TBRSIM

I am out for the 1.06 cycle and likely for about a year. It is just not fun. Pitch/Roll and weight center calculations are massively off. One cannot design decent 1890's ships. The citadel mechanism is a nice idea but implementation is a catastrophy. Even unarmored TB's have a "citadel" which massively affects their design. Pitch/Roll/Weight Center calculations are unrealistically punishiung at the moment. And that is just the designer. The spotting mechanism is still hopelssly mired in an arcade concept. With the additional encyption of the savegame one cannot generate fun any more by editing money/tech and ameliorating the current immaturity of the campaign game. This also makes me apprehensive for the future. Luckily RTW3 is coming to Steam in October. The "better" graphics presentation of UA:Dreadnoughts does not matter if the fundamentals stay as broken as they are now.

They only work with new ships, some even do not work if you start the new design as a copy of an old one.

Thankfully, like in RTW, modding the campaign by going into the save file is quite easy. Money, income, shipyard, tech and campaign length (by editing respect of the losing AI and the VP) can be easily modded. This greatly enhances my enjoyment of the game, as it does for RTW. I would call this kind of access essential. But when I want to play as e.g. USA vs. Britain (or Japan vs. USA) everything, including ship design, works until I go to the next turn after having built the initial fleet. Then the turn progress gets stuck at "Update Relationships". Going back to main menu unfreezes and Continue Campaign loads the next month, albeit without any battles. Only time this did not happen with modded nations was when I as the player had not built any ships and in turns where a blockade commenced. In the latter case I even had a campaign battlehip duel USN vs. RN... I have searched the campaign save file and did not find any incongrous obvious errors (such as having missed modding the relationships section). Anybody got an idea?

GET RID OF AHISTORIC ARCADEY WOWS MECHANICS! 1. Priority one needs to be fixing spotting. This means "copying" the RTW approach with separate optical and radar detection. Needs adding a set of "smoke columns", "radar contact" and "unidentified ship" graphics that would gradually resolve into the 3D ship when in visual range and identified. Combat Mission has been doing this quite well with tanks for decades. One thing in spotting you are already doing better than RTW is tactical RF-DF, so there is some innovation there. 2. Revamp ballistics. You have already done most of what is needed with the first major ballistics revamp. The remaining thing to be done is to separate accuracy (aimpoint precision, i.e. does the ship aim at the correct and point measured in distance to the current "true" predicted position after shell time of flight) and precision (the width and length individual spread pattern ellipse around the aimpoint). And do this for every "battery" seprately of course. Aim progress (depending on tech in range finders, directors, predictors and doctrine) would improve accuracy but not presision (that would depend mostly on turret/gun technology, gun control technology like central electrical firing, stable elements etc, and, of cource, the distance to the aim point). Ideally, very early on with primitive tech this should be done (with really bad results for any longer distance) individually for every gun, this would remain so within the game's timeframe for certain small gun installations and would look very much like early "gun farm" designs in the game currently do anyways.

And anyways, the interference effect would be on precision (pattern size), not accuracy (aimpoint distance to actual target position at time of impact). But the game does not (yet?) model precision and accuracy separately, which is a shame. Sometimes too much precision is even a bad thing since it can reduce hit probability per salvo if accuracy is low.

You can use the speedhack function of CheatEngine to adjust game speed up- and downwards. This is a stopgap but it works.

For all of you who do feel the game speed "drags", speedhack also works to speed up game speed. I use the function in Cheat Egine but there are alternatives out there. My go to is a hotkey I have defined to speed up the game to 20x speed, giving me 60x even if the game restricts to 3x.

+1

Those were station cruisers (avisos, Kanonenboote, colonial cruisers, Stationsschiffe...) not built for war, i.e. to challenge or maintain sea control, but to exercise sea control and project power in those far off areas where the sun shines more strongly than at home and where "peace" just meant white people (mostly) did not shoot at each other but everyone else was more or less fair game. They also served, more peacefully, as afloat "embassies" in some places. Granted, the golden age of gunboats was more moral when they were the mainstay of the Royal Navy's effort to end the slave trade. The "steam gunboat" saw first combat in the 1840s with the West Africa Squadron. But it became central to the fight against ocean-borne slavery after the Atlanic slave trade was effectively ended in the never fully accomplished effort to end slaving in the Indian Ocean and Red Seafrom with peak effort in the 1860s to 1890s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunboat#Steam_era

"Large Torpedo Boat" (Hochseetorpedoboot) is essentially what the Kaiserliche Marine called its early destroyers, so classifying them ingame under "DD" is correct. The first Hochseetorpedoboot Class was a reaction to and contemporary to the first British and French torpedoboat destroyers, in fact same size as the British (with the choice of one more TT for one less gun, reflecting KM doctrinal focus on torpedo armament, this is also the reason for the late adoption of the "Zerstörer" name) and significantly superior to the French. However, the "torpedo boat destroyer" should likely also be classed DD.

Yes, totally concur. Current spotting, even more than "accuracy" mechanism and the "angling for ricochets" is so jarringly arcadey that it suspends the suspension of disbelief. This mechanism is so divorced from reality (i.e. tries to simulate/abstract something that is not even there in reality) that it is the part which bugs me about the game as is massively. Mostly because I have been an active duty naval officer and have quite some experience in how well (or badly) you can see at sea (NPI) under very different conditions. The current "spotting" mechanism "might" work, with some re-work focusing on the basics (i.e. look at what aspects of reality you want to simulate/abstract, not what kind of gameply mechanism you want to preserve from early programming) for night/fog action but not at all for anything close to average daylight conditions, even the sub-average winter/autumn conditions in the Baltic and North Sea. Until we get diesels and/or gas turbines visual range from spotter position (i.e. eye height) equals detection range for both sides. If anything a battleship, with its higher masts and larger crews (i.e. more dediccatred spotters on watch higer up), could "sight" a TB/DD/CL earlier (since the smaller ship would only have the top opf the mast above the horizon when its hull is visible to the lookouts on the battleship mast. But the smoke from oil, and especially coal, propulsion simply would serve to "guide" the lookout's eyes to what part of the other ship is above the horizon. As is the easiest abstraction for spotting range is what RTW does, have a "spotting range" as a weather condition that is shared by all ships. Modify by directionality (sunrise/sunset, glare etc.) and, at night, have firing guns and fires onboard (as well as, may I hope, searchlights and flares) modify spotting range dynamically and have crew experience influence speed of classification (i.e. target or friendly) and identification (as is in game, i.e. what type of ship, what class of ship etc.). Heck, every other naval computer wargame (Fighting Steel, Distant Guns Series, Age of Sail series) did this right. Frankly, but for this game "World of Warships" is the only other naval computer game I know of that gets visual spotting so massively wrong.

AFAIK there is no historic example for any warship taking more than three heavyweight (i.e. full size, for the time, surface ship or submarine torpedoes) torpedo hits and not sink... Musashi was likely sinking well before the number of torpedo hits went double digits, even with the smaller warheads of aerial toroedoes and contact fusing. The sinking of a hardened warship however can take a dozen hours or more (and be sped up by pile-on attacks).

No, they were not "more effective", but they were considered, at the time, a co-equal weapon system due to their ROF/PEN/Range combination closing a capability gap of main guns in the 1880-1905 timeframe. This however was NOT true anymore beyond that, even though some navies did take about 4 decades to realize this...

From around 1880 to the dreadnought age capital ships had 3 (later 4) different weapon "systems", the main gun battery ("battery" meaning the entirety of the guns and all directly supporting subsystems, components and expendables like rangefinders, ammunition handling infrastructure, ammunition etc.) , the secondary gun battery (later with QF guns), the torpedo battery and (later) the anti-torpedo-boat batteries (tertiary and sometimes quarternary). The "original" 3 weapon systems were in a mutual balance with the defensive system, the ship's armor. The main gun could pierce the armor if a hit was gained at close enough range. But rate of fire vs. the combined probabilies of hit and penetration, especially under anything but point-blank conditions, meant that the "all big gun ship" was not really viable until advances in firecontrol, rangefinding and munitions handling (and design for such) advanced in time for HMS Dreadnought. So the roughly 320-400 main gun rounds (assuming four barrels) were not enough to ensure sufficient destructive effect on even one peer target at expected (if not hoped for) engagement ranges. The secondary battery pitched in. At close to point blank range even it could pierce much (enough) of a peer adversary's armor, and that at a higher rate of fire from far more barrels. That piercing range however was less than that of the main battery, so only both together would have hat sufficient probability of effect within the expected engagement range basket. In any case the torpedo battery was the most dangerous of the weapon systems. It could hole a ships hull under the armor belt and sink it. Essentially, this danger created a "minimum acceptable combat range" in capital ship peer-peer combat that was sufficiently large as to render penetration of (main) armor by the secondary battery firing AP moot. Then there was the theory the IJN subscribed to that the secondary battery could serve to engender a cumulative secondary damage effect even without piercing (main) armor and the attendant choice for HE only ammunition there. And the secondary battery would also have been the weapon system of choice against any non-peer adversaries. The curious thing is that between ca. 1880 and 1905 the advances in main gun, secondary gun and torpedo batteries (with their attendant techologies such as range finding, shell design, fire control etc.) essentially cancelled themselves out and the three-way balance was maintained while the engagement range basket grew somewhat, argually all three were co-equal weapon systems, none was primary. The torpedo boat was a potential spoiler for which the anti-torpedo-boat battery was added. Only with the technological advances, especially in fire control, that made main guns viable weapon systems with effective ranges (at acceptable phit and ppen) of more than 5kyd (i.e. well beyond torpedo range and beyond the range at which an AP shell from a secondary battery gun could penetrate capital armor, even in secondary locations) this balance was finally broken and the "all big gun" ship became viable where the "main guns" finally were the undisputed primary weapon system. Nevertheless the German Navy remained intellectually invested in the secondary battery (the "Mittelartillerie"), even when Bismarck was designed, while the RN eliminated it entirely quite early (even though the proponents for 6inch guns on battleships kept piping up their dissent) and the USN eventually merged secondary battery and anti-torpedo-boat battery with the(new) heavy anti-air battery into the dual purpose gun battery without expecting it to contribute to peer combat beyond starshells.

Destroyermen is essentially a copy of Forstchen's The Regiment series but focussed on a WWII destroyer instead of an ACW regiment.