Jump to content
Game-Labs Forum

Friedrich

Members2
  • Posts

    57
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Friedrich

  1. These two parts are pretty obviously supposed to go together, so it's more than a little annoying that they can't.
  2. Diesel II provides a 75% boost to capacity, which is at least on par with induced draft boilers, but there's no bonus provided at all to gas turbines, which strikes me as odd since unless I'm mistaken gas turbines are quite efficient in terms of exhaust.
  3. Here's an example. As you can see the barrels don't actually intercept the middle super-firing turret even at 0 degree elevation, yet the hitbox is oversized thus preventing placement.
  4. Not sure why, but despite the UI going higher I was unable to create skirmisher or cavalry units larger than 450 800 men respectively, and artillery are capped at 20 guns. This is despite far larger unit sizes being shown as the maximum. No idea of the cause. Edit: Looks like it's just a visual bug caused by me having insufficient Army Org. The UI doesn't reflect the true limit of non-infantry units.
  5. There's a bit more to it than that, but in essence yes. Also, for additional components I'd like to see properly scaled components always present. For example, the German Superbattleship's superstructure and funnel aren't to the same scale, causing the models to be out of alignment. In that specific case a larger funnel is probably needed for gameplay reasons as well, since there's only room for the one funnel and even the largest one isn't enough to support the kinds of engines such a high tonnage ship requires. A lot of other components are a similar story, where you can tell that they are supposed to fit together in a certain way, but just don't. Fixing that is a relatively low priority, but among the low priority features/fixes it is one of the higher ones, at least in terms of proportionate effort.
  6. Fundamentally the issue is that adding more guns to a turret doesn't have any bearing on the size of your barrettes, so if your triple turret tech is reliable enough, there's literally no reason not to use triples. Even weight isn't a major factor since you can get more guns in fewer turrets for the same weight.
  7. Yeah, basically this. I get why it was done, but it still raises an eyebrow and would ideally not be how displacement worked.
  8. That is to say that they are a bow and stern with a slabsided hull between them. This is a uniquely american design characteristic which was only in place due to restrictions imposed by the panama canal. If one looks at british or german ships you'll see that, lacking this restriction, they have a very different overhead profile to their hulls. Have the devs commented on this yet?
  9. This sounds less like artillery and more like a scramjet missile with a gunlike launch platform. Interesting, but probably not revolutionary considering that the technologies presumably involved could be applied to current missile designs, thus making this a merely evolutionary change.
  10. If OP is still around could you add my own suggestions regarding turrets/guns to the list? I agree with so much of this and it would be nice to have everything in one place to refer back to.
  11. First, that was their ideal. The fatal shot shouldn't have been able to pull the plunging fire through the deck armor into the magazines at that range, though at a longer range it would've been vulnerable to just that. So b-lining it into their presumed zone of immunity was the only sane thing to do, wasting no speed on major turns. Second, at sufficient ranges slight adjustments are all you need. Third, what do you mean the escort carriers didn't have any guns in the fight? They were suckering them into 40mm range! Goddamn, Taffy 3 was awesome.
  12. Well first, most of the game takes place before then, so developments that only arise in the 40's are endgame content not representative of the 1890 to 1940 (not sure what the actual end date is, but it's 1940 in custom battles ATM) timeframe the game is set in. Second, that doesn't actually help, since you are mostly accounting for your own manuver, which just makes this tactic even more of a no brainer since now there's basically no downside to it. You don't even need to restrict yourself to slight course adjustments, you could be swerving and weaving your way through the oceans and since your own course and speed is far easier to know than your opponents, the fire control computers can account for it. By contrast a hostile doing the same couldn't be hit with anything but strays, since if they change speed and/or course every 30 seconds, and it takes about that long for your shots to arrive, it is literally impossible to hit them without relying on lucky shots going stray, the enemy captain forgetting to continue maneuvering, a saturation attack against every possible location the enemy could be once the shots arrive, or guided ordinance capable of making mid-flight course corrections. And even then there's a limit to how much can be done. Going back to my extreme example, the SR-71 was doing the exact same thing to evade guided hypersonic AA missiles, so I don't think a more advanced fire control is going to do anything to help you hit an evading target. It might make salvo chasing less optimal on the receiving end, (although correcting for rangefinding errors based off where shot are actually landing isn't going to go away... pretty much ever) but for the user it just makes your own manuvering not interfere with firing solutions, or at least not to anywhere near the same degree as it would otherwise. So instead of subtle corrections of only a few degrees you could be dodging torpedoes and still use your main guns at least somewhat effectively.
  13. That's not actually true. I think it was against Bismark where a British ship evaded her fire by making slight course corrections into the splashes of the last salvo. The result was that Bismark would fire her guns, and the shells would land pretty much right on top of where her target would've been had those adjustments not been made. Now obviously this only works at long ranges, does nothing against torpedoes, and makes your own firing solutions require somewhat more frequent range corrections, but it's a real tactic, and an effective one at that, performed during at least one peer engagement. Plus, if you are trying to open or close the range to your target the few disadvantages basically disappear.
  14. I'm not holding out much hope, seeing as none of the other Ultimate games got it, nor appear likely to receive it. Still, it's not like I'm happy about that, and a change in trajectory towards being more mod friendly would be a pleasant surprise.
  15. Yeah, the principle concern has to be with the foundational systems. Making super complicated stuff which tracks stockpiles of ammunition in detail and stuff like that isn't important for the base game, although the functionality to mod it in, and mod support in general, is something I would very much hope to see in the finished game. Not sure about the shell types you mentioned though. There's Armor Piercing, Semi-Armor Piercing, High Explosive, Star/Illumination-Shells... and that's about it. Unless we count special cases like the japanese diving shells, american super heavy shells, british supercharges, or really esoteric stuff like the non-rotating projectiles and super-heavy AA. Of course those last two are for anti air, which isn't even in the game, so it's not really relevant. The ones you mentioned are more tank ammo varieties/variations on the AP and HE shells, which might vary between nations, and occasionally guns/ships, but aren't really distinguished, tactically speaking.
  16. So basically mark would alter the fixed stats like range, muzzle velocity, rof, etc, while quality is more the variable stats like accuracy (of the guns, not your firing solutions). Actually now that I've articulated this, I really like the idea of this distinction, and think that shells, charges, barrels, etc should all have their own (semi-hidden) quality stats for historical authenticity. So Iowa would have mediocre charges, meaning it's main guns will have variable muzzle velocity and range giving them poor vertical accuracy (deviation in distance traveled, not angles) or Littorio having this up to absurd degrees and thus straddling literally every shot unless they get an actually tolerances batch at which point every salvo might as well be lasers for all the difference it will make in terms of accuracy. Bismark/WW1 Britain get unreliable shell fuzings (delayed/nonexistent and premature detonations respectively), WW2 Germany gets higher mark machinery that literally anyone else (who didn't copy/license them) but it's of stupidly low quality and as such will devour itself unless the crew is experienced in the arcane rituals required to appease the tempestuous machine spirits, etc. Not actually asking for this behavior in the game, just giving specific historical examples to illustrate how they could be modeled in game. I don't know any examples of low quality barrels, but that would obviously affect deviation in the initial shot trajectories and spin rate, which for the game I think are the same things. The "semi-hidden" thing is the idea that you might demand a certain quality, but you don't know what you actually got until you test it out, and if you aren't satisfied you're only option is to try again and hope that this time you roll better. So you are basically setting a quality control standard and paying the according premiums for it. For things like ammo and fuel (more so for coal than oil) this would be randomized at the start of each sortie, gun barrels whenever they are manufactured/installed, and things like the engines and hull you are just stuck with unless you intend to pull a Kongou class and rebuild the entire damn things from almost the keel up.
  17. The changes in course don't have to be as large at high speed, so even if the ship alters course by only a few degrees upon receiving fire, at 35+kn it should end up outside the typical spread of most ships at long range. I'm glad we agree on what the model ought to be though, and pleased that the current build is at least oriented in that direction. Does the ship AI actually perform balanced evasive maneuvering as I described, or is it not that responsive?
  18. What would the difference between quality and mark be? I presume mark has to do with things like barrel rifling and breach design, while quality has to do with the manufacture of them, but what would the actual effect be? Making barrel length separate from bore diameter is a no brainer and goes along with my own issues regarding turret/barbette diameter as things which really ought to have been part of the ship designer from the outset, although not quite to the same degree. They are important enough that the high changeover cost is worth it, and I will expect it to be made, but I don't envy the devs for having to rejigger so much in the process.
  19. Uh... that's problematic, since the US armor was not nearly as good as British or German armor of the WW2 period. If Class B is Krupp IV, British and German armor would be a VI or VII. I can't remember if US armor was 85% of British, or if the British was an 85% improvement, but either way it's a pretty significant improvement.
  20. I'd like to echo some of the more popular suggestions made here, and also echo one of my own, RE: turret/barbette rings being erroneously conflated with gun caliber, for more visibility. I think you are failing to take into account the effect of changes in direction at high speed. The more you have to lead to account for your target's speed, the easier it is for them to simply alter course and be in a completely different post code by the time your shells actually arrive. After a certain point your calculations don't even matter, since if your target is actively evading, even if just turning towards your shell splashes, actually landing a hit is literally impossible unless you get lucky with one of your strays. So there are two factors at play here. The first is the accuracy of your firing solution and shots, that being how close your point of aim is to where the ship actually would end up, assuming course (or rate of change in course, if we are shooting at Bismark) and speed remain constant. The other half of that is just how well you execute, so whether your guns all fire at the correct target, how tight their shot groupings are, etc. The second, and this is where high target speeds become relevant, is if your solution is even still relevant once those shots actually arrive. The extreme example is the SR-71 Blackbird. That thing zipping along at mach 3+ can't turn for ****, but if it wants to evade it doesn't have to. All the pilot needs to do is make slight, random alterations in course and suddenly if you want to land a hit, your only hope is to launch a saturation attack which simultaneously aims at just about every location the Blackbird could possibly be once your shots arrive. And with the plane moving so fast that set of locations is going to span hundreds of square kilometers, not even accounting for the vertical aspect. Now ships move along what, for our purposes, may as well be a 2D plane, and at only two digits of knots, things are nowhere near this extreme; but the same principles still apply.
  21. Tell me about it. I'm not even sure it's a good model kit either. See my complaints about gun/turret/barbette sizes or how some mounting points (on light cruisers mostly) aren't even usable due to being out of bounds.
  22. No, that's hull displacement, another matter entirely. Although the ability to build ships overweight to a certain extend, with the consummate penalties which come along with that, would be nice. No, this is a restriction of the hull's designed displacement. The This hull can be designed for a 17kt displacement, but the game is arbitrarily restricting you to 13.5kt because... reasons. Designing a 17kt displacement ship that only uses 13.5kt of its displacement and leaves the rest as reserve would be interesting, but shouldn't be mandated by the game and in either case that's not what's happening here.
  23. Exactly this, minus the quad turrets since triple and quads were a pain to get working even ignoring size. Single, twin, and triple are still relevant though. And if it would be a major change... well I'm sorry, but it was the dev's mistake to commit to such a grossly limiting and historically dubious model for the game. It isn't so much about refits as it is about hull capabilities. Ideally there should be a way to alter engine, magazine, belt, etc coverage/usage of a given ship's hull, and this would determine the relevant capabilities of the ship and where there was room for barbettes and such. That isn't applicable as of right now, but what is of import is deckspace utilization. If nothing else, it looks ugly as sin to see a barbette which is massively oversized for the turret you're mounting on it, yet there's literally nothing you can do, since the you can't make the barbette smaller, and the size of the turret is somewhere in the range of a typical 2 or 3 gun turret of that caliber, so your options are extremely limited if you want something that looks even vaguely historical/aesthetic/realistic. It also makes real world design considerations irrelevant. I'm not sure which ship exactly it was, but one of the US standards had a 3 gun turret superfiring over 2 gun turrets arrangement since the hull forward of the superfiring 3 gun turret was too narrow to fit more than the two. As the game stands, this would either be represented as the ship having more than enough deckspace for a 3x4 gun arrangement, or as the ship requiring two different calibers of gun, since nothing matters except for caliber, and it doesn't matter if your mountings have one gun or three, they still take up the same space.
  24. That's why I mentioned turrets which could be oversized or undersized. There's generally some ideal size of barbette for a given gun layout, but you can go a bit bigger or smaller to try and cram in more gun.
  25. Alternation? If you mean alteration, that is that rather than turrets be placed by going "bore diameter>no. of barrels" they should be placed with "turret ring diameter>gun caliber>no. of barrels". Having deliberately oversized turrets like with Mogami or Scharnhorst would be edge addition, but depicting turrets as being more proportionate to the number of guns they house would be the big one. A single 18 inch gun isn't going to be massively bigger than a triple 16, yet currently that's how it works, since the ship builder conflates the caliber of gun with size of turret, which can get pretty silly. It also makes module placement somewhat more difficult than it ought to be and limits options by radically inflating the deckspace efficiency of multi-gun turrets. Which is saying a lot, since there is quite a lot of efficiency to be found anyways.
×
×
  • Create New...