arkhangelsk

There's one more precedent to this: Victory at Sea Pacific. It was very ambitious, with a lot of scope. I just took it out of the box again this week and verify that even after god knows how many fixes, what falls through the cracks were things like controllability (everything was very clunky and it is hard to get things to move to where you want) and realism (I wince as the dive bombers kind of go above the target and then kind of sharp turn into this 90 degree dive and the 78 day time to build a fleet carrier.) Again, I stopped playing. I will soon forget I ever bought this game, again. With limited resources, choice has to be made between scope and quality. I think quality is more important.

Let's first check what Alpha 4 turns out to be, and also the in-game effect. In addition to the larger caliber difference, however, you might also note that the bonus to the larger gun also covers it being connected to more sophisticated fire control (IIRC, that quoted chart was before director firing became a thing), while little gun may be connected to very little at all.

You mean you fired 400 rounds (over 40 tries given a typical layout of 9 guns) with maxed out 16 inch guns and didn't get a single hit? This I'll have to see. One reason why everyone thinks the secondaries are pretty useless is that the modern guns can kill destroyers (get one hit) at long range with maybe 5 salvoes. Are you sure you did the basics like keeping your ship balanced? What did the computer predict the hit rate was?

Actually from the viewpoint of the computer, this design makes perfect sense. The average dreadnaught hull in the game right now is heavily slanted towards having guns to the back. Try it - add that big tower and two turrets to the front. Even putting A turret uncomfortably close to B (firing arc restriction) immediately the weight imbalance shoots up to something like 40%. There is a raised platform you want to use at the back, so you put your X turret at the very back of that raised spot, which doesn't do nearly enough. Y turret ends up having to go nearly to the rear end limit and you put every secondary around the rear half of the ship, trying to balance things out. Of course, Y turret being so far back means you eat penalties in Pitch, but you eat it because it's just a little better than allowing that massive longitudinal offset. If you don't care about appearance and about making a stable, balanced ship, it is much easier to simply use one turret at the front

Darn, my wish for hydrophones on BBs, BCs and CAs did not make it through. First, historically they are there. Second, if the idea for this restriction is to make us have use DDs and CLs in campaign, right now we have entire Naval Academy missions where we have to use only one ship (or we have zero control over the attached ships so we don't know if they have sonar or not until it is too late). It is OK to restrict them to lower grades (Hydrophone instead of Sonar), but sonar seems pretty lifesaving here. I also have a question mark on the Ban Retreat bit, but OK. At least the AI works pretty well in that area (you can tell something is working when human players ask for a nerf) already so perhaps it is time to test other areas. Also, the campaign is ... first draft still in progress, eh? I remember back when people say they can actually see a tiny bit of the campaign before the devs locked it out. Ever since ... well, just a bit worrying considering the schedule. Otherwise, these sound like great improvements. I look forward to next week.

The historical evidence of Rule of Waves would seem to suggest otherwise. The overall effect of planes is pretty weak and can be replicated to a great extent by a few more destroyers, torpedo boats or other scouts. Besides, we all agree that real planes must be introduced eventually, so basically you are going to have to rebalance anyway. But a note about radar. On second thought, I think I am OK with radar coming up where it is now (starting around 1925 instead of 35). You see, if we use the historical balance, what will happen is that in the last few years the planes will become dominant, to the detriment of the game's theme. On the other hand, the balance between plane and ship is pretty fine. In 1942, the best of AA-fire (American) had grown to the point of making approaching battleships a rather sordid business for Japanese crews (a battleship claimed 26 kills at Santa Cruz IIRC), while a top of the line plane going against relatively weak AA tends to work. In other words, if we advance fire control technologies like radar forward, we should be able to organically squeeze the darn planes out into a very subsidiary role - only the most massive air strikes or attacks against lone ships will be serious threats. Of course, if you had been slack at developing radar and other top of the line AA tech, then planes would be very effective against your fleet. You've been warned

Ah, now I would have to comment, because such a strong gripe implies you feel this to deserve priority status, and I am really thinking all blood should be dedicated towards the campaign. For the sake of fair disclosure, I did make one independent request on this page - releasing the lock on the hydrophone gear for CA, BC and BB, on page one. Hopefully it'll take them only twenty minutes to find the code and unlock it. Now for your substantially more time consuming proposals. This is plain a bad idea. There are two basic adjustments you make to the armor - coarse and fine. You know roughly how much armor you want on the battleship. Then at the last stage you just adjust the armor by increments to either use up the remaining displacement or to squeeze your ship below the displacement limit. In the former case it's more efficient to just enter the value and the latter you need the .1 button. Adding a pair of 1-inch (25mm) buttons is unjustified consumption of precious screen real estate that would increase the chance of misclicking the wrong button - this will be especially serious if the buttons are narrowed to squeeze them both in. I won't diss your buttons here because they shouldn't take up screen space, but really allowing us to just type in the displacement would be a more precise and useful capability. If after the shift you just reverse your motion and get your bigger hull back, everything will almost always return to where they should be - in fact, I don't remember a time when it did not for me. As for the marks, that's one development direction I won't object to, but there are other possibilities - such as continually lengthening hulls (thus making the marks meaningless) or splitting off the sub-hulls into their own separate hulls, each with its own resistance/stability et al values. After you put in funnel one, you'll get the efficiency indicated and knowing where 100% is becomes mental math. Besides, 100% is not necessarily ideal. For example, the torque penalty turns from negative to positive around the 90% mark, and you may often choose to deliberately go over 100% in case one of your funnels get blown out. I've never been unhappy about this and cannot even tell where you are unhappy about with this statement. Perhaps this is better in bug reports? Have you considered that this mechanization might not be welcome to all, and some may actually find it more jarring if they are just blocked from doing something? "Just put it down and I'll fix it by shifting later" is a mentality, you know. All you have to do is not click while the thing's red and right click if you made a mistake. Brilliant. I can see how the additional collision calculations will affect the framerate and stability of the game. Have you considered it is occasionally possible to just squeeze in the part if you don't accept the default orientation and rotate the part a bit? The predictor will find it hard to take that into account. The biggest barbette is up to 18", the center barbette is up to 14" and the left one if you even ever get to use it is 9". As for the towers, how do you think they can tell you in advance when the answer is often not as simple as yes or no for a given caliber, but you get a few points for the 6 inch, more for the five inch, and many many points for the three inch? Is it really that painful to just click the secondary caliber and see how many mounting points are available - you might not even like some of them? You can already change the caliber of your torpedo tubes with a single click (in fact, you are limited to only one caliber of torpedoes). Have you considered that people often place multiple (especially secondary) calibers on their ship as they try to use up the remaining displacement? Would this hypothetical button click change all the guns, or just those of one caliber? Actually, it is possible to deliberately choose to unbalance your ship, and some people like to do fancy fiddling until they can do cross-deck firing. Just don't touch it if you don't want it yourself. There is already a pop up when you put the mouse on Longitudinal Weight Offset. There are no theresholds, just a snowball effect where the losses are small at low imbalance value and huge at great values. You decide how much loss you want to accept, but do keep one eye on Pitch. The most useful proposal. Still, I'm not delaying the campaign one day for this, and this is actually a more useful capability in the battle UI. Find Ship Details on the Right Panel. Find Weapons. Roll mouse over each line of weapons. In addition to the popup for the weapon performance, all guns of that caliber will highlight in yellow.

The damage model and the ship balancing model are not 1:1, at least for now, with the latter at a relatively more sophisticated state.

Well eventually we'll think about it but ... we are now down to having only February, March, April, May and June to get this game to Steam Early Access standards, which is 20 weeks and a bit of change. There really isn't much time left in terms of "new projects" (fixing damage models and such is not "new project") than to get the first draft of the campaign out as fast as possible, get the worst complaints in, and then start putting all blood towards making the game as optimized as possible. The time for any "new projects", be it a new damage control system (which I put much more importantly than spotter planes) or anything else is after the Steam-ready Early Access is pushed out the door without major bugs.

That's not exactly the vibe from "Ability to increase the length or width of a ship without increasing max tonnage." but anyway. What is affected in your example is not only the "stability" and width, but also the Hull Form and every other coefficient currently accepted by the game as assumptions for its calculations. In game terms, Yamato and Iowa would be completely different hulls with coefficients specially entered. Neither the coefficients or the CG models are very amenable to someone just deciding to narrow them. If you have an allergy (understandable) to the tonnage getting too big, just stick with Dreadnaught IV - if you don't play Japan or the US, it seems you are stuck with that anyway.

Don't you think it is manifestly absurd for you to be able to increase the volume of the ship without increasing max tonnage? I don't think it has "mechanics to simulate". It has fixed coefficients for each hull type, which don't change just because you lengthen the hull (change displacement).

Yes, but I'll suspect realistically an "all-forward" design like Nelson or Dunkerque will have to be designed like this from the get-go (with engines and other parts placed further rear) to avoid ridiculous balance problems.. it's not like you can or should get good results slapping 8-10 guns on the front of a normal battleship with nothing at the back. So perhaps you should wait for a new hull labeled "All-Forward Battleship (special for Brits and French only)" with a specially designed center of gravity before making such ships.

For QE, the weights are almost exactly the same. The QE's full load displacement is about 33000 tons. No comments on the appearance, but it is objectively possible to create something with the same stats (in fact a little better because no QE ever actually hit its designed 25 knots).

There is already a similar thread here for the topic:

The little guns already have been given manifestly unjustifiable hit rates (per round) at close range that are higher than the main guns despite their inferior ballistics and fire control systems. Perhaps what needs adjusting is your perception of the overall effectiveness for small guns.

Or they could start not showing the ship like they do now. Instead, you have to put the targeting cursor on the outline, and guess using that combined with the speed and displacement estimator (roughly, a ship with no size modifier is about 15000 tons, and I think the point when you don't get Fast nor Slow speed modifier is about 15 knots).

In fact, let's go one step further. Why don't we just make both sides fully human controllable? All we need in addition to being allowed to design every ship are one extra button on the UI, so you can switch to the POV from both sides. There is already an Full AI button. So basically the default mechanization once entering the game is Player 1 manual, 2 Auto. If you want to switch, simply pause game, engage AI for Player 1, switch to Player 2, disengage AI, then control.

Ended up winning with this: https://photos.app.goo.gl/icGDw8vPj5NXrWtX7 I also won another time with a faster design (post-hotfix) ... but did the devs tweak it? It seems harder this time. I ended up with the firepower build but took some tips from RamJB's idea. Forget speed - the speed accuracy reduction isn't worth a damn at this zone. Put it on armor and I'm not sure if the torpedoes worked, but at least they didn't hurt.

Well, nevertheless, they are making "realistic" their selling point. I am on the side that intends to make it as realistic, with as much granularity as I can stand and the AI can use.

It seems the present computation of lateral stability does not only take into account the distance from the centerline - unless you use a perfect mirror, just putting it equidistant from the centerline on the other side does not result in a balanced ship. Your display should have two dots - one for the mirror and the other being the one other point where it'll also be balanced (if it is available on the line at all). Any other position you might as well place yourself since it won't be laterally even anywa.

You get to control "dozens" of ships in Great Naval Battles, so that isn't necessarily a pain. Besides, there are likely to be many scenarios where you control one ship, or a few. Third, a lot of the time the brunt is being borne by one or two of your ships rather than all of them being peppered at once, so you can focus your attention on those bearing the brunt.

This argument tries to equate all of them, but this is not true. For one thing, this game is billed and sold as realistic, which obviously is a slant away from "out of this world" tech. If you want such games, there are many others on the market. For another thing, short of blatantly sci-fi or fantasy settings, realism to the limits of playability is always a virtue. You don't exactly see World of Warships branding itself as the unrealistic naval game. No, realism is always a good thing. When people want other things, it is often because they are bringing in expectations they picked up from other "balanced" games like World of Warships or even hopes, and the realistic game isn't giving it to them. Maybe this is a good chance for such people to at least calibrate their tastes and at least know what realistic is.

I tried building something similar. The roll and pitch numbers look atrocious: As for the actual, in-game effect ... well, it's probably still worth it - you are still more accurate than the enemy, and the extra guns means more chance to hit.

With respect to your seniority, may I make a suggestion? Next time when playing the peacemaker you might want to take into account the natural (if perhaps incorrect) inferences caused by putting your post right under one of the debaters - you will be saying it is his fault. Since Shaftoe started the exchange and Fundamentalist made an unwarranted response to RamJB's reasoned reply to Shaftoe, this will likely bring indignation. Let me approach this "scout plane" business another way. Whether people are advocating their priority or delayed incorporation, a decision would still have to be made on how effective they are in-game. Right now, historical in-battle evidence is basically being proferred only by @RAMJB and he's saying they are useless (really, I didn't realize they were that useless...) and a fire risk. At this rate, the only historical thing to do when they are incorporated will be to give them coefficients of zero (the good news is that they will be incorporated just that bit faster b/c we will only have to teach the AI not to use them at all). Anyone interested in useful scout floatplanes may find their best interests served by rushing out to find some evidence of their usefulness in actual combat. If no evidence is found, my vote is to either drop them for good or represent them with brutal honesty. No "It is a game" adjustment. And if evidence is found, I suggest posting it here: Which would allow RamJB to rebutt freely without worrying about cluttering this thread which has a lot of functions to fulfill. Now, so that this post is not completely dedicated to that topic: Now that this thread has turned into less of a "Top Priority" thread, I'll say I would like to have something similar. No rush, do the campaign first. But in due course I really won't mind having this.

I suspect there are two things separating our perspectives. First, while I do like realism, I don't place a lot of weight in reproducing a historical ship exactly, and I suspect most players will too once the novelty goes off. You create the perfect HMS Hood or HMS Vanguard replica and send it into battle. The enemy's "Super Battleship" or "Modern Battleship" smashes it to pieces with its 18 inch guns. After that, you'll probably think much more about what gives you an edge in the game than perfect replicas that you won't even spend a lot of time admiring anyway, because most of the time you are zoomed out trying to manage the fight. Having realistic overall capabilities and results is much more important. One example is a certain player who demanded a specialized light cruiser hull so he can recreate HMS Arethusa (another wanted USS Atlanta) with 8 6-inch and 16 5-inch guns respectively. All I can think of from here are unintended consequences like 24-gun (3x8) ships. And I think the current destroyers that already allow 12 5-inch guns is quite enough to represent that part of the bracket. The second thing is that I don't buy the whole "It's for the AI" argument. The complexities of making a campaign ship notwithstanding, creating a good ship for Custom Battle is something the AI should be good at and wouldn't need fixed spots. In the above example, it should be able to easily wargame out the dreadful effects of 18 11-inch guns because it knows all the formulae it will use and reject that option. Because the range is given, it should be able to easily wargame out what would give it the best overall damage potential and then what combination of speed and armor can best neuter my damage potential (isn't it obvious the only two real bulkhead variants are Many and Maximum?). I can't help but think they are letting us win with the current builds, rather than the best the AI could really manage. I think those limits are for us players. In above example, I actually briefly tried the Ctrl trick the first time but for one reason or another I couldn't get a green. The mounting points do still discourage you from the three turret, and because the tower can't be moved freely with the Ctrl trick at least I can't put cram a fourth in there. At least the possibility should be further investigated before just saying "I want complete freedom to build my Arethusa" or my imaginary design. Further is the problem of equality and challenge. People seem to really mind when the AI gets advantages, but when it is their advantage, they don't. Besides, if setting some limits reduces our advantage and makes it more challenging, that's also a factor to consider. Maybe an option is a "historic mode" you can click. When that setting is on, the placement becomes free, BUT you are restricted from using ahistorical equipment. For example, if you click on it when you are the UK, you get free placement, but 17 and 18 inches become singles only (no G3 replicas, sorry), 16 inches become triple only, 15 inches are twins only, you can only use 6-inch triples on CA, not CL, and so on and so on. Since the game already blocks equipment from selection based on year and other factors, hopefully this won't be a hard program module.