Jatzi

Just something that'd be nice to have is in the UI when you mouse over the gun image during combat, on the ship characteristics part, you can see the number of guns and turrets for that caliber. You'll be grouping up same calibers which is nice but still it doesn't tell you the layout of them. I'm left counting the turrets and guns per turret to get a sense of how many weapons the ship has. The format would be 14x1 or 3x3. Number of turrets on the left and guns per turret on the right. It's been brought up on here before and it's a low priority thing, but if you're gonna be working on grouping the same calibers together than why not just add this little UI tidbit EDIT: It's already in with this latest beta patch. Nvm my bad

Lmao this isn't the first time I've talked about this. I know for a fact I've mentioned it before on here. Not my fault if you can't find it. Nor am I the only one to talk about it, I didn't discover the bug for instance. I think I'm just the only one left who still gets on the forums occasionally. I know Alekius kept the build with the bug in there and has played it since they patched it out, but he doesn't come here nor will he post a vid about it for obvious reasons. EDIT: 2 seconds of searching through my recorded posts in 2019 and I found it lol. Alpha 1 v60 on October 12, 2019. Lmao I think I was the first person to say it on the forums probably alerting them to the existence of the bug and the next day you couldn't do it anymore. My bad.

I believe it was in one of the patch notes that they get rid of it. Like V2 or 3 they said something like patched a bug that allowed access to an early version of the campaign or something like that. @Terka1917 You could be right. I don't know, after all this time and with what they're giving us I highly doubt they kept the old campaign. After two years of no campaign when I hear remade from scratch I think they scrapped it. It only makes sense. Especially with how they're releasing it. Yeah it's possible they could get useful info about certain aspects of the campaign from just an endless brawl between two nations in one sea zone. Be a good test of a battle generator I guess, maybe an economic system. But honestly, just imo, if they had anything more than they do I feel they'd release it. Assume it's still mostly RTW-esque. You get far more out of a test including multiple nations and sea zones than you do just two nations in one sea zone. And they've said the economy is rudimentary, the tech is half finished, no diplomacy, limited ship movement. Those first 3 are the main things you could test with a limited campaign release. To me this means a few things, the campaign is extremely far from being finished, we're getting what is done, and two their vision has likely changed. I think in 2020 when they "reorganized" someone was telling them to take the game in a certain way, someone disagreed and quit or got fired and their work, i.e. the campaign, got thrown out along with them. Maybe they were already talking to that company that bought them and wanted to shift the game a certain way to appeal more towards them, help convince them to buy game-labs.

To Taktcom it was like the 1st or second version. So 2019. The original campaign was advertised to basically be RTW with 3D graphics. Those I know who play RTW fully considered, and the talk on the forums followed this trend at the time, that they wouldn't just copy paste the game but would take the general concept and improve on it. That means operational control rather than a random battle generator, AI wars, more interactions with minor nations(like the ability to build ships for minor nations and potentially seize them during war), more in-depth alliance systems and better allies in combat(this kinda goes hand in hand with AI wars). That is a lot, at the very least we expected RTW with 3d graphics, at most we expected a better game than RTW. The leaked campaign was basically RTW with 3d graphics. That simple. Not finished and unpolished but that was what it was. I'm not a game dev but I'd say it was no more than a year from being finished. All the nations were there though I can't remember if all were actually in the game when you played or if it was limited to 5 or so like RTW does. You had sea zones, diplomacy through random events that popped up every turn, like half the tech tree was done, you had a budget and economy like RTW( not a crazy in-depth economic system, you know what I mean if you've played RTW at all). I saw a screenshot from someone building ships for a minor nation like I described above, I've looked for it multiple times but can't find it. It wasn't stable and there were no saves so it was hard to progress really far. I made it like 3 years in, went to war with the US as the UK. Lost a legacy pre-dread to some TB's in the Atlantic(V1 TB's were lethal to kinda everything-secondaries were so bad). Random events cost prestige, there were threat levels and if it got high enough you went to war. If you've played RTW it was that but it unpolished and looked cooler. 2 years later and they're giving us less than that. Far less. They said they scrapped that whole campaign. And have given almost no details on why or what replaced it except for what it doesn't have.

We're not getting the game that they advertised and that I've played. The campaign was leaked through a bug in the first like two versions. Besides the fact that it used the same style of battle generator that RTW uses it looked good. It looked like what I wanted and what they advertised. I at least am not upset because I'm not getting what's in my head. I'm upset we had what I wanted and what they said theyd deliver, and they threw it away for a duel to the death in an empty map with half the tech and barely any predreads. Of course this isnt the final version but if they threw out the original idea what are we getting? They havent said and from the look of things it's not gonna be good EDIT: Also just going back reading some comments. Ppl are supporting them trashing the old campaign and saying oh this is so bare bones cuz they had to throw out the old campaign. Makes sense it's bad. Why did they throw it out? I'll say it again I've played some version of the original campaign. It wasnt finished or polished but it was good. It was what they advertised originally before early access. Whyd they scrap it? They've given no reason for getting rid of a seemingly fine campaign

I want to be excited for this news but I'm just not. It doesn't sound at all like the game I bought. I played the leaked campaign, I have no idea how that compared to the full vision at the time but I liked it. Now to hear it was totally thrown out and replaced with something that sounds most definitely lesser is just sad. This doesn't sound at all like what the game was marketed as, still marketed as I may say. And it's been well over a year now where you've "just been working on the campaign" and this is it? No peace, no diplomacy, no overall map, no complete tech tree, just a random duel to the death? I'm obviously not privey to the details of what's been happening with your company because that just doesn't make sense. I'm aware this is early access and being disappointed because the dev decided not to make the game that you bought is the name of the game. Which is why I'm never buying an early access game again. It's also why I'm strongly considering never buying a games-labs game again, this development has been so bad I don't trust the company anymore. Guess Ultimate General and Age of Sail were flukes. Could we get a solid explanation of why the previous campaign was entirely thrown out? It honestly seemed good, wasn't complete obviously but it looked good. Exactly what I, and everyone else I know that bought the game, wanted. Even the steering gear part being added is probably going to be non-sensical just like the different rudder options. I looked it up, as far as I can find the biggest difference between the different types of rudders has to do with what happens when the rudder jams. But for some reason, in a naval game that tries to say it prizes historical accuracy, rudders can't be jammed. Amazing work. I could go on but I don't trust this to be good after hearing the previous iteration was scratched

You can't have a game where we know the entirety of the enemy design and their speed and heading and damage status and then say oh we aren't giving you a map for realism purposes. No. Just no. This is the games major issue, sometimes it wants to be arcadey, sometimes it wants to be hardcore. Most of the time it just ends up being arcadey but looks hardcore. You can't have both and the devs should have picked a route long ago. Toeing the line just alienates both crowds Also about the miss-IDing thing, I feel if a ship is miss-ID'd then the model should change. Especially if the specific class of the ship is miss-ID'd and not just the type. That doesn't happen, just the type and only at first, but that's another thing-we should mistake one battleship class for another sometimes. If they're similar looking. I've talked about this in other threads. Give it a probability based off of the superstructure design and the gun layout.

A large mistake for sure. Sadly

So crew is finally here and it's cool. It's nice to see hits take out some crew members. But I have issues with it. I know it's the first version, I'm aware of that. And I know the focus isn't going to be in making it all that complex right now. I'm fully aware of all of that. But I want to take about where I think it should go from here after playing a bit. Just a bit, few hours so this stuff might change once I play more. The biggest thing to me is the attritional nature of the crew losses. You lose a guy here, another two over there. All throughout the battle. But it just doesn't make sense for it to work like that. Giant explosions are happening inside tight spaces, anyone inside a compartment a decently sized shell would probably be injured to some degree right? There are certainly situations where maybe a gun gets knocked out and only 1 or 2 members of the gun crew get wounded. Sure. You can always play the what if game with stuff like this. But when I see a hit on the very bow of the ship kill 2 people, another penetrating engine room hit kill another 3 but then an overpen on a torpedo launcher kills 12 I know it's not right. Why would ppl be at the very bow of the ship? I know there are internal rooms there obviously and maybe some ppl would be there during combat but I have a feeling if you shot at the bow of a ship endlessly you'd keep getting crew kills. It seems to me that there's an overall pool of crew and each hit has a chance to kill some and there's probably a dice roll to see how many die and whatnot. Certain modules getting hit naturally result in more deaths, more dice for those modules I guess. And that's fine for now. But I'd really like to see crew be localized to parts of the ship. Like if you put a 12in turret on a ship it'll have like 30 crew. And if it gets destroyed then among those 30 crew some number gets killed or wounded, likely a large one I'd imagine but not necessarily. Not just from a overall ship wide pool but from that specific turret's crew pool. Because it's weird to see a torpedo launcher or gun get destroyed and the total number of crew manning their battlestations for torpedoes or secondary guns stay at 100%. Like I just killed 3 torpedomen presumably, are there extra's or something? I mean maybe but like ships don't just have extra crew sitting in a waiting room until they're needed. They'd be out at their battle stations lol. I just don't want to repeatedly see penetrating hits to things like engine rooms that flood the entire compartment but only cause 2 casualties. Or 1. It's just so unrealistic it takes me so out of the game. Flooding especially would really get people, even more so during the pre-dreadnought era I imagine. I want to see crew die to fire. I want to see crew training affect deaths in situations like fighting fires or having compartments flood out. A poorly trained crew should lose more ppl to a flooding compartment than a veteran crew who knows what to do in that very terrifying situation. Also are crew casualties just deaths or do the numbers include wounded? Because wounded numbers are generally very high, humans are squishy and don't do well in explosive environments. And most wounded probably can't crew a ship any better than the dead guys. So yeah localize the crew to their specific modules. That way, when said modules get hit the correct number of people get hurt. More casualties in general I think. I completely destroyed the citadel of a heavy cruiser and literally the second before it sank it'd only lost 69 crew. After every engine getting destroyed, the rudder as well. Multiple guns and torpedoes gone, the entire ship is flooding, 180+ hits, many of them penetrating 8 and 12in hits. And only 69 losses out of 570. Another thing, sorry. Not really related to crew but turrets need to jam. And rudders. Damaged turrets, while killing some crew should also actually damage the turret, potentially jamming it. If crew losses are localized to specific turrets and whatnot then you can have said losses apply debuffs to specific turrets which would be interesting. A ship with some turrets damaged and unable to fire in sync with the others making salvo fire hard to do would mess up all sorts of things I imagine.

It's not even really a lose lose. If a patch is buggy we know we can expect a hotfix fairly soon, they do one basically every patch to address major bugs that pop up. We all know this by now and it's honestly a fairly standard thing. Ppl only seriously complain about bugs when they don't get fixed. And in that camp falls object placement on hulls. It's not horrible because they have been addressing specific instances of this turret or that tower not fitting. Those kinds of bugs keep happening though which is the issue but again not that big of a deal rn. So yeah the buggy release argument does not hold water imo. The only game development I know of where ppl actively complain about buggy releases is Star Citizen and that is a special case by far. A very unique brand of messed up development.

The reason the RTW comparisons exist is because if you go back and read the original blog posts about the intended game mechanics it's basically RTW with 3d graphics. Not a bad thing. But the fact is RTW is it's direct competitor. The original stuff about the game presented it not like Age of Sail but like RTW. Which makes them competitors. They've said nothing to change that assumption, I think the intention has changed, but they've said nothing to that affect. And so the RTW comparisons will continue until we have reason to think they no longer should be compared. Frankly, if they gave us Age of Sail but with dreadnoughts I'd be unhappy. I wanted an improved 3D RTW, everyone else I know that plays the game did too. That's what they promised when they began selling early access. Calling UA:D a quasi-simulator drawing inspiration from Kerbal Space Program is a massive stretch lol. It's an arcade game that's dressed up as quasi-simulator. Games change in development sure, but I think it's safe to say if you begin selling an early access title and then fail to deliver on what you said you would you have failed. That's the risk of going into an early access, I'm never doing it again. But yeah, I've heard some people defend companies that deliver something different than what they promised but nah. That shouldn't fly. And I mean damn it didn't fly with the Naval Action crowd lol. This feels like a repeat of that. I hope I'm wrong but yeah

Lol that's the opposite of what Im thinking we're going towards.

The sun will die before we get the campaign at this rate

We've had different experiences with RTW 2 lol. I mean sure sometimes, very rarely stuff like that happens to me. But mostly I get CL v CL fights, or BC vs BC or CA vs CA. Sometimes CAs or BCs show up against my CLs or CLs show up against my CA but very rarely and usually I can run. Sometimes not but so what? I read on the forums about people complaining about battles not going their way and like yeah that's probably the point. The game would be pretty boring if you always won. And A BC running up against CA's and CL's isn't like a bad thing, that's who theyre supposed to fight. BB's show up sometimes as a support force in cruiser actions, on both sides. Usually not hard to avoid so it's whatever to me.

Aircraft should be in the game but they won't be added. The development of this game has been rocky lol. So they won't be added. From the very beginning I've said it should be like Rule the Waves and Rule the Waves 2. Rule the Waves 1 had no aircraft, 2 does. Complete this game then maybe add them or make a new one that has them or whatever. As of right now though aircraft don't even factor into the equation with all the issues the game has, how far it needs to come.

They have arguable hurt themselves massively by trying to toe the line between arcade and sim. It's too arcadey for the hardcore people. It's too hardcore for the WoWs crowd. They need to pick a side and they're already leaning towards the sim side so they might as well shift that way. Also weapon reliability isnt that big of a shift in that direction. Also also they talk about realism in their blog posts and whatnot so in order for them to not be even more hypocritical they should include it. You're argument is like saying ammo detonations shouldnt being the game because it's so FRUSTRATING when I'm winning and all of a sudden my whole ship blows up. It's the worst let me tell you. Ruins the whole game. That whole bit about rudders has reminded me that rudders don't jam in the game which is also a little weird. I'm fine with a slower turning rudder if the steering mechanism is damaged and then maybe ad hoc repaired but unless you're using a semi-balanced rudder(had to look up what the differences between those 3 were) if the steering mechanism is damaged the rudder becomes jammed. The whole purpose of the semi-balanced rudder is to make the rudder return to a neutral setting should the steering mechanism fail. So maybe they'll add it in? If you have the balanced or unbalanced rudder if the steering system is hit you get a jammed rudder until it's repaired, whereas you won't get a jammed rudder if you use the semi-balanced rudder. For some trade-off. I'm pretty jaded so that's not gonna happen but it'd be nice. https://www.marineinsight.com/naval-architecture/types-rudders-used-ships/ Here's a quick article I read about them btw if anyone is interested. I honestly didn't know different rudders were a thing, never heard it talked about before in ship design. It's always armor scheme and turret layout and machinery layout.

I dont want to be super negative when you finally decide to give us some info but I am concerned about the preponderance of super battleships that you guys keep pumping out. They're cool, big and flashy and fun to fight but I would hope in the campaign theyd be just as unrealistic to build as in real life. If you're rich and winning then sure but I'd imagine most countries, like Italy for example, wouldnt really want to build a few huge expensive super battleships. As someone else said we need more early cruisers. Cruisers in general. And predreadnoughts.

Of course it'd be frustrating. That's the point? Oh no it makes the game harder we shouldn't include it! They were real issues and I'm sure real ships were sunk or damaged because their guns jammed. It would be a massive disservice not to include it. RTW includes it and it's fine. Just a fact of life in early battles really. You get used to it. I would heavily disagree any kind of compromise is needed. So what if its frustrating. It's what happened in real life, imagine how commanders felt during an actual battle. Imagine how sub captains felt when their MK 14's weren't working in the first few years of WWII. Or how a torpedo bomber pilot felt after losing half his squadron just for there to be no hits because of duds. This isn't World of Warships. Weapon reliability is an important part of warfare. Simply massive. It would keep people from just slapping on quad 20in guns on everything too. There is a reason quad turrets weren't widely used, or even triples for awhile. They were unreliable. This was a major consideration in design and combat and the game suffers from it not being included. I simply cannot fathom how someone would think it would be ok to ignore such an important thing just because it's a little inconvenient at times for the player

That game is how old and it does ship design better than this. It's kinda sad. Designating where the internals are and having the length of the belt correspond to where we put the turrets is hugely important. And being able to switch between a normal belt and a narrow belt, and an inclined belt as well would be nice.

I thought there were RoF differences with triples and quads compared to singles and twins. At least initially right? Or was it mainly reliability. Also turrets don't even jam right now

It's an early access that falsely promoted a shipbuilding system that ultimately got scrapped for very inconsistent reasons btw. Was it because the AI couldn't handle it? Cuz there are easy fixes for that. Or was it because players would've thought it was too complex? Or was it too difficult to code? They've never given a straight answer for it. And they kept going with ads for it even after the release of the early access which is top level scum behavior. Early access means you listen to player feedback and respond and discuss the game. Sure they've listened to some feedback around combat: torpedoes are too weak, oh torpedoes are too strong now. Armor is weak, armor is too strong, ships don't die because bow tanking and whatnot. But they've ignored other issues that are baked into the system and would require some changes. It's fine if they think some ideas proposed to fix some issues were too drastic but say so. Say something, anything. There have been tons of people that were knowledgeable about naval warfare and irl ship design that noticed issues and brainstormed ideas about how to introduce real world stuff into the game, in either hardcore sim ways and in more arcadey ways. They were all aware that GL seems to be trying to toe the line between sim and arcade, a horrible choice imo gotta commit, and they presented ideas about how to gamify real life things in ways to fix GL's current vibe/balance. Nothing, no feedback. No agreement or disagreement, just players talking to a blank wall and eventually getting annoyed and leaving. People just want information, what's the vision now? Not blind hello kittying hope the campaign is kind of decent. If the campaign is so crucial to their development, talk to us about it. Get some hype going for it. They have handled this early access extremely poorly, if you're going to be dead silent, as of course companies often are about their games before release, don't go into early access. Simple as that. They shouldn't have released the game without a form of the campaign working. When the game first released there was a flood of WoWs style players who wanted something similar to that and said so on the forums. The leaked campaign was not two years away. I played it, it was at most a year away if that. What I think happened is that they saw all the pure arcadey people and radically shifted direction then all those people left, who could've seen that coming, and they tried to backpedal. I know others agree with me, there were some hints here and there they were going more arcadey in patch notes, the language they used some changes they made. If I'm right that doesn't give me confidence, their team possibly imploding(?) doesn't give me confidence, them being bought by a mobile game publisher definitely doesn't give me confidence. GL has proven they can lie and present false advertising. Also, I'd consider naval action a subpar release. It's not a horrible game but it's vastly different from what they said the game was going to be and that seems to be what's happening here too. The key things people bought into, the ship builder and the RTW-style campaign, are either already scrapped or likely scrapped. I hope I'm wrong but I don't think I am. At least I learned a lesson, never ever back an early access game. Ever.

So many things about the game are bad and lots of people have pulled real world information to show how things actually work and have given ideas about how to gamify those things. No responses. None. The shipbuilder is bad, the gunnery system is bad, the list is long of things that are bad. Lots of ideas about how to fix them. No response except everyone is working on campaign, after that's done we'll look at things. They've been saying that for a year now, longer really. Still no campaign just these stupid useless patches that add almost nothing. For gods sake they added a reverse button and acted like it was the best thing ever. spoiler alert it's not. It's going to be next year before the campaign gets released in an extremely limited state. Just watch.

I'd question their work. It's been 2 years since the game released in early access and Covid aside they had plenty of time to do campaign work and show us what it is exactly they were thinking with it. Instead they just keep pushing out these dumb academy missions. They abandoned the ship builder that was the major reason most of the original backers were interested in the game and didn't tell anyone until we'd already paid for the game. No information about campaign just that it's been the sole focus of the team for like a year now. Oh and when it releases it'll only be in an extremely limited state. That fact alone makes me question what exactly they're doing with the campaign because so help me god if it's just a string of missions like in Age of Sail I'm not playing the game. Having a RTW style campaign is what they advertised and it's what the leaks showed and it really wouldn't require a limited release with how it was structured, in fact imo that would hurt the testing of it. So the limited release tells me its no longer rule the waves style. If that's true the two reasons I bought the game will have been thrown out without telling anyone. I was still seeing ads for the discarded shipbuilder last year. For 2 years now people on the forums have been really polite and been like I know making a game is hard work but can we get some info or here is this bit of info that might help you with no responses. Question their work because it has not been good work. Literally the only thing this game has going for it right now is the graphics which do look pretty decent, except for how wobbly ships are in the ocean. That's it!

Funnily enough that's changing in an expansion for RTW 2 that might come out later this year but more likely early 2022

Based off of things they've said, like they'll only have two playable nations at the start in one region and expand as they go, I think they've moved away from a rule the waves approach. Restricting the initial campaign like that just doesn't make sense to me with that kind of gameplay