RTW3: v.1.00.37 Public Beta Now Available

[MaximKI]

Hello everyone,

There's a new public beta update installer (v1.00.37) available at the following download link: HERE

For Steam users, you can switch to it by going to RTW3 in your Steam Library, right-clicking on it, choosing Properties -> Betas -> then choosing the latest beta branch from the drop-down list and allowing Steam to update your game. If it updates correctly, you should see the latest beta version listed as your version in-game on the bottom right.

IMPORTANT NOTE: We noticed some users reporting problems with converting old saves to the new format introduced in 1.00.32, however, these seem to be rare as of now. If you do experience any issues or errors in the conversion process, we request that you back up your old saves before converting them and be ready to provide a pre and post-conversion save yo help us work out any final kinks to the system.

What's New in Version 1.00.37:

• Added an export/import function for ship designs. The export function for ship designs is located on the graphics tab in the ship design screen. It will let you export any ship design as a file. The design can then be shared with other players or reused in a later game. Exported ship designs are located in the folder "My Games\Rule the Waves 3\Save\Ship Designs".
• Ammunition expenditure is now spread more evenly across turrets. (Previously, A and Y turret tended to use somewhat more ammo than X and B).
• Prevented fitting V turret on ships that couldn't have X turret.
• Reduced the rate of aircraft production and added a column for production in the aircraft types screen. (The intention is that heavy aircraft losses should hurt more).
• Reduced SAM hit rates (they were a little too good).
• Increased the cost of missile systems and missile maintenance.
• Fixed a bug with the gun quality of the rebuilding nation not being taken into account for gun upgrades.
• Fixed a bug with the autodesigner sometimes building ship with AON armor when it isn't researched.
• Fixed a bug with ammunition weight calculation in the 80-85 rounds per gun interval.
• Fixed a bug with admirals not being removed from an area command when they were assigned to another.
• Fixed a bug with the number of reloads for missile launchers.
• Fixed a bug where a CA could have protected cruiser armour configuration.

What's New in Version 1.00.36:
• Fixed some problems related to introducing the German character conversion.
• Fixed a bug with data for the rightmost nation not displaying in the almanac.
• Fixed a bug with getting the correct name of the nation whose aircraft sinks a sub.
• Increased the maintenance cost of heavy anti-ship missiles.
• Improved the British name list to produce more appropriate ship names from the 1920s.
• Fixed some typos.

What's New in Version 1.00.35:

Save Games
• Games are now saved to the directory "C:\USER\Documents\My Games\Rule the Waves 3". Old saves are loaded from the old save directory and saved to the new save directory.

Strategic Level
• Penalty points for declining battle is now reduced for battles far from friendly bases.

Options and Preferences
• Added an option to convert some characters in German ship and officer names, for example ö becomes oe, ü becomes ue etc. This is for the benefit of users with Asian language OS which can have problems with these characters.

Ship Design
• Moved the auto carrier conversion button to the box for flight installations.
• Added a function to auto change carrier graphics to angled flight deck.
• Curbed the tendency of the AI designer to overuse triple turrets on ships.
• Fixed a problem with rebuilding ships transferred from other nations.
• Fixed a problem with multiple classes being generated when fire control is upgraded for ships under construction.

Map Changes
• Updated the Chinese coastline with shallow water.

Battle Resolution
• Adjusted HE penetration and splinter damage on armored areas.
• Some adjustments to the tactical AI.
• Some adjustments to mission data.

Officers
• Area commander ability now influences the chance of unexpected battles.

Bug Fixes
• Fixed a bug that prevented AI nations from taking territory from each other in AI wars.
• Fixed a bug in Fleet Exercise setup where a ship removed from a division would lead to all the ships in the division being duplicated in the available ships list.
• Fixed some typos in tool tips.
• Fixed the height of the ship status window.
• Fixed problems with some corrupted save files.
• Fixed a bug with divisions with Land CAP were not saved.
• Fixed some misspellings in Spanish officer ranks.

What's New in Version 1.00.34:

Strategic Level
• Adjusted some inconsistencies in the actions of allied nations in a multi nation war.
• There is now a chance that scrapped ships can be sold to small nations (less than average economy), including to the player if the player is playing a small nation.
• Adjusted submarine build times.
• Ships being rebuilt will now be moved to the closest home area with a rebuild yard.
• There will be rebuild yards in home possessions with at least 200 base capacity. (That means US West Coast and Russian Far East will not have any initially on some starting dates, but by expanding base capacity, they will get the capability).
• Increased the maximum number of ships that can be built at one time in the build ships screen to 25.
• Nations at war with you will now not ask to buy a license for your aircraft.

Battle Generation
• Prevented avoiding battles by closing the battle preview screen.

Controls and Preferences
• Added an option to see submarine sinkings in aggregate only. (useful if you have many submarines and want to bring down the number of after turn messages)

Ship Design
• Generating and selecting ship pictures now works.
• Further adjustments to secondary gun placement on cruisers and destroyers.
• Improved the autodesigner to avoid illegal triple turrets in A or Y position.
• The upgrade guns button will now be available when opening an existing design that has worse gun quality than available.
• Adjusted the automatic secondary gun placement on cruisers to avoid having them placed outside the hull. (it is better but not perfect)
• Using auto design in the design screen will now force a different template to be used every time auto design is pressed (if possible). This increasses apparent variation.

Battle Resolution
• Field batteries will now only have HE ammo.
• Some improvements in the tactical AI.
• Radar blind fire range reduced to 80% of radar sighting range.
• Gyro Stabilizer will now reduce the gunnery penalty for sea state.

Aircraft
• One floatplane squadron of up to 12 aircraft may now be based at any airbase without counting against capacity. (This is to increase the utility of floatplanes at land bases in the early game).

Officers
• On auto assign of officers, rear admirals might now be auto-promoted to admirals to fill an empty slot, just like the case with empty division or ship commands.
• It is now possible to manually promote the senior officer of a rank for free (no prestige cost), You can only do this once per turn.
• The ROF enthusiast will now give -10% accuracy in addition to the +10% ROF (or 20% at shorter ranges).

AI
• The AI will now be better at replacing floatplanes on ships with helipad and helicopters.

User Interface
• Research breakthroughs are now also shown in the turn message summary.
• Made sure the commander text is visible in the ship status screen.
• Obsolete ships are now clearly marked as so in ship status screen.
• Officer list now remembers sorting and filter options.
• On the missile control panel, renamed the Fire Salvo button to Manual fire to better describe what it does.
• Added a button to exit the battle from the results screen and a button to view the map.
• Added a button to go back to the results screen from the map after battle.

Bug Fixes
• Fixed a bug with ships transferred to other nations getting the wrong design.
• Fixed a bug with the AI rebuilding ships occasionally producing errormessages.
• Fixed a bug where having no fire control used more crew than intended.
• Fixed a bug with occasional miscount of free shipyard capacity to build ships.
• Fixed a bug with helicopters on recon sometimes going in the wrong direction.
• Fixed a bug with showing ship details from the build screen.
• Fixed a bug in scenario info that led to France having no convoy in one of the convoy defense missions.
• Fixed a bug with background sound not changing on weather change.
• Fixed a bug with magazine explosion sound playing even if sound options were set to No sound (I guess this one could have been somewhat jarring if you expected silence).
• Fixed a bug where in some cases a CL with 4 in B armor was classed as a CA.

What's New in Version 1.00.33:

Bug Fixes
• Fixed a bug where submarines could engage in gunnery duels with enemy ships in another area.
• Fixed a bug with building ships in foreign shipyards.
• Fixed a bug with ships not having missile or torpedo reloads in battles.

What's New in Version 1.00.32:

With this version, we introduced a new system of structuring saves, as well as a way to convert old saves to the new format. Before attempting to load old saves we do recommend you back them up to avoid losing any progress in case there's an issue with the conversion process. If you run into any issues or bugs, definitely let us know in the Tech Support sub-forum.

Save Games
• Refurbished the saving of design files. All designs for each nation are now saved in one file. A saved game will now consist of fewer files, and the total save game size is reduced considerably. This should mitigate problems with saving to Steam cloud. It will also mitigate problems with some ship names on some (mainly Asian) language operating systems.
Important Note: The first time an old save game is opened, loading will take considerably longer as old style design files are converted.

Battle Generation
• Removed some occasional quirks in force selection in battle generator, for example having a BB subordinated to a CL flagship.
• Allied forces can now appear as support force.
• Added ship speeed and displacement to ship list in battle preview screen.
• Background color now changed in battle preview screen.

Controls and Preferences
• The space key will now only pause the game. This is to prevent inadvertently restarting time when you want to pause.
• The alt key will run the game one minute (or longer if auto play is switched on).

Battle Resolution
• Improved go to base behaviour for divisions following the force flagship into friendly port.
• Improved AI convoy defence decisions.

Aircraft
• Before 1930, a floatplane scout with bomb + bomb priority will have torpedo capability and can be used as strike aircraft from AV without catapults.

Officers
• Adjusted officer promotions and retirements to reduce the risk that a nation should have too few admirals available.

Bug Fixes
• Fixed a bug that could make the choice of scout force flag division ineffective in cruiser battles and other battles smaller than fleet.
• Fixed a bug that could lead to an error message when a peace breaks out.
• Fixed a bug with numbers of missiles not being included in the short ship description.

Doctrines
• Added doctrine choices for AP shell design.

Other
• Miscellaneous minor improvements

[Jace11]

I'm having a bit of a problem loading any ship templates with this new beta. Says ship not found and then gives an error message, even in a new game. I'll try a few things to see if I can fix it, the files are there in the folders, very weird.

[MaximKI]

I'm having a bit of a problem loading any ship templates with this new beta. Says ship not found and then gives an error message, even in a new game. I'll try a few things to see if I can fix it, the files are there in the folders, very weird.

If you're able to reproduce the issue, please provide us with screenshots with what you're seeing and the save file you're having issue with.

For the saves what would be ideal if you could provide the save in the old format before it was converted, as well as a post-conversion save file.

[CharlieZulu]

I'm having a bit of a problem loading any ship templates with this new beta. Says ship not found and then gives an error message, even in a new game. I'll try a few things to see if I can fix it, the files are there in the folders, very weird.

If you're able to reproduce the issue, please provide us with screenshots with what you're seeing and the save file you're having issue with.

For the saves what would be ideal if you could provide the save in the old format before it was converted, as well as a post-conversion save file.

I'm having the same issue.

Reproduction steps:

• Start a new game
  Go to design a new ship
  Click the "Load design template" button under the advanced graphics (for modding) menu
  Select any of the stock ship design templates

It'll throw several errors, those being "Cannot find ship design file: [ship name]", "Access violation at address 006A3219 in module 'RtW3.exe'. Read of address 0[...]08.", "Unable to create ship [ship name], Filename: [ship name]", and "Could not load ship!", "Access violation at address 004F982A in module 'RtW3.exe'. Read of address 0[...]0114." It appears to be loading the ship's stats, and it technically counts as a legal ship design (in a quick test just now, you can build them), the graphics just fail to load and attempting to edit them throws even more errors.

While this is hardly gamebreaking, it is quite frustrating that if I spend 30 minutes drawing a really nice superstructure, I can't save it for future use.

[Jace11]

You can click the turret arc / torpedo arc buttons and then fiddle with the zoom to make the ship graphic re-appear!

I reported it on the NWS forums with the steps to reproduce, and I've seen 4 separate mentions of it now, (here, on NWS forum and on the discord channel).

[MaximKI]

I'm having a bit of a problem loading any ship templates with this new beta. Says ship not found and then gives an error message, even in a new game. I'll try a few things to see if I can fix it, the files are there in the folders, very weird.

If you're able to reproduce the issue, please provide us with screenshots with what you're seeing and the save file you're having issue with.

For the saves what would be ideal if you could provide the save in the old format before it was converted, as well as a post-conversion save file.

I'm having the same issue.

Reproduction steps:

• Start a new game
  Go to design a new ship
  Click the "Load design template" button under the advanced graphics (for modding) menu
  Select any of the stock ship design templates

It'll throw several errors, those being "Cannot find ship design file: [ship name]", "Access violation at address 006A3219 in module 'RtW3.exe'. Read of address 0[...]08.", "Unable to create ship [ship name], Filename: [ship name]", and "Could not load ship!", "Access violation at address 004F982A in module 'RtW3.exe'. Read of address 0[...]0114." It appears to be loading the ship's stats, and it technically counts as a legal ship design (in a quick test just now, you can build them), the graphics just fail to load and attempting to edit them throws even more errors.

While this is hardly gamebreaking, it is quite frustrating that if I spend 30 minutes drawing a really nice superstructure, I can't save it for future use.

Thanks for the report!

Do you have some screenshots you could share that show this issue?

[MaximKI]

A new public beta is live now. See OP for details.

[MaximKI]

Happy New Years everyone!

A new public beta is now live with a slew of fixes and improvements. See OP for details.

[AllenK]

Have the bugs with engine rebuilds not restoring the speed loss and selecting colonial service in the design but it not showing when the ship is built been addressed in this patch?

[tywudtke]

Have the bugs with engine rebuilds not restoring the speed loss and selecting colonial service in the design but it not showing when the ship is built been addressed in this patch?

engine refits seem to be fixed, but the multiple refit dates behind ship names is still there

[MaximKI]

A new public beta is live now! See OP for details.

[Tendraline]

A new public beta is live now! See OP for details.

Hello there MaximKI, I know of a couple of friends who installed through Steam and want to not update to the v.1.00.35 version for whatever reason. Is there a way to do this, and do you find anything wrong with this?

[MaximKI]

A new public beta is live now! See OP for details.

Hello there MaximKI, I know of a couple of friends who installed through Steam and want to not update to the v.1.00.35 version for whatever reason. Is there a way to do this, and do you find anything wrong with this?

Hello Tendraline,

Opting into the 1.00.35 public beta is optional and not mandatory and can be done through the game's properties menu as described in the instructions of the original post. Players who do not opt into the public beta will have their game updated to the latest official version of the game, which currently is 1.00.27. Once the 1.00.35 public beta has had ample testing time and is confirmed to be stable we will release it as an official update to the game.

Hope this answers your question.

[CLReed]

I've noticed a bug in my France 1935 start in this version where the Almanac data for Spain shows the data for China when selected.A Screenshot is attached.

[MaximKI]

We're aware of this issue and it should be fixed in the next update.

[MaximKI]

A new public beta is available now! See OP for details.

[MaximKI]

New public beta now live! See OP for details.