Is RTW a strategy game? Can we have/implement a warplan to win a war?

[TheOtherPoster]

The strategic side in RTW3 is mainly the designing/building of the fleet and the world of politics and diplomacy. Once a war starts though, all that good work goes very much lost: it’s a strategy game but we are not allowed to plan/start any offensive action that would make sense for us in our strategy to defeat the enemy. Instead, wars are reduced to fighting random battles generated by the AI, which after a while become boring affairs with the only purpose of sinking more enemy ships. No place for any strategy in this set up. In fact, the only strategy worth having is to build bigger more powerful ships to defeat the enemy in a series of meaningless battles. Not very challenging and definitely nothing to do with strategy.
In truth there’s one type of naval operation we can set up ourselves: an invasion. But that will depend very much on who you are and who are you fighting. And anyway, most of world possessions are too impossible to invade because of the small invading range allowed (plus of course we cannot invade home territories either). So the likelihood of being able to actually order an invasion is pretty small. Even more, when we finally manage to set up an invasion it’s only because there’s a target that happens to be within range and we have enough forces in that area, not because we actually are interested in that territory. So again, no strategy involved even when we order an invasion. Wars in RTW are meaningless affairs reduced in practice to a series of battles where we try to sink enemy ships. I know there are other factors, like blockades and so on but they only add to this. Maybe that’s OK, the main point in a war is sinking enemy ships. That’s fine, but what I object is these battles are random, pointless. They do not respond to any strategy either by us or the AI. They are just there to sink ships and get VP denying us the fun to set up a war plan and a strategy.
It’s quite astonishing to me that the developers do not allow the player any active role in the wars. In fact this situation means not only that we cannot develop a strategy to defeat the enemy (because we cannot order any action to our fleet like bombing an enemy coastal town to woe the enemy fleet to fight, or to invade an island to get our planes closer to the enemy etc. etc.). This oversimplification where wars are reduced to fighting battles (forget any dream of strategy) even affects our ships designs: we do not build a fleet tuned to our resources and the way we intend to use it (if a poor nation, maybe it’s better to focus on fast strikes and running away before the enemy fleet gets near you; or if you are the USN maybe long range ships to cross the Pacific would be best). Instead, whatever nation you are playing, you will do always the same: build the biggest more powerful ship afloat: that’s how you win wars in RTW.

In fairness, I would think that these limitations have been inherited from RTW1, when, because it was a pre-aircraft world were imperialism was at its high, it made more sense wars were simple affairs were defeat the enemy in battle would allow us to enlarge our Empire after victory. But of course already in RTW2 that set up had become outdated and now in RTW3 with jets and missiles, we need something better. Developers need to move forward, give the player a more active role in wars and make RTW the best strategy game in history!

Some suggestions in that direction:
1. Give the player the possibility of setting up naval action too. Maybe player and AI could alternate turns in choosing the battle scenario: first AI generates the battle scenario, next turn the player does, and so on. To keep things easier for the developers and a bit under control, the AI would give us a list of possible battle types (a fleet battle would not always be available, to make sure we’re not using battleships every time), then a list of available locations that turn, and then we would choose the ships from our active list in that area (if we have chosen Cruiser battle, then no capital ships available). Fog of war cannot be the excuse not to offer us a more active, strategically challenging game. Fog of war means we may find a stronger enemy force than expected, but also in the operational level that we may not have the ship we had chosen for this mission due to some issue. This should be possible to replicate in RTW too: a window at the start of the battle (like the one about destroyers no being able to join the battle because of lack of fuel) could say something like: “our BB Incorrigible had to stay behind due to last minute engine trouble” or “a collision with a destroyer when sailing out of the harbour” or whatever. In the end, those are the kind of operational limitations that happened all the time (HMS Dreadnought was unavailable in the dockyard when the Grand Fleet was rushed to Jutland in 1916, and HMS Ark Royal sailed too late and was left behind). So the Fog of War cannot be a reason for not allowing us to start any fleet action at all during the war. As admirals we are supposed to decide to start some naval actions! Really, how can we play any strategy if we are reduced to fight random battles only?

2. Make long range and extreme long range ships worth having: First I would drop the “Invasion range” name and change it for “Operating ranges” instead for both attacks and invasions. We could have different operating ranges affecting short, medium, LR and ER ships.
Attacks: We should be able to set up a shore bombardment of an enemy port, including home ports, if under our operational range from our own bases, like the Germans did in WWI (or the AI does); or just send cruisers to chase down enemy shipping, or to protect a convoy in our sea area… We should be able to set up long range attacks by our LR and ER ships, on distant objectives, like bombing Pearl Harbour or even maybe the Panama canal with our ER ships.
Invasions: apart from the invasions set up as it’s now, which I think is OK, we could have invasions of long distant small possessions like Midway using only our LR and ER ships. Again, like with the earlier example of Pearl harbour, this would try to bring into the game the possibility to play battles based on what historically happened. At the moment Neither Midway, or Pearl or an attack on Panama are possible in RTW3, neither by us or the AI.

3. Make geography count. At the very least there should be a list of strategically important possessions like Gibraltar, Suez, Panama, Falklands, Singapore, Ceylon and Southern Africa. Their attack/conquest should have a high VP value as they dominate the world sea lines. These attacks would be more possible now thanks to the new capacities for long range attack by ER and LR ships as mentioned earlier.

I hope I haven’t been too harsh, but with so many great features already in the game, I think the developers are missing the opportunity to make RTW the best naval game ever (and us missing the chance of playing it) because the disappointing wars set up.

[mk11]

Weird, I find there are quite a lot of strategic choices if playing as a nation that spans the globe. There is less strategy for nations like Italy, Austro-Hungary and Germany that have a more local scope.

Invasion ranges, once a bit of research has been done, seem to allow you to Island hop to almost anywhere. It would be good if you could, eventually, island hop everywhere. E.g. a point in the Western Aleutians so could reach Kamchatka.

Panama and Suez do seem to be the only strategic points. It would be nice for Gibralter, Djibouti, and the like to be able to act at restricted points where you could contest any enemy moving through there.

Also nice would be to set a sea area on a scale from defensive to offensive.

[Lucky]

"Instead, whatever nation you are playing, you will do always the same: build the biggest more powerful ship afloat: that’s how you win wars in RTW"

Austro-Hungary builds some Yamato knock-off. It gets sunk by the swarms of italian land based aircrafts. End of story.

[Zyhgar The Phoenix]

Originally posted by Lucky:

"Instead, whatever nation you are playing, you will do always the same: build the biggest more powerful ship afloat: that’s how you win wars in RTW"

Austro-Hungary builds some Yamato knock-off. It gets sunk by the swarms of italian land based aircrafts. End of story.

Game goes from rule the waves to rule the skies.

[TheOtherPoster]

"Austro-Hungary builds some Yamato knock-off. It gets sunk by the swarms of italian land based aircrafts. End of story."

Thrilling battle! And with land base aircraft as in your example we do not need even to bother arranging the air strike ourselves: AI does everything for us. So your scenario plays like this: AI sets up a shore bombardment scenario, then sends the “swarms of Italian land based aircraft” and our battleship gets sunk. End of story indeed. Humans are not needed anymore. Great playing experience. Yes, thrilling (for the AI).


Anyway, as I said, there are many wonderful features in RTW3, also regarding strategy: starting with designing and building our fleet. Or when at war, we have to decide if we want to use our subs to attack enemy warships or their merchant navy. Or as you said, it’s not the same playing Britain than playing Italy. All these and many others are great. Youtuber Dickie is great at highlighting them in his wonderful videos.

But in the end the same stumbling block remains: the developers do not allow the players to set up any combat mission. So it’s impossible to design a strategy if we cannot set up any mission to carry it out (like to attack some enemy port to try draw enemy forces in, or to invade some island to get closer to the enemy homeland, etc.) Yes, apparently we are on charge of the navy but we cannot decide any naval mission ourselves! Also, we need to be able to attack/invade further away than it's possible now (so to make possible things like attacking Gibraltar or invading Midway). That’s why I talked about LR and ER ships in my previous post.

As the game stands now, the AI creates all combat actions. When we attack convoys or bombard a town it may look as if we have a strategy but there’s none. These combat actions don’t have a purpose beyond sinking enemy ships. They don’t fit as part of a war plan like, for example, to catch the enemy fleet or to wore the enemy out or to divide the enemy or expel it from some area or whatever. Because it’s not us but the AI who creates these combats, so they do not have any real strategic purpose: they are there only to sink enemy ships and get VPs. And that’s all. It’s like reducing the naval war in the Pacific to a series of random battles to sink more enemy ships. No island hopping, no fleet in being, no offensive to the south to get oil, no Japanese defensive island line… Yes, great strategic depth there.

So many things are simplified in wars, that what really counts is just sinking ships. Wars become mainly shooting competitions. And this oversimplification of wars affects our building strategy too: for example, the USN always wanted long range battleships to cross the Pacific. In the game LR and ER battleships do not make any sense: they are much more expensive but will not get anywhere further or faster than a medium range 12 knot KE does.

So as a whole, this is, in my opinion, a very poor set up that makes wars a very passive, sedated affair where, in practical terms, we are just reduced to fight meaningless battles until we get enough VPs. But it shouldn’t be like this, with some effort from the developers, RTW could become the best strategy game ever. Because the rest of the game is superb, it’s incredibly good.

[Lucky]

That wasn't my example. I just saw a guy on youtube who did exactly that. Including the results. I, myself, is a ruthless adept of torpedo-ramming tactics and prefer to have decent advantage in light forces while limiting battleships to their bare minimum needed to do their job.

Everything else you are saying... Dunno. I always a big fan of having more freedom but you are clrearly haven't yet mastered the game to its full extent. I mean while you were writing your essay about how this game has no strategy I had very thrilling multi-theater coalition campaign as Russia with classic decisive battle doctrine implemented in Norteast Asia and some unorthodox cruiser guerilla warfare approach in Baltic including beating off land invasion in the presence of several orders of magnitude more powerful German Navy. And my strategic, operational and tactic experience was pretty colorful.

[mk11]

Island hopping becomes very relevant once land based airpower is important at that point it becomes quite useful.

If you could select your own battles then you could optimise your fleet for the battles you want. Instead you have to the realistic thing of having a fleet that can handle different sorts of missions.

A few different war plans you can choose between
- raiding or blockade
- if raiding surface or sub
- invasions to gain territory you want
- invasions to gain basing so you can better raid or blockade
- concentrate on sinking the bigstuff or go for the little stuff to set up for better future battles
- setting up strong defensive positions to counter enemy coastal raids and to give somewhere to run to or just dominate the sea

[Lieutenant Gregory Stevens]

It's a hard tightrope to walk, because this game is meant to be a simulation of
1. Naval construction/design
2. Tactical-level battles
The design philosophy intentionally limits your influence at the levels in between these two. You procure the ships and lead them in battle, but everything in between - diplomacy, operational planning, strategic wargoals - are varying levels of locked off to the player. Your operational abilities include fleet comp and regional deplomynent, as well as naval invasions. But certainly, most strategy games let you do more and directly influence naval warplanning.

Remedying this would be very demanding in terms of dev time, and also give the AI many more hurdles to overcome to still be a challenge to the player. The last one I think is critical, since the more restrictive encounter generation makes the AI and its competent tactical AI more of a threat.

[TheOtherPoster]

Yes mk11, I agree, we should aim to have balanced fleets. To address that I suggested maybe alternate missions with the AI, first we choose a mission, then in the next turn the AI chooses, and also that we could choose only from a list provided by the AI so we do not get battleships all the time.

I think you may be right, lieutenant, but it's a pity: there're so many great things about RTW that require our constant attention and taking decisions all the time than being left to a passive position once war breaks out of just playing a series of random battles feels to me a big quality drop. But certainly the game is superb.

[Lieutenant Gregory Stevens]

Originally posted by TheOtherPoster:

Yes mk11, I agree, we should aim to have balanced fleets. To address that I suggested maybe alternate missions with the AI, first we choose a mission, then in the next turn the AI chooses, and also that we could choose only from a list provided by the AI so we do not get battleships all the time.

I think you may be right, lieutenant, but it's a pity: there're so many great things about RTW that require our constant attention and taking decisions all the time than being left to a passive position once war breaks out of just playing a series of random battles feels to me a big quality drop. But certainly the game is superb.

Agreed. If we're meant to be playing as a Navy Minister or High Admiral, it's actually more logical for us to be occupied with strategy and operational planning than fighting the tactical battles. It might be a lot for us to ask for every level of planning, but I agree in that there could be more offered at that level than what currently exists. Like you said, it's not nearly as engaging simply fighting a series of unrelated battles. The one-at-a-time naval invasion system also really slows down your already limited operational planning.

[nauticalpenguin]

I feel as though a lot strategy and war-planning in this game is more meant to be up to the player, as in, there is no way in-game through prompts or select-able decisions to plan your war strategy, but the game does not prevent one from creating or roleplaying the strategy they want to use in their minds.

For example, if one wants to use the french Jeune École strategy, and focus on lighter vessels then no you can't tell the game that's your plan and it won't make any alterations for you in battle generation or what not, but if you want to RP or challenge yourself you are absolutely free to do so, and your success will depend more so on how you design and fight your ships, and what battles you choose to fight or withdraw from, then the AI battle generator making some alteration to it's generation based on your selected strategy

All this being said, I am not opposed to the Dev team implementing more ways we as the player can influence our own national politics/decisions/strategy, but I just feel they were angling more for a focus on naval design and tactics, and leaving a lot of the "fluff" to be up to the player

[ifernat]

Originally posted by mk11:

Island hopping becomes very relevant once land based airpower is important at that point it becomes quite useful.

If you could select your own battles then you could optimise your fleet for the battles you want. Instead you have to the realistic thing of having a fleet that can handle different sorts of missions.

A few different war plans you can choose between
- raiding or blockade
- if raiding surface or sub
- invasions to gain territory you want
- invasions to gain basing so you can better raid or blockade
- concentrate on sinking the bigstuff or go for the little stuff to set up for better future battles
- setting up strong defensive positions to counter enemy coastal raids and to give somewhere to run to or just dominate the sea

Please don't claim that the choice of where you invade has some sort of great strategic interplay. You can be fighting the Japanese as the US, with the Japanese getting their oil from Indonesia. You can cover every inch of the Philippines with airbases and stack hundreds of planes there and does this do a damned thing to affect the flow of resources to Japan.

No.

The logical thing would be to have your ships sit in the South China Sea and have the Japanese be forced to fight you under your air umbrella if they want their oil. Does the game allow you to do this.

No.

Instead the game will keep generating random missions in the middle of the Java Sea for ***Reasons*** 1200 miles away from any support from the massively expensive air fleet that you invested in.

Okay, well lets just invade Borneo and deny them the oil in the first place, its only 200 miles from Mindanano, as long as we gave our planes some decent legs and...

Oh the invasion battle has been generated in the Makassar Strait 700 miles from the Phillipines opposite Balikpapan for ***Reasons***. Where I'm in range of all the Japanese planes, instead of vice versa. That's top notch Island hopping.

I recently did a campaign to give the game another fair shake after the last patch. After carefully wearing down the French as the Germans across three wars its late in the 1890's, the French are mostly down to a smattering of battleships and cruisers but a truckload of 400 ton destroyers. Does the game allow me to recognize that I have the upper hand and maintain a distant blockade.

No...not at all. It wants me to take the newest German battleships into the Garonne estuary in a scenario starting two hours before nightfall in light rain. A location that I will remind you is completely outside the range of any German destroyers to support. In an era where any attempt to use the cruiser force as a screen is doomed to fail because the instant they get more than six inches away from the flagship they'll revert to AI control and the AI version of 'screening' is to have the screening ships follow the super expensive capital ships in a loose cloud like ducklings. I can either say 'NOPE' and just understand that I'm arbitrarily going to hand a bunch of victory points back to the AI, or I can risk losing the war. Because I'm not allowed to decide between any form of close or distant blockade.

[Lucky]

About the last part.

Distant blockade shouldn't be a thing in the 189x - early 190x. There were no means to coordinate the effort. Santiago de Cuba, Porth Arthur - this is how you blockade in that era. Prior to radio - in the direct vicinity of the port right outside its guns range. With early radio: light forces near the port, main forces - right outside visual range.

Also, as I said, I'm quite the fan of light forces and I don't remember being in a situation that signal misunderstanding ever affected the battle in general.

My basics apart from playing in the Captains mode:

0. All those "useless" limited scale battles are, in fact, a way to reduce your opponents light forces prior to the general action.

1. Never wait for the enemy to attack you and expect to repell it with your screen. Attack first.

2. Half CA divisions have flag.

3. CL divisions are 3 ships max.

4. Best available division commanders.

5. Decent ships captains. No poor shiphandlers.

[mk11]

Other posters experience of strategy seems to differ from mine. Sure you can't do some strategies but it isn't a war simulation.

As I mentioned in my first post, being able to set whether to be offensive or defensive in a sea area would be nice.

The battles generated, to me, seem to have a reasonable feel for the kind of engagements that happened in real life.

In "ifernat"'s example of the Garonne. If you have enough blockade power to be getting 260 VP a turn for a blockade you just ignore the proposed action and head away. If lucky you may get to sink a transport, if not the enemy still won't get 260 VP for surviving transports so over all you are doing okay.

There seems to be a feeling wondering through some comments that the game should be giving the player battles that play to their strengths. Ignoring that in those cases why would the enemy join the battle.

[TheOtherPoster]

This post's title was rather provocative on purpose, but it may have been misleading too. Of course RTW3 is a strategy game, and a very good one, there are trillions of actions we need to do during the game that have very important strategic consequences. But much of that seems a bit wasted when it should matter most: during wars. These are so much simplified that we cannot plan any offensive action other than the very limited and even unlikely invasion. So wars end up reduced to the AI setting up a series of random battles to get VPs. Even invasions are too limited in range to make them an effective tool and we are incapable to be even a bit precise about where we want the invasion to take place as mentioned above. Also this simplification of wars also affects our designs as it does not make much sense to spend money on LR or ER ships, or give our carriers 33 knots when they can do exactly the same at 28 knots and they are much cheaper.

The issue I wanted to highlight is that after the superb experience of playing RTW3 when at peace, when wars break out, it all becomes a much more simple, passive and dull affair to me. Or put it another way: wars could be much more interesting and fun to play if we were allowed at least to set up some missions…

[ifernat]

Originally posted by mk11:

There seems to be a feeling wandering through some comments that the game should be giving the player battles that play to their strengths. Ignoring that in those cases why would the enemy join the battle.

...and there seems to be a fairly strong blind spot among fans who aren't understanding that we're not so much advocating that we want the ability to ROFL stomp the AI every turn in cherry picked engagements rather than we want to, you know, employ an actual strategy in a strategy game. Instead we have RNG constantly throwing out scenarios that don't pass a logical smell test.

Getting back to my noted example, a coastal raid to interdict littoral shipping is by definition an offensive action. If I'm the admiral, then why on earth would I schedule this sweep to start at dusk in the rain?

There are others even from this most recent campaign I'm referencing. Tension shot up with France from almost the get go, and in the Indian sea zone I had two 3100 ton protected cruisers with 2 5 inch guns as their 'primary' armament to start when the first war broke out. The French had 5 cruisers of generally heavier design including a 6000 ton protected cruiser. This is not a sea zone where I'm going to be able to accomplish much starting out, but the two protected cruisers should probably be able to wear down a lone raider. Do I have any ability to tell them that I want them to hold defensively, close to German East Africa until I can sink some French ships in Northern Europe and force the French AI to withdraw some of their Indian Ocean flotilla?

Nope. The very first action of the first war with France is my admiralty apparently deciding that I need to have those two cruisers go and bombard a 6 inch coastal battery in Djibouti.
Does this accomplish anything in a larger war plan? No. Could I naval invade Djibouti? No. Would destroying the naval gun battery make it easy for me to blockade the port? No, I don't have the forces to blockade.

What in the grand scheme does this accomplish? How does sending very light protected cruisers to fight a gun battery that has bigger guns than they do, against a defending flotilla that out displaces them three to one advance my war effort?

Do not try and tell me that the ability to change a couple of raiding stances constitutes some grand strategy plan. Instead what we have is a supposed naval simulation strategy game where control the built strategy of the navy, but then have no ability to direct how that built strategy gets employed operationally. Instead we get to fight a couple of generic battle types selected at random, from random selected pre-generated scenario locations. Often this results in scenarios that defy common sense or logic. A few of these thrown in ***occasionally*** would be okay to represent the fact that not everything goes according to plan, but instead it happens constantly.

I have other examples.

Like when the AA cruiser I built to do one thing, and one thing only, provide an anti-air bubble to my carrier fleet got selected to lead a division of old destroyers turned mine sweepers into a 'cruiser battle' against two heavy cruisers. And yes, the division roles were set up correctly. I had told the game what I wanted that ship doing and it didn't care.

Or the time that I was fighting Fascist Germany in the 1960's with them in Greece while I had a couple cruisers in Libya with very limited basing capacity as I had just taken the state off Italy a few years before. Missiles by that point were a THING. Airplanes were a THING. The ships I had there? I wanted them to dissuade any invasion attempts but otherwise do nothing but stay under the protection of an air base and two coastal missile batteries. But...no

Scenario generator says your ships are sailing within sight of the shores of Greece for ***Reasons*** despite the fact I wasn't invading or planning to invade. You can have a 500 VP hit or you fight this totally fair engagement because we wouldn't want to be pandering to the player by creating scenarios where they have any input.

I tried to salvage the situation, and immediately got launched upon by two destroyer divisions and a MTB contingent, getting two cruisers blown up inside of 5 simulated minutes.

It goes on. With the scenario generator clearly not understanding that by the 1930s, there needs to be a strategic goal in play that advances the war for ships to be risked operating in waters beyond friendly air cover and well within the strike range of enemy planes. It doesn't, and will happily keep generating scenarios that make no strategic sense.