Diabolic_Wave

Agreed. It's probably best to just ignore this person entirely from here on in as well, I think. I know it's slightly supercilious, but if his arguments are all going to culminate in 'oh no, this person likes a thing/thinks a thing I don't like or disagrees with me, better be rude'. I reiterate that I think that most of his points were fine, but going from decent to mediocre ideas put forwards slightly too forcefully to 'insults insults insults' doesn't endear me to this thread at all.

Well done to our design team! Thanks as always for improving your game constantly! Definitely not regretting my pre-order if it's funding such good work.

Tank gunnery was being used as a simple example of how one abstracts gunnery, not as something they were using as a source for the gunnery. I suggest you reread it. As for how being close to a flagship might improve accuracy, it probably shouldn't improve accuracy much, but it should improve communication of fire orders and target range between the flagship and ships following in the line, at least before radio is used. I agree that the distance from flagship shouldn't have a particularly big influence, but you might have phrased all of this more respectfully.

Fair enough. Note; I'm not against reversing the engine, if only for quicker slowing down. I just thought that your rationale for it was quite suspect, if the game is supposed to accurately represent naval warfare. Speaking of being rude, I was probably also a little rude too. Sorry if I did seem it.

Because broadside isn't as suicidal as it seems in an arcade game. I'd personally argue that it's more suicidal to go bow in towards the enemy, even. When targeting a ship, your problems are azimuth and range. You need to be able to point the guns in the horizontal direction of your enemy. A ship heading straight towards your own ship has very little horizontal movement, and is trival to find the correct azimuth for. Without rangefinding radar, range is far, far harder. Let's take the battle off Samar. Due to rangefinding problems (like having no idea the size of the ship they were facing), the Japanese didn't score many hits. Now, if you give the enemy not ten metres of range to hit you in, but 100 metres, that gives them a lot more leeway. Turning away and opening the range is a lot more sensible than remaining where you are, or reversing slowly, and waiting for the enemy warships to catch up to you. Add to that the fact that you're, again, probably not realistically bouncing shells delivered into the bows, and I think there's a really solid argument against encouraging bow-tanking in the slightest in an even slightly realistic game.

Bowtanking is quite silly, though. In reality, relatively flimsy armour doesn't magically deflect shells, and armouring the bow up to the point that bow tanking is actually viable is a waste. The point of the Nelson class, for example, was more to concentrate the main battery armament of the ship in a more compact and easily armoured area, rather than to try and fire all the guns directly forwards.

Personally, I pick bust. I think you're overestimating the capabilities of the current dev team. PVE is one thing, but PVP tends to lead to scary weird metas, I think. As for your other points, mostly fine. Honestly there are no quantum leaps until 1945, so you probably wouldn't get any particularly more interesting things. Capturing might be a little interesting, too.

The Katakana on the side says 'Akebono', if that helps.

A lot of the problem is probably that you can't achieve good gunnery with small guns particularly often. Especially in the Semi-Dreadnought mission, the light cruisers have a terrible time hitting anything. I'm pretty sure that if they managed to consistently hit the Semi-dreadnought, we'd see situations where good maneuvering could work better. Perhaps make it possible to straight up lose lock? That way, if a cruiser managed to get out of lock, it'd be able to reacquire lock sooner as well by way of higher ROF.

Since we're playing as the admiralty, that might explain why we're specifying speed. That said, it'd be nice being able to number and place the boilers. Especially place.

Absolutely. I just wanted to make the point that a battleship will probably turn out entirely more accurate regardless. I was probably pretty unclear, so sorry about that. And, smaller guns certainly don't feel right. I do agree with the 'buff small guns' sentiment entirely.

He is right, though. Let's assume a battleship and a destroyer made by the same nation. The Battleship is, a more stable firing platform, has more excess buoyancy that could be used on better Fire Control systems, has more space to put them on, and has a taller, better vantage point to put them on. Let's use the Fletcher class to demonstrate this. The Fletcher has a beam of 12 metres. The USS Iowa has a 13.5m wide rangefinder. Since, with stereoscopic rangefinders, a wider rangefinder can allow for higher precision, the Iowa has better optical rangefinding. I haven't any books on the subject, but the principle seems sound; the bigger the system, in this era, the better it should be. Again, the Fletcher couldn't install the Iowa's GFCS at all.

I'm very much in favour of it in general terms. Having an internal armour scheme that works, to restrict the gun position, etc, would be superb. And limited non-citadel flooding for All or Nothing sounds fun too. It'd also discourage some weird as hell tactics, like going bow on, which tended to increase hit percentages slightly in real life. Bonus points for an 'armour scheme viewer' that lets you see the citadel without all the stuff above it, so you can see, say, why the back has so much more armour in it. I feel that essentially a 'sliding scale' from 'armoured deck' to 'well designed citadel' would be extremely fun to tinker with and look at, encouraging different play styles, both using it and against. With just an armoured deck, low calibre secondaries would come into their own, being able to cripple protected cruisers relatively easily. With a tapering armour scheme, more medium calibre guns might be needed, to blow through the ship's heavier armour. Meanwhile, with All or nothing and other more advanced armour schemes, you have to pound the ship to kingdom come with heavy guns, taking ages to sink, even after the ship is crippled. I'm certainly dramatising it, but it sounds fun to me.

The principle itself I can totally agree with. My favourite being turtleback armour being less likely to withstand plunging fire if it gets through the outer armour.

I mentioned those two to point out that their armour schemes were arguably 'bad designs'. yes. Both of those tanks had worse ergonomics than many contemporaries (Pz IV, Sherman, etc), partly due to the way they sloped the armour. (Before you mention the sherman's sloped armour, it wasn't sloped at the sides and was a bigger tank all around, mitigating some of the disadvantages ergonomically)

I'd like to contradict you with the point about size. Sure, they're quite big, but the inside can still be quite cramped, like how on the Panzerjaeger 38(t) it's a little hard to do anything in. And the bad ergonomics of early T-34s are at least partly due to the sloped side armour. Don't get me wrong, tanks aren't small, but sloped armour doesn't help with crew comfort and ability to work. Of course, none of this matters as much for ship armour, where the belt can slope outwards at shallow angles, the armoured deck can be worked into a turtleback style armour scheme, without severely compromising the space available. I don't have the book now, but looking at Anatomy of the ship: Battleship Yamato (Janusz Skulski) you can see both of these armour schemes implemented in one ship at once. Most of the space that would be 'wasted' is either also used to enhance the armour scheme or used for storing supplies like oil, fresh water, etc. Because you have more space to work with, the loss of space is easier to manage.

Perhaps even just make the small ship penalty apply less and less to smaller guns in general so (torpedo boat) destroyers can do what they were originally expected to do.

I mean compared to the current state of the game, rather than anything else. Compared to the game, warspite was probably just slightly inaccurate, after all. I wouldn't want to disparage the Grand Old Lady, of course.

More rapid, less accurate high calibre fire sounds good to me. I'd go for slightly more accurate Low Calibre guns too.

Seconded. I'd personally like to have the choice to fight with and without aviation. Maybe a choice between 'on-battlefield', 'abstracted' and 'absent'. I'd probably enjoy all styles personally, but switching it on and off is probably the best way to appeal to the most players possible.

Forum account rank sounds more reasonable to me. Actual in game things still doesn't sound good to me.

If I may pick a hole in your argument, at Jutland they weren't playing out the battle on a game with pre programmed rates of Fire. Our guns already fire slower than that when it gets up to high calibres.

Honestly, if they don't do this, I'll be disappointed. The idea of everybody stealing each other's ideas is too fun to not have, I think.

Seconded. Losing a scenario because the enemy has light cruisers that can run away from your fleet is just unfun. In the 'Sink the Semidreadnought' mission, I was able to sink the dreadnought itself, but both light cruisers turned and ran, and I couldn't catch up. Alternately, install standardized designs with, say, speeds that should let them catch up to enemies and semi-viable guns, at the least.

This just sounds like it'll make people who didn't hear about the game earlier feel a bit sad, rather than anything positive. I'd rather be happy knowing we've made the game a little better by playtesting it.