[How bout some gun grouping]

yes it is absolutely realistic, in older designs, the secondary tower's range finder and fire control system can direct the secondaries while the main tower direct the main battery, or the other way round too if ever needed. in later designs from the 1930's onwards and modernised dreadnoughts, it was even typical for secondaries to have their own fire control directors independent of the 2 main ones on top of the towers. having the main and secondary guns succesfuly engage a different target at the same time was done plenty of time in real battles and there are many exemples.

technically, even having the main battery engage multiple targets (exemple: the 2 front turrets on 1 target and the back turret on another, or any combination really) was totally possible, though i'm not sure there is any exemple of it actually done in real combat.

the devs already confirmed they are working on separate targeting on multiple side of the ship, though i'm not completely sure if that really means selecting different targets simultaneously, or only that secondaries and side main guns will now auto fire on target of opportunity on their side of the ship, if you have ordered to attack a target on the other side, outside of their arc.

[Armor]

when you need to start worrying about plunging fire depends on a lot of things such as how much deck armor you have but also the calibre, weight and ballistics of the attacking shell. as a  rule of thumb though, under 10km of range, plunging fire penetrating from above is typically not a thing. long range plunging penetrations started being a thing in late WW1 and afterwards only. before that guns just wheren't accurate enough at those ranges and fleet engagements happened closer anyway.

your Mid-Deck penetration was just a shell that hit the side of your ship above the belt and penetrated sideways. the armored belt of a ship doesnt extend very high above the waterline, it's only there to protect machinery and magazine rooms that are at or below the waterline in the hull. most of the side of the ship above the waterline isn't protected by it. this upper part of the hull that isn't protected by the belt is generally called the "casemate" in naval terminology. it generally has a bit of armor of its own, but much less than the belt, typically just enough armor to protect against HE shells, not AP. you can't set your Casemate armor currently in the ship designer, but its is planned to be added, eventually.

fire does not affect the superstructure (as in: the conning towers, gun turrets, ect) directly. they affect only the main hull compartiments, although a penetrating hit on a gun turret or a torpedo tube CAN start a fire on nearby hull compartiments, but if the weapon wasn't destroyed by the hit, it won't burn down at all, and hull fire will never propagate to guns/torpedoes and destroy them either.

if a ship has almost all (like, more than 80%) of its hull compartiments on fire at the same time, then the game insta-kill it regardless of how much structure% or floatability% it has left. then the game then gives you the message "X ship sinks due to heavy fire". it happens only pretty rarely. otherwise, fire slowly burns down the HP of any compartiments that are burning and can spread to nearby compartiments. if a Red compartiment (with Zero HP left) is on fire, then nothing happens, although that fire cans till spread if not put out, and reach a green or yellow compartiment eventually.

one last thing i noticed, though i'm not 100% sure, is that it seems fire that spread to the macinery room compartiments down in the middle of the hull, however, CAN disable the engine of the ship i think, if it burns down to red.

[Will aircraft carriers be added to the game?]

the one issue i have with having CV as an supplementary campaign map only option like subs, is that as mentionned by others above, unlike subs, they were truly decisive in which side is winning or losing the naval war during a conflict, especially late game of 1940 and later, they matter a lot more than your surface combat ships you actually control.

while i still think carriers should be in the game as i said above, and i still think doing them like submarines is probably the most viable way in terms of workload, i could see it being extremely annoying and cheesy to just have a popup message at the start of a war that says "your carriers have engaged with the ennemy carriers and decisively lost, all of them but 1 have been sunk. you have now 1 carrier left in your entire navy while the ennemy has 7". and then for the rest of the campaign you're forced on the defensive because you can't ever move out of your home ports into the ocean without risking to be a sitting duck to ennemy carriers and losing most of your surface ships without being able to do anything about it, all of this because of a carrier battle that was decided by RNG you had no control over...

i'm not really sure how to adress this.

[whould like clarification about armor quality multiplier bonus?]

ah, then it's as i suspected.

no wonder then armor is currently so overtuned! most missions gives you acces to a 60% Multiplier or more, if you concider 270-310 mm was the typical range of belt thickness for most dreadnoughts, with that multiplier they end up with an effective belt thickness in the 450-500+mm range! this is more than the freaking Yamato had, think of that for a moment.

no wonder they cant penetrate each other even from 1.5km with their WW1 12-14 inch guns...

this armor quality multiplier needs to be way re-adjusted whenever they re-balance the armor, i think it's the source of most problems. rather than a flat bonus, i'd rather see it actually model individually what those different armor actually does (exemple: face hardened armor gives you a better chance of shattering the shell on impact, late "all or nothing" armor schemes that use inernal belts like on the Iowa class have the outer shell of the hull acting as a de-caping plate that can disrupt the AP Cap of the shell before it even hits the belt, things like that.)

if that's too much work, at least reduce the quality multiplier to like +30% maximum, otherwise it's making armor way OP

[Will aircraft carriers be added to the game?]

49 minutes ago, Angus MacDuff said:

If you are adding carriers because they were present in real life, wouldn't you also have to use the same logic and add submarines (making Dreadnoughts even less relevant)? 

funny you say that because submarines are also confirmed in the game already (as an abstract campaign map only option, not controllable in battles),

man a lot of you really don't do your research about what was already confirmed in the game before posting do you? 😛

[Will aircraft carriers be added to the game?]

4 hours ago, Zak MacKay said:

The game starts in 1890 just when the first pre dreadnoughts where being launched and before their maturity. Its not a WW1 game its much earlier. Just the game keep going into the interwar with the same model.

you say that, but radar and fire control radar (essentially WW2 Tech) is confirmed in the game, also, the modern BB hull from the last naval academy mission is literaly the Yamato, a ship that went into commision in late 1941 or even mid 1942 for Musashi...

you also says the game isnt WW1 centered but even earlier, i dont know exactly how you did your math there, but even if you assumed the game ends in 1930 and starts in 1890, that still puts 1914-1918 WW1 almost EXACTLY at the midpoint of the campaign... and then of course we already know the game goes beyond 1930 due to what i mentionned above.

[Formations and Groups.]

i remember Battlestations: Midway and Battlestations: Pacific, there was a mix of very good and very bad things about those games but one of the things they did superbly well well was ship formations:

basically in those games, when you had ships grouped together in a formation, you just had to hit a buton to enter the fromation menu, and in there, you had an overhead view of the formation centered on the commanding ship, then you could select and drag every ship in the group to whatever position you want it to have relative to the commanding ship, and when you're done setting every ship in the formation to where you want, you hit ok. from now on the AI will always try to keep the ship in that position relative to the commanding ship, adjusting speed and turning as nessesary, you just give move orders to the commanding ship to move the entire formation.

it was intuitive, quick and simple and it worked perfectly well. EVERY single game that does ship combat should use the same system for formation imo.

whould very much like to see this emulated in this game.

was kind of hard to find good pictures of it but i got one, it looked like this:

the commanding ship is in white, the yellow ship is the one currently selected, of which you are setting his position in the formation (the transparent outline shows where the ship is right now, the arrow where he is gonna go when you hit OK)

 

[the unsinkable TB]

it's a known issue and they are already planning to patch it next update, and probably keep an eye on it still.

it's a mix of multiple things why they are so hard to kill,

-first off, they always give a flat Half-accuracy (-100%) debuff to any ship targeting them due to their small size, which imo is too much, and should at least gets reduced to almost no debuff when you get close to them

-second, damage from near miss by big HE shells is not implemented right now in the game, and such small flimsy boats whould suffer the most from it of any ships in the game

-third, they dont take nearly as much flooding as they should from a tropedo hit, the game still seems to treat them and how they deal with flooding as if they had the hull divided in dozens of longitudinal and transverse sections each sealed off with waterproof doors as in a big ship... which is obviously not actually the case in a torpedo boat.

-fourth, the game gives an accuracy debuff for when the target is moving transversally very quick compared to your ship, which is why when you are zipping past them in your DD from 1Km away, your accuracy drops to near zero inspite of the short range, bcause the game "thinks" and treats it as if they were moving relatively to you at hundreds of knots in terms of how the accuracy is calculated.

-finally, it's due to how the damage model works in general: to sink a ship from structure damage you need to get near 100% of its compartiments red, and if a red compartiment takes a hit no further damge is done, which is why after a while when most of their compartiments are red but a few green or yellow ones remain below the waterline, near the bow or near the stern, they can basically tank infinite hits as long as you arn't lucky to hit them exactly in the one compartiment they have left that is still green.

torpedo boats and smaller ships in general should be given far less compartiments (if not only 1) than big ships, but they currently have a basically comparable amount

[whould like clarification about armor quality multiplier bonus?]

pretty much what the title say, when you choose the thickness of your armor in the ship designer, does the game takes into account the armor quality multiplier you have chosen and gives you the equivalent thickness in steel, or does it just puts whatever thickness you entered and gives you the multiplier on top?

for exemple: if i chose 300mm belt, with the maxiumum armor quality multiplier of +100% (Krupp IV i think)

do i actually have a 150 mm belt, which is equivalent to 300mm of base steel with the multiplier?

or do i have a 300mm belt + the multiplier, which means i actually have a belt equivalent to 600mm steel?

if it's the second option (and i suspect it is) then no wonder in the current build of the game armor seems so OP and Battleships cant Penetrate each other for sh** even when they are broadsiding each other from 1.5 km away...

[Will aircraft carriers be added to the game?]

i think in a game about adapting and evolving your ship designs and building a fleet to the changing nature of naval warfare over a long period of time, carriers absolutely have to be modelled in one way or another, they were a huge game changer at all levels.

i also think abstracting them like submarines as they said is probably the right way to go for this game. the issues with CV is that as soon as you are trying to do them, you also have to model all the physics for the planes, bombs airdrop torpedoes, ect, as well as the unique AI for planes and the carrier, all of this is a HUGE amount of work, basically a game on its own.

and concidering this small team is already gonna be strained to model the ballistic physics, armor, armor penetration, Ship AI, gun AI, ship physics, ship damage models, ect ect... this is already a lot to chew off so i kinda dont want them to spread their ressources too thin and start doing something like controllable planes, or CV that can actually launch and recover planes within battle.  i think the ressources for developpement will be better spent trying to do the focus aspect of the game as good as possible.

maybe long after release for a DLC or expansion, wen the main game is done and done well, sure.

[How to change Graphic Settings?]

with that being said though, performence is ABSOLUTELY horrendeous at the moment and given the level of graphics it has, yes the game really runs way worse than it should...

which is fine right now, because what we are currently playing is literally an early draft/proof of concept for the game, not even a BETA yet. during game developement performence optimisation is typically one of the things that is done one the last stages near to release when all the major features are in, same as bug fixing.

they also said on the forums they are planning performence improvements and crash fixes for the next big patch; and i'd fully expect later on we will see far more customizable graphics option than "bad, good, beautiful..." ect 😛

[My case for the Bulge (Torpedos)]

i want to point out something important to the dev team here: please do not confuse torpedo defence system and torpedo bulge, they are not the same thing:

the current "torpedo protection" options we have in game reference to the internal empty buffer compartiments and holding bulkheads within the hull. this is just the internal "torpedo defence system" mot reasonably modern dreadnought had that from the get go.

then the big external "torpedo bulge" that is talked about in this topic is something even more: it's basically a bolt-on extra hull section that is added during modernisation, that stacks OVER the already existing internal "torpedo defence system. (see picture at the end with Nagato class's armor if you have trouble visualizing what i mean)
because of this, adding a torpedo bulge, in addition to improving torpedo protection (obviously), have 2 additional effects that the internal torpedo defence system doesnt have:

-it give the hull extra displacement limit: simply by putting more compartiments under water, you get more floatability. in their modernized 1930/WW2 configurations many of those old dreadnoughts safely achieved displacements that were now far in excess of their original hull limits. they achieved this thanks to the extra floatation added from the bulges. Fuso class for exemple went from 29000 tonnes to 35000 tonnes just thanks to them!

-it deteriorates top speed and fuel efficiency: by altering the shape of the hull, increasing water drag and reducing streamlining. note however, that in practice this effect was often more than compensated by engine and machinery upgrades also received during the modernisation, so the old modernised dreadnoughts generally ended up faster after the modernisation. but still, talking about the bulges alone, yes, they do deteriorate speed.

 

seeing from this, i think there is a decent case in my opinion that bulges should be represented by their individual option in the game:

-they give even more torpedo damage and flooding reduction (probably need to rebalance the effects of the internal torpedo protection, so that having both internal protection + bulge doesnt make you too resistant to torpedoes)

-they actually give you bonus hull displacement limit

-they reduce speed and increase a bit fuel consumption

-they add A LOT of build time and build cost.

if you plan to have rebuilding/modernisation of old ships during the campaign, could be perfect to have them as a modernisation option rather than something you build on the ships initially (?)

now of course haing them be visually represented on the models whould be a nice touch and i whould love that as well. but i think at the very least in terms of stats and ship design they shouldnt be lumped together with the internal torpedo defence system as they are not the same.

 

 

picture for illustration: here is Nagato class's armor (modified from wikipedia),

in green: the torpedo defence system, this is build-in to the ship as designed, and was always there. the current "torpedo protection system" options we have in game are only this.

in purple: the torpedo bulge you can clearly see that this is essentially an extra section of hull added later. this also alters hull shape and increase the max possible displacement. this is currently not modelled at all in the game, and really should be.

[no emails received after purchase.]

purchased the Limited Edition hours ago, still have not received any emails with either receipt or download links or game key (yes i have checked my spam folder).

what's going on?