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.

Having actually run a couple more tests, I just wanted to say that in the early game, before the AI has access to torpedo protection the torpedoes seem to be much more effective. Playing the armed convoy escort mission with a bunch of light cruisers lined bow to stern with torpedo launchers proved effective in sinking the whole fleet without being detected. I suspect this may be due in part to the AI freaking out when it spawned in and the anti-collision dooming them to follow their original course straight into the path of the torps. Even still it is proof that an important feature of your lighter vessels will be to screen for torpedoes before they sink your capital ships.

I play War Thunder pretty much on the daily and it isn't a model for any successful indie title, even if they do have what is in my opinion the best arcade style air combat game ever made.

Just ran the experiment again to see if it was a fluke the first time and got even poorer results for the torpedoes. This time, HMS Cape Town has 8x5 22" torpedo launchers (the best currently in the game) and we went up against the Furia, the first salvo of torpedoes was a 100% hit, with 20 22" torpedoes taking the Furia down to about half of it's health and float. The second salvo, pictured below, landed only 17 of the 20 22" torpedoes, but was sufficient to finally finish off the enemy ship.

So as one of the many things I checked out with the Alpha-2 build of the game, I revisited a test I had done on the previous builds available and created a cruiser for the mission 'Defend your convoy' with the minimum requirement for guns and loaded the side with torpedoes. The goal of this ship was to bow tank as much incoming fire as possible from the enemy BC while closing the range until the ship could be brought full broadside to unleash a barrage of torpedoes and then run away from the battlecruiser before a lucky salvo sends the test ship to the bottom of the ocean. the strange thing was, after hitting the USS United States (the enemy BC) with 11 of my 21" torpedoes she was crippled, and every one of the lower bulkheads had completely flooded, however the ship was able to keep sailing as she had maintained a 5% float and had not succumbed to the damage. I am by no means an expert on naval combat or the history thereof, but I would find it hard to believe that any ship could survive that sort of strike from 11 torpedoes, let alone 3 or 4, but I could be mistaken. If you all have any historical examples of what happened to me happening in real life, please let me know about it, and if my hunch is correct and the torpedoes are currently under-performing relative to their historical counterparts, maybe we can come up with some solutions to make them a little more effective in game.

I build TNT pretty much always in the late game because of the amount of fires it sets with AP, makes it very easy to deal damage to more heavily armored ships.

This ship won me the hardest mission I have ever played: Ladies and gentlemen, the KMS König (although when I played the mission it was called HMS Rodney)

I have no idea how much it currently affects the performance of larger calibre guns versus smaller ones, but I would say that one way to make the secondaries or smaller main guns more effective would be to increase the impact that muzzle velocity has on the accuracy or accuracy penalties suffered by enemy ship size and speed. This I would imagine would make it more prudent to consider lower calibre guns and not just opt for whatever you have that is the largest and the same tech level, and to consider which secondaries would be the most effective at stopping certain types of enemy vessel.

Alright, so having finally beat all of the Naval Academy missions, the one that I had the most trouble with was the "Destroy a full Fleet" mission. You are given a decent chunk of money to build a single type of ship and fight an enemy fleet. This fleet will have 8 ships, of which you need to sink 6 before they retreat or your own ship or ships are sunk. From what I noticed, playing this mission 4-5 times before I got a working design nailed down was that at the start of the mission, the enemy ships either have vision of your ship(s) or are about to come in to contact, which I believe is due to one of the enemies having a radar equipped. As a direct consequence, your squadron will pretty much always sustain anywhere from 10-20 minutes of fire from the enemy fleet before you are able to start landing hits, which gives them a considerable leg up. Next, we get to the enemy fleet. Now in pretty much all of my playthroughs the enemy fleet would have 4 light ships, usually 2 destroyers that were fast and had a lot of torpedos, an armored destroyer, a light cruiser, a heavy cruiser, and 3 capitol ships: one with weaker guns but very thick belt armor, one BC with very little armor but a high top speed, and another ship with decent armor and very heavy calibre guns. This fleet has great synergy and will always be able to exploit a weakness in any flawed design that you make; the fast destroyers will be able to rout or cripple any slower capitol ship designs, the high calibre BB will tear holes in any lightly armored vessels, and the high armor BB is unsinkable to ships with lower caliber guns and will be a real nuisance to anybody that tries to play with cruisers and destroyers. So now we reach the interesting part: because the enemy ships will retreat if they have sustained damage, you have to design a high speed ship that can track them down before they get away, because of the radar and the high calibre gun BB you have to design a ship that is either very hard to hit or has a lot of armor, and because of the time constraint of the mission you have to design a ship with high enough firepower to dispatch 6 enemy ships before the time runs out. Now I won't say how I finally beat it because I don't want to ruin the fun for anyone else, but I think because of the radar and the fact that the enemy ships will retreat that there definitely is a "right way" to design and play this mission, and because of that I would recommend either giving the player access to radar or removing it from the enemy ships, just so it is easier to track and target your opponents. Big thanks again to the team at game labs for allowing us to play and enjoy UA:Dreadnoughts in the alpha! It has been a real treat being able to build my own ships and fight them for the first time in over a decade of playing video games. You guys are the best!