Germany Syndrome.

[BobRoss0902]

Both the High Seas fleet and Kriegsmariner had the exact same problem. They tried to pull a Japan where if they can't build a big fleet, they would build the biggest meanest ships to float on the seas, and when they were designed they were extremely advanced, but between Germany's unwillingness to put significant funds into the Navy and the lack of resources for ship construction they were often stuck on the back foot where, their ship that would have been ultramodern had it hit the seas when it was first scheduled to, it would be practically untouchable, but every single time the delays due to lack of funds and resources ment that their fancy new ship was now a generation behind every time despite the only way for them to win on the ocean was for them to go with the philosophy that resulted in the Yamatos.

There wasn't really much the Navy could do about it either, and with this context in mind it makes it sound like it will be extremely un-fun to play Germany, or even possibly Japan as Japan almost fell into this dillemma many many times, and actually did during WW2.

[Reaper Jack]

Personally when I play my first Germany campaign, I'm going to attempt to get around this by building mostly surface raider squadrons for Ocean duty, and a Swedish style Coastal Defence Fleet for home waters; this will both make up the numbers and project power as needed to counter the issue of having a lower budget and falling behind (by building ships that take less time to complete) and while I will invest in Battleships, they will be lighter armed, just enough to be a threat to anything smaller than them, while I will use cruiser fleet doctrine to bring down heavier enemies. I've been trying this in Custom Battles lately to mostly good success, cruisers armed with big enough guns to see off other cruisers while having the torpedoes and speed to threaten BB's has done a great job so far, as long as they themselves are also screened by escorts with yet more torpedoes; this is the Coastal Defence idea I want to go far, freeing up heavier units (such as 6 x 356/381 armed BC's or 6 x 406 armed BB's) to project power in the Atlantic alongside smaller, stealthy raiders similar to the historical Panzerschiff.

[1MajorKoenig]

5 hours ago, BobRoss0902 said:

Both the High Seas fleet and Kriegsmariner had the exact same problem. They tried to pull a Japan where if they can't build a big fleet, they would build the biggest meanest ships to float on the seas, and when they were designed they were extremely advanced, but between Germany's unwillingness to put significant funds into the Navy and the lack of resources for ship construction they were often stuck on the back foot where, their ship that would have been ultramodern had it hit the seas when it was first scheduled to, it would be practically untouchable, but every single time the delays due to lack of funds and resources ment that their fancy new ship was now a generation behind every time despite the only way for them to win on the ocean was for them to go with the philosophy that resulted in the Yamatos.

There wasn't really much the Navy could do about it either, and with this context in mind it makes it sound like it will be extremely un-fun to play Germany, or even possibly Japan as Japan almost fell into this dillemma many many times, and actually did during WW2.

The High Seas Fleet was very different from the Kriegsmarine or Reichsmarine.

The High Seas Fleet was an extremely conservative Force which had plenty of funding for the time, a strong lobby and probably the most advanced industrial base with regards to quality products in the area of artillery pieces, armor pquality and targeting devices. 

Thing is that in such an arms race there is no second and as UK didn’t build a big army they were able to put tons of resources into the fleet building and win this race.

 

The Reichsmarine was caught in extreme restrictions, some leftovers advocating Naval might and a “Zeitgeist” not favouring further Naval endeavours. This small force wasn’t much more than an experimental coastal defense force.

The Kriegsmarine on The other hand lived a pipe dream of a new Naval expansion that was never realistic in the political setting. 

 

But these three German Navies were still quite different in many ways. I think for the game it won’t matter much as it will depend on what resources you can use to build your fleet but I suspect none of these limitation the real German Navy faced would be a big issue in the game. I guess any nation will be playable and enjoyable to play 

[Tousansons]

In game perspective this will be rather easy.

Pick Germany. Build a fleet. Don't pick a fight with someone way bigger than you. Keep a good and relevant naval strenght for the rest of the campaign.

Pick Japan. Build a fleet. Don't pick a fight with someone way bigger than you. Keep a good and relevant naval strenght for the rest of the campaign.

I fail to see where it will be un-fun to play. Just don't repeat history and you'll be fine.

[DougToss]

Reposting for the umpteenth time: A brief consideration of various strategic problems in “Rule the Waves”

 

Quote

Germany

The German player starts off the game in a moderately awkward position.

In 1900, she has what appears to be an impressive network of overseas possessions, ranging from the west coast of Africa through the Indian Ocean to Southeast and Northeast Asia. However, when you look more closely at these, you quickly realize that these bases are all too small to support operations by battleships, or really anything larger than a single armored cruiser. But if you want to keep them, you have to protect them — so you have to find a way to get them into shape before another power with better basing in that sea zone comes along and takes them off your hands.

What’s worse, the legacy fleet you usually start the game with isn’t set up to defend those overseas possessions even if you want them to. You usually start with a few battleships, but they’re frequently battleships with short range and cramped accommodations; such ships can’t operate effectively too far from a large base, and in wartime short-range ships can’t transit through sea zones occupied by enemy ships at all. So if all you’ve got is short-range battleships, and you haven’t pre-positioned any of them in, say, Southeast Asia before war is declared, they’re simply never going to get there until the shooting stops again; too many enemy fleets lie between Germany’s home bases in the North and Baltic seas and the German bases in the Bismarck Archipelago and Caroline Islands for such a transit to be practical.

So if you want to hold on to all those colonies, at game’s start you have a lot of building to do, and in two directions at once. First, you have to be building ships with the range to make the kind of oceanic voyages you’ll need them to make in wartime — and that can mean spending the game’s first decade deferring getting into new-fangled ship types like dreadnoughts and battlecruisers in order to build up longer-ranged conventional ships. And while you’re doing that, you also need to be building up the naval bases at your possessions overseas so they are big enough to receive and support those ships once they arrive; and even if you limit that building program to one single base in each sea zone, that’s four bases you’ll need to put through a program of expansion that will take years and consume many millions of marks.

But despite the network of useless colonies it has built up, Germany remains in 1900 a continental empire, which means that maintaining those colonies could be argued to be secondary to the protection of German home waters. And in the game’s Northern Europe sea zone, which is where those home waters lie, you face powerful opponents: Britain, France and Russia, all of which are strong enough to pose a credible threat at the game’s opening. So now, alongside all that building you have to do to make those colonies defensible, you also have to be building up a fleet in the North Sea that can at least prevent those powers from putting you under blockade. And you have to do all this with a limited budget, less advanced technology, and a mercurial Kaiser.

(In the real world, the architect of the German Navy, Alfred von Tirpitz, didn’t even try to square this impossible circle. Instead, he promoted a mission for the fleet based on what he called “risk theory.” Risk theory argued that the Germans didn’t need to have a battle fleet large enough to overwhelm the main naval power in Northern European waters, the British; they just needed a fleet that was large enough to damage the British fleet so severely that it would be unable after a clash to meet its requirements around the world. Tirpitz argued that the simple possibility of such an outcome would deter the British from ever confronting Germany at sea. As it happened, this theory turned out to be completely wrong; having plowed so much money into its own battle fleet, it was the Germans who when war came shied away from a confrontation which could see that investment humiliatingly sent to the bottom of the sea.)

Despite all that, though, Germany comes into the game with some distinct advantages as well. If you’re willing to abandon your colonies, for instance, you can narrow the list of sea zones that Germany has to care about down to just one — Northern Europe — which means you really can build up a fleet that can challenge the British there, especially if they have to cover their overseas possessions too. While your guns will generally lag behind those of British and American ships in terms of caliber, they will often be of higher quality, letting those smaller guns hit more reliably and fail less often. And while your budget starts off limited, as the game goes on it’s one of the few that can grow large enough to keep up with those of the British and Americans. (Who, if you’re lucky, will at some point go to war with each other, letting you watch from the sidelines as your two biggest threats whittle each other down.)

Unlike many powers, Germany is also ideally positioned to make use of submarines. Submarines are useless as oceanic combatants, as their range is too limited to range beyond your home waters and they don’t count towards the tonnage requirements you have to keep on station at your overseas possessions. But they can be absolutely deadly off your home coasts, especially later in the game when the rickety, unreliable submersibles of 1900 have become the swift, deadly raiders of 1915; and since your home waters are also the home waters of your most dangerous enemies, a fleet of submarines can wreak havoc both on their shipping and on their battle fleets.

And, if you decide you really do want to fight for a colonial empire, opportunities can present themselves there as well. If you build up your foreign bases and build out ships with the range to reach them, it can be possible to mass enough force in one sea zone to permit your army to land at your opponent’s bases there, seizing them. France, Britain and the United States have lots of colonies in Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and West Africa; if you’re nimble, you can mass in one of those zones and overwhelm some of those colonies before your opponent can gather enough force to drive you out. (This can have a virtuous-circle effect, too; when you capture an enemy colony you capture its naval base too, so capturing colonies can be just as effective a way to increase the size and number of ships you can operate in a sea zone as building up your existing bases there is.)

So: Germany’s position is awkward, but it’s not impossible, and at least you have options.

Quote

Japan

Japan doesn’t have a lot of options.

In 1900, Japan is a second-tier naval power at best.  In your own home waters of Northeast Asia you can face direct opposition by both Russia and Germany; your only overseas possessions are in Southeast Asia, where you can potentially run into conflict with Britain, France and the U.S. Your fleet is small, your budget is smaller, and your domestic shipyards can only build vessels up to 10,000 tons, which means that if you want to build a battleship you have to pay a foreign shipyard to do it for you. You can build up your own yards to a size where you can do your building locally, but doing so takes time — as with expanding naval bases, each round of improvements to your shipyards takes a year to complete — and unless you’re building out your yards very aggressively, you’re always going to be running behind the capacity of the first-tier powers.

All of which sounds pretty limiting, I know. But we know that, in the real world, Japan managed to build up sufficiently just a few years after 1900 to crush the Russians at sea in a war that dramatically established them as a naval power to be reckoned with. Can a Japanese player do the same in RtW?

The answer is yes. Japan has limitations, but it also has important advantages.

The first is positional. Unlike the Great Powers, you as the Japanese player have no globe-spanning network of colonies; but that can actually be a source of strength, because it means you can completely abandon the need to build a large enough fleet to meet any possible enemy anywhere in the world. All you need to care about is being strong enough in two sea zones — Northeast and Southeast Asia — to handle whatever forces the other powers station there. Additionally, since these sea zones are far from the home waters of most of the colonial powers, what you’re generally going to be facing there is second-line stuff, old cruisers and pre-dreadnought battleships and the like; Britain and Germany and France will all want to keep their cutting-edge ships closer to home for the purpose of fighting each other. Finally, that great distance means that, if you can overcome whatever forces they have on station when the shooting starts, it can take many months for them to sail reinforcements out to meet you; months that you can use to seize their bases, disrupt their merchant fleets, and generally make hay while the sun shines.

Since your home waters are just one sea zone away from Southeast Asia, of course, all of those positional problems are flipped on their heads for you. You can focus your limited resources on building enough ships to be competitive in just the two sea zones you care about, rather than having to disperse forces across the world’s oceans. You can concentrate powerful, modern forces in your two zones without having to worry about potential foes elsewhere. You can move forces between these two zones in just one month’s time, making you agile and hard to pin down.

In other words, so long as you can limit your ambitions to Asian waters, you can punch far above your weight.

You have some other advantages as well, including a special ability that only the Japanese possess; when war breaks out, if you and the opponent have fleets in the same sea zone, you can launch a night-time surprise attack that will catch the enemy fleet at anchor. While their ships are frantically trying to raise steam and get to battle stations, they are stationary and unable to fight back effectively; your ships, meanwhile, are sailing at full speed with decks cleared for battle. There are no guarantees that you will win this battle — fighting at night is difficult in this pre-radar era, wandering too close to the anchored enemy can result in your ships getting hit by torpedoes, and once the enemy is alerted and moving the advantages surprise gives you are gone. But it certainly lets you enter battle with your opponent severely handicapped; and if you’ve built wisely and can handle your ships effectively, you can take advantage of those handicaps to deal a devastating blow.

 

[BobRoss0902]

9 hours ago, Tousansons said:

In game perspective this will be rather easy.

Pick Germany. Build a fleet. Don't pick a fight with someone way bigger than you. Keep a good and relevant naval strenght for the rest of the campaign.

Pick Japan. Build a fleet. Don't pick a fight with someone way bigger than you. Keep a good and relevant naval strenght for the rest of the campaign.

I fail to see where it will be un-fun to play. Just don't repeat history and you'll be fine.

Seeing as how the website is very adamant that you will be in control of only the admirality rather than the government, I don't think you get to decide when and who you go to war with. You might be able to influence but the AI gets the final say.

[Cptbarney]

Just now, BobRoss0902 said:

Seeing as how the website is very adamant that you will be in control of only the admirality rather than the government, I don't think you get to decide when and who you go to war with. You might be able to influence but the AI gets the final say.

if you go to the planning next updates last page with my post it i posted a link to the alpha 1 version which has a guy who leaked an image of the research tree (at the time) for the campaign, it also has some tabs that may give you a good idea of this might work.

that was 7 months ago doe.

[Tousansons]

1 hour ago, BobRoss0902 said:

Seeing as how the website is very adamant that you will be in control of only the admirality rather than the government, I don't think you get to decide when and who you go to war with. You might be able to influence but the AI gets the final say.

You're right I made the assumption this will be possible to an extent in the game. However, it would be a mistake to not give at least "some" control of political matters to the players.

And if politics fails once again, as a player you should still be able to not search a decisive fleet battle against a nation who field way more BB's than you do. Avoid major battles, raid, seek for peace as soon as possible. As long as you can keep your battlebotes afloat, you're winning in the long run.