Steeltrap

Armour being "too effective"?? Don't know who could possibly believe THAT to be an issue. IMO it's demonstrably the OPPOSITE. For example, a 1.8" shell strikes the 12" belt, gets a 'partial penetration' AND starts a fire. Or 3" shell striking a 12" armoured turret from a range where it had next to nothing penetration yet results in a 'partial pen' AND damages the main gun. With all due respect, a mechanic that produces these results regularly, as is the case right now, needs a substantial correction, but NOT in the direction of making armour even LESS effective.

^ We had more or less EXACTLY the same discussion 2 years ago (can't remember when exactly). In other words, I wouldn't hold much hope of that happening if I were you, LOL.

Any plans to do anything about the Borg sighting? It's plain, old fashioned bullshit to say a ship can fire at you from 17km away because a DD can see you from 3km away. That simply WAS NOT THE CASE in any effective measure, or indeed largely AT ALL with the exception of shore bombardment, but that's an entirely different gunnery situation. Not until late into WW2 did ships have effectively fully integrated radar in their fire control suites. Even those continued to train optics on their targets when possible because of issues around radar effectiveness at spotting fall of shot and thus making corrections. Seeing videos of ships in 1900-1912 doing it is just dumb and lazy. It was equally the case 2+ YEARS ago when I and others raised it. I've not bothered with the game since it went to Steam, but I've watched videos of others playing. The same old issues with combat remain as best I can see. MAX Bulkheads = Zombie apocalypse fleet, for example. When things like the specific issue I mentioned get addressed, plus the many other important (with respects to claims of realistic) issues raised, then it might start to look promising again. Cheers p.s. Interesting how few of the names around from those times appear to have stuck at it. Can't remember when I last poked my nose into this forum.

Yeah, at least one of the QE's proved to be one of the most accurate ships in the entire order of battle of Jutland.

You can't have it both ways. If Nick is going to insist on the game "priding itself on realism" then a cruiser armed with 7" and 5" guns against a capital ship with 14" belt and 7" deck armour MUST get smashed with next to no damage done in return. This whole "we need shells to damage things they realistically couldn't because 'fairness' demands it" is the ANTITHESIS of "priding realism". War ISN'T fair. The idea, if you've a brain, is to make it as UNFAIR FOR YOUR ENEMY as you possibly can. If you're NOT thinking that way, don't start a war and don't be in charge of one. But apparently it's necessary because reasons. There are a LOT of mechanics in this game that are simply miles from realism. Seeing a capital ship trashed by small calibre naval guns, ESPECIALLY by fire, is absurd UNLESS there are some truly remarkable conditions involved. Point blank fire at night, such as happened around Guadalcanal, is a case where it's possible, but that's because the armour on the IJN BCs wasn't all that great and 8" USN guns at a few thousand yards had enough penetration to deal with it. At the same time, however, USN South Dakota (in a different battle) got hit by at least 23 hits from memory, up to and including 14", and suffered NO 'loss of ship threatening' damage. The Captain's battle report pointed out the fires that started in the superstructure were small and rapidly extinguished. The "lessons" of Tsushima, especially about effectiveness of HE and dangers of fires, were in fact INCORRECT. Proper analysis of the results proved what everybody already knew: ships sink through loss of buoyancy, which means water entering the hull. I don't believe (again, haven't checked) that a single Russian ship sank due to fires. It was all mines, torpedoes or penetrating hits at/below the waterline. Sure, fires can and do impede crew efficiency. The likelihood of fires making a ship impossible to survive, however, is extraordinarily small unless, again, some truly peculiar circumstances are present. The obvious exception was CVs in WW2 of course, but that's an entirely different subject and doesn't belong here (and even it isn't cut and dried). Interestingly enough, none other than Jellicoe himself understood that last bit, making the point that the HE fire at longer ranges might prove distracting but that the killing of ships wouldn't be possible until their armour might be penetrated at ranges of approximately 10,000yds or less. That's more or less what he stated leading up to Jutland, and his battle plans were made with that general premise central to his thoughts. Apart from any other issue, a shell that doesn't penetrate the main armour of a hull (or anything else for that matter) ought NOT start a fire. It takes remarkably little armour to defeat an HE shell. Approx 3" of standard WW2 armour would defeat a USN 16" HE round. The idea a 7" or 5" round hitting armour greatly over its capacity to penetrate yet it can STILL start a fire is bollocks. The shell burster WON'T function in pretty much every case of a 'partial' penetration, and it is largely a function of the bursting charge that fires start. An HE shell, as I said, would simply detonate on the surface and leave a shallow dent. It WON'T start a fire INSIDE that armour. None of this ought to be news to people who have read a lot on the subject. Go to www.navweaps.com and look around in the historical article section and there are all sorts of great material. Nathan Okun is a person with his own section in navweaps because he's such an expert, and has designed programs you can download that will simulate the performance of various guns striking various types of armour with various types of shells. It's astoundingly detailed, and fascinating. Also gives you an idea of how complicated it really is. Problem the game seems to have had, and I've not bothered with it for a long time now, was the rush to ensure certain things were possible resulted in those things happening SO many times more than anything vaguely close to verified historical realism that it became almost a parody. Turrets popping off like champagne corks due to flash fires, for example? Happened all the time in game. Even 4" guns on open mounts without direct ammo feeds etc on Transport ships could have "flash fires" (which didn't stop those gun firing afterwards; I don't believe I EVER managed to destroy a TR's guns before the ship itself sank). Now go research how frequently that happened historically. Same goes for flash fires leading to magazine explosions YET the ship not sinking. That's astoundingly rare for the first element, and all but IMPOSSIBLE for the second. Yet again, saw it many times. We went over all this and a crap ton more for a few years around here. Didn't really make any difference, there wasn't much appetite for something that deserves the right to claim it prides itself on realism. Maybe it's changed now? If someone I trust says so, I might check it. I've not seen anything to suggest the battle mechanics have addressed the many obvious problems, however, and until they do the rest of it (campaigns etc) is of no interest to me. Why would I go to all sorts of efforts to design ships and all the other things required in the campaign if the battles themselves remain as silly and predictable as they were? Cheers

We've only been mentioning this very absurdity around here for a bit over 2 YEARS now. It's why I said I couldn't care less about the campaign because if absolutely vital, core battle mechanics remain placeholder or junk then the campaign can't possibly hide such things once its 'newness' wears off. Put differently, how many will play campaigns over and over if every battle they're confronted with ridiculous damage sponges and all the other things we've banged on about for ages to no effect? Not many, I'd imagine. I've not bothered to download it on Steam because I have zero interest in playing it until I see the devs get real about addressing these crucial, core, and currently absurd aspects of the main alleged selling point of this game, namely "realistic" combat depiction. Everything else is window dressing to me until THAT is sorted. If this and other persistent, glaring issues aren't addressed then RTW2 is by far the superior, proven product for anyone interested in 'realism'.

Had several discussions about exactly this issue way back when torpedo spotting reports became a thing. Here's just 1:

I'd suggest it's tied to core mechanics, but I don't believe the AI has any inherent advantage over the player. It must depend on your ability to spot torps and then how responsive your helm is, and the tech for those are open to the AI and player. Granted you might face an opponent who has better tech and thus be more capable, but that's not cheating per se. The manoeuvrability of ships in the game is rather massively ramped up in some respects. I wrote about it a long time ago, and why it mattered, but it made about as much difference as anything else I've ever written, LOL. War on the Sea has the same problem. I see people complaining about being hit by submarine ambushes but I've never understood why because ships are so hilariously agile that they almost NEVER ought to be hit. I think I've played something like 350 hours of that game (in fact I largely stopped playing this and have had many interesting discussions with WotS's dev; even got some things altered pretty quickly or various extra config text items added so I could play around with some additional variables) and I've been struck by a torp from ambush ONCE. Even my BBs have no trouble dancing on the heads of pins. It's ridiculous, but the WoWS crowd in particular now think ships really were able to accelerate crazily, particularly ahead ("0 to 35 knots in a >50,000t warship in less than 60 seconds? Sure, no probs; in fact if you fly the appropriate flag, you can go even faster!!11111!!!"), so if you made the system more realistic perhaps the forum would explode, LOL. Given it is what it is, however, yes, ships are much more able to avoid torps in just about any situation. But then you can build monster torpedo ships, so that somewhat counters it. It's almost worth putting some hard limits on just how many of particular weapons and reloads you ought to be able to carry, or at least allowing for that to be turned on by players who don't want massive "walls of skill" tactics to be a thing. If you put ship manoeuvrability more akin to reality in the game but allowed torp numbers that are just silly to stay, only the AI would use guns, LOL. To be fair, however, I think this game does it better than War on the Sea, which is even more "my BB starts to turn within 3 seconds of ordering some rudder put on" which is just LOLS. Cheers

If the campaign has some setting that has ships plonked 'x' distance from one another instead of a distance that is directly the output of the visibility/spotting mechanics then I would suggest that's the error. It's all but mandating scenarios for the player where they will think "WTF??? How did my entire line of ships NOT see that/those further away??" If the campaign is meant to be with the same visibility system but seems to be producing results that are anything but, then, yes, that would seem to be a pretty easily defined bug. Are you able to confirm which system the campaign uses for positioning forces, and what the possible ranges are IF they aren't directly produced from the same spotting system that functions in battle? I understand the campaign might use a scaled down version where it uses the most visible ship from each as the target for the opposition to spot while also using the best vision available in a force as the one that's used to detect something. In other words, a condensed version of visibility vs 'stealth', just as is done in things like D&D 5th Edition and countless other games. But if it's some arbitrary number set at the campaign level? Even if it's "working as intended" I still think it's poor and would far prefer it be removed and something more along the lines of what I suggested be implemented. Cheers

What does this have to do with the SNAFU vision system and lazy, stupid Borg-sighting? Random, "oh damn" moments (maintenance failures, training accidents, whatever) are a perfectly fine set of variables about which to have a conversation. What those factors have absolutely nothing in common with is DDs materialising at 1km when they would never have spotted said BB from 20km in order to close on it. As for "one must expect losses" , ought I view that as condescending or simply remarkably fatuous? Be a pretty pointless combat simulator if one never took losses. I can never quite decide if your ability to type replies that ignore the central point of posts to which you are allegedly replying is deliberate or innate.

^ This matter of the vision system is a continuation of the issue of Borg sighting, too, as far as I'm concerned. We've been saying for a long time the vision system has some major issues. If you shoot at me, there's no way I don't see you, for example. Maybe all I get is an idea of your bearing and range, but it's immediately a huge "look somewhere over here" sign. Yet that's not what happens because the system runs on a lazy Borg sighting system, something that has no business being in a game in 2021. You'd think you'd have a test system with a whole bunch of scenarios mapped out. You'd run your designed game system through those scenarios to see that it generates the result that's expected. If it doesn't, it's a fail. That's basic User Acceptance Testing in a nutshell, isn't it? Granted, I've only ever done it in situations like banking and insurance companies' systems, so maybe I don't understand it properly. On top of that, as I've said many times, you ALSO ought to have a "must NOT" list, too. 'Must NOT have 6 DDs spawn within 1km of enemy BB' would seem potentially to be one of them. If the visibility is so poor that the BB can't see the DDs, the DDs almost certainly would never have spotted the BB from range to close on it. That leaves both forces happening to be on converging courses at exactly the correct distance and speed to come within 1km of each other. I don't think I need to comment on the statistical likelihood of that happening, especially if it's in open seas. That absence of the "must not" list is one I've seen cause all sorts of mayhem (a bank ended up fined ~$1.6 billion because of what I'm sure was a failure to have that check in place with a change made to their ATM network; considering they were technically liable for something like a fine of $50 billion due to the number of breaches through the network, they got off lightly). It's simple yet so often seems to be neglected, with predictable consequences.

I posted quite some time ago (I seem to say that a lot, LOL) about how the issue of relying on someone in the dev team to punch out hulls is poor design. It's a single point dependency for a start, but the other issue is, as was mentioned, exactly WHY some hull gets x% resistance (that makes it more damage absorbent BEYOND issues such as compartmentalisation and armour, for example, which seems pretty arbitrary and pants) and other such characteristics is entirely hidden. Far better to go back a layer and make available whatever inputs CREATE a hull. I want a certain beam:length ratio? Fine. I want to prioritise speed? OK, but I'm going to produce a hull that emphasises both size for certain propulsion plant requirements and also hydrodynamic efficiency over compactness with extra weight available for things like, oh, armour. Perhaps the problem is the need to render these hulls in a form the game can handle. I'd have thought that could be addressed through 'prefabrication', which would be amusingly appropriate given Henry Kaiser and the Liberty ships. Hell, the Germans took to building a gazillion subs through shipping prefab segments of hulls from here and there to assemble them. I think deciding to do all that sort of stuff out of the reach of players BEFORE a hull is released, rather than working on whatever is required to produce a hull with certain characteristics the player can request, is a poor choice. I've thought that for a long time, and said so often enough. If we don't think we've enough pre-dreadnoughts, it wouldn't be a problem IF the system I'm suggesting were developed AND the pre-fab hull bits etc had been put in place because then people could simply churn them out via the 'hull development' step. Could even have it 'redline/stop' you from pushing characteristics beyond levels your tech can't do. "Cannot create a hull of 20,000t or more able to reach 30 knots: insufficient engine power per ton tech available" or something. Be REALLY fun if working on hulls could take longer IF you chose to test them, which would give a greater chance of getting close to the parameters you specified. For anyone who's done smithing in "Mount & Blade: Bannerlord", you'd recognise the general idea. For any who haven't played it, when you try smithing a design, you won't always get exactly what's planned depending on your skill level vs the difficulty of the object, and you end up with a weapon that might be better in some ways while worse in others, or just generally worse by a few points across several factors. We KNOW that happened with ships surprisingly often. Some reached and exceeded their design speeds etc, others never managed it. Some proved better at sea keeping than one might expect, which meant their performance was less affected by adverse weather; HMS Vanguard is often used as an example of that as her handling of weather allowed her to keep pace with the few knots faster USS Iowa class BBs in anything other than relative calm. Want those certain characteristics for a hull? Get better tech, and we'll even tell you where you're lacking. Now THAT could be fun, with clear pursuit of tech because you have certain plans you can't achieve without them. Anyway, we've banged on about all sorts of mechanics for a few years, thrown all sorts of constructive criticisms and ideas, questioned some fairly crucial core mechanics, and so on. What did it achieve? I'll leave that for you to answer for yourselves. I largely stopped getting into discussions quite a long time ago. I've not even bothered with the latest update or two as they did nothing about the things I consider prevent the game from being satisfying for me (emphasis on that qualifier). I volunteered to moderate a long time ago, and was happy to restrict that only to certain, mechanics/fact sorts of threads. Offered to curate pulling together issues and suggestions from the main ones, too. Also offered to go through ALL their text material, be it intro paragraphs that show while we wait for things to load, or pop-ups that explain things. The whole lot; just give me a word doc or whatever and I'd do it. Those aren't all of the things I've offered in the past few years. Again, I don't expect them to take me up on things. It appears they don't particularly WANT our help, other than largely to produce data that I believe is sent to them (unless you turn it off), but I may be mistaken. We've seen some of their attitude displayed more recently, and it's not flattering (of them). In some respects uncomfortable reminiscent of WarGaming and WoWS, which apparently might make some people happy I suppose. I'll pop in for a half hour's amusement now and again, possibly PM a few people to ask how things are or to comment on various posts, but that's about the extent of my participation now and likely forever. There's no return in taking the time to lay things out in considerable detail with sources etc because it would seem it's not wanted. That's fine. I certainly don't expect them simply to roll over because we say so, although I think it IS unfortunate they seem to listen to all sorts of clamouring for frankly trivial things - hello 20" guns, or badly implemented flash fires (I pointed out the flaws in the implementation during testing before its general release, to no effect) - while remaining entirely silent on really crucial stuff such as the issue of damage con generally, and wonder zombie-creating bulkheads in particular. Clearly they will develop it as they wish without much reference to us, with all that entails. The things to which they DO seem to listen are almost always things that push the game away from more accurate representation of naval tech of these times, which I must confess I find both peculiar and disappointing given their claimed intentions. I can check ever month or so while spending my time on more rewarding endeavours. Win/win, LOL. Cheers all

Pretty crazy, isn't it?

I could, but am not going to. Why not? I should think that's obvious to anyone who's been around this forum (let alone this thread, LOL) for any length of time.

Suggested this aeons ago, although it's entirely understandable why they'd not put the effort in to do so, even if such effort ought to be minimal. At the very least it would be good if you could choose to enable a "return all guns to fore/aft train as standard after 'x' time" where you'd likely have time in minutes:seconds. From what I've seen, the only reason ships had their guns trained anywhere other than along the centreline was in foul weather where I've seen BBs with their guns pointed away from the wind/spray. Seen some interesting footage of some Brit BBs/BCs in foul weather with their guns trained off the centre, presumably for that reason. Included in a clip with HMS Hood on her post-refit trials in 1939. You get a sense of just why Hood was nicknamed (unofficially of course, lol) the largest submarine. One other thing it does is give you a sense of just how spectacular a sight she would have been IRL, for many years the largest and fastest capital ship in the world (which of course is not the same as necessarily the most powerful, although to call her 'weak' as some who seem to think her loss wasn't a spectacular fluke by Bismarck and that the battle of the Denmark Strait could've ended very differently do, is patently silly). It's entirely possible you'll have seen it already, but here it is. I'm pretty sure there's a glimpse of HMS Iron Duke, Jellicoe's flagship at Jutland, going past in the other direction, too. That's a pretty remarkable bit of film capturing 2 famous ships.