Here's a little mini-AAR from my latest playthrough of Rule the Wav, uses, still my absolute favourite game of 2015 - which developed nicely over the last year and a sequel was recently announced.
For those not familiar with it, this game allows you to play the leader of a nation's navy in the period of 1900-1925 (with the option to play on until 1950 but without real post-WWI technological developments like naval aviation). You design your own ships, maintain a fleet, and fight naval battles with it when war comes.
So, I thought I'd show off my fleet a bit and post some pictures of the ships I'd built (especially since I spent a lot of effort getting their pictures to look good).
This playthrough, I played Austria-Hungary, with galagagalaxian's "Mediterranean Powers" mod, and ship profile pictures built in the in-game editor with Nuno dos Santos' colour schemes and my own "ship accessories" mod - you can find all of them on the game's forum here:
http://nws-online.proboards.com/boar...iscussions-rtw
Anyway, my game as Austria-Hungary had me playing a continental power that, over time, built quite a navy to dominate the Mediterranean (or at least try to). Without overseas colonies and remote fleets to worry about, I could concentrate on ships built for performance specifically in the Med. In fact, for the entire game, none of my navy's ships had ever left the Mediterranean during wartime.
As for wars, I ended up fighting 5 of them - 3 with my arch-enemy Italy, who were threatening to bottle up my Holy Roman Empire inside the Adriatic, but I had other plans for them!
(the graph represents my "prestige" level, i.e. my own effectiveness score as admiral - it rises for making good decisions and winning battle, drops if you're too pacifist and/or lose battles and wars)
My strategy was to have a balanced, thrifty fleet from the start. First were the battleships - ours were technologically quite a bit behind most of other nations', but would do for the Adriatic at the moment.
Two of our four starting battleships were of the Franz Ferdinand class - sensible, home-built ships. Although their 10-inch guns were pretty unimpressive at a time when most powers were fielding 12-inch pieces and better, they proved not substantially worse than the Italians - and better yet, though the Italian ships were a bit better, their battle line was slower than ours at 18kt, and was made up of 3 ships against our four. Over the course of our wars in the first decade of the 20th century, our battleships encountered the Italians' 4 times; both sides fought well and survived the encounters - and although long in mothballs, the Franz Ferdinands were still technically in existence in 1926.
The real workhorses of our early wars, however, were the cruisers. We started out with three basic types.
The Donau class were a pair of very sensible armored cruisers - not too heavy, not too fast, but very practical in the Adriatic. They fought together with our battleships, as well as on their own - chasing down other cruisers, bombarding enemy land targets, and defending our coast well. Both the SMS Donau and SMS Sankt Georg earned 7 battle stars (maximum possible!) before the end of their battle service - an end which, unfortunately for both of them, came at the wrong end of a torpedo. The Sankt Georg blew up abruptly when it got hit in the magazine by a lucky torpedo from a destroyer during a fleet battle against the Italians in mid-Adriatic; the Donau was torpedoed during our last war by a submarine while returning from a routine patrol.
The Saida class were two fairly large, fast, capable light cruisers (for being built before 1900, anyway). They, too, were workhorses that did everything from chasing down Italian raiders to bombarding coastal towns. Saida was also lost to a torpedo when she got too close to a wounded Italian cruiser (that also sank in the same battle), but her sister Novara survived and even remained in service to our last war against the French (where she was relegated to coastal patrol duty - but still managed to sink an enemy destroyer and a pair of auxiliary raiders, becoming one of our most successful ships in that war).
Finally, there were our light forces, meant for night fighting and scouting:
Though called a "cruiser", the Aspern class was more of a destroyer/leader or perhaps an aviso - a small, very cheap but quick ship. Despite its small size, lack of armor, and only 4 guns as armament, the Aspern was a very successful class - 6 of them were built (of which 2 were lost in combat), and they set a template for other small, quick, cheap ships of this type for many years to come.
Our first destroyers were the Panther class (12 built, 2 lost in combat) - very fast for their time, although lacking particularly effective armament. As destroyer technology developed slowly, with 500-700t ships being the norm until about 1915, these had a long and successful service life.
Finally, our force was rounded out by these little minesweepers (16 built, 3 lost, 1 scrapped) - which patrolled the Adriatic coast and did ASW duty as well over the course of the whole campaign.
So, this was the fleet that fought Italy. In our first war, the Italian navy was slightly larger than mine. With most of the fighting involving smaller cruisers rather than battleships, however, I was able to whittle down their superiority, impose a blockade, and force them to sue for peace. They paid a heavy price by ceding control of Sardinia to my crown - and though they tried twice, including a very tiring war of 1905-1908, they were never able to regain it. After our final clash in 1916-1917 where they were quickly and decisively defeated, the Italians were finally forced to acknowledge our dominance of "their" sea, and turned to their internal problems - like Sicily suddenly seceding!
Technology kept advancing in the meantime. We laid down some new ships as a response to the Italian menace - and though their fleet definitely suffered more than ours, and we were eventually able to blockade Italy from the sea, we still needed more firepower. This produced some very widely varied ships - including our ugliest and most handsome.
First, the ugly. You may want to cover your eyes!..
This monstrosity, built in our own shipyards, was built in response to two things - firstly, the frequent missions to bombard the Italian coast, where we'd often spend more time than we wanted near the enemy's coastal artillery batteries; and secondly, in response to being unable to sink any of the Italians' battleships through a relative lack of firepower. And yes, you are seeing 9 single 10-inch turrets per side here indeed - along with a pair of double 11-inch turrets on each end!
In all truth, these probably would have been floating explosion hazards - but by plan or providence, the four Erherzog Karl floating battery ships ended up never seeing any combat.
A slightly more balanced (but still ugly) design, built in 1909 when most countries were already building dreadnoughts, was the Babenberg. Only this single ship was built - ordered from a French shipyard, because the French had much better large-caliber guns than us, and we were anxious to get something that would be able to punch through heavier armor. Although the Babeberg was later rebuilt, with an engine upgrade that allowed it to reach 27kt (making it more or less a battlecruiser), it never saw combat during its career either.
Finally, on the prettier side of things, we had this...
The Lissa class were three small but nimble battlecruisers, very fast from the beginning. They had a long development history - derived from a German design, and eventually ordered from British shipyards (which were far ahead of ours technologically) and finished in 1910.
Though they were very well-liked ships, and became even faster in 1920 after engine refits, they had a tragic history - all three of them were destroyed in 1924-1925 by much superior French battlecruisers, which by that point were simply far better in every other way. Before they were sunk, however, the Lissas still made a very brave attack that wiped out an entire French convoy (before being caught by the enemy).
In the meantime, the Turks had decided to try and have a go at us in 1914 over crisis in the Balkans - but after a few quick and mostly insignificant battles, their government found their navy blockaded by ours, and simply sued for peace. As reparations, they ceded bases in Lybia and Rhodes to our control.
(to be continued)