DDs and CLs slowly being able to mount more weapons centreline and eventually twin turrets and super-firing. Those are absolutely smart restrictions, and as you say mirror history. The important thing is allowing freedom within the restrictions, and explaining what the restrictions are.

I would guess that the ammunition was packed with dyes by the ordnance men once it was received from the depot. If naval shells are handled like the artillery, you break down the pallets issued from the base stores, distribute shells, and then when going into action set the powder and fuse. The shells you have are the shells you have though.

Ideally an in-game encyclopedia and the UI will present all of that information as well as the game manual. I'm thinking the Civilopedia is a particularly good example. With the example question you asked, clicking shell dyes in the tech screen or what-have-you UI element or looking it up in the encyclopedia would bring up an entry like: As far as @RAMJB goes, I appreciate his information in context but it's probably too demanding to ask a forum's member to write an entire naval history of the period! Someone could make a thread compiling his posts though, I've seen that done on other forums. Your best bet to getting up to speed may be the Reference Materials thread on the forums here.

Here is a wonderful write up of the issues each nation faces in RTWs campaign. Great bit of writing that breaks down the strategic problems and how that influences naval policy and design.

I know, I just don't know how you would get it to work in game. For instance, is it turning into the wind to launch aircraft while in the battle line?

I would rather go with how RTW or Clad in Iron handle land combats and do it all from the strategy map. I can't even imagine what a land combat simulator from 1885-1930 would look like. Maybe in 20 years we'll see titles that ambitious. I know nobody could have dreamed about today's Combat Mission and Graviteam games in 1999.

Does anyone know why Warspite and Enterprise were not turned into museums?

Just how winning a land combat is about control of the field and not wiping out the enemy outright, control of the sea is not about sinking every enemy ship. That has to be built into how the game rewards victories or else commerce raiding or a fleet-in-being will not be rewarding and the player and AI will be forced to see decisive battle regardless of their national situation.

Seeing casemates on a ship laid down in 1933 is going to drive me crazy but that's just a quibble. For turrets, I would like at minimum the options available in RTW2 if we're going to be confined by presets. Otherwise, for how early the game is in development there are a lot of options for recreating historical ships and the designer is very impressive, if somewhat inflexible.

if you are interested in that, I would check out Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941 . It's a riveting read and one of the best works on naval history I've read. I'll also recommend On Seas Contested: The Seven Great Navies of the Second World War which is a fantastic introductory title and covers every aspect of navies from recruitment to training , doctrine, equipment, tactics and their combat histories. In fact, if you are interested on any aspect of surface warfare in the ETO during the Second World War, Vincent O'Hara probably has a book about it.

I agree. While it might be fun to say "ah ha! That's the Nassau!" the first time you see this design, that's just a starting place. With more freedom, you could say move the A turret forward and have a super-firing gun behind it, but have to make up for the weight by reducing two or the wing turrets to single mounts, or omit a pair of wing turrets entirely and decide between F+G, G+K, non-cross firing turrets en echelon. Maybe you delete the middle section of the super structure and a pair of turrets have have cross-firing. Maybe you move one wing turret to C and one to W while centring the remaining wing turrets amidships. There are so many variations and design decisions just based on this one hull, but the designer has to be opened up to allow it, otherwise adding the Nassau hull will only let players build the Nassau with variations in armour and gun calibre and not much else.

Exactly. If people want to build "Gun" destroyers like the Tribals, I say they should go for it, but the design considerations should be taken into account. Hell, if people want to try "Big-Gun" destroyers with 4x1 8", I think they should be allowed to see how impractical, top-heavy, expensive and awkward that design is. Something I liked to do in RTW every once in a while was to put casemates on destroyers. I'd like to be able to do that and see just how ridiculous it looks here. Handling 155mm shells is hard enough on a howitzer with spades dug in. I can't imagine doing it on a destroyer, especially considering the seakeeping qualities of WWI British destroyers and how wet they tended to be. It's important that be conveyed, especially when players are deciding on that range of 4" - 7" guns were things go from easy stowage in ready-use lockers and light, easy to handle fixed or separate quick firing ammunition to accessible magazines storing bagged charges and much heavier, harder to handle projectiles to 165lb projectiles that require mechanical handling (Although Friedman says it was considered the heaviest one man could handle alone, I would be interested to see how they did that on a ship, especially since men were smaller back then). Finally, this is where I think attention should be placed in ship design. Opening up turret, barbette and casemate placement would be a step forward both in allowing creative player designs, and reproducing historical ships. If a rework for full-freedom will take a while, adding more preset points in the time being would be a step forward - at the risk of being accused of plagiarism 😉 Just being able to have the F+K and G+J positions for turrets and the 1 and 2 positions really opens things up. In RTW I'll occasionally put cross-firing guns on destroyers and protected cruisers before centreline armaments are available to increase the weight of broadside, but there are obviously reasons this wasn't done and I ought to have to deal with the consequences.

I agree wholeheartedly, but would go on to say that ideally we would be able to build a pre-dread with 12" casemated guns, and suffer the compromises and drawbacks from that design accordingly (I would guess you could still probably only fit 4 within the same displacement, I have no idea how the armour arrangement or shell handling would work, and you would halve your broadside and lose the ability to fire end-on with main caliber guns). I think the placement of turrets, barbettes and casemates is going to be one of the biggest things that could really open up ship design for some interesting designs that weren't tried in reality.

It would be nice to have the hulls come with the option to have casemate mounts present or absent. Sometimes I have empty mounts because I've opted for turrets and sometimes I'd like to see what would happen if casemates stayed on into the 20's and 30's. Ideally casemate mounts would be auto-generated procedurally when you place a casemate gun, like people are asking for with barbettes. Until then, having an A and B option for hulls would be an expedient solution.

I think the game should be able to account for players using calibers that for whatever reason were not popular historically. Specifically, 7", 9" and 10" guns. I don't see why a light cruiser couldn't be built with 7" guns, or why a heavy cruiser could not have 10". I don't know how good they would be. There is surely a reason those calibers were not common, but it should be up to the players to find out if say 7" guns are too unwieldy or can't have the shells handled by hand on a protected cruiser or used in super-firing double mounts on a light cruiser or what a Brooklyn class light cruiser with 5x2 10" would be like, and if that is in fact still a light cruiser.

I would need a naval expect to weigh in, but I think calibre restrictions should be increased for casemates to maybe 10" or 11". This would maybe be within the edge of usefulness on semi-dreadnoughts and as fantastical and impractical as they may be, seem to have certainly been possible. Thoughts?

There was vigorous debate about this before and after Rule the Waves 2 came out. The general take away I got from that was, concerns about aviation facilities and centreline turrets effecting air operations aside, if your carrier is within gunnery range of the enemy you've done something terribly wrong, and if your guns are hundreds of kilometres way launching aircraft you have thousands of tonnes of paperweights. It would be better to have a cruiser and a light carrier operating in their respective roles for the same resources than to have one hybrid fulfilling only one role at a time. http://nws-online.proboards.com/post/33706

Regarding the campaign, here is a fantastic write up of the strategic problems each nation faces in RTW. I'd like to see those problems also presented in the campaign for this title, whatever the specific mechanics may be.

Sales to who I wonder? Who is the target demographic for a realistic naval warfare simulator but that also wants laser or plasma weapons? Since the technology for gunnery is also trying to model as accurately as possible the technology through the game's timeframe, what practical laser existed in 1930? What warship could in 1930, 17 years before the first transistor even generate enough electricity to power a laser? How would it be operated and directed entirely mechanically? Since no effective military laser exists even in 2020, how would range, penetration of armour, and so fourth be determined? Before I be labelled a member of the No-Fun Brigade, there are many opportunities for wildly fantastic fun in even in a realistic game. For instance, here are some pictures of casemated 9.5" and 10" guns. Within a faithfully realistic sim you can still build crazy ships! Can you imagine if instead of the all big gun armament, a Sea Lord other than Jacky Fisher (the player) decided to scale up mixed-battery semi-dreadnoughts and build a ship displacing 20k tons that had 6 12" and 4 10" guns?! 😂 It would be an interesting ship, never even tried in reality, integrate with all the existing game systems, be possible and realistic with the technology of the time, and allow the player to evaluate the real pros and cons influencing ship designers at the time and how to employ that design doctrine in battle. In fact, I think the ship designer should allow more freedom because while 10" casemates were impractical, they weren't unfeasible and there is no reason to restrict the player from building casemates of that size (or possibly larger). All of the systems in game can already account for the mount's limited ability to have mechanical handling (if any, @RAMJB?) and what the weight, traverse, and elevation of that kind of mount would be. That also goes for learning all of the wrong lessons from the Spanish-American War and instead of large calibre guns building capital ships with massive batteries of 4" or 6" guns. Fantastical, not done in reality, but certainly possible at the time and should be made an option in ship designer, with all of the attendant drawbacks. Imagine a 1900 Ship of The Line with broadside cannon bristling from gun ports. There's no reason the player shouldn't be able to try that and a million why it wouldn't work that would be fun for players to discover. Quad turrets might've been more widespread, destroyer tonnage might've stayed very low, 7" guns could have been more popular. There are a million fantasy options that should be possible in the designer that are also bound by reality.

I wouldn't know offhand but how frequently were ships sunk by shellfire in the game's time period? Maybe this is a case of the game needing to tell players that winning the engagement (and what that means for their campaign) isn't about sinking the enemy's ships. If they return home damaged and are under repair for months, that might be a battle won. On the other hand, if ships are surviving far more battle damage than in reality, that also needs to be looked at. This tension between expectations and reality seems to be also driving the discussion (and hotfix) on accuracy. If 5% is a fantastic hit rate at typical engagement ranges, players need to be told so. It's common in wargamers for new players to be frustrated they are not annihilating the enemy on the field. It is unreasonable to expect most people to know that they can control the key terrain with fire rather than movement or the merits of concentration or dispersal. If you've seen new players tackle Graviteam or Combat Mission, you've seen the experience of the French Army in 1914 play out a hundred times as they charge concentrated columns at entrenched, concealed enemies and suffer the consequences. When the game provides them with the appropriate information they are less likely to fight their pixeltruppen to the last man or to be dismayed when the enemy cancels an attack or begins to withdraw at 10-15% casualties. To be able to design ships and fight the campaign, the information needs to presented to players so that they can make informed decisions based on the same realistic factors as their historical counterparts while understanding why they are making those decisions and having fun.

Perhaps it would help people to know what the advances in fire control were in the time period and what they meant. From that, it would be easier to have a common understanding on how gameplay might be effected by different fire control systems and what should happen if they are absent or disabled. For instance, when did central fire control come about, what did it do, how did that impact gunnery, why was that preferable to local control, how could it be degraded in battle and what superseded it? Ideally, the finished game will include this information in the documentation, an accessible in-game encyclopedia and the UI when designing ships as well as when relevant in battle. That would also apply to propulsion, armament, gunnery and protection. I think the perceived impenetrability of military simulators to many gamers has always been that military topics are by nature, not common knowledge and that the UI and documentation of earlier titles - to put it generously - didn't help. That has finally started to change and we have seen interest in wargaming and simulation grow as a result. In short - while the previous generation of naval wargames expected players to have at minimum read Warrior to Dreadnought and Steam, Steel & Shellfire, UI can guide players into making decisions informed by that information without sacrificing realism to make the gameplay fun and accessible to people not well versed (or formally educated - looking at you CMANO!) on the subject. I'll give a quick example on the subject of gunnery. I was an artilleryman by trade. I know what shell handling is like, and know how a 105mm (4") projectile at 33lbs is much easier to handle than a 155mm (6") shell at 100lbs. I also know that the 105mm shell was quick firing and fired from a gun with a sliding breach block, while the 155mm shell uses bagged charges and has what is basically a Welin breech block (see, it's already getting complicated). For hand worked (another complication - what and why mechanical shell handling?) guns those are already pretty major differences in how shell handling works and from that, rate of fire. And that's on dry land! It's unreasonable for the game to expect people to already have that information, but also important for them to use that information when designing and fighting ships. All of that should matter because gunnery in a simulator is a lot more complicated that juggling rate of fire, damage and range to determine some kind of DPS. The UI is the link that will help players decide that 6" on a destroyer with wet decks is not a good design decision although if they want to, I think they should have the freedom to make that choice with all the realistic pitfalls that entails.

Respectfully, I disagree with your premise. "Who cares about realism" and "it's just a game" are used to support requests that fundamentally alter the stated purpose of the game from that put fourth by the designers and supported by much of the community. So whereas people who support the realistic nature of the game, as proposed by the devs, and widely acclaimed by the community (Case in point from today's article on Wargaming.com : " Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts is the latest entry into this series of tactical, real time wargames [...]." ) are calling for adjusted arcs of fire on cross-firing turrets, the "just have fun" party are proposing 200k ton ships and sextuple turrets. Those cannot exist in the same game. A game that cares about the blast effects of cross-firing turrets on decks and superstructures would also make six-gun turrets an impossibility for a myriad of reasons. So they are not just wishing for different things, they are wishing for a fundamentally different kind of game. RAMJB's commentary, based as you say on a vast knowledge of the technical and historical factors of warship design are inherently useful in shaping community discussions on a game about the historical and technical factors of warship design! These conversations are very useful for any wargame. Look at the discussions proceeding a patch for a Combat Mission or Gary Grigsby title and you will see members of the community sharing insights with the devs and the community about say when 6th South African Armoured Division received Sherman Ib's and how many per troop and squadron by month rather than "It's just a game, let's give them Abrams to make the gameplay a little more fun". Finally, while there are plenty of arcade naval games, some even with ship design (Stormworks, NavalArt, From the Depths, WOWS), the wargaming community has for years lacked for major releases. Silent Hunter 4 and 5 have been heavily modded by the subsim community over the past decade and those innovations, all in the name of immersion and realism drove the recent early access titles UBoat and Wolfpack which have been wildly acclaimed. The painstakingly realistic ship design and naval tactical/campaign title Rule the Waves was widely praised (and sold!) and that success lead to Rule the Waves 2 (and some might say this game 😉). To find 3D surface warfare games about this time period though, you have to go back 12 years to Jutland Pro or to the niche Totem Games Clad in Iron series. This is something of a dream project for the wargaming community (and wargaming press) so of course there is an interest in aiding the devs make it all happen. It may seem like unfun rivet counting but that's the demographic - people who don't particularly care which divisions fought in Normandy aren't buying War in The West in the first place. For your consideration I humbly submit the recent RPS article on the design of an absolutely brilliant (and well selling to both hardcore grogs and the public) Unity of Command 2: How Unity Of Command 2 balances game design with military history: Where abstraction meets accuracy