Rule the Waves, or: Neil Simulator

[grumbler]

Initial thoughts Grumbler/Neil?

The game isn't a historical recreation; Britain, in particular, is badly gimped in starting forces.  For example, in the game I started as a learning exercise with medium-sized fleets, Britain starts with 6 pre-dread battleships and Germany 5; both have 4 CAs and 18DDs.  Britain has 13 CLs to Germany's 3, but this is more than offset by the fact that Britain has to keep 85,000 tons of warships on foreign stations.  War with Germany came very quickly, and the British were badly outnumbered in light forces in the North Sea.  There is a disconnect between the OOBs and the foreign station and patrol requirements, such that the starting fleets for Britain and France are mostly employed in those roles rather than as fighting forces.

The ship creation screen has a few quirks (like Cls being required to be over 4,000 tons unless using one of the pre-existing designs, all of them under 4,000 tons) but gives some interesting choices in terms of guns/armor/speed, and allows one to trade off things like "optimized for colonial service" (which makes the ship count 1.5 times its tonnage against foreign station requirements) and, as technology changes, more tonnage for fire control and underwater protection.

The battles are fun, with limited player control and lots of little quirks like chances that ships don't see signals and so don't follow orders (they can spend a lot of the battle just trying to regain station if they do that), stokers getting exhausted if you spend too much time at flanks speed, and the like.  Ships are very hard to sink, though, with the technology of the early game.

My biggest gripe at the moment is that ships repair much too quickly.  A ship with 50% hull damage or so is back in service after two months. 

The best part of the game is designing and building ships.  New designs cost about 35% more to build than existing designs, so one has to discipline one's self not to chase each new technology as it comes along.  OTOH, there is a nice anticipation involved in seeing those new designs creep towards completion.

My biggest question in my game so far is whether torpedoes are worth putting on anything but destroyers.  There have been no torpedo hits in any of my battles so far, but their damage potential is enormous because no good underwater protection systems exist yet.

[Alcibiades]

Thanks for the description, looks very interesting but that price point...