Matrix Games

Expanded Battles Overview

We are currently into beta testing of “Expanded Battles”, the much anticipated expansion to our successful naval combat and ship design game “Rule the Waves III”. The expansion will include historical scenarios, a quick battle generator, and a scenario editor. The scenarios that will ship with the game are Yellow Sea, Dogger Bank, River plate, Rheinübung (the chase for the Bismarck), Second Guadalcanal, Eastern Solomons, and a fictional cold war scenario set in the Mediterranean.

At present we are testing the main functions of the expansion, the scenarios and the quick battle generator. The scenarios being tested right now include Rheinübung, Yellow Sea and Eastern Solomons. Personally, I think Yellow Sea is a very interesting scenario. It has reasonably balanced forces, clear goals and is easily played in an hour or less. Predreadnoughts are cool and look really great! The predreadnought era also offers a wholly different experience to the typical dreadnought and carrier engagements of WWI and WWII naval combat that many other games focus on.

Talking about scenarios, there will be a scenario editor included so that players can create any scenarios they want. Apart from an order of battle editor, the editor will have substantial support for AI waypoints and stances so that scenario designers can “program” the AI to behave in a way that makes the scenario realistic. These can involve setting multiple paths for formations to create built-in unpredictability and variance for each scenario.

The expansion will ship with a limited number of ship classes needed for the scenarios, but there is also a ship designer included. This is a version of the same ship designer used in RTW campaign, but it is more “free” in that it will let you set the tech year of the ship class to any year and nation, and it will also not have any hard limits on what ships are legal. This is because ship design is a very complex subject, too complex to simulate everything perfectly in the ship designer, and not all historical ships can be designed in RTW without some being overweight.

As mentioned there will also be a quick battle function that will create random battles between whichever nations you want at any time covered by the game. The ships will be randomly designed so that they are realistic for the chosen nations and time. The design goal here is to create a quick battle system that benefits from the templates and autobuild functions already in RTW III, without having to design hundreds of classes of historical ships. This lets the player try any combination of nations at virtually any time.

Some people might, understandably, prefer a quick battle function with historical ships. However, this would require many more historically accurate ship designs, and would frankly be beyond the resources of the design team at this time. We do give the player the option to design their own ships in the quick battle generator, so you can do a mix of your own designs with ones created by the auto-designer.

At the same time that we release the DLC, we will also release a free update of the base game that will include many improvements and adjustments that have been added during the work with the DLC. Just to mention some examples: inclined belts have been made 5% heavier to account for their height being larger than a corresponding vertical belt, costs have been adjusted to make cruisers cheaper in comparison to battleships, as they are presently a little too expensive in the RTW campaign. There has also been some minor adjustments to the damage model.

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