Steeltrap

You're welcome. It's simply more efficient to do it as a document than trying to grab things off the screen. I assume such a document will include tooltips and the like, in fact EVERY text element that appears on screen? I saw one that was written in a way that appeared to suggest the Baden class was the first armed with almost 15 inch guns and the most powerful of WW1. That's true for German ships, but the way it was written technically didn't limit it solely to German ships, in which case it's obviously not true (say hi to the Queen Elizabeth class). I'm sure the intent was to point out it was the most powerful German class of the war, it's just the wording technically didn't achieve that. p.s. As an aside, are you sure you want a localised, Australian version? Careful what you wish for. 😁 😎 (don't worry, we use "UK English")

I've seen quite a few examples of things that require correction, but they're usually popping up on screen so I can't capture them in time. If you have some sort of text file you can email me I'd be happy to go through all of it for you. I've done lots of proofreading over the years for friends and colleagues as I'm somewhat old school and obsessive when it comes to language. Even if it's 100 pages that ought only take a few days I'd think; not as though I'm doing anything else important at the moment. Can mark it up and return. Let me know and I can PM you an email address. Cheers

I'm going to write a thread about "ship mobility and manoeuvrability" generally, because I am not happy about what I'm seeing in a game stressing realism as a significant selling point. There's far too much "arcade" for my tastes, and I for one think it's better to stop it NOW than cater to the broader public's relative ignorance about the nature of manoeuvring what were pretty large ships for their days (and more often than not THE single greatest collection of all sorts of technologies to be found in one manufactured item) using machinery that didn't allow for simply opening the throttles from a standing start. As an example, part of the grounds for using the naval diesels in the Deutschland class of WW2 (the so-called 'pocket BB') was greater economy, greater reliability and, very importantly for a raider, far greater responsiveness over a steam turbine power plant. Maybe the devs have plans to alter the performance of ships, I don't know. But I'll raise it anyway as I've time to burn and it's something that bugs me, especially when coupled with what I consider to be the hugely excessive gunnery penalty attached to straight line speed. The FACT that it would take very large warships, BBs/BCs in particular, many minutes to work their way back to top speed even after dropping only a few knots, is something that ought to be reflected. These things aren't speed boats, you don't do doughnuts in them then reach top speed a minute or two later.

The manoeuvre trials alone that the USN puts those nuke carriers through are really remarkable and brutal. Pretty sure they include things like running full astern for hours at a time, too. I vaguely remember reading something about them years and years ago when the Nimitz class was new and top of the pile.

Ideally I'd like it to be a selectable factor, say "national characteristics ON/OFF" One version sees you play in a world where the results of tech development are what they are, with perhaps a minor random factor thrown in. There's no reason in this game that any nation ought to have any advantage in any particular respect other than their respective economies and territorial holdings, which of course DO have significant implications both for capacity to build and support a fleet and the required abilities of that fleet. The other has the more 'baked in' historical factors that DID arise through this period of history. For replayability alone, if nothing else, I'd like the option to have both settings to experience.

Interesting thing for me about the usual 'dynamic' system was the disconnect between what the weather factors (the +/- % gunnery modifiers) said the conditions were vs what was rendered on screen. I'd see a penalty for "cloudy" when 99% of the sky in the combat area was clear, or had the occasional cumulus clouds in the background. Other times it'd say "clear" while the screen was solid, dark overcast. I've never raised it as it isn't really important in the scheme of things while the game's being developed, although I DID get used to checking the factors (mouse over the temperature gauge top left of screen lists them) as I knew I couldn't rely on what I'm seeing on screen. Cheers

Some of you would know I mentioned that the weather appears to have been locked in scenarios. Doesn't matter what I play, I get a net +2.5% (I think the values for the 4 factors are 0, +5%, 0, -2.5% from memory). I raised this in the 'Support' forum to check if it was intentional, unintentional or a problem solely with my game installation. Here's the latest: Doesn't really tell us if it was intentional, but that hardly matters. Posted here just FYI. Cheers

[Incoming wall of text. Something to do while "staying at home", LOL] Played it again to see if it remained simple. Nope, not at all. What was different? Deployment. I started in a position where the first thing I spotted was the CA, at something a bit over 7km I think. Fortunately, it couldn't see my CLs until I closed to perhaps 6km (both those ranges may have been a bit longer). I wasn't going to waste my time shooting at it, and I certainly didn't want it shooting at me. It was coming directly at me, so I turned away ASAP. It DID get within spotting range and opened fire, which is why I was able to get a fix on the range at which it could see me (if you include "low" details on the 'report' part of the interface you get info on what has spotted/lost sight of what. As an aside, I don't accept that it's at all realistic for you to know when the ENEMY spots YOU. I made that exact same point during both the tank and ship games we don't talk about when they introduced a "crew skill" that told you the same via an on screen symbol. I was one of the few to object, mind you, which I suppose illustrates the difference between a gamer who looks to the utility of something vs a "reasonable approximator" who accepts some compromises on historical fidelity in the interests of game play. Some argued about hearing radio chatter etc, but unless it's in plain language (that you understand), radio chatter is exactly that. You MIGHT get some sort of bearing and indication of signal strength, but that doesn't tell you anything other than there's something emitting down that line of bearing/arc at a certain strength which could approximate a range depending on source. Perhaps it's there because the devs capture it as part of data reporting. Yes, someone could tell me to turn off the "low" level reporting, but it contains things I'd like to know about my OWN ship/s. Be nice if eventually we can toggle the reporting about ENEMY ships to "realistic", which is to say limited to the sorts of things you could detect from whatever range you are at. But I digress, LOL. Position of TR fleet. It would appear I had spawned ahead of the convoy. Ironically, given the AI of the CA escort and TR, this is the WORST possible scenario. The TR will remain in line ahead and start to turn to place you astern. On the one hand that's fair enough, yet they ought to shift to line abreast. Remaining line ahead means other TR are continuing to head TOWARDS you, which isn't smart at all. Mind you, they're so poor at manoeuvring at present that it all breaks down to a total Charlie Fox, including TR that come to a complete halt. If there's ONE thing I would change about the AI, it would be "thou shalt NEVER decrease your speed below HALF your maximum". Another horror from that game we don't mention is seeing BBs floating in the open ocean going gently ahead then astern, back and forth, while under fire; NO, JUST NO, ALL BUT NEVER, EVER is this acceptable. Very low speed/being stationary greatly simplified the gunnery solution of anything shooting AT you. Even the worst gunners in the world will manage to correct their fire to where you are when you're more or less in exactly the same place. It's like playing that old "battleships" game where you guess the location and your opponent tells you if you hit. Imagine playing it if your enemy could move ALL their ships one space in any direction while YOU could not. Anyone want to give me odds on who's going to win? Type of CA. A 15,500t ship with a speed of 20 knots, up to 16" of armour, and a broadside of 6 x 9" and 15 x 7". Yes, it had 5 triple 7" mounts on EACH side. Plus a few 5" and 4" guns. They were all mk 3 guns using Tube powder. Yeah, OK, that's a complete non-starter for my ships to be ANYWHERE near. The types of TR. Almost ALL of them had 2-4 x 4" guns. Of the 9 I saw first, 4 had MAX bulkheads, 3 had STD, and 2 were MIN. Both the MIN were unarmed. The rest were ALL armed. With 5" and 4" guns of my own, that made killing the majority of them a rather terrible prospect once they turn to put you astern of them (for those with an aft and midships superstructure, it's interesting to note their aft superstructure apparently doesn't block the field of fire of 4" guns mounted on the midships superstructure). A MAX bulkhead TR showing you its stern can soak up UNBELIEVABLE quantities of 4" and 5" shells. You are very unlikely to get flooding with hits from that angle other than perhaps the rear 2-3 compartments, and the MAX bulkhead means it can control that flooding and fires remarkably effectively. Just ONE of them soaked up more than 40 HITS and still hadn't sunk. If it's not clear, the problems of the number of hits and the resulting interactions of the damage/armour/damage control systems are what cause me to have little interest in playing other than the temporary interest in testing this scenario once again. [I do play the "Armed Convoy" mission as a reminder of how pretty the game is plus mindless fun where I win more or less whenever I like depending on the ship I'm using (I've got it down to 8.5 minutes I think with NO DAMAGE received AT ALL using one design that utilises current imbalances in mechanics, primarily the grossly inflated speed penalty at 35 knots). That scenario is also interesting for testing differences in powders (it's not clear to me why I'd ever use Cordite I over Lyddite II if I want HE performance or White Powder if I want AP; Cordite seems a grossly over-priced midpoint that commits one of the cardinal sins in gunnery performance, namely reduces your range) and other tech. I use it as a baseline every time an update drops] What it came down to was this. I had to remain in the window where I could spot a target without BEING spotted. Even so, the CA eventually got lucky (with 15 x 7" guns firing when able to use the full broadside, my 28 knot speed even with smoke would eventually run out of luck). Even before that, the sheer volume of fire coming from the TR fleet, even IF I couldn't SEE any but 1-2 of them, was impressive and could damage my upper funnels/towers, the latter seemingly the most hit objects on the ship. As an aside, I'd say I got proof of the "hive mind" targeting system as far as I am concerned; when I wasn't visible, nothing fired at me. Soon as ONE ship spotted me, ANYTHING with the range fired at me without revealing their OWN position, even if it were a TR (so no possibility of RADAR explaining it. This is something else that needs be altered IMO. No way can a ship that cannot see you directly fire at you unless it has at least 2nd gen radar, PERIOD. No exceptions. I hope the ONLY reason it's like this is because the placeholder AI can't cope if it isn't. Could I have managed "to win"? Questionable, frankly. With the TR all bunched up and the CA close by, my ability to play the vision game to pick off one or two at a time would become more difficult. One of my ships had already been reduced to a top speed of 21 knots, so I couldn't afford to be using it to spot. The BC presumably would show up, too. With so many TR having MAX bulkheads (I'd only seen a total of 12, and 6 were MAX, 4 STD and 2 MIN) and thus ridiculous damage sponges, I suspect I'd run out of ammo OR eventually get spotted and hit. Could I be bothered? No, not at all. Fact is I think it's such a silly mission in the context of the forces you have vs your opposition that I object to doing it. That hit that reduced one of my CLs to 21 knots in reality would doom it. We're relying solely on a currently very basic (and tactically poor) AI to make the mission viable at all. I find it beyond my capacity for suspending disbelief. Didn't like it when I first tested it (it was MUCH harder), still don't like it. It's not that I object to the enemies changing in nature and deployment. I DO however object to TR with anything beyond STD bulkheads, let alone being festooned with 4" guns that NO amount of fire EVER knocks out (what's with that? How does a TR get hit 30+ times and STILL have all its basic shield mount 4" guns operating? How DO you KO those guns? Anyone managed it?). I suppose there could be value for the devs somehow in terms of whatever data they get from "anonymous reporting" (still want to know; tempted to turn off if I can't), too. No, I think my biggest issue with this mission is it highlights just about every issue I have with the state of the game, and all in a scenario where those issues work against you. I simply find massed damage sponge TRs armed to the teeth, crazy powerful CA design, 'hive mind' gunnery and a placeholder AI too much to swallow when ALL crammed in a scenario in which your CLs ought to be running away ASAP. Perhaps I'm just peculiar when it comes to these things. Cheers

There is some level of "sun glare" already implemented. In some missions if you're looking "into" the sun you get a penalty. "Minor sun glare" I think it something like -15%, but that's from memory. I checked, it's -5%. Haven't seen anything beyond "minor" in any scenario I've played. I think they may have decided to standardise the weather so as to lock down one variable which is important if you're trying to test a particular aspect. I did ask in the technical issues forum, got a reply, answered that, but am yet to hear anything further. I did a repair/reinstall of the game just in case it was a peculiarity with my own installation, but it still seems to be fixed at 0, 0, +5 and -2.5 (or perhaps the last two are the other way around). Anyway, it's a net +2.5% in every mission I play now. I'm not sure what data the "anonymous reporting" (or whatever the option is) sends the dev team. I did ask, but was never answered. Regardless, by locking the weather you remove a factor and that makes the analysis of whatever else you're looking at simpler (fixing other variables ought to make whatever differences result from changes you've made more visible). As I said, I found the mission went from extreme nightmare to very simple. On reflection I've realised the weather was perhaps the most significant of all, as it was previously REALLY bad when I played, having to close to 4-5km just to spot the TR and then I couldn't hit them. I suppose it's feasible for radar controlled fire to be able to engage effectively ships outside of visibility, but it's pretty clear to me at present that's not required for a ship to be able to do that. ANYTHING can fire at you provided YOU can be seen by even just ONE of the enemy. Firing your guns appears not to make much/any difference to the ability of the ship that fires to BE seen, which seems pretty off. Yes, there was "flashless powder", but that was pretty limited in application from what I remember (the IJN had it and used it). Seems to me there's a 'hive mind" spotting regime. In the case of this scenario, I believe the tech levels are too low for any combatants to be using radar. I accept I could be mistaken, but I've had ships firing at me from ranges OUTSIDE what I believe the visibility of my own ship + their likely max tower bonus would say is the range from which they can see me. Granted, it's a bit sketchy. Would be nice if we could include visibility/tower bonuses on the "ship data card" in the top right of screen in combat. Cheers

Just played Raiders, first time since the 'locked weather' (gives you a net effect of +2.5% accuracy). 2 CLs with 28 knots speed, 4 centreline 5" plus 2-3 x 4" depending on bearing to target. Armoured to withstand 4" guns at any range, and larger at various ranges depending on angle (much as I dislike that particular mechanic). Result? I bounced some 9" rounds at range. Most damage came from a deck pen that damaged the rear tower. No other damage to speak of. Total cake walk. Was allowed to chew up the formation from astern. Biggest irritation remains the damage model, frankly. Mission went from being a nightmare, all but impossible in the initial iteration with VERY bad weather and a convoy full of transports with half your own armament on each, to a doddle. Pretty remarkable illustration of: - the (unjustifiably) high levels of immunity offered by sheer, straight line speed. - the critical importance of the weather. If you can't see far, and can't hit until you get even closer, and EVERYTHING can shoot at you even when they can't see you, that can be VERY telling for the outnumbered and outgunned side unless their few ships are vastly superior. - continued, all but exponential importance of bulkhead status. I encountered NO Bismarck-like MAX bulkhead TR. Only 3 of them had 4" guns, too. Even so, the usual issues with the damage model persist as expected. - the significant issues remaining with the AI. I SAW the CA only twice. It stayed at the head of the formation, shooting uselessly, while I demolished the TR it was meant to protect. If the BC made it anywhere near the battle I wasn't aware of it. Didn't appear to be shooting at me by the time I killed the last required TR. I'm sure this will be fixed eventually. If there's one thing we know Nick has a lot of experience in addressing it's AI. Interesting. Cheers

This is one reason we like playing and giving feedback. Might I add, however, I'm still concerned over the whole "HE v AP" when it comes to plunging fire. If an AP round bounces off the deck, NO WAY can an HE shell then devastate it. That MUST be true of ALL calibres, even if there's a particular issue with 18s. Maybe this generally isn't a problem as much as it once was, as I avoid the modern scenarios for various reasons I won't go into here. If it has been addressed, great. Cheers

The only interest I would have in online would be to arrange campaign play with friends because I can rely on them not to try to introduce cheats/hacks, plus be prepared to devote days and weeks to play through a campaign. No offence, but I'm old enough and grumpy enough to find the average online gamer a POWERFUL reason to avoid any such play. The WG titles not only suffered from their atrocious and dishonest development and business practices, they ACTIVELY pursued lowest common denominator strategies. Trouble with that is it translates to much of the game's enjoyment being tied to how well you can tolerate the consequences of that lowest common denominator "I play for fun, and winning isn't fun" player. No thanks, never again for me, LOL.

It's a mission that's intended to show the sorts of power the higher/highest tech levels available can produce, and how significantly they can overshadow lesser tech. It's somewhat like the "Armed Convoy" mission where you get to build a Dreadnought and go against pre-dread BBs, a CA and 2 CLs. Having said that, I have long been of the view the high end tech is WAAAAAY too effective, especially with respect to accuracy. While to SOME extent increasing accuracy over historically accurate values is understandable (the average person has no idea of how low real gunnery performance was at range even in WW2), it has some significant and what I think are bad consequences for lots of OTHER things (damage model, armour, damage control to name a few). Mind you, building a ship with 18" and 15" is so contrary to all the lessons of naval design. What made HMS Dreadnought so famous? Other than greater and reliable speed through turbines, it was the "all big guns of same calibre". There are still loads of things for the game to resolve if it's to fall within the range of "as accurate as reasonable". But that's why we're playing NOW, to test all this stuff. Some scenarios are likely designed just to check just how greatly the different tech levels alter power, and what happens if even just a few significantly more modern ships encounter a bunch of lesser ones, as that will have implications for AI design and indeed the whole campaign. Cheers

[I'll add my frequent statement of intent etc that criticisms of the existing systems are intended as constructive and also fully acknowledging we're in developing Alpha builds, so things aren't going to be as good as we might hope, and of course I don't expect them to be] @DarkMaid and @Latur Husky Thanks for the discussions, and especially thanks for the additional video effort. Yet again, notice how the transports you faced either were unarmed or minimally so? You could shoot at them while they could not shoot back. That's simply HUGE, because your ships aren't really able to shrug off repeated 4" rounds. While I like the reasoning initially for spreading your two ships, one minor quibble is that 'Test 1' was taking a -15% penalty for "far from flagship". As things stand, there's not much incentive for any significant separation of units. Ideally I'd have the 'flag' bonus configurable, or alter it entirely, so it works somewhat like a slider, which is to say you can choose the maximum BONUS you can get from being in flag range, but that also immediately attracts a PENALTY when you get outside it (which is how the system works now). On the other end of the scale, however, you could elect to have NO bonus when close, but that also gives you no penalty when further apart. It's more important for a fleet to have fairly close cohesion than a pair of raiders, but I realise I'm straying well into the "nice to have some time way off in the future". When it comes to over-pen with HE, I have submitted screen shots of cases where an over-pen makes no sense for small calibre (think 6" or lower) guns. How, for example, would you over-pen any target where the shell trajectory and the location hit means that shell MUST have continued into a substantial extent of the hull? It's somewhat OK to say even 6" shells might go through the funnel without exploding, but the hull? No. Any HE shell of those calibres penetrating the hull from virtually ANY angle, with the possible exception of the narrowest taper at bow/stern from an angle where a through-and-through might be possible, would explode. Watching 5" HE shells getting over-pens of centre belt with a striking angle of 45 degrees off the perpendicular is not right. Another important factor I've not seen ANYONE mention as yet is the last update appears to have frozen the weather in scenarios. If someone else wants to check, just open a scenario a few times in a row, noting the weather then leaving the battle. When I played this mission the weather appeared to be fixed as REALLY POOR. The trouble with that was it pushed everything into the WORST possible conditions for my ships. Visibility was bad, so I had to be MUCH closer before spotting them. It also meant I couldn't hit them unless being even closer. Trouble with THAT was it meant the transports, covered with 3"-4" guns, could hit ME, and my ships couldn't take that massed fire. Which also brings up another thing I'll have to list somewhere (I've mentioned it before), which is the spotting system. More precisely, the ability of ships to fire at a target THEY CAN'T SEE. In the case of this particular scenario, it means EVERY TR with guns with enough range can shoot at you. It also means the CA can and, eventually, the BC, even if the ONLY ships that can see you directly are a few TR. Indirect fire control wasn't really a thing, sure as hell not between a merchant ship and naval vessel. Yet for now that's what we get. I realise all this might sound like me making excuses for why I kept losing. In one sense it is, but for the purpose of trying to make some points I made earlier, which add up to the degree to which the same scenario USED to be able to vary so wildly compared with what I've seen lately. With the weather locked in a setting advantageous to our raiders, TR apparently restricted in their armament, and an escort AI that, face it, is very much not up to scratch AS YET, it's a different beast. I might have to re-run it to see if I get the same. As an aside, I did run the scenario prior to the recent April 1st small update (which I believe is where the 'weather lock' came in) with the smaller CLs that could have deck mounted torpedoes. I had 1x3 and 1x2, yet that was back when the weather was dreadful and the TR were all armed to the teeth. I got torps off, even sank several TR with them, but the visibility meant I had to get close enough that the instant massed fire from everything all but trashed whichever of my ships was first spotted. I think you can see why I kept finding this mission hugely frustrating, LOL. As an aside, Tsushima resulted in navies, the RN especially, drawing what proved to be INCORRECT lessons initially. By the time Jellicoe became C-in-C Grand Fleet, one thing he did was give clear expressions of expected gunnery doctrine. It was interesting in that it stressed careful, DELIBERATE fire at long ranges, shifting to full RoF only once good solutions had been achieved as verified by fall of shot. He also very clearly expected the highly damaging, telling fire to occur at ranges of 10,000 yards /9.1km where APC ammo was expected to be able to penetrate armour. He even went so far as to set a time limit on how long the fleet could stay in line ahead for purposes of engaging with all guns based on the time it would take for torpedoes to cross the intervening space, so conscious was he of the danger of massed torpedo spreads at a battle line. Point is he did NOT expect longer range HE fire to do anything much other than create potential incidental damage to fire control systems, upper works, plus fires and general morale effects. As I said, and you @DarkMaid also commented on, it's a scenario no sane raider squadron commander would take on unless there were some bizarrely significant strategic conditions (think of them being a mass of troop landing ships near Leyte Gulf as a good parallel, the nature of the combat ships not being relevant). Cheers

I think this is a more thoroughly fleshed out solution that serves the same purpose as the 'warning' we were discussing, in a different and far better way. While I don't know how much programming would go into it (as you said, these calculations must be going on behind the scenes anyway), I think it would be a good step between a crude 'on/off' for auto-target (which would introduce its own issues) and leaving things as they are. One problem that will need altering is that even if you target a ship on which you are already locked, YOU LOSE LOCK. That happens now. Even in a 1 v 1 with main and secondary guns locked, if you right click on the enemy as though to target it YOU LOSE ALL LOCK BENEFITS and the system reverts to being exactly the same as though you've never fired at it. Personally, NO WAY. Apart from it being yet MASSIVELY more complexity to be programmed and managed (you're more or less calling on Nick to add another layer to the AI, then allow the player to be able to see 'what sort' of captain a ship has, and then presumably allow the player to manage them etc etc), it's adding MORE uncertainty and complexity. Besides which, it's very much arguably the case that inter-war officers who were mavericks/independently minded generally didn't GET to the rank of Cdr or Capt, let alone flag ranks. Navies in particular were known largely to be highly conservative institutions the world over. That produced its own issues as it turned out that form of highly conservative and conformist institutional 'culture' wasn't great at producing officers good at handling the often fluid and uncertain nature of combat; USN submarine skippers were a classic illustration of that, perhaps because a sub skipper arguably NEEDS to be independent and flexible more than any other naval command position. Regardless, however, to the best of my knowledge officers with a tendency to 'creatively interpret'/ignore their seniors' orders didn't rise through the ranks. Cheers

Yeah, I know. It makes you wonder, doesn't it?

The 'bug' you encountered with the two cruisers is not really a bug as opposed to an unfortunate default. Fixing it would be useful, and I must confess I've never bothered to report it. I've noticed when I detach ships I need to go to them and click on the 'steady' flag as they will often still be on guard or follow, but given they're now their own division they aren't following/guarding anything. With that extra step you'll solve that problem. Surprised you've not encountered it before. Conclusion about the mission? Your design wasn't greatly different from mine. Can't help but feel that an awful lot of the success/failure of this mission comes down to outright luck in terms of the bulkhead status and armament of at least 12 of the TR fleet, plus where you spawn relative to the enemy CA (on one occasion it was directly between me and the TR, LOL). I think at least one of my designs was VERY similar to yours. I only had two, however, although I did have some slight improvements over yours. I DID find it interesting seeing the totally different way in which we go about designing them. Not saying either is better/worse, merely significantly different (I don't put anything on the ship until I decide on the components I want, and I also chose different components over yours). One thing that struck me with your victory was the TRs were unarmed; in my attempts they were festooned with 4" and/or 3" guns. I noticed on someone else's play through, who also lost but for different reasons, that their TR also were all but unarmed. Every time I'VE played, I've run into an absolute barrage of potentially 2-4 x 4" and/or 2-4 x 3" PER TR. Put 10+ of them in range and that's 20-40+ 4" / 20-40+ 3". They may have a low chance to hit, but that many of them? Well, as the saying goes, throw enough shit at something some of it will stick. I think THAT is a factor not to be downplayed. With the low armour of these ships, those 3" and 4" guns can do damage. I was suffering as much or more from the damned TR than the CA. When facing all that fire from the TR fleet, your 'few' bulkhead CLs would've been torn to pieces. Mine had 'many' bulkheads and better armour and still were. I was in the ridiculous position of not being to engage TR ships because their combined firepower far exceeded that which my two "raiders" could produce, LOL. In fact it just highlighted to me that the commander of that CL raider squadron ought never have been taking that fight at all, and, while I appreciate the desire to test things, I DO find being forced to take on missions you'd NEVER sensibly do were you playing the Campaign a bit irritating after a while. But perhaps that's just me; I certainly don't EXPECT missions to be built the way I want them to be. I DID like your approach of trying to lure the CA away, although the tactical layout was such that it wasn't particularly achievable. Of course one would hope the AI would recognise its mission and not be lured away, ESPECIALLY if it knows there's a BC on the way. You had the same problem I also did, with the MAX bulkhead TRs being absurdly durable. ALL THREE of the first ones you engaged were MAX bulkheads, and that means their ability to control fires below the top deck, plus flooding, is insane. Add the fact that small calibre guns (6" and lower) appear to be significantly less likely to cause flooding, and any TR with MAX is pretty much a waste of time for your guns. I've been saying for a LONG time that I think, given the current version of the damage control system etc, TR ships should not be allowed more than Standard bulkheads. Anything further is hugely unrealistic as merchant ships are built with ONE consideration above all others, namely profitability. Greater subdivision is unnecessary AND gets in the way of cargo capacity. Furthermore, no transport ship has any sort of ARMOURED bulkheads. They're built principally with fire and flooding containment in mind. Shell fire and torpedoes? Nope. That's why most would take a single torp to sink (which does tend to happen in game), but also were not difficult to sink with 88mm/105mm on German or 4"/5" guns on USN subs, mainly the former however as the Japanese merchant fleet often had guns/escorts compared with the 'happy times' of 1939-40 in the Atlantic. I've been banging on at poor Nick about this forever. He did alter them somewhat, although in some ways I think it was a worse change. Rather than simply preventing them from having bulkheads beyond 'Standard', he appears to have made them generally more fragile. Ironically, from what I've seen that has made the bulkhead status EVEN MORE SIGNIFICANT, LOL. They'd have been fine as they were if the AI TR were simply not allowed to have more than standard bulkheads (and I hope to hell they can't have armoured bulkheads tech) until the damage and damage control models are improved significantly. Cheers

The game isn't ON Steam. They said they don't HAVE a Steam account. I misread it as complaining that it wasn't available on Steam at first, too. Sigh, I need to get out of the house for a walk. Being cooped up for weeks is making me tetchy, lol.

Well obviously it's true with respect to MY game, lol, or I'd not have raised it. Jokes aside, I can grab you a screen clip of the weather, but that doesn't really prove anything other than the weather condition for that battle. Ironically, in fact, I CAN'T get a screen clip of any OTHER sort of weather, LOL, so it's rather pointless (which is why I didn't bother). I did verify the integrity of local files in Steam plus perform a 'repair' re-download through the normal portal, and that didn't change anything. I didn't expect it to, but did it anyway for the sake of thoroughness. I can understand why it may have been done, and indeed have no problem with it one way or another. We're here to test as the dev team wants us to. I raised it simply because it was a change for which I could find no mention. That immediately makes me want to know if: 1. is it happening only for me, or everyone, and 2. was it intentional (and not mentioned, perhaps an oversight) or a peculiar and unintended consequence of something else. In other words, I'm raising it mainly as a "hey, heads up, anyone aware of this?" Cheers

I've noticed the weather in all the Naval Academy Missions appears to be unchanging in terms of its modifiers. It may LOOK different, but in terms of combat effects it's not. Was this a change of which I was unaware, introduced through the 1st April thing? Or has something gone wrong with my specific game installation? As an aside, there's frequently been a significant mismatch between what shows on screen and what combat effects are listed. It may give a 'cloudy' penalty when the sky is all but clear, yet not apply the same when the sky is solid, dark overcast. Either way, now it's ALWAYS the same, clear and slight sea waves for a combined effect of +2.5%, the other two factors being 0. Cheers

Consider Yamato and Alaska, the latter with what surely was one of if not the most powerful 12" guns ever built. Yamato firing AP is throwing a 1,460kg shell at 780m/s with the shell's bursting charge being 33.85kg. Alaska is using a 517kg shell at 762m/s with a bursting charge of 7.9kg. Worth noting this gun was viewed as being so good that it equalled or exceeded the performance of the USA's pre-WW2 14" guns on many of their BBs. In crude terms that's triple the kinetic energy (444MJ v 150) at the barrel end; the gap would get wider with range as the lighter 12" drops velocity slightly more quickly, and velocity is squared for KE calculations. It's also 4 times the explosive element, although I'm not sure what performance differences existed between the two explosive types. I don't know how the devs have calculated their "damage" values, but the 18" being a LOT larger than a 12" is exactly what it ought to be. Whether 8 times is too much is a fair question. Either way, it clearly has all that extra KE that has to go somewhere (much of it into the matter of armour penetration), and then 4 times the volume of explosives. Interestingly, with HC/HE rounds there's a considerably bigger gap in KE (faster and heavier for the 18") yet only a fraction under 2 times the bursting charge (61.7kg v 36.0). What we don't know is how the internals of the damage model work. We know damage can 'spill' into adjacent compartments, yet we also know a 'destroyed' compartment does NOT lose its ability to soak damage. Just because a shell does 8 times damage does not mean it ought to be 8 times as destructive. I can imagine systems that could cause damage effectiveness to be linear, but also others that could be multiplicative IF they overcome some sort of threshold of damage v the hit location. It's all a black box. As it happens, I had a discussion elsewhere with Nick about a month ago about how the damage model at some point is going to have to be explained because as it is right now it's extremely unintuitive and likely to cause all sorts of ill feeling/confusion in new players, and already bothers a lot of existing ones. In the absence of accurate information, people will make up their own and believe it to be true. Far better to supply accurate info as far as I'm concerned. In other words, nothing here is new. They know about it of course. If you're expecting everything to work as though it's a complete, off the public shelf game purchase, you're going to be frustrated. By all means point out potential issues, ask questions, etc, as that's why we're here. I try to do so in a way that invites discussion and engagement and not so much in an aggressive, argumentative way. Don't always succeed, but the latter will simply lead people to conclude the person is unpleasant and thus to be avoided. Cheers

The biggest problem with "Prove your might" (the rough recreation of the Battle of the Denmark Strait, right?) is the crazy speed and manoeuvrability of HMS Hood (36 knots when I played) and how the gunnery model rewards that. At 36 knots I was getting a -90% penalty in the gunnery modifiers. She danced around doing crazy pirouettes, barely dropping speed. While doing so, of course, a "target ship manoeuvre" penalty of up to -40% from memory was also applied. Thus the BEST you could hope for was -90% being applied to counter whatever bonuses you might have from your techs/towers. It could be higher than that, based on the trade off between outright speed penalty and the manoeuvre penalty. Meanwhile MY ship was in fact something relatively sane for the period. Given I didn't have the benefit of speed over 29 knots, and I assume I was also giving them a pretty large "target ship size" bonus, I was an easier target. Net effect of this was I was being hit AT LEAST ONCE every 1-2 salvoes, often more than once. In the first 10 minutes since opening fire, I HAD NOT HIT HOOD ONCE. I quit the mission in bemused disgust, LOL, and haven't gone back to it. Why would I? I'm aware of what I'm going to see, and I believe it to be pretty damn ridiculous. I also don't want to redesign my own ship to 'exploit' current game state issues that cannot possibly make it to the release version (at least not if the game wants to be true to its claim of as much realism as is reasonable to hope for). 'German Raiders' is another I've not succeeded with. Again, I think it's a problem of these missions pushing you to build ships that suit the peculiarities of the mechanics rather than the mechanics reflecting well how realistic ship builds ought to perform. I also found the massed gunnery of the transports themselves to be superior to my own, LOL I suspect the best answer would be massed torpedo spam from range, but that's another case of building a 'ridiculous' design to cope with various dubious mechanics etc. The other issue with that scenario is a German raider squadron would simply not engage at all when the escort is superior (the CA) in every respect that matters, let alone a BC known to be in the area. No, they'd run like hell, exactly as Scharnhorst and Gneisenau did in WW2 when encountering convoys escorted by the Revenge class BB HMS Ramillies in one case and the Queen Elizabeth class BB HMS Malaya in another. They'd already been on the receiving end of those 15" guns when encountering HMS Renown during the Norway campaign, suffered significant damage from a few hits each, and rightly had no intention of repeating the experience. [be interested to know what people did with the Raiders mission in particular. Get enough TR with 'maximum' bulkheads and festooned with 4" guns and good luck with it, LOL] I'm not going to bash my head against certain currently poor mechanics as I don't find that remotely enjoyable or rewarding. I don't play "to puzzle solve", I play to see how "proper" designs perform in this game platform. The more 'ridiculous' I consider my designs to be, especially if they "need" to be to succeed, the less happy I am about it. It's also why I don't favour missions that put you in circumstances where the 'sensible, prudent, realistic' option would be to refuse combat at all. I'd prefer to be testing the sorts of battles I would in fact fight were I playing a campaign. I assume and accept the point of needing to test how the differences in tech can affect performance and just how much current mechanics can allow one or two powerful ships to demolish a whole bunch of enemies while taking little damage. I simply raise the points wherever in the forum and move on.

How about Bismarck? My recollection is her TDS succeeded in preventing any damage making it through the armour scheme inboard of the TDS. In other words, the TDS area flooded, but nothing else. Isn't that more or less the definition of a successful TDS? It's certainly different from NC for starters, although yes they were air dropped RN torpedoes and not the more potent IJN submarine weapon. I wrote a pretty firm critique of this change in potential for torpedoes back when it was first included in what was then the upcoming new version. I decided not to post it, but I will include a little bit: I spent some time looking through the list of all the BBs I could find ever to have been sunk, regardless of cause. Having done so, I found the data supports the following conclusions: By FAR the greatest EFFECTIVE danger posed by torpedoes was rapid, uncontrolled loss of stability leading to capsizing. MUCH more common, however, was flooding that exceeded pumping capacity and that damage control was unable to halt, ultimately causing the ship to sink. Magazine explosion due to torpedo strike, NOT an explosion from fires when the ship was already sinking and no damage control efforts were possible? ONE, the French pre-dread Suffren that DID explode and sink more or less 'immediately' (the u-boat responsible surfaced shortly after and found no survivors), more or less as with HMS Hood (same catastrophe, different cause). Much the same is true of BBs hitting mines. In summary, my main issues are the threat applies even to "well protected" BBs, we don't know HOW or what chances apply, and real world evidence points very much in the opposite direction such that it ought to be VERY unlikely IF you spend the resources on TDS. This is EXACTLY the sort of thing in patch notes that drives me nuts, LOL. It still strikes me as "a solution in search of a problem", one that can add nasty consequences that are at direct odds with as much available info as I was able to examine in a few hours. If others can point to evidence that says otherwise, I'll be all ears (well, eyes, 😜 ) Cheers p.s. I didn't post it because I concluded it was going to be included no matter what I said, and regardless of the vast amounts of real world evidence pointing to it being a theoretical possibility that could 99.99% be summed up as "never happened, why bother?". As they'd done the development required, I figured they weren't going to be interested in me pointing out a host of reasons why it seemed a poor choice of time and effort in face of far more significant things that could have been done.

Many of us have been commenting on how the damage model is especially deficient at present with respect to the difference between HE and AP plunging fire. The simple fact is plunging HE fire is vastly, utterly unjustifiably, too effective. It's been that way since I started playing last year. Given little has changed with the damage model in terms of application of damage, at least AFAIK, it's not surprising this hasn't altered. One part of the problem is HE is given a pen of 1/3 of the AP (at least that's what the data mine thread on the damage model showed) BUT we don't know WHICH AP BASE pen it is using. Does it scale that 1/3 directly against the AP pen (horizontal/vertical) for the range in question? Or does it retain a certain pen regardless of range? We also don't know the penetration mechanic. Nor how or if fusing is modelled, which is HUGELY important for HE shells. Let alone various forms of ballistic caps and the like. ALL of those are relevant. In short, there are so many things missing that explain real life performances that it's hardly the basic system with arbitrary values and incomplete mechanics that are all part of an Alpha build are producing results that clearly are not anywhere close to realistic.

Yes, high speed and max bulkheads are the two most significant "exploits" available in the game. As far as I see it both will get reigned in as they must for the game to be credible, even if it's more accurate to say that will happen as factors beyond a crude figure such as "bulkheads" are implemented (crew, damage control resources such as pumping capacity, let alone stability etc).