phsylent

Yes even if it was just some sliders to set the funds available and tech level for player and AI. Maybe go so far as to have number and class of ship selectors as well for AI but that's just bonus points

Looking at this I think the citadel mechanic along with the barbette mechanic need to go back to the drawing board. It is a manifestation of the same redundancy of mechanics that the shipyard placement scheme suffers: that there are two game functions trying to solve the same problem at the same time and they're getting in each other's way. I think that the citadel armor mechanic should define the how many regions we have to apportion armor to and where in the vessel those regions are. For example the current scheme of deck, belt, their extended variants, turret, and conning tower armor zones is a great start for the the second armor scheme. The first one should at most be hull, deck, turret, and superstructure zones. As the player progresses to new citadel techs like turtle-back and all-or-nothing schemes more regions for armor placement should become available with either an armor viewer like certain MMO naval games or some sort of schematic viewer styled after the historical schematics that lets us see where the armor is relative to our ship's internal components along with some loading screen tips explaining that an all or nothing ship can still be sunk by flooding in the unarmored zones and other such important advice. For barbettes just make them an armor zone. That and/or maybe rename it to ammo storage scheme or something to define this setting as having to do with the internal structure of the barbette including blast doors, wet ammo storage, and so on.

Lets start off with acknowledging the brilliance of this game in this early alpha state. Customization is wonderful and this game actually makes trade offs something you have to think about. The 10x speed is great for allowing naval realism to still be exciting for those more accustomed to Call of Duty games and Micheal Bay movies Now lets talk problems 1. Currently the designer is trying to have two placement modes at once: snap placement and free form. Both are great approaches and there should be a toggle between them. Ideally in free form we should have to option to place our own snap points to easily fit test different parts in a specific spot. 2. While we have an indicator for how much funnel we have and how well the funnels serve the engines we lack an indicator for how much funnel the engines require. 3. The armor customization system is a great start but the the listed thickness numbers and armor quality multiplier are misleading for the player. Unless different armor types will have different properties against various threats it would be great to simplify the system to just the armor thickness and let the number displayed for both armor thickness and penetration be for the equivalent thickness of iron armor plate. 4. Please give a metric for what HE shells can and cannot damage.