DeadlyWalrus

Armor Main belt should cover the area between the fore and aft main gun barbettes or a set distance past the furthest funnel on all-forward designs. Armor weight would be calculated based on the length of the belt. This would naturally benefit compact multi-gun turret and all-forward designs happened historically. Move barbette armor in with the rest of the armor so we can choose it's thickness like everything else. Replace the "citadel" selector (which doesn't really make sense) with an armor design selector. This is where your sloped armor, turtle back, deck armor only (i.e. protected cruiser), etc. will go (All-or-Nothing can be removed as an option entirely, the player should be able to create an AoN system naturally just be selecting appropriate armor thicknesses). Damage Rebalance effects of damage on citadel versus non-citadel compartments. It should be very difficult to actually sink a ship without penetrating the citadel (armored-raft design concept and all), however, non-citadel damage should be able to significantly impair a ship's speed, maneuverability, accuracy, rate-of-fire, etc. This is one of the main criteria for making historical pre-dreadnaught designs viable. Add the ability to select different levels of damage resistance. This would simulate the presence of things like damage control gear and redundant systems to reduce the chance of systems being disabled, fire spreading, etc. at the cost of money and weight. Increasing tech levels could reduce these costs. Gunnery Rebalance differences in accuracy between large and small guns. Larger guns have a definite advantage in longer range engagements, however, once the range closes to the point where smaller guns can fire on a relatively flat trajectory with short flight times for their shells the difference between the should be negligible. The inability of smaller guns to deliver (relatively) accurate fire even at short range is the other primary reason pre-dreadnaughts really don't work in-game. Command and Control Add the option to order ships under fire to take evasive maneuvers within their formation. Sailing on a constant course and speed makes you a relatively easy target so ships generally avoided doing so when under fire. This can work either as actual AI maneuvers within the formation making use of the existing accuracy debuffs on ships that are turning, or simulated with it's own debuff. Historically formations would generally try and engage the entire enemy formation to prevent enemy ships from being able to sail a constant course and provide a nice, stable platform for their own guns. This change should encourage similar tactics in game. Provide more and less information about the enemy ships. The player really shouldn't have any way to know about the loading status of the enemy's guns, but your own fire control needs to have an estimate of the enemy's course and speed to have any chance of ever hitting their target so they can probably relay that to the bridge too. Assuming some sort of intelligence system is implemented in the campaign (it should be) things like maximum speed and armor thicknesses would be reported (potentially inaccurately) if they have been discovered. Give a couple guys a map and some grease pencils so they can keep a plot of the engagement. It doesn't have to be perfectly accurate, but some sort of plot seems much more realistic than figuring out what the enemy fleet is doing using your magical floating eye. Campaign (still exploring the campaign so just some smaller things) Add ability to assign ships to formations. Ships shouldn't always deploy in their exact assigned formation (exigencies of war and all), but the battle generator should tend towards creating engagements with existing formations. Add various "no show" events such as attacks on unescorted convoys or invasions that aren't intercepted for when not enough formations are assigned to an area (basically an expansion of the current freighter sinking system). This should be harsh enough to prevent just massing the entire navy into one giant doom-stack. Add the ability to specify your combat doctrine for the war. Are you going to group up your ships and blockade the enemy coast? Disperse them and raid enemy shipping on the open sea? These decisions (and the decisions of your opponent will strongly influence what kind of battles are generated. Tie ability to decline battles in campaign map to the actual speeds of the ships involved. Currently you can "fail" to withdraw from a battle but then just turn around and leave if your ships are faster. Make mission success objectives more reasonable and somewhat related to the mission briefing. While sinking all (or at least a large percentage) of an enemy transport force might be a sensible objective if you're intercepting an enemy invasion fleet, a hit-and-run raid on an enemy convoy before superior enemy forces arrive is not a failure because all of the cargo ships weren't sunk.

I think the big problem is that relative accuracy difference between large and small guns is something that varied greatly over time and was in many respects one of the key driving forces in the evolution of naval tactics and design. Way back in the pre-dreadnaught era accuracy is universally terrible so effective battle ranges are very close; specifically close enough that a long-barrel 5" or 6" gun can still fire on a fairly flat trajectory with a short time-of-flight. Under these conditions, the large guns don't have any particular advantage in terms of actually hitting a target, but they do have a significant disadvantage in rate-of-fire. Thus you see designs with a large number of small and intermediate guns to smother the enemy in fire and destroy his ability to fight and maneuver and a few heavy guns to finally punch through the main armor once he's been rendered combat ineffective. Moving on to the dreadnaught era things flip. Now improved fire control lets you hit at ranges where smaller guns need to fire at extremely high angles to reach the target. This dramatically increases the time of flight and makes hitting a maneuvering target even more difficult. Add in the lack of secondary gun directors and the interference the guns cause in observing main battery fire and it's really not worth engaging a peer opponent. Thus you're really more concerned with making things difficult for smaller ships who might be trying to do annoying things like get into position to fire torpedoes or something like that. Secondaries do get a bit of a boost later as they start to acquire their own fire control directors, though the time-of-flight issue still means that their effective range is much less the big guns (or even their own maximum ballistic range), though if a small ship does get close enough (such as Ayanami at the 2nd Naval Battle of Guadalcanal) it will have a very bad day (or night in that particular case).

To be fair, the entire engagement was something of an enhanced target practice (the US carriers deliberately halted their attacks on the fleeing Japanese ships so the BBs would have something to do), so I'm not sure New Jersey would have intentionally maneuvered into secondary range if she was dealing with an opponent capable of offering meaningful resistance. That having been said, it's really not until fairly late in WW2 that radar advances sufficiently to provide accurate firing solutions for targets beyond effective secondary range so really up until that point adverse conditions could bring engagements close enough for smaller guns to still matter.

More detailed fire-control modeling has been discussed at various points... whether that will ever come to anything? I have no idea.

I think that's one of the big issues that the current design is really having issues with. The tactics, effectiveness and really the fundamental purpose of a ship's secondary battery changes greatly from the pre-dreadnaught era to the end of gun based warships. The purpose of a small, rapid-fire gun is going to be very different in an era were everything is under local control and battle ranges are in the few thousands of yards compared to ships aiming radar-directed salvos at 30,000+ yards.

Yeah, fire and underwater damage (i.e. flooding) are modeled to to some extent. The whole damage model has its issues right now and fire, in particular, is often not particularly dangerous, but it does exist. Flooding from shells hits at or below the water line can happen and it does appear that progressive flooding is possible as well. As far as individual damage control assignments, it's possible that something is planned, though I would expect that's far too granular of a detail to really be desirable in a game that intends to simulate fairly large fleets of warships.

Honestly, it only makes sense to "teach" the AI how to use the designer if this iteration of the designer is the final version. Otherwise, any time you change the designer you also have to start messing with the design AI too and it just creates a whole lot of work that may very well all get thrown out with the next designer revision.

Very much this. It makes no sense to spend a whole lot of time finely balancing the exact values in the ship builder when the entire system is under active development and is subject to substantial change.

So, you're not wrong that being able to fit a reduced number of turrets for a given number of guns does result in considerable weight savings, however, there could also be substantial weight savings just in the turret itself. If you look at the Nevada-class, for instance, the two-gun turret was 618 tons while the triple turret was 748 tons... a pretty small increase for the addition of an extra gun. Now there are some differences between the two designs so it's not a direct 1:1 comparison, but considering we're looking at the exact same tech level it does appear that you could get significant per-gun weight savings just be putting more guns in one turret.

Yeah, I really hope these new designer features work out and they can keep moving in this direction.

Lets keep in mind that: The current game map is very much something you can throw together in 5 minutes in Unity just to give yourself something to work with. I very much doubt it's the absolute final design. That 25km number is the maximum distance a ship can spawn from the "center" of the map. So, if you spawn two ships as far from center as possible they can be up to 50km from each other... not exactly convenient visual range. And that's assuming they don't move further from each other at any point. Once you get more than a handful of ships in an engagement, it becomes a tremendous pain to try and keep track of how all of the ships are moving in relation to each other. Yes, you can see a ship's bearing to your camera position, but what you really need to know to make any sort of informed decision is its course and speed, and even if you move your camera over to try and estimate its course you've now lost your initial frame of reference so you have to then look around to find your own ship and the whole thing takes way longer than it needs to be. Extrapolate that out to a major fleet engagement and you're looking at hours spent just figuring out what a top-down plot could tell in you seconds. This is, of course, one of the reasons a real life admiral would have a fairly significant number of staff whose job was to collect all the various contact reports and create a nice overhead map of the engagement.

Yes, everything changes, but it changes in somewhat predictable ways and it changes fairly slowly (at least as far as a shell travelling at several hundred m/s is concerned). So, the basic procedure for the period (pre-central fire control and post-radar gun direction are obviously different), is to get a rough solution through optical observation, fire slow, deliberate salvos and adjust the solution based on observing fall of shot, and then, once you have a decent solution (usually you bracket your target or possibly actually hit it), you fire as many shells as possible before your firing solution degrades too much. Now, in-game, there's no benefit to observing the fall of shot, so your first salvo has the same chance of hitting as your 10th. This is actually somewhat similar to gunnery in the pre-dreadnought (and earlier) era where individual gun crews had very little chance of identifying their own shell splashes amongst the hail of fire from the ship. In this scenario you do want to just fire as fast as possible once you're in effective range as the best way to increase your chances of scoring a hit. In fact, if you look at naval doctrine of that time period, there is a very strong emphasis on rate of fire for this very reason.

The issue is that you still have your targeting solution when you go to rapid fire so your accuracy should still be mostly the same as it was when you finish your observational fire. What the slower rate of fire mainly does is conserve ammo while you're still building an good firing solution and probably aren't going to hit anything (and makes things a bit easier on your observers). However, as the gunnery system is currently implemented you almost always have your solution and it's just a matter of throwing enough steel downrange to satisfy the RNG gods so there's not really any reason to just fire as fast as possible.

Rule the Waves has a mechanic where you can order a destroyer to break off and pick up survivors from a sinking ship so it's definitely a concept that could work. The actual consequences kind of depend on how the overall campaign works, but things like prestige and morale effects, collecting intelligence (if you pick up an enemy crew), rescuing specific officers (if you're assigning named officers to your ships) are all possible just to name a few.

We're really talking about two different things here. Gameplay complexity is (generally) good, because it creates meaningful decisions for the player. UI complexity is, at best, a necessary evil. Having to page through menu on top of menu on top of menu to get what you want or memorize byzantine key combinations really should be avoided if at all possible. The focus should be on who to target, not the technical details of how to make the computer comply with that targeting decision. My point is you can build a fairly simple UI that is capable of supporting much a much more complex targeting system.

Honestly, I don't think the UI has to be that complicated. You have 4-5 buttons (main, sec #1, sec #2, torp #1 and maybe torp #2) and you just press that and select a target. Cycling through the directors to see which one has LOS to the target and then assigning guns is the sort of thing computers are rather good and doing very quickly so there's no real reason to force the player to do that (though you could do it through some sort of expanding menu thing if you really wanted). Then you add an icon above the button to indicate that either because of damage or placement no directors can see the selected target (so the player can quickly see why accuracy is so poor) and that's kind of it. In terms of command overload I think that's better addressed through the division control UI. You can largely mirror the individual ship controls for targeting, but add in options for certain default behaviors, should ships prefer the lead ship in the enemy division or their opposite number in the battle line, should secondaries focus on the primary target or smaller ships, etc, etc. This way the player is primarily focused on commanding divisions and the individual ships in those divisions can largely look after themselves.

Hmm... this got me thinking a bit. Early on, secondary guns were aimed under local control, so the captain (let alone the fleet level commander) would have fairly little ability to effectively direct secondary fire. The guns would mostly just blaze away at whatever happened to be in range. Later, you get gun directors for the secondary battery so then you can engage as many targets as you have directors that can see a target. Which brings me to the main idea. Do targeting through the idea of gun directors. Basically you have buttons for the directors and you can click a director and then click on the target and voila, no more having to play keyboard twister to assign different targets to different weapons. You could theoretically have a system that allows you to manually assign individual guns to a specific director, allowing various distributed fire options as well.

Yeah... I think the important thing you need to answer first is "why?" Outside of malfunctions and other unintentional events the main reasons for not firing all available guns were targeting things that were very easy to hit (primarily things like stationary shore targets) and range estimation. Now, we don't have land so outside of a few edge cases against disabled ships the first reason isn't that important. The second reason makes sense in the context of a realistic gunnery model where ships may need to gradually refine their targeting solution over multiple salvos, but with the current "locked or not locked" system there's no reason not to maximize your chance to hit once your ship has done its automatic ranging shots and is locked on.

I too would very much like to know what they're planning. Though I would expect whoever they hired will need a bit of time to get up to speed on the current state of the designer and then try and figure out what can be changed and improved.

Analyzing reports either from exercises or actual battles is one of the main ways real-life designers figured out what worked and what didn't so I think it would make a great addition to the game.

More than suspect, that's what the USN actually did. All of the USN's Washington Treaty era cruisers were 8-in ships. It was only after the London Treaty created a specific tonnage allowance for 6-in cruisers that the Brooklyn-class was ordered. For the sort of long-range scout and fleet screen role that the USN and IJN envisioned for their cruisers, you naturally needed a fairly large ship that would likely end up fighting it's direct counterparts on the enemy side, so a fairly heavy armament was quite useful and the ship could fit larger guns anyway. Now, absent any treaty restrictions at all, the core of those fleet screens would probably have been battlecruisers, but cost, and the need to keep such heavy units close enough to directly support the main fleet would likely have meant that some 8-in cruisers would still have been built.

So, I think the limitations of the ship editor are pretty obvious. 1MajorKoenig has a very extensive post on that subject elsewhere so I'll not rehash it here other than to say, if you allow sufficient freedom in the designer to make ships that fulfill roles that the user decides on rather than sticking rigidly to roles dictated by the game designers then you naturally eliminate a lot of the "everything is the same" issue. As far as nation specifics go, I think this would be better handled as a set of technology advantages rather than a special "thing" that I can have and no one else can. Historically, it was very hard to keep ideas from spreading to rival nations so it makes no sense to have nation "exclusives" so to speak. What does make sense is make it relatively easier or harder to certain nations to develop certain technologies, so it is never impossible to build a certain item if you really want it, but it might not make sense for every nation to develop the exact same technologies because of the varying costs. Edited for typos

In addition to the points already mentioned, early aircraft were very limited in both their ability to carry a sufficiently heavy payload to damage a large ship and in effective range. Furthermore, aircraft in this time period had very limited ability to operate at night or in bad weather, so surface warships still had a role to play even once aircraft were a real threat. As a result, you really should have to assess the capabilities of your current technology rather than just building as many carriers as soon as possible. Really, the interface and gameplay systems are a much bigger impediment to carrier implementation. "Realistic" carrier operations are a very hands-off, map based affair at the fleet command level. You're mostly sitting around, waiting for contact reports, then you prepare your strike package, send it off in the general direction of where you think the enemy is and wait for them to come back to find out what actually happened. I'm not sure that's something a lot of people are interested in playing, and even if it is, you need to change the way the game handles spotting reports and the ability to direct actions at very long range. Alternatively, you could make the gameplay more involving for the player, but that means making entirely new systems to control aircraft and the like and that's probably more work than they have time for.

Yeah, I kind of feel that completely reworking the gunnery model might be a bit too much for them to pull off. Not only would they need to rebuild the gunnery system itself, but the whole ship handling AI would need to get much more detailed and capable than it currently is. Individually maneuvering ships that are under fire is all well and good in one of the small scenario battles we have right now, but having to do so in a major fleet engagement would quickly devolve into micromanagement hell. While properly simulating all of this would be quite nice and would eliminate the need to manually balance a lot of the gunnery variables, I'm just not sure that it's a realistic proposition.

Accuracy seems to scale pretty heavily with gun size, so main guns and large secondaries are often more effective despite their lower rate of fire. However, tech level also has a pretty big impact, so it's not always the case that the smaller guns are completely useless.