[Super easy feature]

I would love the ability to provide custom name lists for one navy in the campaign (or the game in general).
It should be fairly easy to implement by external file.

[Does the research work]

I'm playing the campaign but the research doesn't seem to work. I unlock stuff but no upgrades are in effect and nothing new appears in the designer.

[>>>Alpha-3 General Feedback v65<<<]

21 minutes ago, RAMJB said:

The overall tone can be whatever it might be. This already has been discussed: biased "feelings" formed on the base of an overall lack of knowledge about how naval warfare was conducted maybe useful as feedback in games as WOWS. BUt not in one like this,




To reiterate it once more: secondaries' current lacklusterness comes from the fact that 

a) the game currently does not allow for multiple targetting, slaving secondaries to whatever the main guns are firing at. This is not how it's supposed to be, so until that is introduced, one of the main advantages of having a secondary battery in battle (engaging several targets simultaneously) isn't felt at all.

b) The game currently does not model supression or crew penalized abilities when subjected to heavy fire. Ships subjected to a hailstorm of secondaries just sail through as if nothing was happening without any impact to their fighting ability. Hence secondary batteries are penalized because other of it's main advantages in battle isn't there at all yet.

c) The game currently is limited to short engagements only where main battery ammo seems more than enough for almost anything. When the whole campaign is released, and large scale battles are fought (in which you MUST save your main battery ammo for critical targets, not for whatever random DD that happens to sail nearby), the large ammount of ammo secondaries bring to the table ,mixed with the a) and b) advantages currently missing already named avobe will make them priceless to have.

d) the game currently does not model the exceedingly high maintenaince cost of shooting main guns. These are scenarios after which your ship is no longer even saved. No need to rebore and reline main gun rifles. You aren't running a navy that has to pay running costs yet.
Main battery guns had to be relined and rebored each 100 to 300 shots depending on the gun we're talking about. They were really expensive to put them back in working order. Secondary guns had a barrel life of THOUSANDS of shots. Hence in an engagement where DDs are present if you shoot your main guns right now there's no penalty. Penalty that won't exist until the campaign is released. Again, other of the main advantages of secondaries which is not in-game YET.

e) the current gunnery model gives a series of to-hit modifiers which are mostly flat across ranges (Some change with range, such as "long range targetting bonuses, others do not). Some of those modifiers should not be so draconian at short ranges (point blank). Secondaries *DO* have too low accuracy at very low ranges, under 2.5km or so. Beyond that their results are perfectly believable.

f) the current armor model is an oversimplification placeholder that causes armored ships to be covered in far larger areas of plate armor than it was the case historically. This hurts secondary guns ability to hurt those ships. Once a definitive, more accurate armor model is in place, the effect of secondaries on unprotected areas of warships will be greatly increased.



I've said it before, I've said it again: there were very good reasons secondaries were considered vital for warships. None of those reasons was that those weapons were any "accurate" on a per-shot basis. Currently none of those reasons is in the game, but they're all bound to be at some point in the future. Because, as advertised, this game will replicate naval combat of the era, and all those factors mattered. So they will be in here. Some will come sooner, some will come later.

Giving any categorical statement about the secondaries "needing" anything at this point (much less an accuracy boost that is not warranted: those guns were much less accurate than main batteries for many reasons already named in previous posts) before ALL those factors are in the game and modelled, so their advantages can be felt (which right now, can't), it's just poor feedback. Because you'll be boosting the performance of weapons that are lacking most of the things that made them important, because they don't "feel" that important RIGHT NOW. The only solution is NOT to "buff them" in their current state. It is to wait for the game to be properly developed and all those things that mattered, included. THEN they will feel as important as they should. Without any unrealistic, anhistorical, and unneeded "accuracy boost".  


It only happens that **RIGHT NOW** this is a game halfway in production. A lot of things that are going to be in here, aren't yet. You can't say "this weapon doesn't work well" when the context is that of a game where of the whole lot of things that made that weapon system important, only two are modelled: their existance, and their chances to hit. Nothing else.  That's like saying that a half backed pie needs a lot more flour when it's not even baked, because it doesn't seem solid enough. No shit. It's not baked. It's not even supposed to seem solid yet. And if you add flour now what you'll do is to ruin the freakin' pie. So leave it the heck alone, and wait for it to be baked first.


So secondaries are currently not as useful as they should be. Of course they are not. 80% of the reasons why they mattered and were important aren't yet in the game. What you can't do is to give them a completely absurd boost to their accuracy right now to compensate, to then when the rest of the reasons why they were useful aren't here yet. 

Once those factors are in, then it will the time to do a proper look into how useful they are. Right now it's just nonsense coming from people with ill-informed beliefs about how those weapons worked historically (which, again, the game is intended to replicate).

But even then, when the game is complete, feedback based on the "feels" of people who know nothing about naval combat of the time will be as solid as now. Meaning: not at all. This is a game that's advertised as replicate the important factors of naval combat, design, and strategy during the big gun era.

Battleships of the time were NOT floating deathstars, and no matter how hard some people "Feel" they should be, they weren't, and they shouldn't be here either.

Nothing you are saying is incorrect. But this post demonstrates that it's you that don't read what other people write.

I made a whole thread detailing how and why the gunnery model should be rewritten exactly for these scenarios.

Yes, secondaries should be really accurate at point blank, at least up until a certain tech level. But this is difficult to model with the current implementation based on modifiers. You would have to add another modifier called "point blank" that happens in a certain range for a certain gun. And then it has to be balanced against all other modifiers. And then what about big guns with slow rotation time against "point blank" fast targets?

The damage model is entirely another beast, and you are mostly correct when you suggest that small(er) caliber should do some "temporary damage" by distrupting ship functions. But it's entirely a moot point until you cannot hit anyway.

[>>>Alpha-3 General Feedback v65<<<]

By the way, I did read the ongoing discussion about secondary batteries.

It's hilarious. There are people here that are actually arguing that secondary batteries should be completely and utterly useless because of HISTORICAL ACCURACY.

So, basically the theory here is that admirals and top brass of the entire world were complete idiots who spent unholy amounts of money to fit their ships with tens or hundreds of totally useless pieces of artillery. For decades.

I don't know what to say. It's... I don't want to be offensive.

[>>>Alpha-3 General Feedback v65<<<]

Secondaries are still unable to hit anything. I get like 0.3% to hit at 1km, which is hilarious. It's like secondaries are manned by orks.
I read that they tried to fix this and other accuracy issues by "rebalancing" some modifiers. I reiterate. This won't work.

You will never have an interesting gunplay if you don't model the gunnery in a better way.

 

 

[Please give us both, imperial & metric!]

On 12/8/2019 at 4:30 PM, Lobokai said:

Wow. This thread... most “first world problem/millennial” gamer complaint I’ve heard in a long time.  Seriously?  Convert in your head, if you can’t... well here’s a skill you need in your mental toolbox if you live in a mixed imperial/metric world anyway.  Reminds me of people who can’t tell time if it’s not digital. 

The implicit idea that something regarding a videogame could be something else than a "first world problem" is hilarious.

[Please give us both, imperial & metric!]

Yeah, that's funny but it's a needed feature.

Problem is that when you are an historical nut and you read and listen to stuff about warships, you get informations in both metric and imperial. Then confusion arises.

 

[The gunnery model]

4 hours ago, Steeltrap said:

I also agree, however, that I can't imagine the devs are going to move away from their design decision at this late stage.

Code refactoring is often more of a mental barrier than a real burden

[The gunnery model]

Also, think about the modding support.

Say that you have a class

class FiringComputer{
	FiringComputer(Ship s){...}

	Point2D GetFiringSolution(Ship target){...}
}

You don't like how the firing computer was implemented by the developers? Write yours!

Do you want a futuristic mod? Suit yourself. Want to differentiate the alghoritms between wwi and wwii? have fun.

I can't sit here and rant for a couple of millennia about how awful Unity3D is. But the modding support is not one of its flaw.
 

I bet that some crazy lunatic will pull out the specifications of an actual mechanic firing solution table and implement a software emulator of it as a mod. Now, try to think about the coolness of it without having your head actually.

[The gunnery model]

Quote

a)-Simulate the shells themselves when fired, their actual trajectory, and if any happens to "collide" with the target upon reaching it, then calculate the penetration, damage, etc. For this you also need to simulate each individual crew of each ship working on the target solution. Where they will fire exactly will be decided by that simulated target solution.

That's the idea, but it you are incorrect when you say that you have to simulate every firing control and crew member. You can always choose an appropriate level of abstraction. You can simulate a single firing solution for every ship and then use some modifiers to handle the fact the different ships might have different "networking" of their fire solutions for different guns etc. The point is not to achieve a perfect simulation, which is nonsense and impossible, the point is have to have a handier and better suited model.

Quote

The first one is more true to history. In history the crew would take a range measure to the target, calculate it's heading and speed, plot it's course and calculate a firing solution for the guns using different kind of devices (more crude or more advanced depending on the tech - from sliderules to actual mechanical computers). Then fire. Watch the fall of shot, and compare where it falls compared with the actual position of the enemy warship to see how right (or wrong) the solution is. Correct the solution according to the position of the enemy vs the fall of shot (for instance, if your shot falls well past the enemy your range measurement might be off. If your shot falls noticeably in front of the enemy, maybe you overestimated the speed, etc). Fire again with the revised solution. Watch fall of shot. Iterate for as long as the enemy keeps the same course and speed. If enemy changes course or speed, you'll need to figure the new ones, work on a new solution, fire away, rinse and repeat.

Exactly. If you simulate this in a more accurate model, you will have a more natural implementation of the firing process. For example, ranging shots won't give a overall bonus to accuracy but only to the firing solution process. If your firing solution is already accurate it won't give you additional bonus or maybe it will make your fire solution process more robust. But if you are not hitting consistently because your guns are not accurate enough, better ranging won't help.

Likewise, extremely accurate guns will be useless without a accurate enough fire control equipement.
This is just a small example on how a more correct model will help you have a better simulation with less effort.

Quote

You can see how historical purists want the first model.

This is not about purism. This is about how to write a software, videogame in this case, that is easier to develop, mantain, balance and expand.

Quote

  But it's much harder to implement, not just in coding, but also in the cost of processing power in very large battles (imagine a battle of 100 ships going against each other, Jutland scale, and the computer being forced to calculate every ship's attempt at Fire Control individually, not to mention simulate, register, and track every single shell simultaneously in flight).

This is theorically correct but pratically incorrect. Calculate the firing solution before firing, is basically just another separate dice roll with his modifiers. Then you have what amounts to another dice roll to calculate gun dispersion. Finally you have to implement the balistic trajectory of the shell, which is marginally more complex . None of these tasks are computationally intensive. If implemented correctly, this won't have any computational impact comparable of actually rendering the ships models, the explosions and the shells themselves on the 3d engine. Without even starting to take into account that most of these are entirely separate tasks that you can easily move to some other thread and the average computer will have probably a couple of underused cores when playing a game.

[The gunnery model]

On 11/23/2019 at 4:29 PM, RAMJB said:

I'm fine with a statistical model. Abstraction simplifies things. We have to keep in mind that we're not talking about a big developer team here. Besides, pure statistic-based gunnery models have been implemented with success in games like this in the past (Rule the Waves or Fighting Steel come to mind), and it was both a serviceable and adequate enough model on them. Maybe it wasn't the best part of those games, but their abstracted gunnery model did the job just fine. So it can do here.


Said that: I'd agree that the 3D representation of the battles here (vs the 2D "map view" of RtW) means that a more accurate implementation with actual ballistics and shells being simulated is more desirable and attractive. But once again It's usually not wise to focus on the "what'd be the best of the best" when "good enough" usually is serviceable enough. At least when we're talking about games being developed by small teams, you want to keep things as simple as possible as long as they are "good enough" as to not detract from the game overall once properly fine tuned.

 As long as whatever system is put in place and does an adequate job at representing the overall feeling of naval gunnery, I'll personally be ok with it. Doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see a much more detailed system in place. If they can pull if off, great. If not, let's be understanding here and settle for something that will work, maybe not perfectly, but at least "well enough".

The simulation of the full 3D ballistic trajectory of the shells is not the main focus here. You can just as well calculate the splash position and the time delta. But at the end of the day, a ballistic trajectory is a simple quadratic equation* and it's not that complicate to simulate.

Regarding the "small team" argument, I learned a long time ago that when programming computers, choosing the correct and more fitting approach, albeit more complex to initially implement, will in the long run make your job simpler. "Programming is abstracting complexity" used to say Sussman. This means, amongst other things, that when your job is properly done, you have a powerful tool to (relatively) simply manage a (relatively) complex problem. For this context, for example, you don't have to mantain and balance a huge amount of horrible enormous tables of modifiers.

[The gunnery model]

What?

[The gunnery model]

On 11/19/2019 at 4:14 PM, admin said:

post you are quoting was updated with more examples.

Having given you the example on the penetration and ballistics i would like to point out that we fully replicate many game elements by using method 1 (full simulation)
For example accuracy: All possible parameters influence the end result including even very minor ones, arriving at realistic low hit rate with early tech.

 

On 11/19/2019 at 4:04 PM, admin said:

Actually unlike water cloth physics ballistics it is much easier with gunnery. 

And the main concept to understand here is that there is no difference between 

Here is the WW2 land example that will demonstrate this concept
Lets say we need to satisfy the most detail oriented tank realism enthusiast and need to implement gunnery on the 88mm

Using the historical tables we can achieve the 85% armor penetration at 2000m in multiple ways.

1. Method 1: simulate the molecular level, metal composition of the projectile, simulate viscosity of steel before, and during penetration and tweak all that until we arrive to 85% at 2000 m range.
2. Method 2: use historical table and just give the game an absolutely correct historical curve from the proven historical reference. 
3. Something in between.

From experience we found that for penetration of armor it is much easier for everyone to use method 2 or 3. We both (you as historical enthusiast and us as developers) want to only argue about effective armor, its type, % penetration chances at distance and curve.. Not the armor molecular viscosity or atomic level of simulation.

But some parameters must be simulated using method one if they are key for gameplay or ship design. For example we simulate accuracy in detail using method 1.

Because this is a historical single player game our hands are untied, we do not have to balance the classes or guns between each other (for example giving small ships a chance) and just show everything as it is making sure a 1939 ships with modern guns, and advanced dumaresqs will just be better, more accurate and deadly compared to earlier variations. Trained crew which will come later will improve it even further (or ruin it) because everyone remembers a curious case of HMS Tiger which missed most the shots with the most advanced directors. 

If you see something that is balanced abnormally or incorrectly let us know it will be fixed as soon as main priorities are finished or even earlier. 


(edits: wording, typos, better image replacement)

You are slightly missing the point. Yes you can simulate armor penetration mechanics with a single dice roll.

But can you simulate a whole tank on tank engagement with a single dice roll? Sure you can. Now you are playing "Risk". Of course you can add modifiers to the dice roll and it becomes  "Axis and Allies". It will never become "War Thunder" this way though.

Back to the point. You are trying to simulate the naval gunnery process with a single dice roll by stacking a unholy amount of detailed modifiers. This won't work, for three reasons.

1) It's difficoult to balance. You will always have some modifiers that are so big that render all the other things irrelevant. You can already see this in the curent alpha.

2) There are some things that you can't simulate. Like for example the fact that someone might manouver during the flight time of the shell and dodge. Or shooting in a tight formation of ships and hitting someone else etc

3) Some things you technically can simulate, but will require endless huge tables of modifiers. Like for example some type of rangefinder performing bad against small ships but very good against big ships. Or slower shells being more effected by the crosswind but only after a certain distance because the velocity drops under whatever. Lighter guns with faster turret traversal being more accurate against fast moving ships. Take your pick.

Again, I reiterate: you have to split your gunnery model in three "phases". The first is rangefinding, that will produce an estimated target position. The second is the firing process that will produce a 3D trajectory of every shell and the third is to phisically simulate the actual shell path over time to the splash point to see if the shot connect.

[The gunnery model]

This game could very well be THE BEST GAME EVAH for the naval enthusiast. But there's a weak spot: the gunnery model.

At the moment, as far as I understand, it is a "simple" model based on a hit probability calculated from many bonus and malus.

There are two problem with this approach. First of all, it will never be accurate enough. It doesn't matter how endless the list of possible modifier is. This model will always abstract too much.

Also, is gamey. It encourages a "min max" approach that will kill any different approach and create a single "best" build in any tactical situation.

A much better and more realistic approach would be to simulate the fire control  with modifier to the accuracy of this process. Then the ships fire at the calculated fire solution and you add the accuracy characteristics of the guns to get a CEP. From there you use RNG to get the trajectory over time of every shell. Then you simulate the actual shell being fired in a way no different than WOWS or war thunder. This way a shell can actually be dodged, for example.

I don't know if the developers can transition to a better gunnery model at this point in the development model, but they really should.

[Are big guns unproportionally better? An opinion and discussion starter.]

My two cents having played the game a bit: yes big guns are op.

The most powerful ship at a tech level is basically a hull with the best fire control and the biggest guns that you can fit. The more the merrier but bigger is better than more numerous.

Secondaries are completely useless. Doesn't matter how many you cramp on the ship, they won't hit.

This is, as far as I understand, because the accuracy is calculated mainly by range vs maximum range of the gun.

This is arguably wrong from both historical and gameplay perspective. A much better model would be the accuray mainly given by range vs fire control capability and then the caracteristics of guns modelled as relatively minor bonuses/maluses.

[What about planes?]

Please don't.
Look at what happened with "victory at sea pacific"

An arguably very nice game with a ton of battleships, destroyers, cruisers etc that after a couple of hours becomes a strategic game about carriers and planes and nothing else.

I love that game because it's a perfect at simulating the frustration of 1940s admirals, but please don't

["IN GAME" status]

I'm also having this issue. I tied the two fixes but nothing worked and I don't have a log directory.

 

This is annoying.

Edit: well I fixed this by removing and reinstalling the game