MishaTX

That would be your mains going after the biggest threat (and easiest to hit), so that makes sense. Your secondaries should be pounding away at the small targets, that's what their job is. If you're ever in a situation where you need your, say, 14"ers to engage DDs getting close, then that ship needs a refit.

Oh, the Ghost Battles are back in full force and Auto Resolve is just plain silly. If I try to engage a task force of 3 TBs with my entire fleet, they run away (understandably so), but if I decide to forgo the nonsense of entering battle, then telling my entire fleet to retreat so I don't have to wait for the End Battle button for so long, and select "Auto Resolve" instead, half my task force takes severe damage from those three TBs who somehow manage to penetrate my screen of 6 CLs and 8 DDs, the very same ships they were fleeing from earlier. Seriously??? And, to add insult to injury, if I retreat, more often than not my entire task force relocates to a random port, interrupting my invasion and forcing me to have to put them together again after they "fled" in terror of three Chinese TBs. *Slams head on desk.* Would it be impossible to keep the "player only allowed to have DDs and, perhaps, a borrowed CL" mission generator from generating missions that the AI has no intention of fighting?

Same here. It would be nice if that could be implemented for when I'm scrapping an entire design, but then it would definitely need a "confirm, y/n?" popup. Oh, imagine the howls the first time somebody multi-selects a dozen BBs and accidentally hits "scrap" without a confirmation popup. I'd be able to hear them from my house! 😁

I would prefer 1890 starts because I like to watch things unfold as much as possible, but the almost mandatory rush for Induced Boilers every game so I can build even halfway useful ships annoys me, so I tend to start in 1900.

Glad you did, because I was getting quite tired of ghost battles. I just don't understand why the devs don't just put a simple calculation in when battles are generated going something along the lines of "OK, AI won't want to fight this and he can outrun the player, don't offer the battle." Or, better still, make them slightly less cowardly like you did. But I'm pretty sure that the fact that they're not as behind as in vanilla also has something to do with it. Now I just need to "git gud" 😁

I figured that was it. Been playing vanilla for too long and become complacent 😀 Also, and this might be me, too, but it's a welcome change to be sure: The AI doesn't seem to run as often as it does in vanilla. Could have to do with them not feeling woefully outclassed so much with the mod. Thanks for your reply and, again, great job!

Man, I must really suck at this game, because the AI seems DEADLY with this mod. They never miss, well hardly ever, and when they hit I pretty much lose a ship every time. Sure, when I hit, the damage is quite convincing as well, it just seems to me that they hit much more often on 2% chance than I do (checked it in a simple one on one battle where our accuracy was roughly equal, did it over a couple of times too). I take it you didn't change AI accuracy, but only worked on the overall values? If so, I guess I either suck or just had a series of battles with really, really bad RNG. Both are equally likely 🙂

I appreciate the latest pen fix, as well as the "downgrade" from 1.2.2. It was silly. I was penning 60" armor with SAP before, now I actually have to think about my ammo choices again. Thanks! I appreciate all that you do! One ask, though: Could we have it so that ammo choice changes were instant rather than taking a month? I get it that changing the armor, gun layout etc requires a refit in port, but surely changing the type of ammo that your ships carry shouldn't take that long?

Interesting. At least it would be one example where AMD users had an advantage (I don't mean quality wise, but coding wise). It's just such a pity, because this game is so much fun and graphically awesome, but every time I see a battle pop up that involves more than a couple dozen ships, I'm like "oh no, here we go again, slideshow time. And I can't just auto-resolve it either, because the AI is an absolute genius when it comes to those. I'll never forget when I made the mistake of auto-resolving another ghost battle facing two DDs with an overwhelming fleet and thought "why bother?" I should have, because those two DDs managed to sink one of my BBs, damage another heavily and send another three or four to dry dock for months. Anyway, I just wish the coding could be fixed so I don't have to hate big battles.

Because I can't really see it. I'm running an 11th gen i5 with 16GB and a 3070, and the stutter is pretty annoying in large battles. Any tips as to what I might be doing wrong? Changing settings doesn't seem to do anything.

Yeah, might want to give it a day or two as the 1.2.1 update introduced a slew of interface bugs (don't seem to impact the game, though) that they'll most likely push a new update for quickly. Love your work, by the way!! Finally had a shot at trying it out in a proper longish campaign, so a huge thank you for your work!

OK, so silly question, I'm assuming you mean "how it affects other research". I can see that and yes, it cuts it significantly for areas that will otherwise take a long time to research (by the way, thank you SO much for revealing what I'm actually researching sooner!) I just need to know whether it's viable at all to rush research, because otherwise I'll just readjust my play style 😊

Quick question, since I haven't really tested the long term ramifications of this mod enough yet, but I do love what you've done so far and greatly appreciate your hard, unpaid work to the benefit of us all: Your tweaks to the research system, do they make it much harder to, through careful prioritization, both in using the priorities function itself and through devoting as much of your budget as you can to research, gain an advantage over the AI? I'm asking this for two reasons: First, I'm the type of wargamer who likes to "turtle", as I believe it's called, or "building high." It won't help me for the longest time because my quantity will be way behind everybody else's, but I'll reap the benefits later (if I manage to balance it correctly and survive that long, that is). Second, will prioritizing (talking about the three priorities you can assign in game now) actually hurt more than they will help with the mod? Better, same or worse? I understand that it's always meant that prioritizing one will slow down all the others, so this may be a general question as well, because if prioritizing one will hurt the others so much that you'll lose out overall, then what's the point? But mainly, and I do understand that a lot of you who have been playing this game for years now long for an AI that can out-design you for a better challenge, I just don't want to gimp myself and make it impossible/almost impossible to get ahead. At a cost, of course. Because then I might as well just leave the research budget to itself and forget about that whole aspect of the game. Thanks again for the work you do!

Have to amend my initial assessment too. Next major battle, enemies seemed to surrender at the same rate as previous. Must have been something about the way I fought the first that made it different. Just putting this out there so nobody gets any wrong assumptions.

This only based on the first battle in the British campaign after the latest patch, so subject to change deeper in. It does, however, seem that I won't really need the "kill prisoners" command anymore since they rarely surrender now. They still fight as you would expect untrained militia to fight, which is to say not very well, but their courage seems to have gone up quite a bit. They're almost all French Foreign Legionnaires now (minus the skill), fighting until the last man, then shattering. Not much of an issue in the British campaign where you can buy all your stuff with the piles of cash that His Majesty throws at you, but it might make the American campaign quite a bit more challenging. We'll see

That's exactly what I was looking for, thanks

Something I find confusing is the timing of the point of interest missions, meaning when do they finish so I get my ships and troops back? Quite important as it helps me determine which ships I can afford to send on these missions without ending up missing a key ship or two when a major battle has to be fought.

I agree. I'm even willing to swear that there is more than one example of exactly that happening. They strike, and suddenly the ship they struck to gets dismasted, distracted, sails off in an entirely different direction. Makes sense for them to say "hey, this is different, how about we rejoin the fight?" Even more so because they're still in possession of a ship and whatever weapons were left on her, unlike the case of the surrendered prisoners suddenly plucking muskets off a nearby tree to rejoin. Or perhaps they got them from the rescuing unit. Everybody knows that infantry carried three spare muskets a man just in case they came upon a surrendered unit they needed to rearm 😉

It's not whether or not it's doable, so much as it is my innate hatred of all things RNG 😉 On a serious note, though, it feels like a bad roll forces me into a play style that I can't escape because no available ship turned up for purchase. I mean, it's not like it being available comes without a cost. I still have to spend resources on buying and equipping her that I could spend otherwise. And, as was mentioned earlier, I can't even get "around" it by voluntarily stripping one of my ships of cannon and refitting her for a transport. So it's not that I don't like new and unplanned for circumstances, that is indeed what makes for replayability, it's more that I DO like having choices, if that makes sense.

That was the whole thing, really. I still won and got the appropriate rewards, it's just the summary screen was a bit confusing. No huge deal, just a bit of cosmetics. 🙂

I'd like to second that. A bit of RNG is OK, but when it creates a situation like the one I'm in right now where I should optimally use two troop ships but can't because one has never shown up in the pool, it makes me grumble at least a bit.

Sorry I forgot to F11 this one, I'll be better about it in the future. I just finished Dinner for the Admiral and ended up rescuing the Walpole, capturing the Santa Rita and, well, the San Juan Bautista struck her colours, the coward thus making it impossible to sink her as required. Here's where it gets confusing, though. In the post battle screen the result was listed as a victory, but the goals were marked with red crosses as if they failed (due to the San Juan not being sunk, I assume). Near as I can tell, I was rewarded as if it was a victory, and I now have San Juan Bautista as a prize, which is nice. Not dissatisfied, just a bit confused is all. P.S.: Whoa, that beefed up Walpole! No more sending off a longboat to recapture her now! Keep up the good work!

I did. Talked me into it, thanks a million. My family may never see me again 😉 Yes, I'm having a blast on the PvE server right now while learning how to fight my ship properly. Only beef is I wish the AI would react to me in some way, much like the AI does in, say, E:D. It feels a bit surreal for me to go snatch a Spanish NPC trader, only to pass by a Spanish NPC fleet minutes later without as much as a frown in my general direction. Or sailing straight through pirate territory with two trade ships full of goods without worries. Enough OT from me. Also still loving UA:AoS. As I said, I may never see my family again.

After a mere hour with the game, once it had finished downloading, I can say with quite some confidence that you're right. I had a blast! (So did the Spaniards, but not in a good way). I was slightly dismayed, however, when I learned that apparently there is no mid battle save function as I was called away for other duties. Oh well, I get to beat the Spaniards again!

I've been sorely tempted. However, I'm not really interested in MP, too many squeakers, griefers, casuals and assorted other dregs of humanity there, and I wasn't quite sure how much fun a game designed for MP would be in SP. But the temptation has been great, since it's one of my favorite periods in history.