RedParadize

@TAKTCOM This is a poor exemple. All the gun in that scenario are of small caliber. And there is the tower accuracy buff difference.

@RAMJB The way I mixed secondary battery and Destroyer topic might be confusing. I have the impression you have miss interpreted many of my statement. I feel that in many case you focused on a single sentence and missed the overall point. Anyways I will try to answer what I can and maybe clarify what I think you missed. 1 (Small caliber accuracy ) We seem to mostly agree on that one. Your contention point seem to be that in your opinion inaccuracy is mostly due to DD hit penalty. It is a factor for sure, but accuracy is not terribly better vs a light cruiser. Accuracy is still too low in my opinion. 4 (secondary battery volley fire) I do not disregard the doctrine origin of volley fire. For main gun it work fine. But game mechanic are more dogmatic than humans. The result is that a single weirdly positioned secondary turret entering firing arc will delay all the other. BBs at close range have turret entering and leaving firing arc constantly. Resulting in battery no firing at all. As for 2, 3 and 5 can be easily reproduced in game reliably. It wont be visible at range, you have to get close to see what I am talking about. Yet somehow you're expecting secondaries to be a lot more effective here. Why? (and all the explanation and example preceding that statement) I said I am fine with 5" not being able to kill DD before they launch torpedo. You quoted that part, yet somehow answer like if I stated the opposite. If you want to know why I think secondary are under performing... well the very next two sentence you left out of the quote answered your question: There was 51 5" guns firing at least 10 salvo at 15% hit chance at 0.6km. So of the 510 shot fired +-75 hit. Ignoring accuracy, isn't 75 5" hits a bit much against a DD? About DDs firing torpedo at DDs being a exploit. You missed the point. The enemy AI, the one not under player control, will always fire at closest enemy. That mean that in a fleet engagement player can effectively counter all the enemy destroyers with a single one. In term of meta, player only need allots of BBs and very few DDs. No need for CA and CL. Don't you see this as a exploit?

Did some secondary battery vs DD testing. I hoped to keep it brief... Looks like I did not succeed in that. I ended up focusing not only on secondary battery but also on Anti destroyer warfare in general. I did all my test in custom battle with best technology available (1940) and against 4 DD of the same era. Secondary Battery on big ship VS Destroyer: I made a BC armed with token main battery and 51x5" guns per sides, a unreasonable amount really. On this test I manually controlled the BC to range where I can kill DDs with the 5" gun. I could not dodge one of the torpedo salvo. Above 4km secondary barely hit anything. Its only once I got in the 2.5 km range I finally started scoring some hit and killed one of the DDs. However at that point the other DDs were point black and almost ready to fire torpedo again. They did not launch trough. The front DD got damaged and moved to the back of the formation, messing with the other DD path in the process. They did not fire that point on, not until I got them all. I think its due to turret tracking issue, more on that later. My conclusion is that 5" secondary are marginally useful on BB and BC. They can kill DD, but not before its too late. In term of balance I am fine with that part, Battleship should struggle against DD when unescorted. However at extremely close range secondary battery just do not deliver the firepower that they are capable of.At 0,6km, the dd on the picture should have been obliterated given the hit probability and the amount of gun I had. It took a good 10 salvo to kill it. Basically, its better to rely on the main battery, as in Alpha 2. Secondary Battery on Cruiser VS Destroyer: For this test, I made a dedicated DD hunter Heavy Cruiser with a heavy emphasis on secondary battery, a CL basically. At first I tried to leave it under AI control, it did not work, the CA is trying to stay as far as possible of the DD and is permanently running away in the opposite direction. That behavior is different when screening other ship trough, CA will get between target and escorted ship, but too far to have good chance of scoring hit. Doing this the CA is the one being targeted by torpedo and most case scenario will easily avoid them. When controlling the CA myself to get closer to decent hit chance I started noticing few weird behavior. The CA did not fire until the target was way closer than guns range. Not sure why. Also, it did not fire at all when turning. At first I trough it was due to turret not being able to turn fast enough, but when I did a sharp turn turrets did not just struggle to track, they started turning away from target. I think there is a weird calculation on where the target will be after the maneuver here. Regardless, at close range ship often do turn after turn guns ends up rarely firing. It also seem that in some case secondary will not fire until all turret of the same caliber in firing arc are aimed. Since secondary are often have very different firing arc it can slow fire rate allot. To make it worst, secondary battery often get the bug where they get stuck in ladder fire. On the image here 3 of the 5 battery are bugged. At the end, most of the work was done with done by the 8" Main battery. About CA countering DDs, if I did not micro manage the CA at all time it would have been sunk quickly. However UA:D is focused on fleet engagement, not micro managing a single ship. My conclusion is that within a fleet, dedicated DD hunter cruiser are not that great. Specially if it rely heavily on small caliber gun. Destroyer VS Destroyer What about countering Destroyer with destroyer? I packed as much gun as I could on a destroyer. AI behavior suffer from the same problem as CA. It turn away and run. So I placed the DD on screen duty. The Screened ship had its gun at off. On the bright side, the DD got focused on and easily dodged all incoming torpedo. That's mostly a exploit, DD should launch their torpedo at battleship, not other DD. On the negative side the DD stay too far from each other and could barely hit and damage each other. I ended up taking control myself. Under 2.5 km DDs start hitting each other and doing some damage. Mine being all guns and armor it was a easy win. even in a 1v4 Overall, it is a valid strategy. DD are cheap. In fact, it is the only strategy that is actually cheaper than what it counter. Here is the summary of the problem of secondary gun. Some of them are not exclusive to secondary, but affect them more. Secondary battery issues: 1-Small caliber accuracy is still too low at close range. 2-Secondary often get stuck in ladder fire bug. 3-Secondary turret turn too slowly to track target. 4-Secondary will not fire until all turret of the same caliber in firing arc are aimed. 5-Turret sometimes stop turning during maneuver. (Sometimes it even start turning in opposite direction.)

Yeah, custom battle need a budget limit, the ability to design all ship in the fleet and to save these design.

I would be great if we were able to place Barbette and Tower just like turret. At least until you add snap point to all middle section.

Emplacement for tower and Barbette remain extremely limited. In the case of one of the new modern battlecruiser hull there is only one tower and it fit only on one place, to make it worst you only have one choice of tower. On almost all hull the tower placement is too much forward, specially if you stretch them. Edit: Against a single target ship get stuck in ladder fire forever. That is really annoying, specially since you cant restart custom battle

Isn't this a bit lazy? I mean its just multiply or divide by 25.

Monday is better than Friday. There is always a game breaking last minute change that make it to release built. At least that way the team wont have to work on weekend!

UI would have to display two number, does it fit? do you scale down the text? make it so the slider arrange themselves differently? Its still something that need to be worked on. Everything that would be added past that would have to take it into consideration. That was my point. The team only have one credited programmer. There must be some uncredited too. still, its a pretty small team. If I was at their place would place that deep down the "nice to have" list.

UI is already over loaded, Having both values would make it worst. Armor layout may get more complex (I hope it will). Requiring more sliders. Imagine how much number would need to be displayed.

I hope we don't get another past/future/news/update 😬

They need to rework their armor mechanics for everything, babette belt and else. ATM you can't do a all or nothing layout.

Post WW2 sea battle are a different thing all together. Ship to ship is inexistant and everything happens at +200km range

The all forward guns present several advantages in the layout of the citadel. It is true that it was due to the weight limitations of the Washington treaty. But optimisation works even without the weight limit, it reduces costs. I bet you that if plane would not have existed most battleship would have end up with that configuration.

So, Upcoming Alpha-3 News? In the sense that the news will be upcoming? Just saying because it have been almost two weeks and the description looks like a patch note. Its confusing.

I did something similar not so long ago. Could not sink a battlecruiser with +20 torp

That is pretty much what I did. Biggest accurate guns on two bb hull. I only added secondary to balance the hull. Balance can make a huge difference in accuracy.

I would not be surprised if the visual impact didn't match the actual impact location. Given how much shells are flying around trajectory+hit box collisions might be a bit too much to calculate. A simpler system would be predefined hit chance and have the visuals matching that afterwards. given I need seen a ship get hit by shells not destined to it it seems to be the case.

It's a question of from where you stand in the process. If you are the admiralty, then you ask for a specific speed as a spec. If you are the designer the you are on the receiving end and ask engineers for specific power. Engineers will then have to make it happen.

Or simply disengaging yes.

If you factor in accuracy, by the time of ww1 torpedo outranged secondary battery. That is a historical fact. (Or at least what most people of that era trough) Best tool to discard DD would be the main battery. And DDs are hard to hit and very maneuverable. What they need to do is make the torpedo spotting harder, make the BB more sluggish to turn and make the torpedo more devastating. I would also make them unreliable. But only if it hit much harder.

@Spitfire109 Include the wounded in this. A dead crew is "just" a pair of hands less, plus moral impact. A wounded is the same plus the two or three guys that have to take care of him. A ship with 1/5 of its crew wounded or dead is no more effective. It might not even be combat capable anymore.

With big ship its not that easy. And for big ship in formation it might not even matter. In terms of balance, I would say that a single unescorted BB should have a decent chance of being owned by a DD group of equivalent cost.

Thanks, you confirmed what my 5 minute research suggested. I was interested but unwilling to spend more time on that. It does make sense to have reload instead of all in launcher. Deck space is precious. It need to be kept as unobstructed as possible for safety reasons. And if you want to do convoy raids with DDs better have more torpedo if possible. About unreliability. Yes Torpedo were highly unreliable. But also way too effective to ignore. As a corollary, ICBM are just as unreliable, yet it would be ridiculous to ignore them. Torpedo needs to give that feeling.

@TAKTCOM Yes. AoN armor scheme do not cover all the squishy and essential stuff... the crew.