Rule the Waves
August 28, 2015 by George Ross

Introduction

Rule the Waves (RTW) is a naval strategy game by NWS (Naval Warfare Simulations), depicting the great naval arms race of the early 20th century. The player in RTW takes on the role of grand admiral from 1900-1925 (assuming he doesn’t get dismissed before then!); and must design, build, maintain, and command the ships of one of the great powers of the era - all while navigating a minefield of national and international politics, which always threaten to throw a cog into even the most well-greased of naval machines.

RTW is a stand-alone global game built with the developers’ well-tuned “Steam and Iron” (SAI) engine, which is used in RTW for generating and resolving tactical battles once a war occurs. For those familiar with computer wargames generally, this parallel should immediately make sense: NWS’ “Steam and Iron” engine is the same to naval combat as Command Ops (by Panther Games) is to land combat. It’s a real-time operational wargame, which is focused squarely on “big picture” decisions rather than micromanagement, with a smart AI handling most of the tactical details - with painstaking simulation of things like damage, line of sight, rates of fire and ammunition for each of the many units in the battle. And, like that game too, it is a game resolutely devoid of all but the barest 2D visuals.

But what Rule the Waves promises is a lot more ambitious than just some interesting naval battles. Now, you can craft every (functional) detail of your ships - and then use them in a global grand strategy campaign, winning (or losing) wars, helping advance the prestige of your navy and the conquests of your nation. And of course, you must always watch your back - weak decisions, missed deadlines and lost battles will cost you prestige as an admiral (and, eventually, your job); while a weak navy will cost your nation its place in the sun. So, RTW promises to thrust the player into a fully dynamic world of great powers and great ships. But how does it fare as a game?

Installation and Support

The game is sold via NWS’ Yahoo Store page, and costs $34.99 US, quite reasonable for this type of game. In the age of Steam, the storefront for this age-of-steam game seems a little archaic but works well enough - you get a download link, and a serial is sent to you by email. Some users reported delays/problems in getting their serial key, but mine arrived within a minute of purchase.

The first striking fact about this game, which says something about its design philosophy, is the installer itself: the file weighs in at a whopping 8 MB. That’s not a typo! It is indeed eight megabytes, which expands to about 14 MB on your hard drive when fully installed. Needless to say, system requirements are not a concern. As long as you have a reasonably modern Windows system, that is all you need.

The game comes with two manuals: one for the RTW strategic system, and another that explains the SAI which is used for resolving battles, with both weighing in at less than 40 pages in total. The RTW manual definitely a good starting point - and even if you don’t own the game, you can read it here:

http://www.navalwarfare.net/files/SAI/RtW_MANUAL_110v3.pdf 

The manual does provide a good starting point, but could use a bit more examples and screenshots. The first encounter with RTW’s glut of menus may prove frustrating to a new player, and with a somewhat limited save feature (which only allows one save game per campaign, erasing any previous save), that almost guarantees some unfixable mistakes and botched campaigns early on. There are no help tooltips within the game, either.

Fortunately, the developers are very active on the game’s discussion forums, and have always been forthcoming with answers to player questions: http://nws-online.proboards.com/board/25/rule-waves-discussions-rtw

Just as importantly, the developers have been very active in supporting their product and their customers - frequently asking the players for input on game features, both pre-release and post-release. The game was released in a very good state - without a publisher to rush them, NWS worked on it as long as they felt necessary. Of course, there’s always things to fix and improve - beta patches started trickling in pretty quickly to try out new changes and features, and about 3 weeks after the game’s release, the official patch 1.1 arrived. Among new additions introduced are better modeling of army operations, revisions to damage modeling, added interface tweaks, and perhaps most importantly - the ability to continue playing a campaign past 1925 if the player wishes (although technology eventually stops developing, so don’t expect to see aircraft carriers - that’s said to be for a future expansion). It’s encouraging to see a developer support the product and listen to community feedback so thoroughly, and NWS get excellent marks on this.

Presentation and Graphics

As I already mentioned, the game’s graphics are functional at their barest. RTW’s maps and ships are rendered entirely through simple line vectors and shapes. Ships are flat hull outlines seen from top down, with grey polygons drawn on top of them to represent superstructure and weapons. The map is likewise made up of polygons, the colours of which you can tweak to your liking. One nice thing about the map is that it is a true globe, with accurate curvature and day/night cycles. There are no weather fronts in the game - rather, global weather is meant to represent the conditions as seen from your flagship.

There are a few sounds in the game’s battles, representing explosions, gunfire, splashes, etc. - however, these are quite generic and do not provide much information on where they came from. I personally did not find sounds useful in the game at all, and quickly turned them off. Fortunately, that takes away nothing from the game, as its combat logging system is very detailed and will give you regular, informative text reports.

The game’s entire interface is made up of standard Windows menus, buttons, tabs, checkboxes. On the one hand, it’s admittedly quite ugly and sometimes a bit clunky. On the other hand, it’s extremely intuitive and hassle-free. So, what it lacks in immersion it makes up for by cutting out distractions. Still, if graphics and appearance are important to you, Rule the Waves might come off as unsatisfying - it makes no pretense at visual immersion, and those whose interest in naval games was raised on games like our beloved sub sims might be initially turned off by the presentation.

Campaign Gameplay

Rule the Waves has only one gameplay mode: its single-player grand campaign mode. For those more interested in custom battles and skirmishes, or historical operations, those can be found in older Steam and Iron titles. Unfortunately, the SAI engine never supported multiplayer, and neither does RTW.

The game starts with a choice of nation to play - RTW shipped with 8 playable historical empires (Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Japan, the USA) and two “custom nations”, the historical Spain and the alternate-history CSA which had survived the Civil War. The difference between a major power and a custom nation is that a custom nation can only be controlled by the player, not AI. Whichever faction you choose, the AI will always be controlling 6 opposing nations, so it is always a 7-way struggle for global dominance.

Now, it goes without saying that not every empire is made equal. Britain is the power that ruled the waves in 1900 as well as she ruled naval budgets - so much so, that RTW’s developers had to artificially inflate the finances of other nations, sometimes by as much as twice, to give the non-British players a fighting chance. Fortunately, they also left an option in RTW to play with realistic budget differences for those who want a challenge. Nations also differ in their starting conditions and characteristics. For example, Japan has a penchant for surprise attacks (which creates a special type of battle at the start of a war), while Germany has a bombastic leader who will often meddle in naval affairs.

Your nation starts with an existing fleet - you can opt to design that fleet yourself within budget constraints, or let the game do it for you. The game’s initial fleets are not the historical navies of each nation - rather, like every AI nation’s ships, they are procedurally-generated, though you will always begin with a pre-dreadnought fleet very similar to a historical one at the start of the game.

The game’s interface provides you with reports on your budget, prestige, political unrest, international tension, a map, lists of your in-service and in-construction ships, and a myriad of other reports and options. Far on the lower right, the “Turn” button beckons you to take the plunge - after making your choices, you advance time forward in 1-month turns. On first look, it seems like a micromanagement nightmare - but after the initial overload wears off, it turns out that the game is actually quite briskly-paced and avoids clickfests or player chores.

For example: the research menu looks pretty complex, but you won’t have to go clicking on a tech tree and spending in-game cash - all you have to go to get your scientists and engineers working is decide how much of your budget (up to 10%) will go to research, and which areas to prioritize. From there, research is basically automated. The same is true for many other tasks - building ships takes months and years, and you can watch the progress, but you won’t be pestered about it unless there’s something you absolutely need to know. With a large fleet and a big map, stationing ships across your empire might seem like a massively daunting task - but it’s vastly simplified by being able to simply set ships to “Foreign Station” assignment, which will automatically assign and rotate them through your colonies. But you can also station every ship manually, if you wish.

After learning the game’s menus, I found the turns flying by quickly - some of the less eventful turns would take literally two seconds, where I’d check my budget and hit “next turn” to advance to the next month. Despite its big scope, one can finish a full RTW campaign in just a couple of nights at a leisurely pace. Time spent in the game boils down a string of big decisions made quickly, and creative decisions that you can mull over for a while before committing. But by far the most creative part comes with the game’s all-important ship design tool.

Ship design

Like many things in RTW, the ship designer screen looks about as exciting as a tax return, but once I learned a few tricks, this part of the program pleasantly surprised me with its ease of use. You can use it design a ship from scratch, but unless you have a degree in marine engineering, that might seem rather daunting. It is also possible to modify an upgrade an existing ship design, but if all you could do is just upgrade and revise the same ship over and over that would be boring, right? Building and balancing designs in RTW could have been a painstaking chore - but instead it makes the task as simple or detailed as you might like it to be, catering to every taste.

One of RTW’s best and most helpful features is the “auto design ship” button hidden unassumingly near the top left. With one click of a button, the game quickly generates a ship of the type you chose (e.g. a destroyer, battleship, battlecruiser) in an instant, using some general guidelines and what it considers to be state of the art technology for the time. Don’t like the design? Click again - and it will generate ship after ship until something looks better. Want to upgrade the engines, add an extra inch of armor, or change the gun arrangement? You can do that to your heart’s content, changing every individual parameter in the designer.

Can’t build a certain design in your own shipyard? See what other non-hostile countries are offering! Better yet, an undocumented feature is that if you select a foreign yard along with ship type before clicking “auto design”, the game will generate a ship proposal from the engineers of that nation and what they consider state of the art. As historically, German designs will emphasize armor and reliability at the expense of speed and firepower, British ships will emphasize superior speed and weight of broadside, the French will offer some unusual armament and armor arrangements, etc. etc.

And even once you’re happy with a proposed design, you don’t actually have to order it until you decide you have the funds. You can save, review, and modify the designs as you see fit, and build classes of multiple ships to them. You can also use the ship designer to create rebuilds of your own ships, where you cannot change the hull structure but can still swap out armament and engines.

There are, of course, limitations. Before a ship order is sent to the yards, it has to pass a “design check” by the game - it will find any errors, prevent technology that hasn’t been developed yet from being used, declare overweight or unbalanced designs “illegal”, and furthermore, it will reclassify ships according to its own logic. In other words, if you take a destroyer, blow it up to 30,000 tons, and put 16” guns on it, the design check will reclassify it as a battlecruiser before it lets you build it. For those with really radical design ideas, RTW’s ship designer might put a damper on ambitions - but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it keeps the game grounded in realism on the one hand, and keeps it balanced for gameplay on the other.

And of course, the game’s AI receives its ships in much the same way - by semi-randomly generating them. This means that your fleet will always have new and unpredictable opponents to face. As admiral, you would be wise to keep track of whatever any intelligence info on enemy ships that you come across, and invest a bit into spying. Likewise, buying ships from foreign yards lets your engineers examine and copy advanced technology that your own researchers hadn’t yet invented.

Resource Management and Politics

In all of this, money is more or less the only resource you need to worry about, and the budget is not very difficult to balance, provided you know where it’s being spent. Budgeting is simple, but maybe not as simple as it looks - often, it is a tightrope act, and not just economically. Building ships rapidly is not just expensive, but can also rack up international tensions. Not building enough ships makes your government unhappy. As a result, you always have to find the right balance and make sure that you have a standing fleet ready for conflict.

The trouble with conflicts - and one of RTW’s greatest challenges - is how quickly a war can break out. It takes only a few months, or a couple of bad decisions, to go from being on neutral terms with a nation to all-out war. But it takes at least a full 3 years to build and commission a new battleship. By the time it goes down the slipway, that battleship will already be in some ways obsolete and far superior ships will already be in construction elsewhere. Even if you see war coming, you will often have no time to build up for that war. RTW’s harsh reality - which it delivers very subtly to the player - is that you never have that perfect fleet, and you can never be sure who you can trust.

And because you are not your nation’s leader, but just an admiral, you will often find yourself taken along for the ride - there are often no good choices when the government prompts you for advice. For example, you’ll often find yourself desperately needing to stave off war with a hostile nation just long enough to complete a few key ships for your navy. You advise your nation to appease the opponent - which works, albeit at some cost to your prestige, and tensions drop by a little bit. But next turn, seeing that war is no longer imminent, your government promptly slashes the naval budget, forcing you to halt construction on the ships that you needed to buy time for in the first place. So much for that!

At many points, RTW can frustrate you as a player, backing you into corners and forcing you to fight badly-timed wars. Arms reduction treaties can wreak havoc on your ambitious construction plans.  Your fleet will be often at the whims of an AI government that doesn’t understand the first thing about naval warfare. RTW does this deliberately and by design - and while that creates a unique and satisfying challenge, those wanting more control or expecting a “battleship-building sandbox” from it might be a bit disappointed. The game can be very demanding and, regardless of the nation you are playing, you will sometimes find that RTW’s idea of how you should be playing clashes with yours.

 You might start out with a radical idea that you want to try - say, you’re a proponent of an extreme version of the Jeune Ecole  and want to see what would happen if you built a navy with no battleships or large cruisers at all. After all, experimenting with possibilities is one thing simulations are for! But you will lose the game that way almost immediately - and not by going down in a spectacularly failed battle, but by a boring act of parliament that decides you don’t have enough tonnage on foreign stations, nor enough mighty battleships to inspire nationalist spirits at home. Game over.

Now, all of this is actually a very positive thing about RTW from one perspective - because as I mentioned at the start of the review, the game’s stated goal seems to be to put the player in the shoes of an early 20th century grand admiral. In that respect, it succeeds brilliantly, forcing the player to think about politics and finances as much as guns and torpedoes. However, in the process it does put the player into a box - and not a sandbox where anything is possible. At the end of the day,you will still find yourself having to maintain a thoroughly Mahanian fleet, whether you like it or not.

War and Battles

Finally, RTW would only be half a game without its battles - and here, it delivers in a way that shouldn’t surprise anyone, because the battles are resolved using the “Steam and Iron” (SAI), which has been refined and patched for many years now. It is stable, detailed, and easy to play - with a strong but cautious AI that has more than a passing interest in keeping its ships afloat.

Combat occurs in the RTW campaign game when tensions boil over and war finally breaks out. The campaign map is divided into a fairly small number of global zones - and as long as there are ships of both warring nations in one of those zones, there is a chance that a battle will occur. A nation with a more powerful fleet near an enemy’s home region can institute a blockade. Unless the opponent can break that blockade, his navy will be bottled up in that area - except for ships already on foreign stations, and ships on raider duties which can run that blockade. Wars are won and lost by gaining VP (Victory Points) for each battle, as well as for completing tasks such as commerce raiding (which mostly happens off-screen).

Battles are generated randomly based on forces, ports, and merchant shipping present in a given area. The engagements range from shore bombardments, to destroyer raids, to convoy battles, to decisive fleet actions. The player does not get to choose the types of battle, nor the exact location, nor the roster of ships present - it is all generated procedurally. Some players have voiced frustration with this lack of control and unpredictability. Others have praised the unpredictability and freshness of the randomly-generated battles. The combat set-ups are usually well-balanced and interesting.

Very importantly, the AI seems to know when to flee from battle. As a result, wars - especially early in the game - do not tend to be very bloody, and are more about maneuver than carnage. I have fought multiple conflicts that lasted over a year and resulted in, at best, a single capital ship lost by either side as a result. Most of the actions you will fight are not big battles. You may want that great decisive fleet action, but as history tells us, those almost never happened.

One thing that the game models superbly well is the rapidly evolving nature of naval combat in that period. When you begin the game in the year 1900, your largest combatants will be pre-dreadnought battleships, which can plod along at maybe 18 knots at best and flog brittle shells at each other from an effective range of just a couple of thousand yards. Battles are slow, ponderous and clumsy, rarely resulting in direct kills on ships - most of the time, battles between big fleets will end in both sides retreating after beating each other up for a few hours. Fast forward two decades, and you have immense battlecruisers speeding along at some 30 knots, launching shells weighing thousands of pounds at each other from a dozen miles away. War then becomes much deadlier business. The game has no trouble modeling either of these two extremes, as well as everything in between.

Combat

Once a battle is generated, the game takes you to a battle resolution screen. You will usually start with your opponent’s force out of sight and your squadron still on AI control, but that changes quickly. You then command your force using a simple interface while the AI handles the tactical details. In Rule the Waves, you do not give orders to individual ships - rather, you control force or squadron flagships. Depending on the difficulty setting, you may be able to prioritize targeting and issue general orders - for instance, “flotilla attack” sends your destroyer and cruiser screens lurching at the enemy with torpedoes, while “retreat” gets your force to do the obvious. But 90% of the time you only give one order: course and speed for the force’s flagship. Now, that might seem really simplistic, but you will quickly learn to appreciate just how much difference that makes in a battle.

The tactical game has three difficulty settings: “Captain” mode, where you can control any squadron (or leave them controlled by the AI); “Vice-Admiral” mode, where you can directly control any squadron as long as they are directly within sight of your force flagship; and “Admiral” mode, where you may only control force flagship and the AI handles the rest. It’s not hard to guess which mode this staunchly anti-micromanagement game wants you to play!  In previous Steam and Iron titles with their pre-set scenarios, I’ve always played on Admiral mode only, and RTW is certainly still manageable that way - but I found myself switching down to Vice-Admiral setting to gain a little more control over my forces on tasks like convoy defense where I needed tight coordination.

The AI squadrons, both yours and the enemy’s, behave according to their type and role, which you can adjust as needed. Big ships on “core” tasking and attached to your flagship squadron will attempt to maintain a battle line. Cruisers on “scout” tasks attached to your battle line will sweep ahead and abeam of your main fleet, signaling any contacts they locate back to the fleet and chasing away the enemy’s scouts as best they can. Small ships on “screen” tasking will guard the core of your fleet from destroyer and cruiser strikes, while “support” ships will stay behind the squadron they are attached to, trying to stay out of harm’s way unless otherwise ordered. It’s a simple system that completely cuts micromanagement out of the deal, and though the AI will make mistakes sometimes, you really get a sense in RTW of commanding a trained fleet.

Better yet, your research and training in the campaign make a serious difference in friendly AI behaviour. Early in the game, ordering “flotilla attack” will usually result in a failed attempt as small destroyers struggle with their primitive torpedoes; but late in the game, destroyer charges will be masterpieces of deadly choreography. Or, when you research a scouting fleet doctrine, your battlecruisers and fast cruisers that will appear as a separate controllable force in battles, sweeping well ahead of your main battle force - much in the way Hipper’s and Beatty’s forces did in World War I.

RTW’s fleets are not rigid box formations - they are fluid bodies of ships that twist and turn, retreat and advance, and occasionally make mistakes. Especially in bad weather, ships can lose formation or even stray away from the fleet altogether. In battle, they might be spooked by an approaching enemy force, or distracted by an intruding scout. It might be tempting to micromanage them and adjust headings constantly, but you will soon realize that too many orders simply get in the way of your fleet’s overall effectiveness in battle - constantly-turning ships lose formation and block lines of sight; gunners lose targets and torpedoes go astray. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is just get your head down, stay the course, and fight it out - a steady ship has the best chance of hitting its enemy.

All this might sound almost too simple to control, but where the game really shines is the detailed simulation and feedback it provides - not a complete and perfect picture, but a lot of useful information that you can base your big decisions on. Every minute of game time, you get a detailed combat log, with important events (like shell hits or mechanical breakdowns) highlighted on the right side of the window. You can double-click on any event in the log, and it will take you to the ship in question. You can then right-click on any ship on the map, friendly or enemy, to access all that you know about it - lots for friendly warships, less for the enemy’s ships. Fog of war creates a chance of mis-identifying enemy ships or even ship types, and your damage reports on the enemy are only best guesses.

Although the game’s logging and ship data menus are sometimes a bit cluttered and take practice to learn to read, there certainly is no lack of detail if you are willing to look for it. You can get a full readout of the ship’s gunnery performance, its estimated probability of scoring a hit with each of its batteries, and factors that affect it (smoke, speed, maneuvering, enemy and friendly fire, etc.) You can also get a full readout of hits on this ship, and see what damage they caused. While there are “structure” and “floatation” damage bars, they are not the same as simple hit points, and the simulation of damage is quite deep and not always easily predictable.

For example, if a ship catches on fire, it will gradually accumulate damage - and depending on your technology and crew quality, the crew might be able to put it out quickly. Or, they might not. You can try to help the ship by ordering it to break formation and slow down to fight the fire, but there are no guarantees this will work. At the same time, you also learn to recognize that while the fleet’s well-being is your job, individual ships can typically take care of themselves - their captains will make decisions on their own, whether you like it or not. All you need to do is give intelligent fleet orders and maintain cohesion as best you can. Many times, all you can do is watch the drama of a stricken ship unfold, as you try to keep the rest of the fleet in battle.

The game’s tactical movement is processed more or less in real time; gunnery and damage are processed in 1-minute intervals, however those should not be thought of as turns - that’s just when you get results. If a gun battery has a rate of fire of 0.67 rounds per minute, for example, that is exactly as often as it will shoot throughout a battle, second for second. All you know from the log for that minute is whether that gun battery shot (or hit anything) during that minute, or not. The nice thing about this system is that you don’t have to run the game in real time to catch every little detail. I found that in the midst of battle, a speed setting of “slower” (which seems to be about 4x real time) combined with clicking the “run for 1 minute” button will ensure that you get as complete a picture as you need to to make decisions. And when things are slow, you can speed the game up and skip the boring parts.

Battles in RTW usually last a few hours of game time - from 5 to about 24 at the most. The time it will take you to play them depends on the complexity of the battle and forces involved - from a couple of minutes to hours, although I’ve rarely spent more than an hour on a single engagement in RTW. Once a battle completes, you get a detailed log of all that occurred, which removes the “fog of war” - you get to see exactly how the enemy ships did, and how that compares to your results. The map can also provide an end-of-battle plot to show the courses both fleets took throughout the battle. You can learn a lot from the debriefings, and they are handled quite well. Finally, the game also gives you a point evaluation for how you did - which is then translated into VP for the campaign, and helps determine the overall outcome of a war. The transition back to the campaign mode is smooth and makes battles meaningful and satisfying when you do them right.

There were a few small glitches reported by players for point scoring during battles that the NWS team is already addressing, but besides that, I have little to complain about when it comes to RTW’s tactical mode. It is solid, well-crafted, easy to play, and provides a deep simulation of combat in its era.

Final Thoughts

As you can hopefully see, Rule the Waves is a very sophisticated game, made with a lot of care and forethought - it provides a great deal of detail but, just as importantly, it manages that detail cleverly. Playing RTW rarely feels like a chore - it knows how to get you to the “good parts” and keep up an interesting pace of big decisions. To answer the big question of this review - yes, RTW succeeds at making the job of a grand admiral interesting, challenging and enjoyable. Just on that, it already deserves a big recommendation.

However, it’s important to acknowledge some of the potential turnoffs as well. One of them is a relative lack of control, especially over the way battle scenarios are generated, which will frustrate players who want more freedom. It is a game that is keen on making you think and play in a particular way, and not a true “sandbox”. The game’s lack of any but the most primitive graphics may also be a big turnoff to many simulation players. A solid interest in the subject of the game, as well as a good imagination, are more or less requirements for playing RTW - and although it offers some very compelling gameplay, I would hesitate to recommend it to someone who isn’t interested in the history of battleships.

Some of my personal minor peeves with the game are changes from previous “Steam and Iron” (SAI) titles by the same developer - a limited save system that allows you to only have 1 save file per campaign, meaning that virtually any decision or mistake you make is “final”. It’s missing a few other things I liked about SAI campaigns - like a loss map, which showed ships you’d sent to the bottom in the course of your campaign; or a more nuanced model of mine and submarine warfare, both of which are very abstracted in RTW, and are far less decisive than they were historically.

When the game was released, there was a hard cutoff date of 1925 - as soon as that year ended, it was game over, regardless of what was happening (it could, for example, end right in the middle of a war). Following player feedback, version 1.1 allows players to click “continue” after 1925 and keep playing until as late as 1950 if they wish, although as the game warns - there is no technological development beyond the 1925 level. The ability to keep going is very welcome - but regardless of what year you finish, there is no big reward at the end of the game: you get a bit of feedback on how well you did and a ship named after you, but decades of hard fighting and political drama, the endgame feels almost anticlimactic. Maybe most importantly, you usually don’t get an answer on whether you really “Ruled the Waves” in the end -  unlike the real world, RTW doesn’t usually end up in a World War that reshapes the global order. It is a game that one plays for the journey, rather than its ending.

But is it a journey worth taking? From my own perspective - absolutely! Surprisingly, for something seemingly so technical and difficult, I very quickly found this game addictive, much in the same way as grand strategy games like the Civilization or Total War series - you’re always tempted to play “just one more turn” or “one more battle”. While outwardly simple, I would say that RTW is easily as well-designed as the best games in those series and no less entertaining to play.

There is no other game out there like “Rule the Waves” - and it is the kind of game that will keep a player coming back for years to come. RTW offers a truly dynamic campaign and a realistic model of ship combat. Its killer feature - the ability to design and construct your own ships and fleets - works brilliantly, and provides a whole new layer of depth. It is a game that will often surprise even the most seasoned “Steam and Iron” player, and yes - it does do a thoroughly good job of making you think like a Grand Admiral, even without trying to visually immerse you in that era. An ambitious strategic/tactical wargame, “Rule the Waves” quite certainly rules!

Developer: NWS (Naval Warfare Simulations) - http://www.nws-online.net 
Buy “Rule the Waves” for Windows PC: http://yhst-12000246778232.stores.yahoo.net/ruwaddo.html
Developer forums: http://nws-online.proboards.com/board/24/rule-waves