Bigjku

There has long needed to be a hard limit on the SHP you can put in a design. There were clear physical limits due to the properties of steel and metallurgy that limited the SHP per shaft. There are also clear downsides if you try to go beyond 4 shafts on a design. This would solve a TON of problems. But everyone wants their 180,000 ton monster steaming around at 33 knots apparently.

Thanks, that is a small button but that solves one issue.

Unlock the campaign start dates without making me play with Pre-Dreadnoughts that I hate. Some people do not care for certain eras. We paid for the game. Stop restricting it.

I stepped away from the game for several months when there were no updates. Came back to it in the last few weeks to see what was improved and what was working better. These are my thoughts. Good The ship designer appears to be working somewhat better. It seems to save ships. Most importantly you are letting me design all of my ship classes in a custom battle. This is such a vast improvement that it can't be overstated. I can actually create a fleet that makes sense together and fight with it so it make obvious the potential of the game. Advice on some smaller details of the ship designer got updated. All of the options now make more sense. So job well done there. Bad The AI still builds awful ships. They just don't get it and there is no logic there. I have been playing 1927 battles of the USN against the RN. Often as not they trot out battleships with 13 inch guns, destroyers with one torpedo, heavy cruisers with 8 different calibers of guns on them. The only way to get the AI to design decent ships is to play very late dates as far as I can tell. And then you just get monster ships out of them most of the time. Look, just implement a ship library and be done with it. Or let me design my opponents ships too. I takes a while to load a battle so its a big disappointment when the other side brings their clown car. Plus at times I just want to simulate a battle by designing exactly what I want on both sides. Please fix this. The tactical controls are still kind of wonky. There still desperately needs to be a reverse heading button that reverses the lead ship in the column and changes heading 180 degrees. Torpedo attacks work a bit better but I still need to be able to set the spread (narrow, normal, wide). It is improved but not fixed. The speed controls still don't really work right. It seems more of a suggestion. The ability to set a "fleet speed" that all units are at prior to the battle would help. The ability to order speeds to the whole fleet would be helpful. Ugly I hate to say this...but I don't know that I will keep playing the game if fleet deployment and formations aren't fixed. If I try to work with a reasonably sized fleet of mixed units (6 capital ships, 6 cruisers, 6 destroyers) the game deploys them in a maddening way to start and there is no quick or clean way to get them deployed in a way that makes any sense at all. Whatever random program you are using to do this needs to be deleted. Either let me place my units or simply deploy them in a line ahead formation with units of the same type all in the same divisions. I can make the necessary changes from there. But when the AI has defaulted to putting 4 of my capital units in line ahead, 2 more following them, 2 cruisers in a screen, 4 destroyers following the first capital ship unit (and colliding with the second division of capital units) and then 2 destroyers in a screen it becomes and almost impossible mess to sort out. I have figured out how to do it. But it involves directing individual ships away from each other and reassembling divisions. I can do this by starting massively far away from the enemy so I have time to do it. And it still only works about 70% of the time. But mostly its just something that is unreasonably annoying. It doesn't need to be like this. So just stop it. That brings me to point two. The collision avoidance and line ahead formations simply don't hold together and work. Fairly often when simply executing a 30-60 degree turn with no one else in the way ships within the same line will create major issues for one another. If I am in one places managing my light units I can return to my battle line to find one ship 10,000 yards ahead of the others because ship two and three collided and then turned in useless circles and ships 4, 5, and 6 are following ship 3 around. The only way to resolve this is to disassemble the damn formation by detaching a ship, turning it away and sending it the the back of the formation. They aren't under fire. They aren't avoiding torpedoes. They just for some reason can't stop colliding with one another. And I am extremely careful with my maneuvering. I don't turn formations back in on themselves. I don't cross different lines of ships (excepting the mess of how the AI puts them on the field in the first place). These issues make the game feel broken and worse than that they make it INSANELY FRUSTRATING. I am a huge fan of the studios work. Love the Civil War game. I love what this game could be. But stop working on the campaign and fix the very basic stuff with the battles. This game has a broken core mechanic. You can't layer more crap on top of it right now. I hate saying it but it is 100% true.

Given the investment Japan had to make to build Yamato infrastructure wise I can’t imagine the basic work to build the necessary dry docks, do the harbor dredging and everything else you need to support these ships. I suspect there is a very good reason A-150 didn’t seem to be planned to be much bigger than Yamato. German stuff of huge size I suspect was nothing more than a pipe dream.

I am fine with firing with sever penalty in accuracy as well.

North Cape happens in 1943. The game effectively ends in 1940 and most of the meat of the game is earlier than that. I agree it “can” be done. But the circumstances of it being done are generally limited. It works at North Cape with more advanced radar than the game would have and a single target to deal with. TBS radios quickly went to crap in more crowded and complex engagements with multiple targets. So I would say this is quite a complicated issue. Shooting at a lone battleship that can’t shoot back is the equivalent of practice range work. It is something that kind of worked in practice and sometimes works in reality. This is a view from the deck. Spotting tops are 100-150 feet in the air and the ocean is quite flat. It’s a maybe or maybe not depending on the distance in my view. I am thinking more from an aircrafts perspective to be honest but either way I think the spotting advantage goes to the ship with the higher spotting position as they can physically see further over the horizon than can the lower ship. If a destroyer is 15 meters tall and my spotting tops 50 meters tall they are able to see the destroyer at 14.45 NM. We can see each other’s fighting tops at 22.37 NM but the destroyer can only see my hull at 7.91 NM. Regardless of how they are seen the battleship should have a full picture first by virtue of its fighting tops. The destroyer could range on the fighting tops but can’t see it’s fall of shell until much closer.

I think this is on the right track. No one has cooperative engagement capability in 1940 or even 1960 for the most part. I suspect that some navies did try to use cruisers or destroyers to spot and correct the fall of shot but I strongly suspect this would be limited to ranging corrections on a target the larger ship can actually see and use its fire control on. My suggestions would be along the following lines and is close to what you suggest. 1. You can only shoot at what that ship itself can see. Agree 100% here. 2. You should increase the spotting chances and range to varying degrees based on the level of radio technology installed. So if my destroyer screen spots something it helps my big units find the target by focusing their attention on the correct bearing. Install a high end talk between ships radio fit and your chances to spot at the maximum calculated spotting range go up 100%. Basic radio it’s 50%. No radio it’s 25%. This gives the radio a bigger purpose beyond a command bonus. 3. Tie visibility fairly strongly to the speed of the ships you are looking for and then negatively vary it with sea state (I think it may already do that for sea state but if not it should). It would be fairly easy to miss seeing a destroyer at 20,000 yards in heavy seas if it’s just making steerageway. But it would be almost impossible of calmer seas if the thing is doing 35 knots from a high spot position. It will throw out a wake many times the length of the ship and it’s a contrast the human eye is drawn to naturally. 4. The effect of making smoke should vary drastically depending on what you are doing. It should be almost wholly ineffective for the ship making it when on a direct intercept course. Unless that destroyer has an equal tail wind it will just fall behind the ship. Might screen the rest of the column. On the other hand smoke should be highly effective when sailing directly away. It’s unclear to me now how it works with regard to other ships. It seems to work more or less like a cloaking device just for the ship that makes it right now. 5. Ships shooting should be drastically more likely to be seen. Like 2-300% more likely to be seen. It should be almost impossible absent very specific conditions (low sun in your eyes) to not see ships firing at you. This can change a bit when radar gets highly advanced (doesn’t during game time frame) or if you had say a 1930’s ship fighting a 1890’s ship where it can and will fight beyond the range your spotting equipment was built for but for rough peers if it’s shooting at you you should see it. 6. If you really want to spice things up I would be all for doing things on a quadrant basis of spotting fore, aft, starboard and port. Divide things up and if you are engaged to starboard your spotting to fore and aft becomes worse and to port it becomes flat bad. This would actually give you reason to maneuver light units around more and reflect human tendency to focus on the issue at hand and mechanical limits on the number of high powered optical instruments available to each ship.

Its Modern tower 1 and the only available rear tower in the 1927 version and Super tall and tall cage mast in the 1922 one. The former is as good as is an option at that point. Cage mast aren't the best of the best but really were great spotting tops (they only lose their advantage when FC equipment got too heavy for them) as they were incredibly tall compared to other options. They have the highest spotting scores in the game I can pick during those time frames. So I am not going cheap. I also have the best optics I can put on the ship for long range fire in the highest stereo rangefinder in each setup. The game can put whatever stats it wants out there. But in fair weather I basically operate blind against opponents when there are small ships on the water. And it also clearly doesn't impact the other side which is shooting at me for significant lengths of time prior to me being able to engage. I am not a 100% expert on this subject but I have a battleship with much higher spotting towers being charged down and shot at by destroyers and cruisers with much shorter towers. I should be able to range on their hull before they can range on anything but my tower. That is just the curvature of the earth at play really.

It seems to be a strange compound issue too. most of the time I do a fight of capital units vs capital units or cruisers vs cruisers ect. I am doing a battle of battleships vs some BC's, Cruisers and Destroyers. And it isn't just the small units I can't see. I hardly pick up anything until its all right on top of me. I am taking 5 and 6 inch fire routinely before I can shoot at anything. Even if I can't see the small ships I can't figure out why I can't see the heavy cruisers and battlecruisers.

Can confirm issue still exist in 1927 (prior was 1925). I am currently getting pelted with 5 inch rounds and can't see anyone. I expect to eat a torpedo any second now.

Spotting of small ships still seems off to me. Using a mid 1920’s USN battle line with super tall and tall cage mast I still had them popping up within 10,000 yards. I would suggest spotting them be very much a function of their speed. They can stay hidden at very low speeds with little to no wake. But at higher speeds they should be quite visible.

Agree if we can control all the ships in a battle it’s easier to see what works and what doesn’t. Even if I can’t control their actions if I can just make sure that I don’t end up against a ship I outweigh by a factor of 2 (or vise versa) it would help.

Yeah, the are a ton of aspects to the subject that go well beyond what we can see in a game. Its an interesting rabbit hole to dive down for sure.

The implementation in my mind would be more along the lines of you having to pay for these things as R&D in campaign mode. So you may invest a lot into say heavy armor production capacity but not as much into engine capability (only so many resources after all) and that would make for significantly different ships among the various powers and on different game play throughs. It would also let minor powers create more interesting one off type ships by focusing in certain areas. I was involved with a play by email wargame for 1920's naval race (no Washington treaty) where the Italian player of all people invested a ton of money into researching large guns and was prowling the Mediterranean with 18 inch gunned monsters with almost no range and almost no speed (22 knots IIRC in 1927 or so) but IIRC they were the largest ships in the world because they invested in huge infrastructure for them. The US ended up with ships in the 26-27 knot range with a lot of armor but only 9-16 inch guns. The British, burdened with so many old ships, ended up having a mix of very fast battlecruiser/fast battleship types and some 24 knot types. The limiting factor that drove what you could do was that you had to do R&D for the naval guns and max SHP you could achieve as well as do industrial investment (which was represented by the capacity of each individual dockyard in terms of tons of displacement). Those caps saw people investing in different ways and ending up with distinctly different fleets. So I don't necessarily want caps for caps sake (though I do think SHP ultimately needs a cap just for sheer sanity sake on the speed of the monsters). I want them to be fields you can invest in that will drive distinctly different ship types and naval composition overtime. Otherwise I fear everything will trend towards sameness.

The 26 inch plates were the Yamato turret face plate IIRC. I can't find if they were combined two plates or not. However they knew for the A-150 they couldn't do the belt as thick as they wanted. I am not enough of an expert on the specifics of making each part. I suspect belts were a bit different than turret faces and maybe they could do one and not the other. I agree the campaign might already be handling it. These are just my suggestions.

The fix on the American Heavy Cruiser secondary mounts on the tower is mostly right. I can mount dual 5 inch guns. However the upper secondary mounts mount the guns at an odd angle. I think it works fine for gameplay though.

Personally this is very very low on my list. I get it but I wouldn't push this up high.

I have started just altering one factor of the three (armor, speed, weapons) in the ship designer to see if the changes make sense to me as I see what you can get for building bigger ships. There is a big long thread I started about it but overall I think at least in late model ships (1940) things work pretty well so long as the ships are sized within the bounds of historical ships and even somewhat about that. Things get a bit wonky (particularly speed) as you get up above the 70,000 ton mark. I have thrown out some suggestions on ways to maybe incorporate limits into the campaign and tech tree to keep things a bit more in balance as well as open up different things in the tech tree players could invest in which would create more variety in player outcomes. Tonnage Cost of Capabilities and SHP for Designs - General Discussions - Game-Labs Forum (game-labs.net)

Tonight looking into what happens on the bigger hulls as we move onto Modern Battleship II Second Baseline This thing won't let me upload my screenshots but in making a baseline ship we encounter our first oddity. So I am using a slightly heavy tower setup than before but I don't have a secondary barbette to worry about. On this hull with the same armor and guns I am sitting at 62,300 tons. That seems odd to me and you certainly wouldn't pursue using this hull for that kind of ship in a campaign situation. It would make no real sense. But for the purpose of this our baseline is basically the same stats as above, just heavier to start out. Armor Adjustments On an 86,000 ton hull I can get truly absurd levels of armor. My build here has a belt of 20 inches, 10 inch deck, 12 inch turret tops, 20 inch turret faces and 22 inch conning tower while keeping speed at 27 knots and weapons the same. From a scaling standpoint...this seems reasonable compared to where we started. Compared to my earlier ship on the Modern Battleship I hull that I armored up I get 2 more inches of belt and deck and 2 more inches of turret top. In terms of percentage gains this is really quite a lot of extra armor. Particularly the increased deck armor. I do have some issues with it as a feasible build industrially but we can get to that later. Gun Adjustments I can easily get a dozen 18 inch guns onto this ship with a displacement of 81,000 tons which being honest I think is too much. I am getting the impression that the huge guns aren't quite heavy enough. This ship is back at our original armor level so is very under armored for this level of weaponry. I can actually get 8, 20-inch guns on the ship in a twin and two triple turrets on 86,000 tons. This in my mind is very light for a ship armed this way. Even though I haven't upped the armor. The German's seems to have believed a ship so armed would need to be around 130,000 tons albeit being faster and better armored. The Japanese seem to have figured they could get 6 such guns on a ship of this size and of similar speed. I suspect that the largest of the large guns simply run a little light and should have their weight increased. Speed Adjustments So far I have been able to play with this hull and staying at 27 knots we have kept the SHP numbers at a reasonable. But here is where I think the model needs the most work (or frankly some hard limits). The system has zero issues with me putting together a ship that will do 36 knots with almost 500,000 SHP. Hell I am only at 83,400 tons but I hit the speed cap for the type otherwise I could keep going. Keep in mind this would be 2 and a half Iowa Class ships worth of engines power. So here is the issue...you simply don't have the physical space for it even if you can accommodate the weight. Iowa is 900 feet long and 108 feet wide. The game determines my 36 knot ship is 918 feet long and 126 feet wide. We appear to need roughly 20-25 feet for each shaft alley to not have the propellers running into each other (they are 18.5 feet across). The only way I can even begin to think that one carries this many engines would be if you were stacking them vertically and had a very high freeboard or very deep draft, which I do grant you the game says this ship has at 70 damn feet of it (which present a whole host of other issues such as which harbor could this thing actually go into). Then you get into the fact that the props would have to be even bigger to actually put that power into the water and if the shafts can even survive turning a prop that big (newton still applies, whatever force you put into the water is torque on the shaft and they can and will snap). Sorry but that level of SHP is just not happening. Conclusion As we work on the biggest and most modern ships I think we see that the system does scale fairly well but starts to break down at the extremes just a bit. Speed in particular gets pretty whacky at the highest displacements. What I think are needed and should be worked into the campaign are some limits on certain components you are able to manufacture. Armor Limits There was and is a limit to how thick of a single armored plate you could manufacture. Beyond that you had to basically start stacking plates. Japan ran into this issues with the A-150 design. The belt of 18 inches would have been stacked armor plates. They couldn't manufacture a single plate of that thickness. I would suggest that the campaign have a maximum thickness of armor above which you cannot go without having to stack plates. The game should give you a warning and armor above what you can make would have say half as much effectiveness (but all the weight). This would force you to invest in the underlying industrial capability to make the ship. Gun Limits I think guns are generally too light for the biggest models. Developers should look into the difference in weights in total installations. Yamato's turrets weighed twice what a North Carolina Class turret weighed plus all the knock on effects. Overall I don't think it is crazy out of line but I think the guns above 16 inches need some tweaking to be more displacement absorbing. Speed Limits There need to be hard limits on SHP if you want to force realistic compromises in large ships. I love large ships but no one was realistically none of the 100,000 ton monsters should be burning up the seas at 30 knots plus. To that end I suggest the following limits (and really in campaign you could make it an ongoing research thing so people have to pay their way up the chain within each technology). Regular Turbines: 120,000 SHP or so. Geared Turbines: Something around 250,000 SHP (I think your model calls for more SHP and heavier ships that historical so this has to scale up a bit with it unless that is all changed which doesn't strike me as worth it). Turbo-Electric Drive (really fits as a drive system, its something you do rather than geared turbines, not with them): 280,000 SHP Diesel Engines: 200,000 SHP This would force people to make compromises on the top end and ensure that we don't have 100,000 ton battleships running down destroyers and cruisers all over the place. You can do an Iowa as a fast ship. You can do a Montana or a Yamato and sacrifice some speed for armor that has a decent chance of stopping your own shells. Or you can sacrifice even more speed and build an armored monster in the low 20's for speed. My overall impression is that the balancing works pretty well through the modern hulls that represent ships along the lines of what we saw historically. And honestly I think they are pretty reasonable on what you can do with armor and still passable with the guns to the point it isn't a huge issue. But the speed thing all falls apart on bigger ships. I had wondered why I ran into so many AI ships when I do late period fights that were 80,000 tons and tooling around at 30 knots and now I know. It really doesn't cost you that much. The tweaks I suggest are more geared towards the campaign mode to keep things reasonable. I am not going to bother with the USN super battleship. I think I have seen what I need to on the modern hulls. I am going to look at some vintage WWI ships next and see what happens.

That sounds great.

Oh this ship had many more launchers than 3 quints. It was loaded down with them fore and aft and port and starboard but the 160 number wasn’t an exaggeration. Usually it isn’t that bad but I have seen plenty of numbers on the far side of 50. Most realistic would be zero reloads to one reload. Honestly the best option to modify your exiting three options would be No Reloads, stowed reloads (ie you can have a reload set between battles) and combat reloads where you get one fresh set during a battle. The issue with anything but the Japanese style system is you have to put people on deck to manage the process. People tend to be very squishy when shells are impacting in or around the ship. So I would say they are a one shot weapon with an option to carry one combat reload at a big weight penalty. You could have the third option to select stowed reloads that would let you have torpedoes in multiple battles but not reload in the heat of action.

I ran up against a cruiser with something like 160 torpedoes on board. No issue with a ship with 15 tubes carrying 30 total torpedoes. 160 was and is absurd. Have not tested heavy cruises much in new build yet to see if it still happens. When that happens it creates tactical oddities. Say I have 4 each destroyers, battleships and cruisers. It isn’t unusual for the enemy cruisers and destroyers to unload full decks of torpedoes at my destroyers as they run in. This would be a giant tactical mistake in real life one would struggle to recover from. But it doesn’t impact here because they just reload and fire at the next target. For deck tubes there really should be a hard cap of one reload set. 15 tubes you can have 30 torpedoes. 20 tubes and you can have 20. Otherwise destroyers have to go back to a tender or base to reload the things. If you don’t have a base or gender close using torpedoes is actually a major decision in a protracted remote campaign. The people commenting paid for the game knowing it was a work in progress. Many likely did it because we are fans of your prior work (UGCW is one of my favorite games). So don’t take it as criticism. But for those with knowledge of naval history it takes them out of immersion when a ship is volleying off full deck load torpedo volleys every few minutes until you can deal with it.

More than that who are you going to sell this game to if not people interested in naval history? There isn’t some mythical market of people who will buy this who aren’t interested in a reasonable degree of accuracy.

I think the simple fix would be to add a launcher with a reload mechanism as a part. It can fire two salvos and the others can fire one. Single Fire US Models Reload Japanese Models Those big rectangular boxes in front or behind the tubes are where the reloads go. Basically you double the length of the installation to have reloads. Just implement a new part for the quad and quint launchers that has reloads and you should be in good shape. The logical question of course is why not just put another launcher in that space. Japan had a very doctrinal reason for doing reloads. Every other navy just installed more torpedo launchers if they wanted them. Russians might have been an exception but they did it Russian style and just lashed the things to the deck if I remember right.