Rule the Waves 3 News

*The start time of the winners livestream has been delayed a half hour and is now 12:30 PM EST

Hello everyone, we are happy to announce that we got a ton of great submissions from the community, just like with the first contest it was a very strong showing.

Submissions are now closed and all of the designs have been forwarded to the judges. They are now getting to work going through your ships to pick out their favorites and choose our six winners for our second design contest.

Our livetsream where we announce the results of the contest will be Thursday, February 22nd, at 6PM CEST/12:00 PM EST hosted on the Slitherine twitch channel.

Thanks for participating and I hope to see many of you in chat next Thursday!

Hello Admirals, Commodores, Captains, and every other kind of Master and Commander.

We are launching the second ship design contest for Rule the Waves 3.

Every person entering the contest and making a valid submission will receive a Matrix store voucher worth 15 USD. The contests winners will also receive a voucher worth 30 dollars. For those of you who were in the previous contest, we have made some minor revisions to the rules.

Contest Rules: Submit a picture of your ship with both its guns page and additional armaments page.




In addition to the images, give us a very short story why the ship is designed the way it is or it's battle history. This can be humorous, knowledgeable, or simply an entertaining yarn about your ship. We are not imposing a character limit this time but please keep it brief for the sake of our judges. You may submit in both categories but you can only be picked as a winner in one of them. Variant technology submissions are also acceptable.

Please only submit a ship designed in an unmodded version of the game.
Category 1 - Light Cruisers, any period and any configuration. If it is a legal design and says CL it will be sent to the judges for consideration. This is a very broad category and we are excited to see ship designs run the gamut from the Town-Class to the Bremen. Protected Cruisers do count as CL, and are accepted designs.

Category 2 - Heavy Cruisers, any period and any configuration. Same rules as the Light Cruisers, if it says CA and is a legal design, we will accept it for judging.

Players should submit their designs to [email protected]
Now for our community judges, we are proud to announce they are:

DasTactic: If you ever needed a tutorial on how to play a Matrix game, DasTactic has probably done a video on it. From Distant Worlds to Shadow Empire Das's videos are a familiar sight in our wargaming community. This is Das's second round as a judge.

Drachinifel: Creator of the best naval guides out there. If you ever had even the slightest interest in a topic about warships, Drachinifel has you covered. From triple expansion boilers to the war galleys of antiquity, he has made a video on it. This is also Drach's second round as a judge.

Tortuga: Probably one of the best regular RTW3 Youtubers, Tortuga currently has a marathon 1890's Germany playthrough that is 55 episodes deep and growing. This is his first time as a judge.

Scores and winners are up to the judges, we aren't putting in any hard quantitative rules regarding what a ship is graded on, so expect some subjectivity. With that being said we have some very clever and knowledgable judges who will be looking for solid design work.

With a judge selecting a winner for each category, we will have six victorious designs. The winners will have their ships and stories broadcast when we announce the contest results with the judges on our livestream! The date and time of this stream will be announced when submissions close.

Submissions close February 12th, good luck and happy designing.

While technology has always played a role in shaping the military, naval warfare in the early 20th century was defined by rapid innovation that saw whole generations of ships made obsolete only a few years after they were completed. The Ironclad gave way to the Battleship, and the Battleship to the Dreadnought. Here we are covering the big innovations that drove the changing face of naval warfare in the 20th century in our new historical video series.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Special thanks to Drachinifel for lending his voice to this project.

You can expect Episode 2 out February, next month.

Hello Admirals,

We are happy to release the largest update RTW3 has gotten since launch. The Admiral Update includes a completely reworked battle generator, adding an entire new level of command to Rule the Waves 3.


Admirals can now be promoted and assigned to command forces in a particular area. These admirals have command skills that can be used to re-arrange your divisions before contact with the enemy.

Rearranging your forces can lead to misunderstood signals before battle however, so it is a risky option. With an intelligence coup you can even decline battle without the normal victory point penalty.

There are also numerous other features included with this update. The tactical AI has been tweaked, a slew of bugs have been fixed, and improvements have been made to the UI to improve functionality (the N key will advance time on the strategic map, the ESC button now closes the division editor etc).

The full changelog is posted below.

What’s New in Version 1.00.27
Battle Generation

• Fixed missing objective in a convoy attack battle Germany vs France.
  
• Completely new pre battle procedure that lets the player edit the force before battle, depending on a command roll for the commanding admiral.
  
• On an intelligence coup, you can decline the battle with no penalty.
  
• Fixed a bug in battle generation that could lead to error messages, primarily in carrier battles.
  

Battle Resolution

• Some tweaks to the tactical AI.
  
• Made the check for airstrikes in the air preventing scenario end more restrictive. An air formation must now have more than 3 aircraft and be within 100 nm of enemy ships to stop a scenario from ending.
  
• Improved the notification when a friendly ship suffers a magazine explosion from a torpedo hit.
  
• Limited flooding from collisions in some extreme cases.
  

Ship Design

• Fixed illegal AI build templates that combine protected cruiser and narrow belt.
  
• Prevented replacement of -2 quality main guns if ship has more than 2 centerline turrets.
  
• Stopped the auto-designer from using triple wing turrets.
  
• Improved Japanese ship names list (thanks to @Burningapple3 and helpers!).
  

Officers

• Admirals can now command forces in areas. Their ability will be used in the pre-battle stage.
  
• Admirals will not be eligible to send as Naval Attache.
  

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug with KE being allowed to have submerged torpedo tubes.
  
• Fixed a bug with battlecruisers not being included in the losses history statistic.
  
• Made sure the the lukewarm wartime support event does not fire if the player nation has been at war with the enemy of the ally.
  
• Suppressed a debug message with "Too many rounds" that could appear very occasionally.
  
• Fixed a bug that made detached damaged ships occasionally go towards their original division instead of to nearest friendly base.
  
• Removed double message in turn reports about base expansion.
  

UI Improvements

• On events, pressing the 1,2,3 key will now select the respective answer and close the event dialog.
  
• Escape button now closes the division editor.
  
• Current submarine reliability is now visible when building a new submarine.
  
• Added a button in the design screen for upgrading guns in a refit (instead of changing the caliber back and forth).
  
• The N key will now advance the turn in strategic mode.
  
• Added a help button on the main screen to show keyboard shortcuts.
  

Divisions

• Added warning when assigning more than one core division to follow the same lead division.
  
• Fixed oversensitive core divisions check.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause an error message when the division screen was closed.
  

Balance Changes

• The Japanese surprise attack can no longer be declined by the defender.
  

We hope you enjoy this new update, and hope to deliver more exciting news and updates next year.

We want you - yes YOU Admiral - to nominate us for the Best Game you Suck category for the steam awards. Since our launch back in May we have had plenty of AAR's on the forums highlighting all the challenges players face in RTW3. From 1890 to 1970 the challenges you face as a naval commander certainly evolve.

She's only a little sunk

Starting off in 1890 you have to deal with the Ironclad age. Fire control systems are as sophisticated as the human eyeball, and torpedoes have a range of about a kilometre and change. But really at this point combat is still rather simple. Your mistakes are forgiven because naval weaponry is still pretty inaccurate and small caliber. AP shells aren't that impressive yet.

That certainly changes with dreadnoughts and battleship

As we skip ahead to the 1910's and 1920's gunnery improves by leaps and bounds. Fire control systems and rangefinders are invented and quickly become very effective. The weight of broadsides massively increases as we go from two turret battleships to four turret dreadnoughts and battle-cruisers. You have to adapt your style of play for an increasingly lethal world.

We've got a need for speed

By the time the 30's and 40's come around you may have mastered the art of battleship engagements, only to run into waves upon waves of torpedo and dive bombers. Bomb loads and air ranges improve drastically and most nations begin constructing airbases and carriers. Your prized battle fleet is increasingly vulnerable to those magnificent men in their flying machines.

Why even bother with armor anymore?

Finally, we get to the 50's and 60's, and the whole game changes yet again. Guns are out, battleships are obsolete, because how do you armor against a supersonic missile attack? In an age of jet aircraft and guided weapons the only way to survive is to not get hit.

We hope you managed your allies correctly

You have to change your tactics, balance alliances, research the techs to fit your doctrine, and make sure you don't over invest in a boondoggle and ruin your budget for the coming fiscal year. It's ship designs and spreadsheets, a wonderful challenge for lovers of naval history, and the Best Game you Suck At.