7thGalaxy

The game's in alpha, not yet balanced because it's not yet feature complete. I imagine speed in general will be balanced better at some point.

I'm really struggling with cruisers needed, the enemy BB is seriously strong, I've been attempting to build fast CL with strong torp attacks, but get blown out of the water each time. Does anyone have any tips? The bb is incredibly fast and accurate, half of the time it destroys the allied BB before I can do anything about it.

We're straying into philosophy here, to be precise epistemology, but the short answer is no. To make value judgements you need context, even if there were no other naval games and this was the first you'd simply be comparing to real life. afaik no major religion claiming to objective truth has ruled either way regarding the placement of secondary turrets.

I was thinking about this yesterday when trying to torp a battleship with some light cruisers. Is it worth taking evasive action? With longer range battles the flight time of the shells is enough with a nimble ship to have moved considerably from where the enemies fire computer would have calculated. But if the hit odds are rolled at the firing point how does that work?

A few more bits of feedback: Damage to ship needs to have impact on fire rate and accuracy. When there is a large fire near a turret those things got hot and unworkable. The damage from smaller shells to the deck structure of the ships needs to be upped; I was fighting a BC with 3, 4x4 9inch CA, each firing 3 times a minute; they would have shredded the superstructure. How often irl did destroyers or cl make suicide torp runs? Not that often, I imagine, yet it happens frequently.

In a sense this is the case even with a detailed simulation surely?

I guess the difference is that in xcom you make relatively few rolls, whilst in ua:d you make thousands. Over thousands of rolls things should average out. That's not to rule out the odd extraordinary thing: the 8 inch shell that breaks the turret traverse, or sparks a fire that grows out of control. The 6 inch that takes out the bridge and causes a c2 loss and a crash into another ship. A morale system is needed for this really: in reality a CA would run hard from a battleship, the balance of odds are well against a lucky strike. The odds are against the BB missing every time. It's just not worth the risk.

Personally I like it a lot. I've got a good 20 hours out of it thus far, I think the campaign will add a lot if done properly. Currently the challenges provide enough interest although there are a few too many "build a big ship and shoot up a load of old ships" missions, and the whole thing is slightly random due to the ai ship designer. There's a lot of potential here, I hope they follow through. There are a few glaring weaknesses; the designer needs some balancing, polishing and some rework around how much flexibility the player has. The fleet ai is pretty poor. But I'd say it's worth it.

To be honest this is pretty much what happened in real battles isn't it? There's way too much investment in a capital ship to risk it, so unless forced it's better to retreat and regroup and look for decisive advantage. If a ship took 10% structural damage irl it would be retreating sharpish. If anything there should be lower win criteria than destroy all enemy ships. Hopefully the campaign will bring this out.

So I've got a battleship dueling a few cruisers at about 12 km. I've got 3 quad 15 inch turrets. The odds of hitting per barrel are purportedly about 4%, giving combined odds of one hit per salvo at about 40%. I'd expect, therefore, a hit just over every three salvos. I'm actually getting a lot lower than that: about every 6. I get that there is rng involved but the odds are rolled so often that it should tend to even out. Either the calculations of the odds are wrong, or the simulation of the shells. I suspect the later: I get that these are moving targets but the computation on the fire control was pretty sophisticated, and the guns accurate.

They're grouped differently in the guns list, do they share the locked on bonuses?

For the purposes of aiming, are a 2 barrel and a 3 barrel mount of the same calibre and shell counted as the same? If not, they really ought to be. Otherwise you get a penalty for the perfectly reasonable and often seen design of making the top Barbette weapons lighter.

A few suggestions from my play this far. I'm sure most of them have been mentioned before 1) more flexible placement of secondary barbettes! This is a sort of minimum change, in general more flexibility of placement of everything, and more modular hulls/superstructure would be good. 2) some sort of system of morale, there's no way, for example, that a BB would continue fighting until sunk every time. Fire and damage near weapons should reduce effectiveness (of that weapon). High list should render the whole ship inoperable. 3) formations need a lot of work. Why does the lead ship randomly change after some damage? That should be a player decision. We need to be able to organise into divisions before battle. We need some formation orders (such as all ships in line turn 180 degrees) we need more sensible manoeuvres from one formation to another. Ships in formation should be able to manoeuvre to avoid torps or other ships, then rejoin. 4) fire arcs shown on battle map 5) compass around ship (toggleable) 6) how about the game shares successful human designs and uses them as ai designs?

Can you confirm this? I've been reducing my armour as I've upped the techs!