Mad_Sailor01

While playing through the first couple of missions in the Naval Academy I wanted to share some of my thoughts: 1. First both the game and user would benefit from some visual feedback on balance while building out the ships. Now you get written warnings that don’t give any visual clues of where the problem might be. This could easily be fixed by causing the ship to tilt port or starboard to represent weight problems in that area or at the bow and stern to indicate problems with balance along the center line of the ship. 2. Second, it is not obvious how to undo a mistake. I eventually discovered that I could click on the ship hull and then left click again to remove something, but this needs to be made easier, maybe a left click to place and a right click or shift left click to remove. 3. I think learning to design a large dreadnaught is likely an iterative experience where one learns by starting small and gradually expanding that knowledge to larger vessels. For that reason, I suggest adding some additional learning type tutorial missions at the beginning that sort of teach war ship building. I also recommend starting small, like with PT boats and then destroyers, later cruisers, then heavy cruisers and finally small, medium and large battleships. 4. The game needs additional work around engines and smokestacks. For example once you have picked the speed, and engine type, there should be some sliders on how many cylinders, boilers etc. are required to achieve that speed. Right now it is a little too automatic. Second there needs to be some sort of feedback that provides an indication of how many smokestacks are required to achieve the desired engine efficiency. Maybe post the engine efficiency percentage with recommended levels so the user has some idea how many stacks are required as they increase or decrease that number. 5. In terms of fuel and rations I’d change that to include the number of days away from refueling and restock to give users more control in this area. Along those same lines, I would also give the designer more control over the size of the crew. Crews on ships serve in watches, usually three, sometimes four of four hours each. So a crew member in the first watch serves for four hours then has the next eight hours on a crew of three watches. More watches means a more efficient boat as people are fresher. But adding crew comes at a huge cost in that you have to have beds, food and extra water. This should be worked into the ships design. For example, in the US merchant marine, they went with two watches of 6 hours each and used hot bunking to save on cost( you only need one set of bunks as people off watch can share the bunk with the crew member on watch) with the trade off in efficiency. Other techniques involve going with a single watch, but using a subset of the crew to minimally man the ship until a critical situation arises that requires all hands on deck. Anyway, I think these types of design decisions should be included as they have a huge impact on a ships cost, its weight and its efficiency. 6. I also think it would be interesting if you implemented a similar system to the one you had in Ultimate General: Civil War, where you hire, equip and train both the watches and officers so part of the cost allocation for building and commissioning the ship is taken up by the types of officers and watch captains and the training/experience of the sailors who will man the ship. 7. While actually fighting the missions the game gets boring. Other than deciding on direction and speed the user has very little input on the direction of the fight or control of their ships. I think implementing a few additional features might help with this. My recommendations here are: - Add a damage control button that redirects crew to damage control over firing the guns and allow make shift repairs that can either control the flooding or maybe patch up some of the damaged guns, engines, rudders, put out fires or simply withdraw the ship to make repairs etc. - Add an evasive action command that would allow the ship to respond in an efficient manner to sighted torpedoes or an enemy finding the range. - Allow independent aiming and firing of primary and secondary guns. Instead of Auto Firing, which is neat, but boring after a while, I think more control in this area is needed to force commanders to think about how they are using their guns. Also, implement some sort of visual representation of gun range so you realize you have to close on the enemy to engage them with some of the smaller secondary guns. - Have a look at the training missions in the game “Atlantic Fleet” for some additional ideas on aiming guns. - Add a Make Smoke order/icon to provide covering smoke. - Modify the rudder commands to have exact increments such as center the helm, Port and Starboard 15, 30, 45, 90 degrees instead of the slider or in addition to the slider. - Implement a fire torpedoes order/icon. - Implement a launch plane order/icon for help in finding your enemy. Note(I guess I don’t really know if war ships of this period had stern launched biplanes. Assume they do but maybe that is more of a WWII invention. Anyway, if they were being used during this period, I think they might be useful in longer range missions where even finding the enemy was a problem.) - One other thing I noticed during the second mission was that even when the enemy battleship was completely on fire and half underwater it was still able to fire most of its guns with excellent accuracy. That would not have happened. As ships take damage they lose things like fire control, secondary guns, and the hydraulics needed to bring up ammo and charges to the main guns. This leads to a diminishing return in its ability to fight back as the ship takes damage. In my mission I had the battle ship listing heavily to starboard with a hull mostly full of water still able to accurately fire its main guns. As badly damaged as it was at that point I doubt there would have been any people or systems left online that could have accomplished that feat, let alone accurately. - Implement more visible damage on ships, such as over turned main turrets, down fore and aft towers, damaged stacks, damaged rudders where the ship can no longer turn as well as major damage to the crew and officers. On many battles of this type, most of the senior officers were lost due to the ships bridges and fire control areas being targeted. As ships took fire to their main and secondary guns sailors and watch captains died and both fires and flooding took their toll. This should be implemented is some way. At a minimum, I think it would impact both the ships fighting efficiency and the crews willingness to follow orders as opposed to looking out for themselves. Sort of like the endurance and will to fight that you implemented in the Ultimate General games.