Ignominius

Been a while since I played through the naval academy missions and overall my experience is much better compared to the last time (Alpha 3 for most missions), however I've run into a bit of a stumbling bloc with the mission 'Cruisers Needed' the premise of which is that you must build light or heavy cruisers to defend one of your own battleships against a French super-battleship which is unescorted and vulnerable to torpedo attack. Since the last time I played this unassuming mission a couple of changes to the game have made this mission very frustrating to play conventionally. In the mission you were previously limited to using either normal or fast torpedo propulsion, which made sense since the AI would almost always sail in a straight line until the last possible minute whereupon they would be struck by a salvo of torpedoes. Now, the AI almost always is running Sonar II or III on their ship, making successful attacks with torpedo ships unreliable at best due to the ease with which they can be detected and avoided. Secondly, the player battleship which must be protected as the mission objective starts on 80% structural integrity at a range of 13.5km nearly fully broadside to the opponent. In previous iterations of the game where capital ships were almost laughably too survivable this was not an issue, however currently, especially with the addition of 19 and 20" guns, this results in the almost immediate crippling of the player battleship. In a couple of test runs my battleship has been destroyed on the first salvo by flash fires caused by penetrating 20" shell hits. The remedy to this situation is simple: for the torpedoes, either limit the use of detection techs for the French ship to at least Hydro or consider giving the player the option to use electrical or oxygen torpedo propulsion; for the second, consider spawning the player ship farther away from the AI and/or at a steeper angle to prevent near-instant destruction or incapacitation. If any of you have any feedback of your own on this mission, or you beat it yourselves with no problem, I'd like to have your input as well.

I feel pretty silly about beating all of the missions before the re-balance I guess, oh well.

Having trouble with the torpedo banzai mission for a very frustrating and probably unintended reason: because there are so many enemy ships, they keep getting too close to each other and swerving to avoid a collision, which as it turns out makes it very hard for the torpedo aiming AI to predict where the enemy ship will be in a couple of minutes when the torpedos reach their targets.

I do think that, as you suggest, the primary method of sinking a ship should not be by reducing the structural integrity below 0%, but should revolve around destroying critical components, causing flooding, or by setting fires, however I do not believe that the chance for ships to be sunk by other means is currently feasible in Alpha-4.

Boy are you in for a treat.

Just as a curio, how many 13" shells from inside 2km do you reckon would be enough to kill one of the 1940s Battleships, given a full broadside? Historically or otherwise speaking.

Another mission, another unkillable battleship running away from my 6 forward 18" guns and getting absolutely hammered until I run out of ammo. Please, whatever you do, revert the damage back to the way it was in Alpha-3

This is probably the most infuriating patch yet. Playing the 'The US Super Battleship' Mission and I have been in a very one sided shooting match for hours. The last Japenese Battleship is running away from me, and I am hitting it over and over again with my fore 18" guns, but it will not die. This enemy battleship has sustained greater than 250 direct hits from 18" guns, and yet the fires are not causing structural damage, and the shells themselves are hitting already damage saturated areas of the ship. By contrast, the one hit I landed on the same ship that cause an ammo detonation lowered it's health from 100% to 26%. I have (over the course of the last 3 in game hours) managed to lower that all the way down to 14%.

Having serious issues with penetration damage on large caliber guns. Just played 'Prove your Might' and sailed my battlecruiser within about 2.5km of the enemy ship, landing several broadside penetrations with 15" Mk. 3 guns, and barely chipped away at the enemy vessel. If I had done the same thing in alpha 3 the first shot I landed would have disabled the engines or detonated the ammo. Edit: Just tried again with 18" guns and did 26 dmg with a hit after ramming the enemy BB. Something is up. Edit no. 2: I think this may just be up to the propellant, tried switching to High TNT and got a detonation.

It appears I am in the minority on this, but I think multiplayer would be the best environment to really test your designs and see if they are up to scruff, since at least currently the AI is no match for the player in terms of ship design or in tactics. At some point my fear would be that the replay-ability of the single player campaign or custom battles would lose its luster due to the fact that it felt like you could do nothing but win against an AI opponent.

I'll release it when I have done a few more tests, currently trying to figure out the exact calculations for damage on PEN vs. Partial Pen, Overpen and then I'm gonna make a couple more models with 15", 11", 8", and 5" guns

This is a test calculating the theoretical DPM of a triple mk3 18" gun on a stationary target at various ranges using all explosives. This test does not calculate pen chance or HE damage/fire affect and assumes we are shooting AP only. Alright, so here are the results: As you can see, Lyddite Shells offer the best theoretical DPM on stationary targets (with AP) given that 100% of all shell penetrate. Since I do not know how penetration, partial pen, non pen, etc. affect damage there is no way for me to make this test with armor as a variable. As it stands, the absolutely massive +57.5% bonus to shell damage that Lyddite I has makes it by far the best suited for this task, totally negating the bonus to range that Ballistite gives. Some more things to consider are that these test results are swayed both by the modern fire control on the towers, the stability of more modern hulls, and the high damage output of the triple 18" Mk. 3, It is probably very likely that the performance of these explosives would differ if different caliber guns or more antiquated fire control were used, but the only time to consider using all of the possible shells in the game would be in the late-game, and so as a result I am not sure the extent to which these confounding variables skew the result.

I find that having a higher HE fire change by using High TNT or Lyddite I is a stronger choice for smaller caliber vessels, however you do make a good case for the Ballistite as it has the greatest + modifier to shell range despite being one of the earliest and cheapest explosives availible. As for the penetration debuff with Lyddite, in most cases firing large calibre guns at small ships will result in an overpen, so having a shorter fuse will, somewhat counterintutively, increase you chances of having a penetrating and thus higher damaging hit on smaller targets, again, for the large calibre stuff I think that Ballistite may be the best option availible in large ship vs. large ship engagements. I guess when we finally have the chance to test designs against each other we can see definitive proof.

Alpha 3 was a lot of fun, I really enjoyed playing around with the new hulls, especially the modern CA and the BC, however I do have one minor concern: The fact that capital ships cannot mount any hydroacoustics or sonar makes it very difficult to protect against incoming torpedoes without an escort, and in a lot of missions it felt like the enemy light cruisers were just sitting at about 7-9km away from me and launching very consistent and very accurate hits that I had no way of dodging and that the best way to deal with light ships in that situation is to charge directly into the enemy fleet to sink them as quickly as possible. Also, in addition to the new torpedo warning icons, it would be nice to have some sort of audio queue for a new spotted target or torpedo, just in case we happen to be looking in another place when our ship or ships spot the torps.

Woke up early this morning to sit here and refresh the page until the patch drops. I'm pretty excited to test out the new missions.