Entropy Avatar

Thanks for the analysis. I have to say, this reduces my enthusiasm a lot. If the design is wildly off on the base formulas like this, it doesn't seem like any amount of tweaking with caps and parameters will really fix things. It's sort of like adding epicycles to a geocentric model.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like a very bad scaling rule? Shouldn't armour weight scale very roughly with the surface area of the ship/turret and not it's displacement? Does this mean that small ships and large ships can afford equally thick armour?

My interest is mostly how the damage model in the game works. I'm wondering if it's possible that when HE does damage to an unarmoured portion of the hull, does the "splash damage" to neighbouring portions of the hull take armour into account. As you say, the thickness of the armour should have an effect on the spread of damage from one part to another - but that won't happen unless it's explicitly coded in the damage model. Overall, I get the sense that the dev's use armour to determine penetration level but perhaps haven't considered all of the effects.

The splash damage part is interesting. My understanding is that if a large HE shell exploded in unarmoured forward part of the ship, the internals would still be protected by a transverse armoured bulkhead. Is armor only used for penetration calculations and not to protect against the actual explosions?

It seems like it would relatively simple for the game to change how it calculates which sections are covered by main belt and deck. Instead of the main belt always being the central 3 and the extended being the outer 4, you say that any segment with a primary turret or an engine is covered with main belt and deck. If you decide to cover your entire ship with primary turrets, congrats, everything is covered by main belt and deck (and you pay the cost in terms of weight and dollars).

To be clear any model of gunnery is going to have some random factors. In reality, there is going to be some "random noise" in each part of the process. E.g. a rangfinder is going to have some error with some standard deviation. When you estimate a targets speed, you will be off by some random amount, etc. So I'm not against aiming essentially being a function with some randomness and luck. If you've got a 3% hit chance, you might go a whole lot of salvos before getting a single hit (that then bounces...). Or you might penetrate that turrent roof and set off an ammo explosion on your very first full salvo. Them's the breaks! I'm against how the function is currently designed though. Right now, every possible factor is boiled down to it's impact on hit chance. So in the end you have a bunch of deterministic calculations each affecting hit chance, combine them together and roll the dice to see if you hit or not. I'd much rather be rolling lots of dice, simulating the contributions of small errors in the aiming process at each stage. So instead of whoops, you missed, better luck with the RNG, it's more like "You missed because you under-estimated the target's speed by 2 knots, or over-estimated the distance by 2%. Going to adjust and try to dial it in.."

Yeah I think the current design is driven by wanting to have a hit percentage and breakdown of the terms in that hit percentage function. It's nice feedback to the player and can maybe explain to them why they are missing. But that's not something people really had. They had their methods and technology and that was that. What I like about the simulation approach is that it's very natural and problems at any stage will have natural consequences. So you don't have weird edge cases like "our bonus for close range isn't enough in situation X to counteract the penalty for small target size and high target speed" ergo we can't hit that DD that's 800 yards away and effectively stationary relative to us. In a "to hit" model, that can result from the function having slightly imbalanced terms.

I am definitely more in favour of a simulationist model of gunnery. Correctly estimating the hit chance under all possible conditions (and how all possible conditions affect hit chance) is a very difficult problem. Deciding what the hit chance should be and then forcing shells to hit or miss can look super bad in some conditions. Having a system where you try to estimate where to aim and then model where the shells falls just seems easier and less error-prone. You can break down each component and think of it in real terms. E.g. this range-finder tech should have this much uncertainty at this range. This estimate of ship speed has this uncertainty function. I guess one drawback of the simulation approach is it may be harder to explain to the play why he is missing without a "real" (forced) probability of hit breakdown. However, I think presenting uncertainty in target range, heading and speed (and observed hit rate) would feel a lot more immersive.

That would be great. Helps provide a nice sense of scale.

The ballistics and damage model changes sound great! Does the game model hitting the front and rear armoured bulkheads or is a shot from the front and rear of the ship treated as an extreme-angle hit on the armour?

I played the H-class mission, and took the extra money. However, as far as I can tell, I still had all the techs? Maybe the guns were one mark down from what they would have been? Anyway, I built a ship with 4x3 18-inch guns, 30 knots, 20 belt and turret armor and I think 12 inches deck? It didn't seem to be much bothered by anything the other fleet threw at it, but actually sinking anything bigger than a DD was a problem. The first BB I targeted suffered 3(!) ammo explosions and scores of penetrating hits from long range, but was only down to 35% structure with no sign of internal flooding and still maintaining a good speed. The BC had something like a -90% chance to hit due to speed, which I think was rather crazy, especially since it was mostly moving in the straight line. I guess my targeting computer has an overflow error for anything moving more than 30 knots.

Am I the only one who read this as "mage cast towers"? Seemed a bit ahistorical.

My experience aligns with the OP. If guns currently have lower penetration than they should, then it makes sense that you need the absolute biggest guns to cross that penetration threshold. If penetration becomes easier across the board, the weight and ROF advantages of slightly smaller guns can make more of a difference.

What does the weight reduction in higher-tech armours represent?

It feels weird to me as well. In RTW, selecting "all or nothing" doesn't cost you anything. As far as I know, it limits the effect of flooding and damage to the unprotected sections. So you could do some damage to the unprotected sections, but not really stop the ship that way. I feel like the designers want the citadel options to be "balanced" in some sense, when in reality the later options were simply better because they reflect people better understanding how to make robust ships.