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dbs1701

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Everything posted by dbs1701

  1. I have maybe a slightly different take on the barbette size issue - but I absolutely think that if something like Friedrich's barbette suggestions were implemented, it would be ideal. Here is my thought: If the barbettes can't be tweaked like that easily, maybe lock different weapons out of different hulls as a temporary workaround to improve historical accuracy while letting them work on new features. Here's my workaround idea: Short term fix: Give each battleship/battlecruiser hull a suite of "unlocked" weapons to use. These won't be changing based on tech levels or anything, they are based on the rough size and era of the hull. Lock the too-big turrets out of smaller ships. Don't worry, it isn't too limiting. Here's what I have in mind: (by the way a fix I really want to see is smaller quad guns down to 9". Because why, exactly, can we have quad 20's but quad 13" is just too much....?) I don't personally believe anyone ever even considered more than dual 20's, but hey, the point of this game is to imagine and have fun, so I figured at least there should be a fantasy hull where literally anything goes! Cheers! dbs1701
  2. Remember what is still appropriate for merchants is not necessarily military spec. Civilian ships (like the Liberties) would use the most efficient tech for the budget and need, so using older cheaper engines is less a problem than on military ships. Agree though, old tech shouldn't disappear, rather it should be obvious in builder that, sure, it's cheaper but there are tradeoffs in weight, fuel cost, etc. that make it better to go with the newer tech. They honestly need to do something like this about the diesel engines in game - there isn't much reason aside from cost to go with them in most cases.
  3. I tend to have a really hard time focusing on any element more than the others. I tend to up-armor a lot but not a ridiculous amount. I tend to try for between 27 and 30 knots, only faster if going for a battlecruiser or real fast platform and only going less if need be due to efficiency. I try to get four or five turrets, and I try to get either three forward or three aft. My weapon of choice, unless going for a super battleship, is the quad 15" gun (see my post on gun effectiveness for why). Basically, I try to get as many of those on a hull as I can, armor and speed are secondary but not ignored. I absolutely will not skimp on accuracy from towers, radars, or auto reloading. I will skip turret traverse because the ships turn so slowly and fire so slowly it doesn't really seem to matter. As far as firepower vs armor, you can look at the vertical/horizontal penetration of the guns you think you'll be facing. A battleship is supposed to be proof against it's own guns, but I haven't really pulled that off, and I'm not sure it's possible in the game. Note where the "plunging fire" range starts - where the vertical penetration exceeds the horizontal dispersion. This is handy for finding how much deck armor you need. Notice that your battle range is probably going to be between 15 and 20 KYDs at least for the opening engagement. So what is your chance of taking plunging fire vs how long you'll be at that range? Given the accuracy of shells at long range, you are probably more likely to take plunging fire from cruisers, so be sure to look at penetration from 9-12" guns too!
  4. How exactly do you choose which guns are the best to use? This is probably one of the first things you think about when starting your design! This will be a pretty long post, but I've spent a couple of days (slowly) gathering the data and darn it if I'm not going to share! If this has already been done, my apologies! I'm going to split this into a few parts on this post, so feel free to jump around. CONTENTS: What are the stats that affect gun effectiveness? Which of those are the best guide for a designer? How can one test this? Conclusions and Suggestions for Game Improvement Further Research or Information needed PART 1: Elements of gun effectiveness I am neither a programmer, a mathematician, or a developer, or even a particularly skilled player in terms of datamining or minmaxing stats. However, there are some interesting coincidences and game design elements that made me want to crunch some numbers and do a few tests! First, it is boring game design to just make the biggest guns the best, or the most guns the best. So is there a "sweet spot" where, all things being equal, you should start a new build? On the flip side, as a game with so many scenarios and possibilities, if you have an obvious "sweet spot" that is objectively the best way to build, you lose a lot of creativity in the designer as the player thinks they MUST do certain things! I will argue in this post that, yes, there is a sweet spot, and also, yes, there is an element of maximizing is better, but also there is a remarkable flexibility, so you won't be failing too much if you get this wrong, either! I would say overall this is pretty well set up. With that out of the way, here we go! Accuracy: Obviously, we want the ships we shoot at to kindly sink or explode or not shoot at us anymore, so one would think accuracy is the most important thing. It is certainly important, but focusing on it exclusively is not ideal either and leads to some...weird builds (see videos of players maxing kill rate with single 18" guns for example. This will be debunked in this analysis). There are two caveats to this number: Note that in the game, accuracy is percent of shots that are on target at a given range BEFORE bonuses are added. You can see changes to BASE accuracy if you add equipment like towers, but weather, speed, aiming progress, and other bonuses won't show up on the gun info screen. It is given per single shell. So when you look at the penalty of using triple or quadruple mounts, you aren't getting a less accurate weapon overall, it's just each individual shell will scatter more. The real question is does the extra shell downrange make up for the loss in accuracy? Rate of Fire: This is the other interesting one, and the same caveats apply. We want to send as much explosives down range as quickly as possible to make the red ships go away, preferably in spectacular explosions. Rate of fire isn't really affected (yet) by in-battle conditions as far as I can tell, so what you see after applying your technologies and mods is what you are going to get. Note that once again, the reload time is per barrel. So even though a dual turret might reload in 30 seconds and a triple might reload in 35 seconds, the dual turret is firing at 4 shells per minute (2 barrels x 2 rounds per minute), while the "slower" triple turret is firing a bit over 5 shells per minute (3 barrels x 1.71/min) This analysis is thus going to focus on how rate of fire, barrel number, and accuracy come together to create guidance for you beleaguered designers! Penetration: This is a very interesting one. Generally bigger is better, but knowing when and where "plunging fire" happens is important. I haven't looked into this yet, and remember that while penetration is based on range (how much horizontal armor vs how much vertical armor it will defeat), the armor schemes in game are a bit convoluted and as I said, I'm not a dataminer! Penetration is the MOST affected by little things like range and angle of armor, so it's quite difficult to explore without tightly controlled experiments or digging around in the code. It does apply, and I'll explain at the end, but for now we'll leave it behind. Damage Dealt: This is assuming a full penetration. Partial pens and fires do not count here for this number. It is affected by shell weight and technologies as well, and those numbers do pop up on the information card. Modifiers: Towers, Propellant (Explosives), and Shell Weight all affect the gun barrels stats. Aiming time is affected by towers, turret techs, and reloading buffs, but once the guns are dialed in, the shells will hit with the same accuracy, penetration, and damage. Therefore, I'm not too concerned about aiming time here. Note that things like aiming time, 3 and 4-barrel accuracy and reload penalties are applied EQUALLY regardless of gun size. So all we're interested in here to choose your gun type and layout is really just accuracy vs. rate of fire. The rest will make it better or worse, but it won't change you your gun decisions stack up against each other, all things being equal Picture Break! (figure 1.1) ! Here we see a graph of the 9" mk 5 gun in terms of accuracy and penetration. Note how quickly accuracy really falls off. Finding the best range to fight at depends on how well the penetration values match up with actually being able to hit anything. Note that larger weapons (15"+) actually do reach a point where the vertical pen will exceed horizontal penetration. If you aren't clear about what "plunging fire is", that's what it is. The tables also might help you determine how much deck armor your ship will need. PART 2: Which Elements should figure into weapon choice? As we've seen, there are so many possibilities, and the developers have really done a great job of making them all viable. But, how can you tell if some are "more viable" than others? What is the "best" design? First, let's focus on accuracy, rate of fire, and equipment. Spoiler alert: All things being equal, there is a best gun to use and a best turret size. However, most will work well. So you want to get the best firepower you can before you start to make compromises on rate of fire or barrel number. Triples are indeed better than duals, so if you can fit triples up to 16", but need to switch to duals to fit 17" on your ship, better to stick with the triple 16's! The same goes for auto reloading. If you can fit auto reloading on 15" turrets but can't on 16" turrets, stick with the ones you can get auto reloaders for. The "Why" gets a bit interesting, and here is our experiment! Because some equipment works across all gun sizes, to control for that we'll need to ensure that our test ship will have the same equipment fit regardless of weapon choices. If you were to look at French triple turrets, with no modifiers (no tower installed, no auto reloading, same propellant), and compare the accuracy across all ranges, you end up with a chart that looks like this: (Figure 2.1) Accuracy for main battery weapons from point blank to 25,000 yds. Note that to spread out the results at effective battle ranges, we are looking at a logarithmic scale for the vertical axis. Takeaways: "Mk" number may refer to an in-battle bonus, it does NOT affect accuracy on the info card. You can see that the smaller guns run out of range before reaching 25Kyds, while some have better accuracy at longer ranges. You can see there is actually quite a lot of variance, but some weapons are clearly more accurate than others. I was surprised to be honest that there wasn't more "grouping" between the different patterns (ex. all Mk 4's ALL being better than the Mk. 3's; which does not actually happen - more datamining required; is this the "guns grade" bonus in game?). I also expected to see each weapon have a point where it's accuracy was better than others. This does not seem to be happening, so the idea of building around a SPECIFIC range seems to be out the window. There are obviously differences between close and long range weapons, though! However, this is only HALF of the story. The other thing that matters is how quickly shells are sent downrange. The more shots you can take, the sooner you will score a hit, especially at longer ranges. So, I plugged the accuracy percentage into a "drop calculator" (because I don't math) to figure out how many shots must be taken to guarantee a hit (I call 99% a guaranteed hit for these charts, by the way - the math holds for lower thresholds too, so it doesn't matter here). So I plugged in the number of shots needed, divided by the rate of fire (remembering these are all triple turrets) to come up with "effective" accuracy. That number, to me, is how long you can expect to fire at a target at a given range to guarantee a hit. Basically, If you have half the accuracy, but twice the rate of fire, you are still going to score hits at the same rate. And here it is! (figure 2.2) This is the TIME taken to reach 99% chance of a hit for each gun size, using triple turrets. IMPORTANT - lower is better here, because more time taken is bad. This is to GUARANTEE a hit, not "get lucky". Of course you will score hits sooner on average, but your second hit might take a while. This does NOT count ladder aiming or radar aiming progress, target lock, etc. This is ONLY the stock guns with the same equipment. Imagine a turret on a firing range with no technology to assist the aiming. Notice that the time taken really flares up beyond 15KYD. This is basically the inverse of your accuracy curve. As long as your armor can take it, you need to get within a certain range to be hitting ships consistently. We all know this already, but it's kind of neat to see on a graph in real time! As a Log chart, we can expand the closer range and actually see what's happening here: (figure 2.3) This is the TIME taken to reach 99% chance of a hit for each gun size, using triple turrets. The log scale opens up the closer ranges so you can see that some weapons are consistently "better" at scoring hits over some ranges. Again, lower lines are better, because the less time taken to get hits the more damage you'll be dealing! So, we can start to see some winners here. Notice that the 12" gun in INCREDIBLE at getting shots on target inside of 10KYDs. At greater ranges, you see that the 9" gun takes over, until it runs out of reach, anyway! The problem, is how much damage are you doing to your targets with such light shells? If you want to look at the "heavy" weapons, you can draw conclusions as well: Note that the 13" and 15" guns are very similar. You are going to get a similar number of hits over time (at closer ranges, the 13" is a little better, at longer ranges, the 15" is slightly better) However, the 15" shell is going to hit a lot harder. Interestingly, the 14" gun is consistently worse than both! There is also a "Pack" of guns around 15KYDs. 14", 16", 17", 18", 19", and 20" are all getting hits at about the same rate. So at that range, bigger really is better. BUT - all things being equal, and assuming all shots can do damage, you can still see the 9", 12", 13" and 15" guns ahead of the pack. Against small ships, the light guns seem to indeed be better. Against medium ships, 15" is looking like the best balance of accuracy and hitting power. Against the big baddies, heavier is probably better, as long as you can control the range (and SURVIVE at 15K Yards!) PART 3: Testing Time! I was inspired by the YouTube "Taskmaster" challenges where various gamers tried to kill 10 early battleships as quickly as possible. I've done two levels of test here, so I'll share both. The first test was whether or not the accuracy and reload penalty of more barrels offset the increased fire. My thesis was that more barrels is still going to be faster, even if the guns are less accurate and slower firing. To test, we used the same 5 Turret "Test Hull" (see figure 3.1) with 18" guns, changing only the number of barrels per turret. We used 1940 tech, vs. ten 1900 BB starting at 20,000 Yds. The results were pretty compelling! (Table 1:) This was my first test, it is not as controlled as the following test and just gives a rough estimate. The results were consistent however, demonstrating the concept that even though larger turrets have reduced rate of fire and accuracy, the extra barrels more than make up for it. First, against such weak targets, the time to get the first kill was pretty much tied to getting the first hits. I was surprised at how similar the times for that were. The guns do dial in much more quickly (and much more consistently) than my "Effective Accuracy" table would predict. True, we were using the same guns, but the rate of fire was going up very consistently, which WAS reflected in the total time, but was NOT reflected in the first kill time. This suggests a bit of a tweak to the code as far as getting that first hit, maybe there is a little bonus to ensure a quick hit that disappears after that first hit. More research!) So, if you can afford them, quad barrels are best! However, what about different gun sizes? That was the point of the first bit of analysis, anyway? Well, glad you asked! Here we go for the "BIG TEST" The Test Ship (Figure 3.1) The specific stats don't really matter. This is the gun layout all of the test ships for both the preceding and succeeding tests are used. The tonnage was always maxed out (to fit the largest turrets) but armor was changed to allow them to fit. We always used a 125,000 ton hull so that we could fit quad 18's (and eventually quad 20's) for the purposes of the test. To get the biggest guns, we limited to speed to 25 knots, and cut the armor as much as needed to do so. We always used the same towers, the same explosives (TNT) and standard reloading. Because we know that quad turrets are fastest at getting the kills in this scenario, we only changed the size of the guns - 14", 15", 16", 17", 18", 19", 20". (smaller guns do not allow quads). Because the variance between what the AI builds, RNG, and different starting angles makes a big difference, we ran several tests per weapon loadout. We looked at: Time for first kill, Time to complete mission, and Time from time of first kill to the end ("effective time") Table 2: Note: The 14" was predicted to perform poorly in the stat analysis above, and after two tests it was clear that that was in fact borne out, so I did not complete the third test. Looking at this data, I believe the predictions based on the graph of effective accuracy were borne out in the results. As expected from the predictions based on data, the 15 inch gun stands out as the most effectively accurate of the heavy weapons, the 14" is noticeably worse, and at moderate ranges the other heavy weapons are remarkably consistent (but still worse). The 19 and 20-inch guns seemed to overperform, considering that although their raw accuracy is indeed the best, their effective accuracy is hurt by their slow rate of fire and they are EXPECTED to line up with the 16-18" guns in terms of effectiveness. My theory is that there is a hidden buff to early "rangefinding" accuracy to get players hits sooner than mathematically should be happening, which then disappears after the aiming process is complete. The 19" and 20" weapons will basically one-shot a 1900 BB, so those "lucky" first salvoes are more effective than would otherwise be expected. It is also important to note that at a range of 15KYD, we should expect the TIMING of hits to be relatively consistent, so the very largest weapons are just showing the point at which the heavier shell does in fact start to overwhelm the other stats! It is also important to note for rangefinding purposes, we are sending 20-shell salvoes downrange, so there is an awful lot of "stuff" to throw at the wall. When some of it invariably sticks, those heavy guns pack a whallop! PART 4: Conclusions and Suggestions Based on these tests, a few things emerge. Firstly, how effective your fire is depends a lot on the range of engagements. If you get to around 15KYDs, you will find that the heavy guns all perform relatively consistently with each other. If you get closer, accuracy improves a lot over all weapons, and your first hits will be devastating. Also, at the closer ranges, the rate of fire really will make a difference especially if you are crippling targets every salvo. Because penalties for 3- or 4-gun turrets apply to reloading and accuracy, it is fair to ask if they are worth it. As of this patch, they are very much so. The extra shells going downrange compensate for the lower accuracy and rate of fire. It is clear that the more guns in a turret, the better! We also see that unless you are needing very heavy weapons, 15" guns work just fine at least against weaker targets. My personal conclusion: The quadruple 15" gun is probably the sweet spot for me. Against similar class vessels or less, it is probably the best overall weapon in the game. I would only use heavier weapons if I know I am facing modern or super battleships. This leads to a few design principles commanders might consider: For a given number of turrets, the more guns in a turret the better. If you can substitute triples or quads without having to sacrifice a turret, do. If you are limited by weight or costs, consider how you can get the most barrels possible. Invest in technologies to boost rate of fire and accuracy. RoF makes a HUGE difference. If you can invest in autoloaders, do so. I didn't include it here in a table, but I took out my test ship with a full 15" accuracy and ROF, and it brought down the engagement time to consistently around 20 minutes, with one run having just 16 minutes between the first hits and the last kill. Those boosts in rate of fire directly translate to expected time to sink targets. Assuming your shells can damage the target, and assuming all other things being equal, the 15" gun is the most effective, barrel for barrel. BATTLECRUISER DESIGNERS: This is a HUGE takeaway for you. Since you SHOULDN'T be engaging heavy enemies, based on this, you should probably go no larger than 15" guns. You will get more bang for your buck and slightly less dangerous shells lying around. If you are going more for a "super cruiser", the stats suggest that 12" guns may be best, at least on paper, out of the triple-only mounts. If you need to go for heavier weapons, it won't make the biggest difference as long as you can maximize the technologies. If you can get better tech or more barrels on, say 17" guns but have to sacrifice to get 18"'s, it's better to stay with the biggest weapon you can "max out". Suggestions for Developers: Based on this study, it seems that gun size balances VERY WELL with rate of fire and accuracy. As long as we choose weapons that are effective against the expected targets, there isn't a "right" or "wrong" answer as long as we consider the applicable elements. Revise how quad turrets are selected for or are possible in designs. The way the stats work right now, all things being equal, quadruple turrets are ALWAYS the best as long as they can fit and be afforded. This probably is something that needs to be addressed because we see in reality only three battleship classes ever used them, (with a few more designed and not laid down) while the vast majority of battleships used dual or triple turrets. Perhaps the weight penalty should be reexamined, so that you could fit a quad turret to replace two smaller turrets but could not fit two quad turrets in a similar area. Perhaps also turret and hull size should be considered - where guns larger than 16" simply cannot fit in a quadruple turret on anything short of the super battleship hull. That is, unlock different turrets based on hull. I would prefer something like this: Battlecruisers/Super Cruisers: 12/4, 13/4, 14/4, 15/3, 16/2, 17/2, 18/1, 19 or 20 can't fit at all Small/Medium Battleships: 12/4, 13/4, 14/4, 15/4, 16/3, 17/3, 18/2, 19/2, 20/2 Modern Battleships: 12/4, 13/4, 14/4, 15/4, 16/4, 17/3, 18/3, 19/2, 20/2 Super Battleships under 100K: all quads possible except 19/3 and 20/3 Super Battleships over 100K: all quads possible. By the way, quads of all main guns should be possible all the way down to 9". PART 5: Further Research, datamining, and Study: I would love to know how initial accuracy is figured out. It seems that ships consistently get their first hit much earlier than expected, especially on the larger guns where it should take vastly longer time to get that first hit (considering the increased time between salvoes). Is it always a hit on Salvo #2, 3, or 4 and an RNG decides which it will be? If such a system exists, what happens after the first hit? Once the first hit is achieved, performance approaches what is expected for gun size and range. Based on the evidence suggesting that more barrels is better with the same techs, I have not compared, say, quad 15" guns to triple 16" guns. The penetration vs accuracy over range curves would be interesting to plot or see for all weapons. This has not been done on secondary weapons either. This study has only worked with French pattern guns. How are other nations different? If you made it this far, Cheers! Happy Sailing, please let me know if this borne out or if I am barking up the wrong tree! -dbs1701
  5. Still loving this! I know that developing AI, campaign, and crew features are priority, but please still keep considering ways to unlock certain designer options for players but locking them for AI if it breaks the AI. We still really need moveable barbettes and more rational limitations on where things can go. I'm trying to play with the IJN 8/8 Plan ships (so building and having fun with Nagato, Tosa, Kii, Nr. 13, Amagi, and a Nr 13 BC variant), and while the hulls look great for that, you can't get the Pagoda tower on a hull small enough for Nagato and Tosa, and you also really need an aft barbette point for all of these. Here is a screenshot of the best I could do with Nagato, they really suffer from not having the ability to put in an after superfiring barbette. Amagi and Kii should work, but Tosa again needs to be far too big to fit the fifth turret in. On a related note, the superfiring barbette on the long fantail of the Hood-inspired super BB hull is great, and fun to work with, but it is really hard to balance the hull because the fantail is so very long, it is almost impossible to get the aft pair of turrets far enough back to balance. More barbette options, please! Others have also said that secondary barbettes need to be more freely positionable, and I second this absolutely!
  6. First off, thank you for your work, Devs! I LOVE the new hulls and quad turrets! But, I’d like to see a bit more sanity with the quad turrets: 1. They go too big. There is no way a 20” gun is going in a quad turret on any platform smaller than the absolute highest tonnage and even then probably no more than two of those and not superfiring unless you can REQUIRE the “enormous” barbette. 2. They don’t go small enough! Can we please have the French 13” turret for a Dunkerque? Also, aside from ubiquitous AAA quad mounts, French sometimes put their 5” secondaries in quad turrets on Dunkerque and Strasbourg. What about having all smaller main guns (say 9”-16”) be available in quads, but 17”-18” be only in triples, and 19”-20” only in duals? Alternatively, could the nationalities and hulls themselves dictate what is buildable? So modern BB hull could have the aforementioned limitations (look at concept art of the A150 Super Yamato to see how anything over dual 20”s are insane on anything under 80k tons!) but the Super BB hulls can be no-holds-barred with the quads? Better still, tweak each nationality to make it better/worse for various turret sizes. You COULD build anything but your nation has the best effectiveness on certain turret designs. For example the French and UK maybe not have much penalty for building quads, while the US can but won’t do as well with them. Germans even would suffer with triples but have their legendary accuracy with duals.
  7. You can basically build one of the Tillmans now - you can use the Modern BB hull, put in 15 18" guns in 3 turrets, drop the speed, up the armor, and profit!
  8. Wouldn't it be possible to use snap points or "best practice" for AI ships, while removing some of the snap point requirements for User players? We know the AI already can build with different constraints based on the mission (mission 23 they get the 105K ton hull which we only can use via cheat mode), why not keep the AI basically the same as for ship designing but remove some of the limits from the user interface side? If the "auto-designer" is the problem, perhaps have a "pro" or "free" mode available to the player that turns off the auto-designer in exchange for getting rid of superstructure snap points, etc. With the understanding that I have no programming background and no idea how it would be implemented, here is what THIS player would love to see: If NOTHING else, just remove all snap points in favor of the limit boxes that are already in game (you can find them when you are trying to place secondaries or MB turrets if you get too far from the snap points). There is a key that lets you micromanage where the guns go, at the very least couldn't we do the same for funnels, towers, barbettes? The only snap points would be secondary/barbette mountings and casemate gun points, or a funnel point specifically for a certain tower. These seem to work fine and don't cause major issues. You could retain the limits on how many of a thing can be placed on a hull (so a hull can only support 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 main turrets, but they can be placed anywhere they will fit, a hull may have only a single main tower, only a single secondary tower, etc.) Weight and balance would be even more important, perhaps adjust the "yellow" limit down since we will be able to adjust balance better. Perhaps replace funnel snapping rules to the designer such as "funnel must be aft of main tower". Could funnel cost scale with the amount of "trunk" distance from the boilers? This way you could put a funnel quite a ways aft (think the N3/G3 British design) but it would cost more and weigh more. IDEALLY, I'd like to see an "advanced designer" that lets you get inside the ship more. Have all items have a complete "placement box" that you need to account for when setting up your ship. For example, you can't place a main turret directly over the boiler or engine rooms, but you can place a tower over them as long as there is space for the funnels. When you select your "engine" components, we actually see where the engines are, and how their size changes based on equipment installed. While you have clicked on the engine model, you can move the box around the ship (subject to rulesets like "must be aft of boilers") the further forward engines are the more a shaft will cost (and the more it will cost to upgrade to "Shaft II or III") Just like towers and turrets, moving engines affects balance. They start at a default position Boiler components are selected the same way, but you see in the hull where their "box" is. You can move this around too, but must stay ahead of the engines. You see the funnel uptakes modeled on the deck of the hull. You can click on them and move them, but it adds cost and weight. This can just be a deckhouse looking box, (which you bring to full efficiency by choosing a funnel or funnels that match the exhaust, as we do now), or maybe better yet, 1, 2, or 3 discrete mountings that funnels HAVE to cover (the less powerful the engine/boiler tech, the more funnel mountings are required, up to and including two boiler rooms for a given speed) Instead of having many (rather confusing) options for funnels, you have "single" funnels which would cover ONE point, "double" or "wide" funnels which cover two, and "trunked" or "Mega" Funnels which cover three points. Again, you can move the funnel uptakes at least some (say at least the same length as the boilers are) but the cost and weight of the funnels will scale up. Towers have collision boxes that do not take up space in the hull but need to negotiate the funnel mountings. Some towers in game do not have funnel mounting space, and they CANNOT touch the funnel uptakes. Some towers in game DO have funnel space built in, and they CAN cover the funnel uptakes. Under THIS system, If you want a setup with all armament forward (Dunkerque, Richelieu, Nelson, G3/N3) you can do it but have to move the engines and boilers back. This means you pretty much HAVE to balance it out by setting guns all forward. You could do all aft as well (which would be SUPER cool) but you'd have to spend more money on shaft armor. So this system ALLOWS you to do things but there are definitely disadvantages to doing them. Main Turrets: Each turret has a barbette (this is true in reality, even for deck flush guns). All "barbette" separate components can be removed I suppose. You can place guns as you currently can, but you also can control superfiring by extending the barbette (perhaps a key "shift-up or shift-down") to go up or down one level. This can be controlled by technology and superfiring will reduce the stability score of your ship. Maximum of 3 superfiring - deck level, superfiring position1, superfiring position 2, which is available only with higher tech level) Each barbette acts the same in the damage model as they currently do. Higher barbettes are longer and more likely to be hit, they also cost more to armor. (again, use the mechanics of the game to prevent foolish designs) Each barbette penetrates into the hull, and cannot share the space of a boiler room or engine room. You can place a center P or Q turret, but you have to leave space between the boiler and engine to do so. Each barbette ends with a magazine, which I believe is already modeled. Secondary Turrets that are mounted on the deck can be raised the same way, but do not penetrate into the hull. As far as damage to the module, a hit to the barbette could count as a hit to the gun. They can go up to the third superfiring level (as in Yamato) with appropriate tech. Towers that have dedicated secondary mountings do not need changed, they count as "deck level", but secondaries cannot be raised. Alternatively, towers with secondary mountings automatically set the secondary barbette to the appropriate height, extending to the deck. This system SHOULD allow for most any actual historical ship to be built. The only thing really missing is the potential of quadruple turrets at least up to 15" guns. Perhaps this can be locked behind research, or be a national flavor. Thanks for reading! dbs1701
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