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.