RedParadize

I can confirm that, you need a shipyard that can accommodate the new unlocked hull. It should be made more clear or, alternatively, you should still see the new hull in the builder but not be able to build it.

To illustrate my previous point, here is my fleet after 3 year of battle: All these ship were assigned to various port of the North Sea, and now there is only the 4 newly build ship protecting the transport in that area. Needless to say that I will lose very soon because of that.

There is a issue with port attribution, when a ship is damaged it get reassigned to a different port: As you can see Frankfurt and Stralsund have been reassigned. It is a major problem as we cant send them back to their original port. For the British it do not matter much but for the German it result in ship slowly being removed from where they are likely to get damaged to where they are not: North Sea to the Baltic Sea. Over time, it leave the North Sea completely empty and you cant do anything about it.

@akd @TAKTCOM @arkhangelsk Not that I disagree with you guys, but we have been talking about torpedo, secondary, accuracy and armour for over a year... We have the campaign now, we should focus on that as that's what they are working on atm. There is plenty of issue to address, plenty of suggestion that need to be made in order to have a viable and fun campaign.

Somehow, while player cant transfer ship form port to port, it seem to be automatically done, but in a very wrong way. As Germany, almost all my fleet got transferred to the Baltic Sea... Leaving the North sea transport unprotected... now I am losing hard. Looks like it doesn't matter that these ship have a range of 15000 km. They will not protect convoy if they are not in the region.

One pressing issue now that we have to handle fleet is the collision/torpedo avoidance. As it is ship in formation do not avoid torpedo. On the other hand there is the issue of collision avoidance bug like this one: Ship on the left of the image refuse to turn ether way. because of it ship on the middle and top cant turn to avoid torpedo... Really annoying.

I suspect it does. I had games where I did not massively sink AI transport and it still went bankrupt within the first two year. I think that AI do more research than player do ( I do none) resulting in a much more constrained budget.

On the building side of cost balance here is two cruiser. First one of them being as cheap as possible while still being battle worthy and the second one built as good as technology allow it (no torpedo on both of them, it scare the AI too much): Second one is faster by 4 knot, has a armour +- 30% stronger. Accuracy and other soft stats are better, but not enough to justify a doubling the price tag. To make it worst, compare it to the next hull you would get on the British side and the minimum price is doubled again. which would be suicidal given how the transport protection mechanic currently work.

@DougToss I agree with you, this is specially true for 1890 and 1900 campaign as you have to get within the 2.5km/3x speed zone to have any chance to hit the enemy. It result in unbearably long battle. The only battle I manually did in these two era where torpedo rush vs BBs as they are quick and decisive. In 1910 its more bearable trough. We need faster play speed, at least by a notch (5x close range, 10x above that). There is allot to say about the cost/effectiveness balance, atm the quickest way to lose is to make upgraded ship. Part of the issue is the transport protection mechanic. I like it, but I think it there is too much weight on it. If it were to have a reduced impact it would allow player to make advanced creation. I prefer to stick to the gameplay over historical accuracy, but If real life would have been as the game is Russia would have won the Russo-Japanese War. As numeric advantage matter much more than quality.

While waiting for a 1920 campaign I jumped over custom battle to see what I would do. I think I know why it isn't there yet, a huge balancing pass is needed. Beside that, there is absolutely no point building shipyard or researching over a 10 year period, specially since you win or lose within the first two year. You set the slider in finance tab only once, then the only reason to go there is to look how much crew is available.

While I absolutly agree with @Evil4Zerggin , you can balance enemy fleet (and avoid losing transport) with most ship class. What really matter is to keep them cheap. Mather of fact, in 1910 its better to not use most upgrade, wherever you plan to play battle or not.

And there is also the issue with AI controlled ship that are trapped in a perpetual circling maneuver. That need to be fixed as you cant even manually get them out of that.

The Light cruiser spam is really effective at protecting your transport. What I do is a 80ish CL starting fleet + 1-2 BC. You auto resolve every battle that do not feature your BC and you will win within a year.

Ah...

I am at my 6th attempt at unlocking 1920. Enemy keep going bankrupt and I only get minor victory. I am not sure what to do.

So far I made it to 1910. Enemy collapse too quickly. I had 4 minor victory and it seem it isnt enough to move me to the next level.

@Nick Thomadis Looks like I was clicking on Cancel instead of Ok. Manually setting it to full works but the auto fill via the "add crew" do not.

I made sure that there was always enough crew to fill up newly build ship. If its a bug its pretty contextual. I would like to confirm it first, but on the other hand you may have tools to do it quicker than me. So here it goes, to reproduce: 1:Have a low crew bank. 2:Have many ship rolling out at the same month. 3:Wait for the crew bank to go up. 4:Try to fill manually and/or with the add crew box.

The issue I had was that I had 5000 crew in bank and these ship were not filling up, even when playing with the crew slider. I think I found the cause and I may be able to reproduce it. It seem to happen when the ship are build and that there is 0 crew available.

they are all full.

For some reason I have a big portion of my fleet mothballed. Not sure why... I have 5000 crew available for them and all these port have the space for them. In the main time I am loosing the transport war... again.

Ok, so far I played it 4 times, all of them as the German. I cant say it was a pleasing experience: 1st one I restarted after 30minutes, I was losing allot transports and did not know why. I assumed it was because of my fleet composition. Somehow the British have a much stronger starting fleet. Not sure if its to be historically accurate. (Edit: it seem to be only the case if you make your own fleet) 2nd & 3rd games, tested fleet composition, to see if it change that transport lost thing. It seem to be a bit random I think. I decided to try auto-resolving battle and see how far I could go with it. Lost both games within a year. 4th game I decided to play most battle and slowly reduced British fleet to a level where it cant blockade me anymore. It was looking good, I had a clear VP advantage, but then something weird happened. Over the course of 8 month I lost over 100 transport and only got two missions. Now with all 3 economy slider at 0 I have a deficit of 2millions per month... Looks like its over. That game lasted 5 hours, I am about to lose even if I won all the battles... And I do not even have a clue why. Outside of that, here is the thing that I found the most irritating: 1: In 1980 you have 4 hulls and almost no room for customization. And from what I have seen in the custom mission mode there isnt much before 1910. So 30 years with almost nothing to play with. I wish had get more hull... But honestly, what I would really wish is to make them myself. 2: Missions are quite repetitive, regardless if its a convoy or intercept. If the enemy isnt in superiority it will run away. Nothing wrong with that, but doing so result in 30 minutes chase in a battle you know you already won. The real issue is the time compression limit. bellow 2.5km its 3x and you need to be closer than that to have chance to hit the enemy. Hope it will get better before it get on Steam, early negative review kills games sell really quick.

Screening would normally be the way to protect vital asset. Thing is atm handling fleets isn't very pleasant. You either have to micro manage everything or let the Friendly AI handle it... And it will just do circle around target.

While it is a tad beside the subject. I have a different take on this. The reason why the British did not aggressively engage the German in the battle of Jutland was mainly because of the fear of torpedo. In a sense, this is why that battle did not result in more ship sunk, either by gun or torpedo. For that reason I would be incline to consider torpedoes as a decisive factor here. Arguably, if the British fleet would have ignored that fear, history might have provided us with a example of a fleet decimated by torpedo, in theory!

I usually stitch few secbat. but not many and nothing under 4". Best is to go for a pair of 8"ers. The are deadly vs Destroyer and still useful vs capital ship. But if you really want to kill destroyer, 9" cruiser are fantastic at it.