Seleukos of Olympia

What I like to do is use some destroyers or light cruisers to divert the attention of the enemy battleships. Let them try to hit my fast little escorts from a distance and maybe zigzag to avoid some long range torpedoes. If an escort gets hit, they're cheap anyway. Meanwhile, my own battleships focus their firepower on theirs, so they can cripple them before taking much damage in return. This is useful when facing more or more advanced battleships than I've got in the particular battle.

I noticed some missing flags (Croatia, Tibet, Xinjiang) but I can't recall if I had checked those countries before and if they had flags then. Tibet and Xinjiang are landlocked, so they're not important, but Croatia is my ally and it's weird seeing that blank placeholder flag everywhere.

It's also been my experience that submarines are weirdly efficient at countering enemy submarines, at least in a game I've been playing with a 1930 start. Is it realistic? No. Is it practical? Eh, I guess.

Does government type have any effect on the game, other than cosmetic?

"The only time a submarine beat the Royal Navy's destroyer screen". Ironically, the very next year a German submarine would sink the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle, on its way to Malta, when it was surrounded by no less than 32 destroyers and other escorts. These things happened. They just didn't happen every month. And the submarines, in those two cases at least, were 1940 models, so much newer than the capital ships they sunk.

Yeah, battles have definitely improved.

It wasn't an issue in the last version before 1.4. I played on it extensively and the AI only ran away when it was heavily outmatched - and sometimes not even then.

I had been playing on a pre-1.4 version until now, because I had a campaign going and didn't want to lose my saves there before I could play it out as much as I wanted. I finally updated the game today and tried "Dreadnoughts vs Modern Cruisers", a naval academy mission that was fiendishly difficult in the previous version, because the AI could massively outspend and outgun the player. I hadn't managed to get anywhere near winning it before, so I thought I'd see how it is in the new version. This time, things appeared more balanced - I was able to design two battleships with advanced tech instead of one, and that give me a very significant fighting chance. Unfortunately, the AI doesn't seem inclined to oblige. It will run away outside not only my firing range but also theirs, and stay there because their ships are faster than mine. And this in a mission where it's stated that the "enemy will never retreat"! There's clearly something amiss.

I wonder if it's a camera positioning effect. The cruiser ought to be around 50% longer than the destroyer for those displacements.

I'm sure I've had over +2000%, but hadn't thought to take a screenshot. The last battle I played, I noticed I was up to 371.8% at one point.

93 hours into the game I've been enjoying my first campaign, but there's one thing in particular that's been irking me: The info panel in the world map contains two lines of completely irrelevant information for that level (since it doesn't affect my actions on the world map) but lacks something I find myself needing to check constantly: shipbuilding capacity. Whenever a ship gets damaged or I accept to build one for an ally I have to check the finances screen to make sure I'm within capacity, otherwise I have to put something on hold because going even a little over capacity can cause long delays in everything else. It would be very handy to have that information on the world map panel. That way it might even be visible whenever someone asks to commission a ship, and I usually have no idea whether it would put me over the limit. On another note - I'm not sure whether it's a UI issue but I'd rather not start another thread for it - whenever I move ships to a port, more often than not they'll end up somewhere very near that port but not in the port itself. I usually have to give them new movement orders to get them to actually move in. Each time, my cursor would be highlighting the port's info panel, which I've been taking to mean that it's selecting the port as its destination. If that's not the case, it may be an actual UI problem if it's giving the wrong impression.

I believe when you click on a tech you can't yet research it highlights the tech you need to unlock it. That's how I found out how to get French re-bored guns.

Good to hear!

After Copenhagen, I now have over 8000 prisoners, costing me over 8000 per turn. I'm already at -48k per turn and have to survive on mission rewards. If they could just vanish, that would be a good thing, financially! I'd sell some Ardent-class ships to remedy my monetary shortfall, but I have no way of knowing how many I'll need in the future.

I've played up to Camperdown so far, and in the past few battles I've faced nothing but Ardent-class third rates - often in large battles with ten or twenty of them on the opposing side. Is that intentional or a placeholder for more varied enemy fleets? Even without adding new classes like the OP suggested, couldn't there be more of the existing classes used, like the Bellona?

This is something I've only encountered in one battle, earlier today, but I figured I'd write a post because I figured out how to work around it. At some point late in the battle (Camperdown), one of my ships stopped receiving wind in its sails. They could be perfectly positioned to catch it, but they just hang limply while other nearby ships sailed gracefully. So the ship could only very slowly turn as it remained otherwise useless. I figured out that this could be fixed by putting the ship under AI control; and it stayed fixed after reverting to my control. It happened to a couple of other ships soon afterwards and was resolved the same way.

I don't think I've been able to do anything with my prisoners ever since the French Revolution, and it's now 1801. I don't know whether that's intentional or not, but they keep accumulating and costing me money to feed.

Spain also uses its 1785 flag prior to that, but overall I don't particularly mind. There could be design limitations on switching between flags for different periods.

I've seen the HMS Asia, the lead British ship at the Battle of Navarino, referred to as a second rate, and that was constructed in 1824. But I suppose the definition of rates had changed by then, right?

Thanks, that clears it up for me.

Having captured a single Endymion-class frigate from the French, and having assessed its capabilities, I find it a little odd that it's categorized as 5th rate. My historical understanding is that it was considered so when it had 40 guns, but was subsequently reclassified as a 50-gun 4th rate. The model we use in the game has 52 guns and weighs 1500, which is closer to a small 3rd rate than most 5th rates. I haven't played the American campaign yet, but I think super-frigates are considered 4th rate. Should that also apply to the Endymion?

Here's something that has been mildly annoying me at times and which I think can be easily improved. Say you have a line of battle and you move a ship out of it. All the ships behind it keep following the lead ship in the line. But what if you want to remove the lead ship? You then have to reassign every other ship to the one behind it. What if assigning a ship to another ship or another direction made all the ones behind it follow that ship instead of the first one? If you want to remove it from the line, you could then easily select the ship behind it and click on the ship in front of it. That's one click instead of however many it takes to remake a line once the lead ship has to leave it.

It does look like you keep the guns of trophies you send to the admiralty. I don't remember whether that was the case before. Edit: Those were probably the guns of the trophy I kept, unless something has already changed from yesterday. I may have gotten confused because I kept one and sent off the other.

There have been indications that they will consider it after the game is out of beta but not before.

Grenadiers seem to have better stats overall, so I expect they'd be consistently better than fusiliers as they gain experience. I haven't looked into the price difference, though.