arkhangelsk

In broad terms, this corresponds to my experience. I've taken to calling red objects Indestructible and I have had to resort to driving my battleship real close to "stab" the enemy ship to death, always fearing I might just be counter-stabbed. I try to delay until all his main turrets go red. As a basic proposition, cruisers aren't supposed to beat dreadnoughts one on one. Though the game does make it harder than it should be, the base problem here seems to be your ship designs (your nose fire being weaker than their stern fire), and your lack of a decisive combat advantage. Let me give a counterargument. First, setting the winning condition to be sinking the ship is at least clear cut and objective. Second, why should humans be judged the victor based solely on them getting an early advantage? The computer did the smart thing and withdrew at the right time and put you in a position you don't dare pursue or will lose your advantage if you try to chase him. Shouldn't that be called, uh, a draw? I have seen my own ship repair itself. I know it's more memorable when the enemy does it, but it does happen to your own ships too Such problems have been reported though it hasn't happened to me often enough to really bother me. Besides, there is a proposal out there for malfunctions to be part of the game. Just think that it is already a feature The last one I admit I had not experienced. Of course, there is a chance that you will not hit with every salvo, and just because the chance is low does not mean you can't be hit, but I don't exactly see it being false and I am usually able to get fire superiority over the enemy.

It's a tangent but let me discuss this part a little - I don't think it really says "What do you wish". I wonder if you notice that about the only two people who did not put in a massive wish list were me and RamJB. From my perspective, this thread is turning into the regular old wish list, which I don't think is the goal of this thread. From the OP: When people start putting in wishes for everything down to the color of the sea, I just wonder if they really read this part. I should remind everyone that this game is due out in summer. Which is in about 30 weeks. And remember these things are always late, so if we plan for 30 weeks of work, we might just have the game out for Christmas. And while I do remember you saying something about you not minding extensions (and indeed, we are already playing the game, if in an early version), at some point the devs would want to start really selling this thing. The point being we have a finite number of weeks. The campaign is a core part of the game. It'll need a lot of tuning and we hadn't even seen a draft of it yet. Every wish on everyone's wishlists that get granted will mean less time working on the campaign, and you can only reduce the development time of that by so much before its quality at launch suffers. So I think the intent of this thread is that posters should be putting in only things that are so utterly important to them they are willing to sign off on a hit to the quality of the campaign.

I don't experience most of the problems you mention. Here's how I fire torpedoes. First, turn torpedoes OFF until the moment you want to fire. Just the ability to do so gives you a real edge over real admirals. Next, drive your ships into what you think is the perfect position. When they are in the perfect position, manually designate the desired target to make sure they are on the right one, then turn the torpedoes to AGGRESSIVE. Then the only problem left is getting them to fire. If the torpedo tubes are above decks, see if they are turning slowly to the right direction. If they are underwater tubes, try a slow parabolic turn to get the target into that narrow firing arc and remember that maybe it is not pointed straight at the enemy ship (lead). When ship number one fires, detach it, use the Auto-Retreat function and focus your efforts on getting Ship #2 to release its torpedoes, and so on until they have all fired. By the way, if you want to do any advanced formation work, I suggest manual control of individual ships. I know everyone likes the Turn Together, but in real life that takes a lot of training to pull off especially if the ships are of different types. Since the system cannot stop you from stringing different type ships into a division, we are left with this fail-safe system of auto ship control...

I'll dispute this a little bit. I'll argue the better solution is to allow more "structural damage bleedthrough" from the red destroyed compartments than is presently the case. First, AI behavior that's reasonable and realistic (human-like) is hard. If you kind of like what you are seeing in that department, it is more important to preserve and refine it. Second, the AI doing the smart thing is actually remarkably annoying to human, especially casual players. I can easily foresee the result following your strategy when you revert back to a better threshold for starting the retreat, with people writing complaints about "Ships running more than in earlier version. Annoying. Plz nerf." (We are seeing that right now 😁). All discussion as to how this is actually realistic will fall on deaf ears, so I think getting people used to them running is important. The overall difficulty in sinking ships should sap towards the correct overall state, rather than overshooting with a knowingly bad patch and then trying to work back. Third, in very broad terms of overall effect, the ships need to be a bit crunchier. Shouldn't the temporary fix involve making the ships crunchier instead of nerfing the AI? Besides, with the correct "overall crunchiness" (even if it is for the wrong reasons), the AI can be refined to best work with it. Fourth, from a realism perspective, is the current conception right (I mean right in terms of best "tactical accuracy" pending a major armor model revamp)? I grant that a shell detonating on an already mauled compartment shouldn't do as much, or perhaps even much, to the overall ship structure. But right now, all too often this is exaggerated to it doing nothing but giving a few points. It isn't a "destroyed compartment". it is an "indestructible compartment". Isn't Structure supposed to represent the slow warping, loosening and other damages throughout the whole ship (rather than just the individual compartment) from having objects the weight of cars slamming into it? Every time I get a large caliber penetration or partial pen to a red compartment and the structure doesn't go down at all, I find myself wondering exactly what that was supposed to represent. Is it falling through an already created hole? If that's so, shouldn't I get to penetrate the lower decks? Is it slamming onto relatively fresh metal within a generally non-functional space? If that's so, shouldn't I get structural damage? Even if I hit a piece of weakened metal and its "softness" somehow attenuated the shock going through the entire ship, shouldn't I still get a little bit? I am getting nothing.

If you mean something as extreme as this hotfix, I suggest that they be clear about this from the start. Don't call it a "hotfix" because they are supposed to make things better overall. Call it a "controlled experimental patch" and tell us what part they want tested, and assure us in advance (not after our screams of horror) that this is not meant to be an improvement. We'll make as many test runs as we can. Oh, and I just remembered one really easy thing they can do for us - Release the lock on the Hydrophone gear for CA, BC and BBs. On the realism front, real battleships like Bismarck are known to have hydrophone gear. I suppose the game reason is to make us build destroyers and make a combined arms team ... but you also have to remember the Naval Academy missions that limit us to one ship. The enemy has torpedoes. And we are deprived of torpedo warning gear (which is what all the hydrophone/sonar gear is in the absence of submarines). Besides, the goal is to make us build or not build destroyers due to their own realistic merits or lack thereof, not because it is the only way to get hydrophones. Maybe they can keep those with the word "Sonar" on it to the DDs and CLs, but give us the ones labeled "Hydrophones"?

I don't think it is a priority, but we can have it, eventually. Now, how much penalty should we assign this design. A rule of thumb about turrets is that twins are worth 1.75, triples 2.5 and quadruples 3.125. Extrapolating from this, by the time you get to six guns you really won't be getting much out of them.

Actually, in one way the "PS2-era" game everyone talks about does it better - you have to put the engines in yourself and IIRC the guns explicitly penetrate below the deck, so you have to think about what is happening inside your ship (though I don't think it cares about weight balance, much less stability). You can even choose between Split Plant and Normal configurations. Maybe we can install engines and even shafts ourselves. If we can maintain weight balance and route the internals (such as funnel ducts. magazines ... etc) properly, we should be allowed to place guns wherever we please.

I think that a lot of people have talked about their "happiness" with the hotfix's accuracy, penetration and damage alterations. I shall assume that I will see something a lot more like the pre-hotfix state in Alpha 4. Also, I don't remember this happening to me too much, but yes all guns should fire, or we should be given an intelligent reason why they are not. Otherwise... Really I have to say that I can think of nothing that should take priority over getting at least a draft version of the campaign out, and having skimmed through the posts so far, I honestly think that nothing in them should have higher priority. I don't disagree with them per se, but a lot of them are eye-candy fixes, or small changes with the procedure (yes, technically it's true the accuracy should update when the shots hit ... on the other hand, we are one man commanding a fleet, we arguably need a little lead time to think, so we don't keep pausing the game). On the more substantive matters, we all desperately need to see what happens when real players have to make their ships last more than one battle, or take into account cost constraints.

The penetration have gotten a lot of love, to the neglect about the hit rates. Here are some from the Sino-Japanese War (equivalent to the earliest era)'s Battle of the Yalu: Japanese 12-inch: 13 fired at ranges of under 3000m, 2 hits (15.3%) Japanese QF: Olender estimates from 3300 for 170-210 hits (5-6%) to Osprey's ~8700 fired for about about 330 hits (3.7%) Chinese 12-inch: 197-217 fired starting from long range, 9 hits (about 4%) Chinese 10-inch: 10 fired, 2 hits (20%) Chinese QF: estimated 1200 fired, 69 hits (7%) As an aside, I'm not sure where the multiple hundreds of hits on 定遠 and 鎮遠 came from . Lai's Chinese Battleship vs Japanese cruiser (Osprey) figures 定遠 ate 159 hits, while Piotr Olender's Sino-Japanese Naval War figures it ate about 90-100. As for 鎮遠, Lai repeats the 220 times figure in his maintext, but his table estimates about 80 hits which is about the same as Olender's 80-100. (I'm sick and tired of multiple romanization systems. We are in 2019. I'll just enter glyphs and you can throw them in the search engine.) The preliminary conclusion is that even the act of mounting huge guns on tiny ships with horrendously slow rates of fire cannot neutralize their inherent advantages in terms of hit rate per round, even at close range. Here are some from the Russo-Japanese War (from Olender), though the range is slightly longer: People, how about trying to use honest, reasonable numbers for the secondaries and accepting whatever damage they inflict, instead of just insisting that they must be effective no matter what?

If that's so, I suggest making it zero and be done with it. To go over your previous answer in brief, I think players will accept that knowingly installing an early radar, or deliberately using extremely high pressure machinery ... etc, will induce a failure rate. This is what players will feel to be a "fair tradeoff". But we should avoid as far as possible force majeure where nothing the player can do (except Save/Load) will eliminate the possibility of a lightning strike. And I'll disagree that games should not reduce the incentive for players to save-scum. IMO, save-scumming happens in two scenarios - the first when they can immediately see how they can do better and can implement it with minimal time loss. That can be considered a learning experience and a good thing in a single-player game. The second is actually the exact opposite, when they had been the victim of RNG. In that case, S/L imposes almost no time cost and no thought cost - just reload and a better result should come. This S/L does not come with a feeling of having learnt something, just the feeling of reversing an injustice - it does not improve your enjoyment of the game and if it happens too often may put you off the game entirely. Also, remember the player can S/L and the AI can't. So a player may deliberately choose less reliable (but higher performing) parts, with the preparation to S/L a lot to ensure RNG goes in their favor each time (or at least for the critical shots). That gives them an unfair advantage.

I'll dissent with the above a bit. I agree that in real battle, it would have been sufficient to mission kill or even just stop the TBs from doing their work. However, the extra difficulty does reduce the margin of error and make you learn the system. If anything, arguably most of the other missions are a little too easy. Not everyone is RamJB. Most of us would like to succeed in even a training mission, yet the moment we succeed even once we are reluctant to try it again unless it is a good dumb fun (easy) mission. The logical course is at least some missions that are at the edge of what is achievable, so players learn the lesson. Maybe a label should have been stuck on that mission: "Look, guys, this one is hard. Don't expect to always be able to win it. It is not the point. You have probably been able to get through the ones before this by building the right ship, and not necessarily even the best one. We don't expect you to be able to do that this time. You will have to build the right ships, make the right choices and be diligent to win. This is where you learn the finer points of the system"

First, it is not like he is completely against the idea of quality making a difference. He is just suggesting it be done another way that will overall lead to approximately the same result, but be more deterministic. Here is where the chase for realism, or how to handle realism, bumps into the reality that this is a game. Unlike in real life, players are not obliged to take the die-roll the world gives them. They have a Save / Load button. Sure, if what happened is only of moderate importance they'll eat it. If what happened was critical, they'll use the Save / Load button and request an appeal. And cutting out the Save / Load button just to avoid such things will clearly increase the inconvenience too much. Further, you now get into the ball of worms that is ... what is the appropriate "minimum failure rate" anyway? Don't you think we have enough discussions on accuracy, penetration and damage already? Imagine trying to balance this fourth factor as well. Do we make it different for each country? There is also the argument that the game should reward you for correct actions and punish you for incorrect ones. If you get hit despite taking all the correct actions, it can be very frustrating and the computer can be accused of bias. As it is, when players see the AI come out with a 44 knot monster with lots of guns, there is a real temptation to ask to see the design. The suspicion the AI is getting a better deal is always there, and would only be increased with such a thing as a mandatory minimum failure rate.

Sounds like an interesting idea, with the caveat that the player should be allowed a reasonable progression where they can get a perfectly reliable ship. It is one thing if they suffer duds knowing they skimped, but if they did everything and they still suffer a failure, they would first try the Save / Load button and then start filing complaints.

Actually, the pre-hotfix Destroyers vs Torpedo Boats does a pretty good job of that. I won't mind a few more like it.

Sure, you can lock it in on Ship Design, but then you deprive the players of the realistic option to change loadouts for each sortie, and that would mean they would spend even more time mulling over it.

It is more realistic to separate them, but you do have to balance this against the complexity of pre-planning that this forces onto the players. Imagine this screen popping up: Naval Battle: Close to your Home Port Available forces: 4 battleships, 8 heavy cruisers, 12 light cruisers, 36 destroyers. Accept / Decline fight. You click Accept and instead of warping into the battle, you are stalled by a screen: Please select the loadout you want for your battleships. And you have to select (or confirm) ammo for 60 ships before you can flip into combat...

Why do you think your ship should become more stable as you cram heavy things on top of it? For its final qualities, you should check their batch of stats with things like Pitch and Roll. Put cursor on and they show how much accuracy you are losing.

Well, then the enemy's stats will start popping up, and you will have to first compute the percentage difference between your modifier and his modifier, then apply it to the penetration values.

On the one hand, I'm leaning towards OKing it for just this reason... Let's be honest with ourselves. To ignore what will unquestionably happen next is to ignore human nature: Once it is in even a corner, the next push will be for "Let me play it in the campaign!" And then the campaign will have to be distorted to accommodate these ships. My conclusion is that if you conclude it isn't good for the campaign, resist any urges to include them at all. We are already doing that exact What-If. It is expected we will have no planes and treaties will be an option rather than fate. However, a good what-if differs from a fantasy by taking all realistic factors (except the bare minimum needed to switch history to its alternate track) in full rather than ignoring them. So things like canal size limitations are very realistic and necessary factors. ... An idea would be to allow the current super BB hull to upstretch one more step and reach 150kT, but remove it from all but the Japanese and Chinese navies. It'll be kind of realistic and a bit of a playbalancing factor to compensate for the industrial weaknesses of the two Asian nations.

I get that, but I'm more in the school of either do it right or not include something at all. Besides... Something like this could actually be very unpleasant for players because it'll feel more like a lightning strike (kind of like RTW2 suddenly ruling one of your battleships have been sunk by some stupid sub you were not given a chance to fend off - you can watch that kind of thing off a Youtube video and still feel the greatest sympathy for the unlucky Youtuber) than a justified result. Ultimatley the result might be the same but if you don't give people the chance to fight this kind of thing off for themselves, it could be very unpopular.

Let me give my impression - you are not so much trying to line the game up with reality than trying to line it up with what naval theory blubbered, or worse what naval theory hoped would happen. Now, I don't mean to say they are stupid, but the blunt truth is, modeling techniques were darn primitive back then. Heck, until 1916 they did not even have Lanchester's Equations. So what passed for naval theory is a mix of what superficially worked (or did not fail catastrophically), very simplistic calculations, intuition and prejudice along with some conditional experiments (like firing at a dead hulk which while valuable clearly had limitations). To show you how accurate naval theory was, let me cite from Warships 2018's article "The Battle of the River Plate: A Tactical Analysis": We are in 1939, and the wargaming rules (in which is summarized the naval theory of two nations) can still disagree so heavily on topics leading to cranking out different tactics. At least one, or both clearly had it wrong somewhere. In short, while contemporary naval theory might explain why ships were built a certain way, or why certain tactics were attempted, it is very far from guaranteed that either is correct. It is likely no exaggeration that if this game is made properly, it'll be able to wargame ship combat to a far higher precision and likely accuracy than any predictive tool the contemporary navies had. As such, the primary calibration should be to historical combat results, and to objective realities (which we can model much better and more systematically than back then) than then naval theory. The more so since the naval theorists themselves in the case of A ultimately discarded their mixed battery ship - in fact, they did it soon after they got in some modern naval combat results. This suggests the mixed battery was the weaker idea for at least some time before the Battle of Tsushima, perhaps a very long time - someone just blubbered something that made superficial sense or continued a long tradition and everyone just went with it without ever having the chance to wargame it out with the requisite rigor. As for B, we are getting to the naval theory "hope" part of the equation. The secondaries clearly aren't going to hack the mustard, so we try making destroyers and sticking whatever guns we can on them. Can they do the job? We aren't sure, but they are our best hope because the secondaries definitely are feeling the limits. 4 inch guns may not be enough? Well, but the 6-inch won't really fit on it, right? So we have to use the 4 inch and hope it works - it's not like we can do better. In short, neither of these theories really have the kind of weight that we should break the game's modeling just to accommodate them. Hope that expresses my position.

I hope it does. I'm sure all of us will return to more balanced reading comprehension once this problem gets solved. I agree with the basic concept, though I won't begrudge them if they just adjusted the 1000m zone first, and perhaps just changed the curve so the % modifier for 35 knots becomes the modifier for 45 knots (curve flattening) and then observed the splashes before continuing.

For your reference, let me show you how a person that feels uh, strongly, about the hotfix, reads your post. 😀 You might have meant for other places to be given more weight, but readers don't always give emphasis to the same places as the writer. The speed and armor models have been there since Alpha-2. The citadel and 1/12th problem are either new (in which case a revert will kill them as well) or have their "true significance" revealed in this hotfix. Since the most obvious change in the hotfix is the small caliber buff, that would be a clear first target, but you seem to really want to preserve the accuracy change despite its manifest implausibility and lack of historical substantiation.

My main emphasis is to draw some hints about the practical hit rates of secondaries (as opposed to gunnery trials) on destroyers rather than a battlecruiser's evasive capability. Scharnhorst was apparently hit by one of Acasta's torpedoes at 1734, so it must have closed in before then to torpedo firing range. She was sunk, finally at 1820, about 45 minutes later, not counting any hits that happened before 1734! Things just aren't looking too good... For my end, I actually differ from RamJB a little bit. RamJB seems confident with realistic (or pre-hotfix) hit rates that once we actually have to think about more than one battle people would realize the importance of secondaries despite their tactical limitations. I'm actually not as confident it'll take place, but I'm happy to accept either result, as long as they are from "honest" assumptions - that is, we did not give the little guns MVs of 11xx m/s, massive penetrations or base hit chance better than the better-equipped big guns to obtain these results. I'm actually curious which will come out on top in an honest simulation.

Well, the boats fought back, as did the real Germans. In fact, the real scenario had a few more things going for the Brits, such as the real Germans only having puny 50mm guns which AKD wouldn't let me call pom-poms :) while the computer created his with at least one 4" gun (so it could shoot back a little bit). I think at some point you might notice you are spending most of your time trying to "dodge" the historical and simulation results. Sure we can make excuses but really it just isn't looking too good, isn't it?