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disc

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Everything posted by disc

  1. I completed all of the missions. I was impressed at certain improvements. Nice patch. The reduction in bugs was noticeable. Loading bugs are better. The "red" placement bug has largely disappeared. The AI sometimes still has issues with bad gun arcs, but I no longer see ships with completely blocked weapons. I am happy to see that all hulls now have covers for unused casemates. This has been a long-requested feature. The AI is still dumb when it comes to maneuvers. Setting small ships to AI control leads to trouble. However, I think there is a definite improvement. I like the reduction in torpedo load, but I see two issues. First, the AI is not very prudent with its shots and tends to waste a good number. Second, underwater tubes have also had their reloads reduced. I think that should be reverted to 2-4 torpedoes, as this would be A. more historic and B. not half as annoying as big deck launcher spreads. I think underwater tubes should have their own (historic) disadvantages to offset the greater number of reloads. The partial pen / overpen changes have been pretty unremarkable. I have not noticed the changes to HE penetration much. In terms of dispersion changes, I perceive big guns are less accurate at long range.
  2. I think there are several quality-of-life changes and fixable issues that would make battles more fun. I've seen many suggested. Here's my list. Divisions, AI, and Smoke The player should be able to choose division arrangements and formations before the start of battle. It is irritating when ships are spawned in nonsensical places and weird groups. Damaged ships should not loop to rejoin at the rear of the division. This often leads to chaos and wastes time, requiring the player to remove them from the division. Perhaps they could simply move a bit to the side and slow down for the rest of the division to pass by. Division ships sometimes become very widely separated in loose divisions. Ends up with torpedo boats or destroyers lining up to torpedo a battleship almost one at a time, greatly weakening the power of swarm attacks. I find it better to just remove all torpedo-vessels from divisions and send them in a compact group without sacrificing speed. But I find this too much micromanagement. Pathfinding is often bad. Ram avoidance is far better than it used to be, but I still experience issues. Ships frequently refuse to cross the track of moving vessels ahead of them -- because the computer fails to recognize that the path will be clear in the future. There should be waypoints. Ship reaches a point, it starts going to the next. The AI is too cowardly with handling destroyer groups. In the "Battle of Destroyers" scenario, this is particularly prominent. Handing over your DD allies to the AI control leads to them immediately retreating from close combat. They tend to move to a point 10-15km away from the nearest enemy and ineffectually plink away with their small guns. If you are particularly unlucky, they will start running away and never stop. The enemy has the same issue, but if you manage to close in on an enemy ship it will detach from the group, run at you, and make a last stand... the rest of the fleet runs away and leaves it to die. We should be able to give more general commands for the AI to execute. The AI doesn't understand smoke. Often the whole fleet will use smoke simultaneously as soon as an enemy is spotted, which wastes it. Smoke screens are poorly implemented. A screen should be a temporary opaque wall, which no one can see through without special tech and/or training (eg radar, spotter planes, range clocks at short range). This blocks vision from the inside, too. Weapons, Damage, and Player Information There should be torpedo launching indicators. IE, the ship should say why it has or hasn't decided to shoot. Would be extremely useful in figuring out why torpedoes aren't being released. There should be visible gun and torpedo firing arcs in battle on friendly ships. This would dovetail neatly with the above point. Torpedo reloads should be longer -- at least without proper tech. Less so for underwater tubes, but they should have their own distinct disadvantages. Torpedo damage is probably still too low at higher ranks. There should be permanent markers on all visible torpedoes. An audible warning would be useful. The torpedo message is often lost in the battle reports. Invisible shooters are annoying. Such things can certainly happen at night, but in daytime, if your enemy can see you, you can probably see them -- barring spotter planes, range clocks, radar, etc. Probably simplest fix would be to increase detection range to equal gun range for a time after shooting. Hitpoint values should be placed next to the structure and floatability percentage values. Hits show specific damage values, after all. Current speed and rudder angle should be displayed in the right column. Annoying to have to hover over the division portraits. There should be more types and quantities of critical hits. For example, a generator crit might affect electric power, and an ammo supply / magazine crit (if the turret is not outright destroyed) should increase reload time. Additionally, ships had different numbers of engines and boilers! Maximum bulkheads are too strong and minimal bulkheads far too weak. There's too little choice. Max is almost always best, and it is seemingly the most important survivability feature. The compartment scheme and armor scheme need to be improved. Dovetails with the bulkhead situation. Partially because there is no crew, firefighting and flooding control apparently do not degrade with heavy damage. It would be good to see how exactly crit repair rate, fire fighting efficiency, and water pumping speed work. Eventually, enemy torpedo reloads should be obscured from the player. It should be hard to tell if torps were launched. This feature should come only if other torpedo changes are made. Eventually, ammo counts for guns should also be concealed -- the reload timer is far less important here. However, this should be implemented only after other fixes. Eventually, some (not all) critical hits on the enemy should be temporarily concealed from the player. Pretty obvious when a magazine detonation occurs.... Not immediately obvious if the captain is killed. Again, this should be implemented only after other fixes. Eventually, unidentified visible enemies should be given generic models so that the player cannot easily ID them. Once more, this should be implemented only after other fixes. There should be easier ways to jump to visible enemy (or allied) ships. At long ranges, it can be hard to click on them due to render distance. The return to flagship button is a nice example. The ship maneuver accuracy modifier makes little sense right now. A stationary target with its rudder hard to port will receive a big modifier. Special Features and Cosmetics Small ships look silly periodically submerging even in "calm" waves. Pitch and roll are often too much, and the graphics show the water washing over the deck in a very unrealistic way. Low priority fix. It looks weird for a heavily listing ship to still be shooting. Low priority fix. Horizon often looks strange due to render fog, even at high settings. Low priority fix. We need land! A simple infinite shoreline would work wonders. After that, maybe harbors, ports, fortresses.... There should be after action reports showing shots fired, hits made, damage done, and ships sunk. There should be a sandbox / training mode. The player would have full vision of all events and ships and partial control over the enemy. This would help enormously with testing.
  3. Navies were confident that a great rain of HE shells from QF guns would destroy the unarmored parts of the enemy and set fires. Big guns would usually also fire lots of HE up to the early Dreadnought era. The idea that HE should be better is reasonable. The trouble in the game is fivefold. We don't really have unarmored parts, aside from the superstructure and funnel. All ships have extremely tall belts, so there's less area for HE to work. Not as applicable to small ships, but important to big cruisers and battleships. Because of the strangeness of the armor model, the extended belt covers 4/7 of the ship length. The computer uses weak armor here, and many players do, too. AP can hit and penetrate to do a ton of damage, but it's often enough to keep out HE. There's no crew. A 3in gun peppering the superstructure of a torpedo boat can't kill off the gun crews in nearby open mounts with flying fragments. Also raises the question of how far damage spreads. Fires are also weak if the right techs are used, especially with max bulkheads. They get put out quickly. That's ok. Competent firefighting can keep a fire from getting out of hand. But since there's no crew, pumps, generators, or water lines, at the end of the battle the ship with 5% structural integrity has no problem shrugging off more fires. That's not so great. Finally, and by far the most difficult to fix, there are no true night battles. It is therefore extremely hard for torpedo boats and destroyers to approach without being targeted by big guns at long range. Small guns shooting HE have less opportunity to shine, because these close-in surprise attacks don't happen. What I'm trying to say is that I blame the armor and damage models for this band-aid fix. I would love to see changes here instead.
  4. Another positive value to procedural generation is that the enemy will build ships appropriate to its research level and budget in the campaign. So, if a nation has Mark 3 12in guns, coal fuel, reinforced bulkheads 1, geared turbines, etc. it can combine these into a design. Player-designed ships would be nice too, but it would be harder to match them to campaign.
  5. Edited the list. Should be up to date with most suggestions I've seen.
  6. I think this is more relevant to the custom mode than to the ship designer itself, but I fully agree with you. Added this to the list. Excellent idea. I'll add it. I have noticed the tubes don't scale right. Also, we don't have variants of tubes (though this would basically be cosmetic only). For example, the crew shelter on some Japanese launchers was very distinctive. I think torpedoes in general should be a little dangerous to carry. Usually they have only splinter armor to protect them. Nice point. I agree with the first bit. You are right that early torpedoes were too weak to survive long falls, but this was mostly rectified in the interwar period... for ships, anyway. Already on the list! An open question on how this will be fixed.
  7. I think Numbers Don't Matter is much more difficult, personally. I ended up building three fairly high-speed all-forward battleships, so I could close in on the monster Dreadnought while constantly firing all weapons. It took many tries. Eventually, I won after getting an ammo detonation. Felt like I was just lucky. I had tried a torpedo-battlecruiser approach, but the Dreadnought can often absorb a large number of 21in torpedoes.
  8. Prove your might is tough, but the objectives given may be a little confusing. There is no need to engage the battleship. If you destroy all three cruisers, you win. I used balanced tech. In common with many of these missions, high speed is not necessary. I lowered the "battlecruiser" speed to 25 knots and invested the weight and money into big guns and extreme durability. I used semi-auto 14in guns in 3 or 4 triple turrets, as these are Mark 3 variants. Max displacement, max bulkheads, max aux engines, max shaft, reinforced bulkhead II, antiflood III. Plenty of armor. Citadel 0 and 4 are both viable. Can try the different torpedo protections, though I was able to go without. I didn't try a secondary or torpedo launcher focus, but that might work too. Tactically, run in and keep a moderately close distance to the enemy cruisers with this fast battleship. The AI is not smart enough to go around to the merchants. Primary threat is from torpedoes, so one must carefully watch reloads on the cruisers. Generally can survive at least 3 hits, but even one can be dangerous. I believe the cruisers usually carry maximum reloads, so a ton of dodging is required. Max hydrophones is necessary. The enemy battleship will keep away and make few hits from long range. The durable "battlecruiser" can shrug these off, mostly. The destroyers are useful as distractions. If they get to close to the enemy, they will usually be sunk. However, the enemy tends to prefer them as targets, so they can be used at medium-long ranges to attract fire away from the battlecruiser. The reinforcing battleship is really not needed. It helps near the end, but usually it is either slow and heavily armored (so it gets there too late) or very fast and fragile. Finally, the enemy cruisers will often run out of main gun ammo after a while. This makes it easier to close in and finish them. May take a few tries, but it's not impossible.
  9. We definitely need a testing mode, this is a curious phenomenon
  10. Ship-based spotters could direct the fire of other ships in the division. This is the idea behind range clocks and turret rotation markings. Short-range radio could be used for the same purpose. This required special coordination and training, and it was only useful if the shooting ships were close to each other. Range clocks did not stay in service for very long, mind. Artillery computers after the Dreyer tables could generally predict the movement of an obscured target based on previous observations. A US range clock. But, again, I think the game has a ton of room for improvement here.
  11. I'd far prefer there be no duds, and lower reliability simply be represented as lower damage per shot.
  12. I also find it frustrating that enemies are invisible while shooting beyond a certain range (perhaps excluding radar-equipped ones in bad conditions). I'm not sure what the best system would be, but this one seems terribly awkward. Ends up with battleships with incredibly tall masts and fairly advanced fire control somehow unable to shoot back at -- or even see -- cruisers beyond ~9km range. Wouldn't be so bad if the cruisers weren't able to shoot with absolute impunity. One would think the constant gunflashes would make a good point of aim. Maybe an accuracy penalty, instead?
  13. I think it would be far easier to make balance conclusions if players had access to a testing mode. All hulls and modules would be unlocked, and the player would be able to save designs for use on the enemy team. The player could assign a design to be the "enemy," and one to be player controlled. A more complex test might include several player-designed ships of different kinds. The player could have a limited control of enemy behavior -- such as a feature to force the enemy to sit still and not shoot back. Naturally this could function as an expansion of features in the current Custom mode. I think this would make it much easier for players to input balance feedback, as right now we're working with disparate data. An after-action report would be useful in all game modes.
  14. The face plates were single 660mm (or 650mm, depending on source) thicknesses of Vickers Hardened steel. This was the same type as the belt. I don't think there was a backing layer, but, if there was, it would be added to the 660mm rather than a part of it. The barbettes and conning tower were similarly 560mm and 500mm of VH armor, respectively. I am not sure if the belt armor for A-150 was ever settled upon. I can definitely believe that composite plates were considered, as Garzke and Dulin say, but in the event it never got that far. Perhaps the hang-up was have been the quantitative capacity of the rolling mills and the hardening installations for super-thick plates. I also have wondered if the idea was to save cost and weight by mounting relatively thin face-hardened plate onto relatively thick homogenous armor, with the idea that the homogenous armor would be integral to the ship's strength girder. 410mm VH plus a 50mm structural NVNC armor backing could get 460mm total thickness at a relatively small increase in cost and might see little increase in weight.
  15. I don't know about those specific limits, but I'd agree that it seems way too easy to build huge plants and guns. I think they should weigh more. Space is also not represented for power plants or magazines, which doesn't help. Campaign might also offer a way, if the price were to skyrocket with added tech, and if time-consuming research were needed. Japan could and did make face-hardened armor plates of 26in, but no doubt the cost would be obscene to make more than a few of them. A new or upgraded factory would need the big bucks. The armor weights are very weird. The designer system is too opaque.
  16. I've posted about this before, but a fair number of US destroyers had a small number of reloads for their torpedo launchers. This picture is USS Fletcher, which was designed to carry 4 reload torpedoes. The weight required was probably not huge -- as far as I am aware, the reloading equipment was the crane system used for normal restocking. The torpedoes would be stashed in lockers near each mount, usually below it. Reload lockers can be seen next to the second funnel on this picture of USS Porter. On the other hand, no doubt this approach was slow and awkward, even if the ship wasn't being shot at. Weight was also relatively high in the ship. It seems that most US destroyers lost their reloads sometime in 1943 (?), in favor of other equipment. Why waste weight on these sluggish reloads, when radar and radio and AA and ASW are so pressing? The Japanese example is different in that it was designed to reload quickly. There was a special chain drive intended to pull the torpedoes straight from the storage bins into the tubes. This required that the torpedoes be stored directly adjacent to the launchers and at the same level. Additionally, the most common Type 93 variant weighed about 1000kg more than its US counterpart, at 2700kg.
  17. I have a little difficulty interpreting this. Does this imply that the "max penetration" is the theoretical pen of a shell that impacts at a perfectly normal angle, at 90 degrees, no matter the range? If so, is this based on devolving the impact vector in x, y, and z components, or is something else going on?
  18. Many early destroyers had no independent directors, using handheld instruments or calculating sights mounted on the tubes. Later cruisers and destroyers oftentimes did have separate directors, although as you suggest they were usually not as complex as gun directors. A good description of the typical US WWII destroyer torpedo director can be seen here. Pages 15-20 explain the general functions of the device. https://maritime.org/doc/destroyer/ddfc/index.htm#pg15 Generally a US destroyer would have one or two torpedo directors, either one on centerline or one on each side of the bridge. They were pretty small and are hard to spot in photographs: Usually they are seen on the rear part of the bridge "wings," often covered by a tarp.
  19. An interesting idea, although the idea of multiple directors increasing accuracy against a single target seems a little odd to me. About the only advantage I can see is adding more rangefinder input. Secondary directors usually have shorter base lengths and thus worse ranging estimates, so they don't seem very valuable in that role.
  20. It seems to depend heavily on the Mark number of the gun in question. The rates of fire are not too absurd; in the Battle of the Denmark Strait, Bismarck fired 91 rounds in about 13 minutes, or 0.875 rpm per gun. At Guadalcanal, Washington (with essentially the same reloading arrangements as Iowa) fired about 1.5rpm per gun.
  21. Autogenerated reports would be great. The game already tracks hits in the events tab, so it should really be visible and collated at the end of the match.
  22. Leaving aside armored cruisers, there was definite interest in 7-9in gun cruisers before the Washington Treaty appeared. The Hawkins class was the base-point for the restrictions eventually put in place. The idea for the Hawkins was to match any raiding German light cruisers with 175mm+ guns, and to be able to hit targets at the visual horizon -- thus the selection of 7.5in weapons. All had begun construction during WWI, and two (or three, depending) had been completed prior to the Treaty. The Japanese attempted to match the Hawkins and outmatch the 6in-gun Omahas with the Furutaka scout cruisers. These would have 200mm guns, and were in the design phase 1921-1922 (after years of consideration). The decision to use 200mm guns preceded the Treaty by at least several months. I think probably more, as a test gun was fired in 1921. Finally, the US had been looking at large cruisers for long-range Pacific operations prior to the Treaty. After seeing the Hawkins, 8in guns became increasingly popular, with several design series featuring them from 1919 to 1921. John Jordan indicates that the US was the driving force behind the 8in limit in the Treaty. Had the Treaty not been instituted, there is little doubt that the Furutakas would have still been built with 7.9in guns (that is, unless Japanese finances collapsed). It is a little speculatory to say what American plans would have been, as things were not set in stone, but I strongly suspect some sort of US 8in cruiser would appear.
  23. Riveting in the citadel area was common and should not be seen as a particular disadvantage. Among "modern" battleships, the Nelsons, King George Vs, North Carolinas, Iowas, and South Dakotas were mostly riveted. Welding has unfortunate properties with crack resistance, which reduced its appeal in those times.
  24. Agreed, these options should stick around longer. I suspect that the cutoff is based on the USS Oklahoma, which was laid down in 1912 with triple-expansion engines. This was the last US battleship with reciprocating steam propulsion, and to my knowledge the last battleship actually completed with them (in 1916) anywhere. There were other classes of warships with steam engine propulsion after this, but no cruisers or destroyers that I am aware of. Edit: The Kaba and Arabe classes of Japanese-built second-class destroyers were built with triple expansion engines. The Kabas were all laid down 1914 and completed 1915, and the nearly identical Arabes (built in Japan for France) were laid down and completed all in 1917. The French Normandie class of battleships, laid down 1913-1914, would have partial triple expansion drive. However, these were not completed due to the war. Bearn, the last member of the class (laid down 1914), was actually to be built with turbines alone, but curiously the machinery layout was changed later, and the ship was completed in 1927 as a carrier with partial triple expansion. After this, steam engines were used primarily in auxiliary vessels, merchant ships, and warships built to mercantile standards. This latter category includes a whole host of escort aircraft carriers, corvettes, and frigates constructed during WWII.
  25. That said, navies (especially the Royal Navy) would eventually put a great deal of emphasis on training for concentration fire. This would help to leverage a numbers advantage. This led to tactics like salvo timing, where each ship would fire at pre-arranged intervals, to avoid interference. Shell dyes also would become prominent in the late '30s and early '40s, so the splashes would have distinctive colors. Each ship might have a different color, so they could tell apart their shots. (I suspect dyes would be of little value at night.) The idea is that it would take time, effort, money, and tech to improve concentration fire.
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