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Blothorn

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Landsmen

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  1. Comparing AoN and turtleback is a bit misleading--you can conceivably have an AoN turtleback ship (although I don't know of any), and can definitely have a non-AoN non-turtleback ship.
  2. It still takes a lot of hits to sink a ship, but I normally see pretty steady progress. Last update I remember putting dozens of shots into ships without their damage meters budging at all (despite gaudy floating damage texts), I think from damage to already-destroyed compartments being ignored for total structural damage. I'm now seeing, I think, that individual compartments are harder to kill so when a ship is near destruction there are more still-living compartments to be damaged. Although it now seems really hard to knock out turrets--even full penetrations from main-caliber guns don't do the job. I've almost never seen a DD killed by anything other than a main-battery or torpedo hit, and have mostly abandoned secondaries in consequence. (The fact that destroyers are extremely difficult to hit and secondary guns have poor accuracy doesn't help.) That said, I think secondaries would be much more useful if they could target ships independently of the main battery--I'd tolerate the long TTK of secondaries if I didn't have to stop shooting the enemy capital ships while they did their work. On a related note, is it possible to manually assign separate targets for ships in a division? Whenever I manually target all ships change target so distribution of fire only seems possible by getting really lucky with automatic target selection. This also compounds with the inability to target secondaries independently--in order to deal with destroyers I need to either split up groups or shift the entire division's fire to a single destroyer.
  3. 8" guns were a product of treaty, not a finding of design optimum. (6" guns were encouraged by treaty but are at more of a natural threshold in terms of the complexity of the loading system). Without a treaty to enforce it, the AI's tendency to upgun makes sense.
  4. I doubt this is a priority as it very rarely happened historically--I recall one instance at Guadacanal and nothing else. There's a lot more sea than ship, so a sensible CEP around a target is usually not going to encompass much else. (And a CEP approach isn't very realistic--fire control errors dominate ballistic inconsistency at naval ranges, and fire control errors aren't random.)
  5. I'd note that you often get more realistic results out of a statistical model than a trajectory simulation--the trajectory simulation will omit/simplify some factors of necessity, and it's difficult to ensure that they roughly cancel out. That said, I don't much like a lot of the numbers at least as of the present alpha--in particular, size seems overweighted and platform stability underweighted. (More specifically, small ships get too much of their evasiveness from size, not maneuver--a zig-zagging CL should be hard to hit at 15,000 yards when time-of-flight matters and the danger space is narrow, but in a straight broadside at 1000 yards it shouldn't be that much harder to hit than a BB.)
  6. The other black-powder war that deserves some consideration would be the Seven Years' War--perhaps the height of linear tactics (as strictly defined), fought across perhaps the second-greatest geographic extent of any war. My preferences also depend on whether the large-battle system (or campaign generally) could be made more dynamic. Leipzig with a UGG-style set of dependent scenarios could be amazing; Leipzig with a UGCW-style railroaded progression an exercise in frustration. Moreover, both Napoleon and Frederick were masters of the campaign as much, if not more, than of the battlefield--seeking favorable engagements, keeping superior forces divided and defeating them in detail, etc. Extending play to the campaign map would make a huge difference to either the Seven Years' or Napoleonic wars. Conversely, if we are stuck with UGCW-style scripting, a war that featured smaller battles (to mitigate immersion-breaking scripting) and more pitched battles (to reduce regret at not having a campaign map) would seem more attractive.
  7. I am very impressed by the realism, given the fairly simple combat model--morale is important and nuanced, etc. One QoL issue that has caused me several ragequits thus far: hard map edges are problematic but hard to do away with for units already on the field, but cause problems when reinforcing mid-battle: multiple battles now I have had cavalry suffer severe losses because infantry spawned almost on top of them (in open ground, so they should have seen them a long way off). Two possibilities: set a map edge for in-play units inside the edge of the displayed map (for battles with in-battle reinforcements) but spawn reinforcements at the outer map edge, or have reinforcements arrive on a not-displayed extension of the map, calculate visibility to them, and show the player an icon on the edge of the map when they are visible.
  8. I think throwing actual historical ships against each other in an untiered world would be bad, but I can think of many ways around that. In particular, a game could abstract from historical progression while combining elements from across the time period. The all-big-gun battleship was not an undiscovered gamewinner during the pre-dreadnought era--its dominance was enabled by advances in loading procedures and equipment for big guns that reduced the RoF advantage of quick-firing guns and developments in fire control that allowed combat at ranges at which the ballistic inferiority of lighter projectiles became problematic. (I recall a USN study that showed a 12" gun hitting at a higher absolute frequency than a 6" gun at ~15,000 yards.) Nuanced settings of the relationship between shell weight and RoF, optimum engagement ranges, and the damage model may give intermediate batteries a place. Based on the recognition images shown, this may be what the devs are aiming for--those anachronistically mix an early hull form and intermediate batteries with superfiring and three-gun turrets. And of course there is the option of following historical progression in an SP campaign game or tiering ships in an arena-style game.
  9. @admin I have been doing a lot of research on the period for a naval-focused alt-history worldbuilding project--I would be eager to discuss/share anything I can. (Particular interests--historical fire control, approximations of hydrodynamic properties, and effect of gunfire.)
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