RedParadize

@Draco About the deck pen chart... Good to know that for once historical and game balance argument are on the same page!

That double barbette, by sheer luck, is back to back. One of the few instance where that barbette do not look out of place. Its heavier than the secondary tower trough!

I would suggest choosing your word more carefully, as the author of the report you posted did: In other word, they were confident that projectile mass detonation was unlikely. What about the propellant bag? In any case, the relatively low chance of flashfire in UAD seems to reflect that.

@DougToss@SpardaSon21 @MicroscopWhile I certainly agree that Iowa class was the most potent battleship of all time, its aura of invincibility is more a result of the propaganda done when it got reintroduced during the cold war to counter the Kirov class. I am of the opinion that Iowa was superior to the Yamato, but it certainly could have lost versus it. Lets not get dragged down into that kind of discussion, it will get us nowhere. The fact is that many nation decided to stick with lower caliber, at the very least there must be some merit to that approach. Yet we do not see that reflected in the game. Beyond that, in term of balance only, the larger caliber have too much of a edge. Atm 6x+18" is superior than any number of 14" you can fit on a deck. I do not know about you guys but I kind of like pocket battleship and super cruiser, would be fun to not be constrained to super dread.

If you can fit a 3x16" with 405 shell/gun, you can also fit a 2x16" with 405 shell/gun. Same space, but less gun, that's it!

To be clear, I perfectly fine with the 19" and 20" implementation, part of the fun in game like UAD is to rewrite history. I however think that they should be a much bigger downside to them. You mentioned cost, weight and space. But there is also a massive barrel wear increase. High velocity + high shell weight result in a very short barrel life (look at the Paris Gun). I would be surprised if a 20" gun could fire the amount of shell a UAD triple turret has per gun. (Btw Dev, you still need to fix the amount of shell per gun. Why would a 3 guns turret have more shell per barrel than a single gun one?) Larger caliber guns should raise the maintenance cost exponentially. Yeah, it is a massive investment, but it work. At 97% you only need few inch to protect vs secbat. A 20" deck hit will do no more damage than the fart of a wale. It is ridiculous indeed. While a the obvious fix would be to level resistance across all the hull and tweak the buff from citadel and all, the problem is that resistance is currently the only factor that some-wait protect ship vs plunging shell, specially large caliber one. Make a decent late year British battleship, they all have low resistance, restart battle until you get 18" or more on the opposing team. Large shell deck hit will pen all the way down to the engine, like if the shell was coming down at a +45deg angle. Beside a much needed balancing pass on hull (and tower), I would suggest that deck should act like "spaced armour", as they were. 3 layer of 1" provide much more protection than 1 layer of 3". Not to mention what deck sized spacing does to shell fuses. I do not think it would be necessary to go for complicated new mechanic to achieve this. Just need to nerf the deck pen or make the "partial penetration" much more likely on deck hit.

@arkhangelsk @DougToss I am much more lazy than both of you, but I agree. Sorry to quote myself but what you both said is more or less what I meant when I said this:

UAD currently have two cause of destruction, by flooding or by structural damage, three if you count flashfire separately. I would say we are missing two of the most common way a ship go down. Capsizing is one of them, obviously. I however do not see how that could be implemented correctly without having asymmetrical damage. There is also the crew. Now that we have them, it would add allot to also have a destruction by "crew damage". Not quite a ship destruction even, more like a pre-destruction state. Flooding, death, wounded and fire... At some point there is too much stuff is going wrong at the same time for the amount of crew still alive and well. Some start to panic, chain of command collapse and no one know what to do... and the ship become inoperable. It however may recover if the enemy stop firing on it, with some luck and a good crew. I think I will make a tread about that, it deserve a good coverage.

And some ship in UAD have over 20% of their mass in the superstructure!😂 I would really like if roll stats would also be affected by high center of mass... As it should. Its a tad sad that we do not have capsizing yet.

Late game resistance is the most important metric as it is impossible to armour your deck enough to stop the larger shell. For that reason the Austro-Hungarian 51-81 kt modern battleship hull is by far the best hull with its 112 base resistance as it can absorb up to 97% of the damage with the IV citadel, AntiTorp V and Triple hull. For this reason you can make a 51kt BB that easily beat two not too bad +100tk AI design. I see two problem with this. First, not every nation have super high resistance hull. So there a balance issue here. Second, say that hull resistance stats were to be nerfed and equalized, you still have the problem of high caliber deck hit. I would argue that past 1930 no battleship should be equipped with anything less than 18" as it cant be countered. I personally do not like the over emphasis on super BB and very high caliber, not just because these never existed, but also because its a design limiting factor. I hope super BB and guns will have a prohibitive cost in the campaign. Simply put, many nation would have went bankrupt without the Washington Naval Treaty.

My background is the movie industry. For "historical" movie, the approach taken is to stay within the limit of "Suspension of disbelief" of the audience. Take Band of brothers for example, one of the best WW2 show ever made. They did take many liberty regarding characters, company, and event. Purist may complain about the historical inaccuracy of having the 506th liberating a concentration camp, but without that we would not have gotten to see one in the show. You can't really talk about WW2 without covering that subject. So, in a sense, Band of brothers is a condensed WW2 reality, greater in its depiction than reality itself. It is important to note that even the most purist audience would not like the most accurate depiction of the life of a WW2 soldier... As it would be extremely boring. This is how I think a "historic" game should be made. Now, if we go back to the AI design, I do not expect them to be historical at all, but they need to be believable and competitive vs player design. Atm they clearly are not.

I think that a great deal can be explained trough the context in which sonar was used. Do not forget that they were human operated, single direction device and subject to the environment in which they were operated. It isn't surprising that both terrible and great performance were recorded.

Doesn't clearly belong in the clown car tread, as there is merit to paper tiger design, I just trough it was worth mentioning: guns are 15"er.

There is no meaningful difference between coincidence and stereoscopic range finding. Both system are only marginally different on a technical level only. They both rely on the difference between two point of view to extract trigonometrical estimation of range. Both system have a similar number of lens and mirror, thus are subject to the same amount of inaccuracy. Not to claim any form of authority on the subject but my field of expertise is the stereoscopic treatment of image (in the movie industry), My job is basically to fix the deformation caused by lens, then extract accurate positioning data out of the image, then create a landscape out of it. I often use what could be described as a "stroboscopic range finding". Basically I alternate right and left image and offset one of the two until it converge to the desired point. That could have been a 3rd kind of range finding in ww1&2, with its own advantage and inconvenient... but not physically more accurate than the two other. Having said all that, I am ok with designer choice. @madham82 All good, no offense taken. Hopefully my answer did not feel to harsh to you.

Btw, you should take a look at resistance stacking. Combined with flashfire removal you can make ship that do not need armour.

It isn't pure fantasy. Fast were harder to hit, but certainly not as hard as it was before the nerf. Anyway, this is beside the point I was making. The speed nerf AND the secbat buff, once combined, make the DDs a much lesser treat. So much so that there is little point in building them. Before, I use to make super fast BC with no secbat. Now I make slow, high resistance, BB with a pair of high caliber secbat... I wont build DD and CL as I do not need them. On the other hand, I will make close range torpedo CA. As @DougToss pointed out, its more about authenticity.

I remember that discussion! I was on the side of the "justify the existence of secbat" side. They may have gone a tad too far trough, screening is effective but not that essential, specially late game. 2" and 3" are still useless, 4" can help... But if you really want a effective secbat 6" to 8" are the way to go. I would say that compounded by the nerf on speed accuracy malus, secbat buff made the TD and DD a much lesser treat. Sonar may also be too good at range... it make evading torpedo really easy. It would be better if we would only get the warning sign until they get in visual range.

Speed may not equal armour but it certainly provide protection. Speed advantage give you the ability to chose if you engage or not. In face of a superior force I would rater be faster than heavily armoured... Because I could flee!

There is another issue at play here, if you have more than two turret (of the same kind) then the 3rd one and up will not fire on every volley. I am unsure of what cause that, IRL it was relatively frequent that a gun or a turret would skip a volley. But since you will never have that if you only have two turret its a bit odd. I wish we had more info on this.

AI version of a "All or Nothing" armour scheme... mostly on the nothing side... in a game where AoN do not work. I think it would have been better with mega barbette for its 13" guns. Its all good trough, it has 13.9" of armour on the 8" casemates guns!

I remember playing when BC were practically untouchable, it was not fun. BC are now very much unfavored as now what matter the most is hull resistance and not hull speed. I am ok with that if BC get a advantage on the strategic level, its something we cant judge yet. Having said that, a slight buff to aiming speed penalty might be welcome, DDs and CL are a bit too easy to nuke. I more or less settle on 26knots on all my ship, simply because there is very little to gain in going faster. Excluding the strategic level advantage that speed may provide in campaign, its important to note that AI do not exploit speed within battle. A 14"er vs a 18"er should seek to get closer, most case scenario the 18"er should seek to get away if the enemy try to close in. If it were the case then speed may provide some form of tactical advantage again. Atm AI just circle around so there is nothing of this, AI ship often get far away from its optimal position.

If you look at the hull for each nation individually you will see that there is around 2 to 3 hull at any given year (often one old and one new). The worst era is probably around 1920, most ship have generic hull and the same selection of tower.

There is few issue that intertwine regarding AI capacity of building a decent Ship. There is the issue with the script that build them for sure, but it isn't the only issue. I spend several hours looking at nations available hull trough ages. The choice is very limited until 1930. The most striking part is that in most era there is often one hull that is much better than others, mainly because of their tower. In allot of case there is one hull that outmatch all others for more than a decade. Of course most player will pick that hull, but the AI will pick at random. With that much disparity in quality, the diversity in hull, tower and all do not really matter... As only one choice really stand out.

Oh, I should say one more thing to clarify my trough. While I do not think I will build much TB/DD and CL in campaign, if I build any really, I will certainly build Torpedo equipped CA. These are fantastic weapons.

By the times of ww2 torpedo detection was indeed good enough to detect incoming torpedo. One thing that isnt taken into consideration is that there was basically only one sonar, with one guy pointing it in a specific direction. With the sonar you get the incoming direction of the noise pretty accurately, but for the bearing and distance you can only rely on guesswork. The talent of the sonar operator could vary greatly and in a intense battle, where there is multiple boat and multiple incoming torpedo, things get much more complicated. Reality is that sonar equipped boat were indeed getting torpedoed in ww2. As for the game its more of a balance issue I would say. Atm past the 20s DDs are more or less pointless, specially if the boat is AI controlled.