UnleashtheKraken

I also would like to know. Right now i've given up and I just stack up main belt and center deck armor. Armoring turrets doesn't seem to matter. Turret position doesn't matter. Balancing the ship does matter, and increasing speed worsens the stability. This game often feels like a very unrealistic ship builder with somewhat decent combat mechanics. The way turret marks (I'm going a bit off topic) are size by size, rather than an overall mark increase that takes longer to research but applies to all researched sizes, seems really unrealistic. Many of the decisions of this game could use reworking, smoothing, and advancing. I've given up pushing the bug that I and several others found and reported. No reply, no 'we're working on it', not even a sign of developer notice. I'm still playing but no longer enthused about this dev team, to the point that I'm not buying any further games from them without first doing some serious scrutiny.

Reading this thread just reinforced how much I don't like the dev's vision of not having political say in the running of finance, invasions, or other guidance of the nation/empire. It is extremely frustrating to be placed at the hands of an AI that acts as a black box, with terrible decision making (I will NOT invade this country I am at war with, despite surrounding it with 3 nations that cumulatively have six times the army power, and that nation repeatedly launching failed invasions of my countries), and popup messages that you have to remember 10 turns down the line. Mouse hovering gives barely any info. I need 25K tons for a popup conquest. I move a fleet there, the fleet is 175K tons, outmassing 7:1, and I see 65% chance of victory because a decade ago I did sell this territory some obsolete destroyers, which are now easy fodder for the invasion fleet nearby. Can I launch my own mission to destroy that naval power? Oh no, I have no control of that. Despite being an admiral and planning/launching battles being what I should be doing. This game rips so much control away from the player. It's like a sim game with most of the strategy torn away, leaving task force positioning and in-game control of heading/speed. And do not get me started on telling a group of ships to fire at a target I select, only to have that group immediately switch to a different target. So I select and retarget my selection, and again the AI decides to have my battleships shoot their main guns at a destroyer that's further away than the enemy battleship I'm trying to sink. The faith in AI control the devs seem to have is misplaced. If there were a mod that let me take control of political decisions, and see tensions as more than a once-in-a-while popup, I'd grab that in a heartbeat.

Also on earlier techs, center deck armor can really help control pitch and roll, unrealistically heavy center deck can actually help with gunnery so that as the AI tries to close to 'kill' range, my guns are destroying them before they can get in range.

As far as I know, it's not listed as a fix for 1.4 either. There are great things about UA:D, and there are things that make me despair. I want to open a port on the map, and build ships from there, instead of build ship, go to fleet list, assign port from a scrolling, small list. Especially destroyers, I actually have trouble sometimes, finding the right port. That's just one example. I think the game desperately needs QoL passes. I think they'd be well worth it, and this bug with intercessing accuracy actively affects how I handle ship maneuvers. I daren't cross ships close by, or the AI will likely deeply damage, or sink, the one they're not even aiming at.

BUMP.

In my semi--informed opinion, what you're (we're) waiting on is game engine optimization. I've seen games with more factions and a deeper political system wizz by. This is not a beta game, no matter what the devs call it. It is not feature complete, let alone feature-fleshed out and deepened. Right now half the features you could automate and never notice a difference. I look forward to further development and refinement.

Yes, I watched that. 'We will see what we can do about it in the next updates.' I'm not holding my breath, that's too damned weasel-wordy. A popular player request? There's already SOME system for pre-battle deployment being handled by game logic. This doesn't seem like it's a huge ask and with a 'popular player request' one would really think an answer more like, 'We have heard the community and will add it to our plans for upcoming patches'. I'm frankly shocked that the devs didn't already have some plan for this. This seems very out of touch and speaks to the 'player hands off' to a lot of aspects of this game, of which I personally am not a fan. The only thing saving the game is the real time battles, commanding multi-unit fleets. The moment a naval ship design/ship combat game that is more player friendly (I do not mean hand-holdy or casual) comes along, I might be dropping this. The ship designer is very limited and weirdly arbitrary, secondaries seem stupidly effective against large ships. And the complete lack of multiplayer in a game that is BEGGING for multiplayer is frankly a massive disappointment. Co-op modes, and team PvP using some sort of points system, could be amazing. I'm willing to bet they could triple sales or even more if the game had multiplayer. I have several friends who expressed interest until I told them 'single player only, just AI opponents' and they were like 'I was interested but hard nope without multi'. Right now this (definitely not a beta lmao) game has weird design focus and priorities, but sometimes that can come out great. I'm just feeling hope fade.

Well, yes, but the request and idea are valid and, honestly, I'm not sure why pre-battle player set deployment is not ALREADY a part of the game. This would be a serious improvement. There's a lot of 'player hands off' decisions about this game that are frustrating. It's not immersive, it's just '*EYEROLL* here I go having to undo the tangle the computer has put my fleet into for the hundredth time. Why in hell do I have 4 destroyers in one division and then 1 on it's own following, or screening. At the VERY least I want to determine how many ships are in each division, what role they're fulfilling. Setting the position, division composition, and role of my fleet pre-battle would be the ideal.

I checked to see that it worked, but given how many times I've had to restart the campaign (I know it's a work in progress, I'm not complaining about that), I stopped naming unless I deeply dislike the name. When the game is done with adding completely new features and forcing new campaign starts, then yes, I plan to start naming my ships. Favorites of mine, from Total War: Napoleon for example, I played a very long campaign as the UK. My armed merchants were precious stones or birds. 5th rates, which I used extensively in anti-piracy in Empire, were Swift, Chase, Rapid, or Cheetah, or anything suggesting speed. 1st rates were Magnificent, Splendid, (King Name and Number Goes Here), of course I had a Victory. So generally themes. I also share the problem of a poster from above (looks... @HistoricalAccuracyMan ) wherein I don't know enough foreign languages to come up with names. So detailed lists of ship nmes are very helpful. Speaking of, an idea for the game - lists of ship names, both historical and fictional, grouped by class, and selectable by dropdown.

Gamelabs calls this a Beta but this is very early pre-alpha certainly. It's a 'Beta' so that you can play the unfinished version of upcoming additions/changes using the Beta tab in Steam. In reality this is a pre-alpha product. Major features aren't even implemented, all of the factions are not present in campaign. The next major update (1.09 as I type this) is set to actually introduce minelaying and minesweeping functionality, as well as submarine and antisubmarine warfare as an abstract in the campaign. The list of new features, as well as revising and reworking and adding to the tech tree, is fairly large. A game is in Beta when all major features are implemented, and is the time for tuning, tweaking, and optimization of said features. I understand WHY UA:D is stated to be in Beta but let's separate Steam functionality from the actual meaning of the terms in software Dev. I can't wait to see what this thing will look like when it's ACTUALLY a beta.

I was confused because I play at 1440. Glad you figured it out.

Got a whole thread on this. As yet, no dev response. Hopefully you get some attention.

Bravo for this.

I would want to be able to shift-click select ships that are mothballed, and full crew them all at once. Replying to this in support. We can already multiclick ships and set their port while under construction...actually to that end, I want to be able to change home port after they are built. They shouldn't be locked to the shipyard they launched from.

Here's another +1 to everything on this list. This game feels...spongy and unresponsive in a lot of ways. Spongy in that although a player inputs commands, ships in battles may not respond well to them, even though the command and desired outcome is ENTIRELY WITHIN the realm of possibility. Too much of this game feels out of control, and I personally want to MURDER my destroyer captains who fail to launch optimal torpedo strikes with aggressive launch orders, a perfect approach on the bow, the torpedo target manually set before the enemy was even in launch range, and the enemy currently shooting at something else. I am utterly out of patience for this to be fixed. I've also posted several bugs that have yet to see a patch list or get any dev notice. I'm currently feeling that buying in to contribute to testing was a mistake. My oldest report, of guns having uncanny 100% accuracy against ships that intercede on the firing line to a target ship, is getting toward a year old with no dev acknowledgement, despite several players reporting and confirming the issue in that thread. I've currently taken a break from the game, albeit keeping up with forums and patch announcements. I'll wait to the next major patch to see if the devs start listening to us that we DO NOT LIKE a lot of these decisions about tactics and when to launch and turrets not functioning. At the very least if a turret is not firing/launching at a target in range and inside fire arc, I want to know WHY the damn thing is not responding to orders.