Rule the Waves 3

If Microsoft excel was this addictive I would have been an extremely productive member of the society.

Rule the Waves 3 looks like Wikipedia and Excel had a kid… and then left it alone in a room full of warships. You boot it up and it’s just menus, numbers, charts, more numbers… like damn, where’s the “game”? But then it clicks and suddenly you’re obsessing over ship designs at 3am like a complete maniac, arguing with yourself about armor thickness and gun calibers like it actually matters. There’s no flashy action, no hand-holding, nothing pretty to look at. It’s just pure systems, and somehow that turns into one of the most addictive things ever. You lose a battle and it feels personal. You win one and you feel like a genius. It’s ugly, it’s overwhelming, and yeah, it looks like a spreadsheet on steroids—but once it grabs you, it doesn’t let go. This thing shouldn’t be fun… and yet it absolutely is (if u have the IQ required). 9999/10, spreadsheet supremacy achieved.

Seems the developer is EA-pilled. Releasing a paid DLC for a game with an already absurd price point. Should have been just a regular content update.

Fix flooding ships killing themselves by going full speed when entering AI mode

A really, really good, fun idea with tons of potential ruined by absolutely god awful programming and a complete lack of any functional tutorial or even a basic glossary for terms. I say this as someone who enjoys and knows a fair chunk about naval combat and history. First, the game is vastly overpriced for what you get. It really is just a spreadsheet simulator. That is obvious just from looking at screenshots. What is not obvious is the absolute lack of any meaningful tutorial, tooltips to explain things or even just some way to give you an idea of what's going on half the time. The best example I can think of is it has a granular system, it's lots of little improvements leading to bigger changes. The problem is the tooltips are not granular. What does it mean by tension +? Does it go up 1? 2? Does tension ++ mean 2? No because I've seen it leap 5 with no warning and without me doing anything. I figured out what tension (+) means but good luck without knowing the context and even then I'm not sure. Ship building is a chore. Not because it's just drop down boxes and numbers being filled out but because the ship classification system is absolutely broken and not in the fun way. What's the difference between a light cruiser and a heavy cruiser? I have no idea besides the obvious but almost every time (bar a fluke) every light cruiser I make ends up being a heavy cruiser if I try to do it myself. So I leave it to the auto designer except that sometimes goes ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and doesn't make a light cruiser but some other ship. Every other time it messes with my displacement and all but guarantees I'll have to redo most if not all of it anyway resulting in being told my ship is no longer a light cruiser more often than not. Most tellingly half the time when I try to make something like a heavy cruiser it's not considered a legal ship design for reasons the game doesn't bother to tell me. Could it be the armour design? No, it's the right type. The guns? Maybe but changing them down to 7 inchers doesn't stop the game from telling me the ship is not legal. If it actually told me what the problem was I wouldn't mind. I want to make a heavy cruiser, give me a check list of minimum specs to reach that classification and any maximums that may apply. If Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts can do this, I do not see how this supposedly better game fails to do something so basic and yet it does somehow. Actual gameplay is a mix of fun management and brain numbing tedium. Being an admiral is not the problem. I do not mind not having great influence on the nation and I do not necessarily mind having to work with the budget I've been given. What I do mind is when the budget is cut for nonsensical reasons over and over and over again. We need more heavy cruisers to the point the government is giving me a budget increase for it? Great. Why are they cutting it down seven months in a row? That's an annoyance but not the biggest problem in this area which is the random events are slanted to favour other nations and not your own. More often than not the RNG too but I have no idea if or how I can improve my chances because the game doesn't tell me anything besides "Doing this will increase tension ++" which is really great for making important choices that could get me territory. Battles had the potential to be fun. It could've been interesting. Instead you have the same weighted RNG paired with completely brain dead idiotic AI. Enemy AI typically flees if they can and you have some sort of real advantage over them which means half your fights of a war you are winning in all but actual gains are just you chasing the enemy navy over and over again and getting nowhere. Your navigation is also locked at the start of each battle normally which ensures you can't do the same until you either run past the enemy (which is also frequent) or run straight into them where you will inevitably lose if you don't have said advantage. Why will you lose? Easy, friendly AI is so braindead idiotic that I don't think friendly AI exists. It is wholly artificial but intelligent it is not. I have routinely seen friendly AI make basic navigation errors when trying to stay in formation WITHOUT any alert about miscommunications. Perfectly functional ships that should be capable of keeping up with battleships somehow go the opposite direction of any course changes, constantly fall out of line with said battleships and generally do absolutely nothing of value most of the time because they're too busy wandering several thousand yards off in the opposite direction of the enemy to do as they are told. I would try to manage all of this at once but that is a task I don't find fun and is scuppered by the AI of the ships you do manually control. Frequently on any course change, regardless of circumstances, the ships will wiggle about. They will ignore course change commands even in open seas with no damage to the rudder and nothing in their way. If you add obstacles like land, thankfully no damage modelling is done for anything but ships hitting one another which I honestly didn't think was a thing at all given the fact I've seen friendly and enemy ships pass through one another to the extent ramming didn't seem possible. If you try to move close to enemy ships these navigational failures stack on top of one another to the point your ships will often refuse to do anything but wiggle in place, destroying their accuracy in the process and being shelled to oblivion. Also I've had strange glitches with this title such as somehow managing to lock my cursor to the bottom of my screen. There's no other misbehaviour from anything else so that's something to keep aware of. Do not pay anything more than £15 for this at most. And preferably don't buy it at all. Edit: I have tried it some more. Unfortunately it has only soured my opinion further. I do not believe the developers know how to code nor instruct the player in anything. I do not believe their systems actually work as intended (unless pointless frustration was the goal all along) and I know for a fact their hit chance calculations are completely broken, as is their armour penetration calculations. Don't even get it on sale, pretend it doesn't exist and get Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts or wait for something similar. Every time I come back to this some aspect manages to be so deficient and worthless it sours every second I waste my time on it. There is nothing of value here and I do not understand how it can be sold in good conscience given its myriad of failings.

Creating ships, commanding the navy great. Fleet battle system terrible. Just add an option for autoresolve.

Yes, the battle generator absolutely sucks. Yes, mostly everything possible in this game is unfair towards the player and not really fun. Yes, the AI cheats so hard it makes playing CS with Chinese look like an intelligent activity Yes, the tactical AI is at a level of a lobotomized cucumber. Yes, the enemy AI still seems to hit you 100 times more often than you hit them. Yes, the AI just killed your ship with their first 4 inch shot that caused a flash fire Yes, the war score mechanics are so horrendous garbage that Paradox games seem enjoyable. And yes, I'm recommending this because it's the Dwarf Fortress of naval combat games with utterly ridiculous simulation of various things nobody else cares about. It's not about having fun. And it's not supposed to be. Look at the UI. Buy the game, design a ship, watch the AI wreck it with a single lucky shot in a 5v1 battle you never wanted to have, rage quit and then realize it's a pretty good game.

The battle system is just ridiculous. Too much is left to chance as to which ships in an area will meet. It's so difficult to get an equalized battle to happen. I'm all for realism. Heck, no one who has spent the time necessary to learn this game (as I did) would play it if it wasn't for realism. BUT, you have to build enough fun into the game, even if it means allowing more equalized engagements than real life would allow. Sorry, the algorithms just aren't fun enough to get good match-ups. Uninstalled.

Rule the waves 3 is a bit of a mixed bag for me. The game before the late 1910s is fantastic. Particularly the dreadnought battles between the other nations and the funky designs you can make. However as soon as I begin using aircraft carriers in any of my games it starts showing the massive AI advantage. They always know where you fleet is and their aircraft do much more damage than yours. CAP does not seem to work at all either which makes this part of the game very disappointing. For this point I can't really recommend this game as it feels like you only get 30/20 years of gameplay (depending on which era you start from)

This game should be right up my alley. I am a massive nerd for naval history, I love RTS games, and I love designing things, let alone all 3 in the same game. And yet, upon opening it, I feel like a kid told to design and operate a nuclear reactor with no help every time. The game does not explain how the design system works, it is not hands on at all and is really just changing numbers on a spreadsheet, and the "guide" included with the game does not help with my confusion at all. And that's not even to talk about how overpriced it is for being a spreadsheet simulator.