Jatzi

Everything you said there just reminds me of SpringSharp, a program to design ships. If they took that style of design and brought it into this game it would be so nice. Like you set up everything in something like that and the game generates everything for you. It's not going to happen at all but I can daydream

Everyone on this forum really seems to like recreating historical ships as already stated above so I can see the nations limited to one style being quite popular. I wouldn't play this game more than once after that. Like if I want to recreate an historical battle or a potential battle between historical ships, like Yamato vs Iowa, then I can do that in custom battles. That's the place to do that sorta stuff. The campaign is supposed to be a sandbox of sorts. The goal shouldn't be to artificially limit nations to a specific style but instead bring the in the factors that led to those styles. All forward armament came about as a weight saving measure due to treaty limitations (cost probably played a role too but mainly tonnage in a world with naval treaties). Remove the treaties and I honestly doubt the style would have happened. So if you want France to adopt all forward styles make treaties a thing. Make them better than RTW's treaties by letting us have some kind of input. I'd imagine nations like the US would have less restrictive limits in a treaty. Depending on government type you could have the option to circumvent treaties a bit at the risk of diplomatic penalties. So if you're a democratic but less powerful nation, i.e. France, you gotta work with what you got and bam all forward designs. I could go on but my point here is that such styles that you guys are arguing about became a thing for a reason. Real world factors, complicated things, led to why different nations designed their stuff differently. The devs should be seeking to put those factors into the game in some way. Make the campaign actually kinda deep and I bet you'd end up with organic styles and trends for each different nation. An example of this is as the US in RTW I never build all forward designs because I'm so rich I can just build bigger, more expensive ships. As Spain or Italy yeah you can bet I'm building all forward designs asap so I can get a decent design at a smaller tonnage, reducing build time and most importantly cost (those nations are poor). As the US I'm building medium and long range vessels, in RTW 2 my carriers are lightly armored to account for that range. As Italy a lot of my ships are short ranged(allowing for more stuff at the same tonnage or less tonnage for the same capability making them cheaper which is necessary) and I can afford to build short ranged armored carriers without sacrificing too much air capacity since the range is short. No artificial limits, I could build a super armored carrier if I really wanted to as the US. Or an all forward dreadnought. But I don't cuz I don't need to. As Italy in the Med in RTW 2 armored carriers are nice(land based bombers are hell there due to how close everything is) and short range is all I need which makes that actually possible. Organic styles and trends for different nations without crappy artificial limits.

I saw this made by the AI during a destroyer battle mission. Good counter to destroyers really. Got wrecked by a long range torp from a damaged friendly AI destroyer way in the back of the battle though

I know pocket battleship, semi-dreadnought, semi-battlecruiser are all not actual classifications. But they do represent in-between ships. I mentioned a specific cruiser I made early on in a RTW game as Italy. I was fighting France in like 1905 and couldn't beat their CA's So I made a kind of semi-battlecruiser or pocket battlecruiser. 16k tons, 11 inch main guns, heavy secondary battery of 8 in casemates and 4 in tertiaries. 24 knots with CA armor. It was really just a CA albeit a large and well-armed one especially in this game. In RTW it's less common to have CA's with such heavy armaments though. But all this and what you said just goes to show that classifications and labels are flexible and not everything is equal. RTW treats all CA's and BB's the same but they aren't. Hopefully this game lets you have more control over the disposition of forces leading up to battles. I'd rather not have a RTW-style battle generator. I know they initially used one, I really hope they've changed it

If you think the AI will ever get good enough to generate the same exact ship twice in a row than I think you're very optimistic. Also tech will totally increase during a war. Also also, without knowing what the AI has built, what their fleet is made of you can't build your own fleet to match. Building a fleet in a vacuum is boring and probably bad. Also also also, you're probably gonna be using ships that are kinda old in some wars. In many cases ships were outdated by the time they were finished and entered service. If the AI just generates designs on command when a battle starts you're ignoring that reality for the AI giving them a massive advantage over the player. No thanks, it'd take all the fun out of the game. @DocHawkeye Even if the game classifies your ship as a BC or whatever you can still build your design. Classifications alter what battles the ship may show up in but that's really an indictment on the battle generator, it sucks and that's probably the biggest area I'm hoping this game improves on. Beyond that classifications don't really matter? They kinda didn't irl honestly. Just look at the Alaska's "large cruiser" designation. You can call your ship whatever, doesn't change what it is. You create a pocket battleship, game calls it a heavy cruiser or battlecruiser? Whatever, still a pocket battleship. Not sure what you mean about the turret configurations and protection. Afaik the only major limitations on armament and configurations and protection are on light cruisers and destroyers. Heavy cruisers for a time can't use heavy secondaries too. Not saying it's the best thing in the world but I don't think it's too limiting. The main issue I think is how the battle generator utilizes those designs you've made that perhaps don't fit perfectly with heavy cruiser or battleship or whatever. If the player had more control over what participated in a battle you could utilize edge designs better regardless of their official classification. Also, imo right now anyways this designer is more limiting. It's hard to make unique designs in this game until late game era cuz of the hull system. They really block you in. Heavy cruisers for most countries right now as you progress through the 1890s and into the 1900s and 1910s is just the exact same hull upsized. Which means you can really only make the same design but with more armor and better engines/turrets. Same goes for light cruisers and torpedo boats/destroyers. In order for there to be real variety they need to add lots of more hulls. Or just bring back the modular system that they still have ads running for. That's of course not gonna happen so more hulls. And perhaps a width slider

Better not be like that. The game should generate designs and have them be built with the full cost and time required that the player would have to pay to build that same design. It shouldn't be some random design only made when a battle happens. Cuz then also if they win that battle or they retreat and the ships aren't sunk then what happens? A brand new totally different design is made when the next battle happens? That's terrible game design and I wouldn't play it if it was like that. I'd just play RTW which doesn't have such a stupid system. EDIT: This would also play into intelligence and espionage. Seeing what you can of foreign designs and trying to get intel on hidden aspects like the speed, amount of armor, various techs used in the design. And then using that knowledge when designing your own ships. In RTW for example this is a thing and the AI totally reacts to your designs and vice versa. I remember I made a semi-battlecruiser during a rough war with France as Italy. It was a large heavy cruiser with good speed, 11in main guns and a heavy secondary battery of 8 in casemates. Was very effective actually and within a year I saw Britain, France, and Germany all making ships with heavy secondaries as well. A point of contention with this game is actually that I can't put heavy secondaries on any cruisers should I want to. And it's very hard on battleships. We need a width slider. We also need to stop being able to see literally everything about enemy designs during a battle. Very much not a fan of that

Access to enemy reload timers and even the specific dmg they've taken is something I'm not a fan of. This game is most similar to RTW so I compare them a lot. In this case RTW is better, you don't get notifications of torpedoes being launched and you can't tell how much damage a ship has taken besides a guesstimate, light/medium/heavy dmg that is often wrong. You can see the enemy designs as that information is mostly public but sometimes that information is even wrong, armor values and speed at least. It's easy to see if a ship has 16 in guns or 20in or whatever. You definitely don't get access to things like the ballistics and radar tech they're using. I guess this can be connected to difficulty levels as others have said about other things but yeah. I'd like the option to turn all that off even though it is nice seeing it. There definitely needs to be an AI system for friendly ships evading torpedoes though. A lot of the battles are fairly small but I'm positive it'll be very easy to get large battles in the campaign. Be really annoying if you have to micro every ship evading torpedoes in a large fleet battle

Someone said it a few posts above. Less super dreadnoughts. More of the actual realistic ship hulls and components and whatnot. Based on how everything is I'm kinda expecting to have to build 100k ton battleships during the campaign if only because the AI surely will cuz it's stupid. I don't want to do that though. Super dreadnoughts are, or should be, extremely expensive and honestly they're not worth it. In RTW I never go past 50k tons for my dreadnoughts because after that they start to get prohibitively expensive especially since in RTW it's hard to armor against 16/17/18in guns. Of course in this game it's not that hard but hopefully armor will be reworked at some point. But yeah, less superdreadnought stuff more predreadnought stuff. That's honestly kinda where stuff is interesting, trying to squeeze out every last bit of performance on a crappy ship. Pre-dreads, and really all ships of that period, were extremely varied in their designs and it would be nice to let that be reflected

The ability to see machinery and armor would be useful. Something along the lines of WoWs or Warthunder's system where it highlights the different armor sections and shows the machinery and citadel spaces. I'm not even sure if the citadel is a modeled thing that moves depending on your turret placement, as it should, cuz I've always seen some weird hits that are listed as belt/deck extended or really far up hits that are listed as main belt/deck. Also the friendly AI ships being able to auto avoid torpedoes would be very nice. If it messes up a formation that's fine, torpedoes are deadly, get out of the way! Manual control can always fix a formation. If go slow with a large battle I can usually catch everything but sometimes I don't want to do that. An update on the campaign would be really nice. There were issues with the dev team and development seems to have basically halted for awhile. This patch is nice to see but some more info on the campaign would be nice to see yeah. Also just being more clear about some things, like what "dynamic targeting" means. Like you guys said it is supposed to help smaller maneuverable ships avoid fire but how?

That doesn't change the fact that those ads are still out there when the system doesn't exist which is blatant false advertising. Not cool. I wonder how many ppl have gotten excited by that ad and then seen it's not real and understandably completely lost interest in the game

I'd like to believe the concept of the cruiser submarine could've taken off if the treaties hadn't killed it

I'm gonna skip a few pages and say why are ppl so hyped about quad turrets and 20 in guns? You should be hyped about the damage saturation fix. That's one of the biggest things. Changes the game and fixes a serious issue, hopefully.

In RTW 2 as the confederacy I was able to push the US Navy against the shore while getting in between them and their home bases. That allowed me to destroy a large portion of their battle line. Actually I sank every single pre-dread they had over the course of I think 3 battles, two of which I accomplished this.

The game is very much not finished and the Academy missions are a poor place to really figure out tactics and doctrine. Maneuver a lot and try to avoid torpedoes before you see them. Be vigilant about keeping the range or closing if you want to. Don't just ignore it though. As for torpedoes when only small salvoes are launched from a multi-tube mount it's because the firing angle is too sharp. Try to have more of a broadside firing angle for torpedo mounts if you're consistently getting half salvoes. Tech is important and the size of the torpedo changes the range. That could be why you're being outranged by the enemy

Why do ppl like quad turrets so much? Like obviously they're gonna be in the game so I honestly don't understand the constant outcry for them.

Having watched some of Tortuga's Atlantic Fleet videos you don't have to guess. He reliably either hit or straddled his targets after only 1 or 2 ranging salvoes. I'm sure the system is fairly simple in Atlantic Fleet though.

I wonder if it would possible to allow us to modify the hull in some ways. Specifically I want to be able to change the size of casemates on some hulls. Currently casemates are limited max to 6 in from what I've seen. Early on in RTW I really like putting heavy secondaries on my ships, usually 8 in casemates. I wonder if it would be possible to let us like raise or lower the caliber the casemate is set for. The trade off would obviously be weight and also the number of casemates? Like you could have more 4 in casemates than 8 in ones right? I just want heavy secondaries to be a thing and early on that's just not possible right now

Last I checked the role of destroyers were to screen large capital ships not just hunt them down with tons of torpedoes. Very early on you can have torpedo boats and torpedo boat destroyers which do have different roles, one to kill capitals and the other to screen. But when those types merged to become destroyers they took on both roles on the same hull. So a destroyer using up it's precious single torpedo salvo doesn't make it useless. They just screen their parent fleet. And also torpedo boats were bloody bad for most of their existence. Removing reloads adds a very nice tactical layer to the game. You have to choose to go in and risk missing with that one salvo or wait for a better opportunity. As of right now I can just stand off and launch waves of torpedoes at ships. Launch, sit there and wait then launch again, sit there wait, launch again. It's unrealistic, arcadey, and a little stupid.

I'm sure eventually we'll get battles around the coast rather than just in the open ocean. Not quite sure how that'll be handled but it should make it easier to tell where ships are going if you're fighting near land. I'd like, rather than a separate tactical viewer, a seamless kind of transition between the two. So an expanded zoom out that eventually turns into a sort off 2D tactical viewer. I'm thinking of something like Dragon Age Origins although I know there are other examples.

If you keep your formation normal rather than tight, it's tempting to have it tight since you get an accuracy bonus, than it shouldn't be a huge issue. I don't see tons of issues with it if I detach the ship falling out of line and just have it move forward and back rather than turning around entirely. I think if any ship that isn't the rearmost in the formation takes a hit in speed and is forced to fall out of line than it should automatically be detached. Also don't keep escorts super close to your main battle line. That's just good practice since friendly fire is a thing and enemy fire can hit ships that aren't being targeted. It also helps to detect torpedoes if you have your escorts closer to the enemy although right now the AI likes to focus fire DD's cuz they're easy to kill. Of course the auto-collision stuff needs to be reworked I think. At the very least it needs to be reduced big time and not to work against the AI. I tried to ram a ship once in a custom battle and the game just wouldn't let me.

So generally afaik ships fall out of line when they take engine hits and can't maintain the speed of the whole formation. Since everything likes to focus fire right now, which is a bad thing in naval combat and I hope that changes, the flagship is usually the first to take enough dmg to make it lose speed and thus it falls out of line. I hope in the future they automatically detach themselves when this happens so as to not mess up the formation or anything as in RTW. Of course you can reattach it if you want afterwards. I'm sure if it's a ship in the rear it'll lose speed and slowly fall back from the main formation unless you drop the speed of it. Eventually it will get so far that it automatically detaches or again as in RTW it asks you if you want to slow down the formation or have the ship be detached. In RTW this can happen from main tower hits as well and I wonder if that's the case here. I try to armor my conning tower pretty well, equal or better than my turrets since the debuff from a destroyed bridge is massive, and so I rarely see it happen. Also despite the superstructure being huge I actually don't think conning tower hits are all that common

I mean it's a 92,000 ton battleship. It kinda makes sense it has ridiculous amounts of armor. Yamato, the largest battleship ever built was only 70,000 tons at full load and had a 16 in belt and 25.6 inches on the turret faces. Imagine what 30,000 more tons would allow. I hope you know that such dreadnoughts are not going to be built in the campaign except for like super late game and probably when it's not really necessary. Maybe the AI goes too far with armor but the player is capable of building an unsinkable dreadnought, the AI should too.

I imagine any carriers and aircraft system would be way simpler than what Task Force Admiral is going for. They're going pretty hard with that game. But yeah this is definitely a years down the line thing. I've just been thinking about it as RTW 1 vs RTW 2. This is RTW 1 and in the future we'll get a RTW 2-esque sequel that adds in aircraft and carriers and other stuff too. For my last post I'm curious were there any historical cruisers that had heavy secondaries that they could use to make such a hull that I want in that specific scenario?

Number of slipways and size of those slipways yeah. Like in Aurora. You have shipyards that have so many slipways rated for so many tons. You can either choose to increase the size of the existing slipways or build new ones. The bigger the shipyard the more costly it is to build a new slipway cuz it's built up to the same size as the others for that particular shipyard. It's customary in that game to have tons of shipyards at different sizes. Capital yards are huge but generally with less slipways while the smaller destroyer and very small FAC yards have lots of slipways. A FAC btw is a fast-attack craft(it's a space game).

I really hope the devs eventually make like custom hulls that are perhaps a little weird to allow interesting designs. I like giving early cruisers in RTW 2 a heavy secondary battery of 7 or 8 inches in casemates while using 9 or 10 inches for the main guns. They're very expensive but also very effective against cruisers and not too bad generally against pre-dreads. 2 of them sank a pre-dreadnought outright by themselves in one battle. I'd like to make that kind of ship in this game, and possibly other weird ships and I can't right now. So yeah I hope at some point the devs move away from historical hulls and make custom ones based off of historical ones I guess. In this case all you need to do is just put in a spot for large casemates on a CA hull, there are non currently, which isn't too hard probably.