Let's Sperg Lets Play: Rule the Waves - Beware the Kiwi Kantai Kollection!

Techpriest

Praise the Machine Spirits
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kiwifarms.net
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Jul 12, 2015
So because some autists and myself are really into ships and noticed the new SSGN for the Royal Navy will be named HMS Dreadnought, I thought I'd pop open a game I haven't played in a few months, now that for the foreseeable future the current version is what we'll have, and only this one.

Welcome, Kiwis, to Rule the Waves.

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Some motherfucker insisted I'd play Japan instead of an actual nation like Russia or Germany or even fucking Austria-Hungary (who nobody gives a shit about), so I'll make sure we're entirely fucked by playing with historical budget and I won't turn manual legacy fleet building on, so I can't cheese my starting ships so the AI will go for as much of a historical ship design as possible for Japan in this time period. For maximum suffering, I've also engaged Very Large fleets, so we're going to see the UK go full historical build policy and fucking build more battleships than we could ever hope to match mano y mano.

We don't even have 12 inch guns yet, so we can't even make a proper battleship compared to pretty much everyone else. Our total territories is three, so we're only barely better off than Austria Hungary, but Austria Hungary is basically a one sea power so they can skimp on certain aspects of ship building to have a powerful fleet. We have an underdeveloped shipbuilding industry, so our ships cost more and take longer to build until we get our economy rolling and enough ship production off the line. We've got shit for Oil and resources as well, but what's the bright side of even playing Japan?

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Memes. Well, memes and better torpedo research, being out of the way of most of the bigger powers and thus harder to blockade compared to say, Russia, and also getting better torpedoes before pretty much everyone else, not that that even really matters early game but hey, it's the thought that counts.

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And I'm already cringing. Oh what god have I pissed off to deserve this.

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They're all built in Britain, meaning they had 12 inch guns available in the design, but instead, the fucking AI decide "Hey, we can only make 10 inch guns here in Japan, with our tiny dicks, so why buy a bigger foreign gun?"

These things are glorified Armored Cruisers, and not very glorified ones at that. The quality 0 guns are actually slightly better than my current ones, but only slightly... and all those 7 inch secondaries are asking for a flash fire once AP rounds catch up to armor development. Still, this thing should molest anything below it in tonnage with a good rate of fire and - wait. They only have 80 rounds of 10 inch a gun. I'm only carrying 320 total 10 inch shells on this entire ship.

On the plus side, if I really make a run for it, I could build these locally once my dock size gets large enough, though at that point I'd probably take a few inches off the armor, crank up the speed to 21 knots, and just make them actual CA's to save some tonnage.

DD's are standard early build, nothing to really even bother taking a picture of. But what I really need now are cruisers. Light cruisers to be specific, considering my B's are CA's that ate too much. I need two different designs actually, a colonial service style ship designed to go commerce raiding with enough speed to outrun CA's and five inch guns to fight off CL's, and another as a Destroyer Leader, who basically will be fast and cheap with a lot of 4 inch guns without armor on them.

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The Izumi class fits the commerce Raider specification quite well. I'll probably build up three or four of them before my next war, and station at least two or three in Southeast Asia, once I can afford them.

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And here's my Destroyer Leader class. They're cheap cheap cheap, with a good amount of guns (Five for a broadside) with a good amount of ammo and good enough speed and armor. 3 inch guns can't penetrate it, and the conning tower should hold up alright. The engine is optimized for speed, and I've got 200 spare tons for flotation redundancy because this fucker will get shot to shit leading DD's into trouble and screening my Armored Cruisers/Battleships. I'm just building one for now, until funding becomes available.

Speaking of which I checked my under construction tab and well... I'm building two new battleships.

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Great Britain is actually giving me a decent battleship design, in 16 months. Four submerged torpedo tubes, 18 knots of speed (slightly slower than the rest of my 'battleships') but she has 12 inch guns and 90 rounds a pop per gun for them. This thing will see some serious work as the backbone of my fleet most likely.

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The French design I'm also building is a little further along, obviously nearly identical to the Suwo aside from the turret shape. Something pretty common early game honestly. The AI didn't fuck up this time, and It'll give me a grand total of EIGHT Ships of the Line within two years, not a bad compliment for a rising power like Japan. Sure, six of those ships are really not worth diddly squat and I'll replace them ASAP and relegate them to either the scrap heap or patrol duty, but hey, this ain't too bad all things considered.

I have to halt construction on the British design for a month to stay in the black, but that's fine. I'm not expecting war any time soon.

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And a few turns later, I'm on my first event of the game. Rule the Waves has a chance of spawning these each turn, which can have different effects. The first option raises tensions with other powers in the region, but gives me a chance of taking over Borneo, which is apparently in rebellion against the Dutch. The other does absolutely nothing for me.

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And at the dawn of the new century, Japan has set her eyes on the East Indies. The Dutch cannot help but accept the annexation of their former colony in a fantastic deal for the natives - they give us shit, we don't murder them!

With that, I'll end this first post. It's not much of a start, but it's better than most.
 
Dis gonna be gud. :popcorn:
I'm already cringing at the AI's design decisions. Four guns on the DD's, 2 of which are secondaries (which is kinda good kinda bad) and they're cramped accommodation. I need to design new destroyers to put in SEA or I'll start to rack up unrest due to my sailors bitching about their lot.

After the two battleships end construction, I'm building a fuckload more CL's and designing a basic CA to raid and screen for my failed abortions of battleships. They're seriously hyper shitty for what they're supposed to do.
 
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This post in general is pretty great with how it explains why Japan is shit in this game, but the highlight of it all has to be this.

The quality 0 guns are actually slightly better than my current ones

Seriously, this is some good stuff. My only request is that you explain some more for those here who aren't military spergs since you used Acronyms pretty often and this is just the start before any complicated game junk happens. Between CA, B, DD, And CL I'm sort of lost as to what they actually mean.


As an aside for if you're going to be taking any audience suggestions on future goals, I hope this leads to total Takeover of Southeast Asia. Fuck the Dutch, they're gonna be underwater when global warming hits anyway, why should we let our neighboring islands be controlled by quickly bunch of faggots who can't even win against mother nature when they could have glorious Nippon watching over them?
 
This post in general is pretty great with how it explains why Japan is shit in this game, but the highlight of it all has to be this.



Seriously, this is some good stuff. My only request is that you explain some more for those here who aren't military spergs since you used Acronyms pretty often and this is just the start before any complicated game junk happens. Between CA, B, DD, And CL I'm sort of lost as to what they actually mean.


As an aside for if you're going to be taking any audience suggestions on future goals, I hope this leads to total Takeover of Southeast Asia. Fuck the Dutch, they're gonna be underwater when global warming hits anyway, why should we let our neighboring islands be controlled by quickly bunch of faggots who can't even win against mother nature when they could have glorious Nippon watching over them?
CA: Armored Cruiser/Heavy Cruiser, depending on the time period. They're the smallest "capital" ships you can build.Very useful for convoy raiding and killing DD's and CL's.

B: Battleship, specifically the pre-dreadnought type. Slow, loads of armor, 4 or so main guns in dual turrets though some French designs had 4 single turrets.

CL: Light cruiser. Scouts, raiders, and destroyer leaders. Lighter armored and armed than heavy cruisers, but often are faster, trading armor for speed. At this point in ship development my CL's are better referred to as protected cruisers due to the armor scheme they use.

DD: Destroyer. Armed with small guns, and torpedoes and balls to the wall fast. Pretty much no armor. Punch above their weight later on in game as torpedoes become faster, more reliable, larger, and longer ranged. By 1915, they're hellishly good at sinking ships in knife fights at night. Later on they become able to kill submarines too.
 
Can you build a giant Monitor class with a nearly impossibly huge gun on it? If so you should do that, in the spirit of weird experimental weapons.

(Where did you find this game at?)
 
Can you build a giant Monitor class with a nearly impossibly huge gun on it? If so you should do that, in the spirit of weird experimental weapons.

(Where did you find this game at?)
Here's a store link, honestly that they sell it this cheap for the amount of personal time and research this must involve and as such a small team is really a steal. I've seen games with far better graphics and less hyper autistic attention to detail sell for far far more than this.

Sadly, I cannot create an 18 inch gun monitor, as this game focuses more on fleet engagements and small scale naval skirmishes rather than things like monitor on monitor river duels or harbor defenses. It'd be something to suggest to the developers though, certainly.
 
So, I forgot to take screenshots of the battle or the event that just started this war because I panicked, but expect a full update leading up to this tomorrow or tuesday.

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Surprise attacks are broken even this early in the game.
 
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My first event of the game is basically a fluff event.

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An AI destroyer design is not fun, I'll tell you that much. They're just as fast as my default so it's not much of an issue, but having an undeveloped ship building industry makes things like this far more likely to happen. I won't be posting every event here, but I'll feature a few I view as important and that help explain the game mechanics.

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As you can see, the game models the purchase of types of technology and such in order to model the actual wheeling and dealing arms and ship manufacturers did with another during this time period in order to gain edges and shore up weaknesses.
 
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I completed the Japan game by the way, I gave up taking screenshots about halfway through 1908, because if I didn't this would be something akin to 20+ pages of pure slog through little events and I'm not going to subject that to you with a nation like Japan, especially because I can't design the sort of ships I'd like to show off with them.

I fought a grand total of two wars, one with Russia and one with Germany, and I pretty much thrashed the German Navy as hard as I could. Sunk a battlecruiser, 20 of their destroyers, a bunch of their light cruisers, and otherwise made life hell with them.

I'll probably do a Germany or France playthrough next, because those wars are more interesting than "Oh, here's their initial fleet, I surprise attacked them and killed half their fleet gee wiz they can't ship anything over here worth a damn now oh gosh how sad". Hell, A-H would probably be more interesting to play through than Japan, simply because they can actually build highly advanced designs, and have regional rivals that won't send a global fleet to crush them if they step out of line.
 
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