Maty83

This all looks awesome. But I have one concern with research: We should be able to have higher variety in our gun propellants. Right now it is actually likely, not just possible to get soft-locked into Cordite III since it tends to show up before Tube Powder II and obsoletes any other previous propellant tech. It's minor, but fixing it for the campaign where it essentially soft-locks your ability to refit ships with lower flash fire protection would be great.

Yes, you can. You can also have multiple "campaigns" if you dare touch the correct files (C:/Users/Username/Appdata/LocalLow/GameLabs/Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts/) The active save is save_0.json #2 and #3? No. Tech is partially random, so it could happen your engines are not unlocked in the campaign. There probably is a way by messing with the save files, but I'm not gonna try that since a lot of the save-edit stuff bricks the save (Shipyard size, hello)

From what I had in the campaign at least in the betas (And using my campaigns as a base) it did tell me I got the transports at the end of the battle. Though I may be wrong about it, but after killing all escorts for me the battle just ends, crediting me with the kills.

As mentioned above. Beware that I've modified some of the enemy reputation values (Yes, at my own risk, I know) and the campaign still launched. The modification was done to Germany and A-H reputation and unrest to force a longer campaign Link for the save below. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OWRVRKqV2VL7dnl2wtKbqW8rov_A2Tci/view?usp=sharing

They count as killed as long as you either sink them, or destroy all escorts.

The game chugs hard simulating the first 16 months or so since the AI lays down all the designs during this time simultaneously, along with actually building the ships (And the building process for each WILL take between 1 and 2 minutes average). On a laptop this will take even longer I expect, so go and make a coffee and don't minimize the game during this time. Before it wasn't this bad as you had only two factions fighting.

I let the AI run rampant on some designs for the French, here are the.... "interesting" ideas it came up with. Exhibit 1: Terrible firing angles due to secondaries being added in bad spots. Also, despite the stats this ship only has 12.4" belt.... WITH 20-inch guns! You should really be able to fire at least over the 4" quads.... Exhibit 2: It needed some time to happen here, but I've seen it before. Looking at the armament section, the AI doesn't weigh specific turret types it used before as more valuable. Oh and the first turret needlessly uses a barbette, wasting a neat total of 300t. Some of the large cruisers also had better belt than the super-battleship above. Exhibit 3: Fore weight offset and 2" gun spam. I'm deliberately using shorter hulls because it makes the AI make more mistakes in its build. It should also be noted the design only needed one funnel out of the three seen here. Armour is definitely also lacking as seen on the picture. Exhibit 4 Aft weight offset, 2-inch guns heavily blocking firing angles on torpedoes: For the CL I had a design where the AI decided a 58% funnel efficiency was enough, but otherwise it seems apart from its enthusiasm at putting 2" secondaries everywhere the AI can do a reasonably good job with those.

This is really bad when you're using your DDs to finish off wounded enemies in close quarters. I've lost several DDs to this.

Great job with the update! I've been playing the Beta extensively and I really like the campaign At this stage, I find Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts to be actually almost where it should be. However, there are still a couple items I'd like to mention, mostly as general feedback on ship classes. and the campaign. Prepare for a wall of text. Gun calibres on DDs and CLs: There are instances of larger guns than we have in-game on ship classes represented. Such as the 1936A-class destroyers of the Kriegsmarine. I'd recommend upping the maximum calibres of DD through CAs by a single inch (Especially with the Panzerschiffe hulls, this would mean you have a more reasonable evolution of design going through Destroyers (Even larger leader-types like Tashkent, or Mogador) with guns which can reliably kill CL/treaty CAs (These fit on the current CL hulls if given different superstructures) at close ranges, up to CL-like types which can hurt the large CAs thanks to the availability of 8-inch guns (Fitted on pre-dreadnought era protected cruisers sometimes, plus Mogamis even if those are meant to be on CA hulls currently) and then CAs, which can at close range on the upper end of the scale hurt battlecruisers thanks to the access to the 12-inch guns. Honourable mentions here go to some of the interwar British large cruiser designs, which were contemplated with 12-inch guns despite the displacement staying below 20 000t. If it becomes a problem early with 1890s CAs being better than battleships, the hull technologies for more modern hulls could unlock the use of these greater calibres on CAs. Speaking of the 12-inch: BRING ITS ACCURACY IN-LINE. Right now there is practically no reason to use 11 and 13-inch guns on capital ships as the 12-inch gun has much greater accuracy than either of the other options. In fact, I consider it pretty much the best calibre in-game against non-capital units thanks to this frankly ridiculous number. Better yet, if streamlined a little the current system could be much more friendly by using a stat curve so we can set calibres in 0.1 inch increments and let the curve determine the statistics (With gun techs being tresholds where new marks of guns are available, such as the 16" gun tech providing 15.6-16.5 inch guns.) Stop limiting the amount of armour we can put on guns so much. This is a serious issue for small-calibre guns which remain useful on all ship types, especially within the 4-6 inch range (Though the issue persists up to the 12" gun). The 4" guns can only have basically structural plating and even the 6" being limited to 2/3 the armour you can put on the main belt of CLs (Or which was historically found on some CL turrets). Yes, I agree we shouldn't be able to cover the guns with 20" plates because reasons, but a more reasonable upper limit would be great. Same goes for CLs: Let us have slightly more belt armour. If CAs can go crazy, CL armour should be at least partially able to keep them out at extreme ranges if invested into. Quad-barrel guns. Why not let every calibre use them? I understand this is asset-heavy, but even with the placeholder quad turrets for everyone but the French there are ships which currently cannot be replicated, such as the Dunquerques (neither a 5, or a 6-inch quad exists), some of the designs of the Edinburgh-subclass with quad 6", or the designs for, again, British large cruisers with quad 9.2-inch. Barrels should not block lines of fire. Simple. Right now a person can massively upgrade some designs by just rotating the turrets they place on a ship. Best example of this being cross-deck firing main guns. Try placing two wing turrets firing aft and check the firing angles! Why can't you fire over the barrel of the other turret? Reasons! Seriously, this would also massively reduce the complexity of hitboxes for determining firing angles. Now you just need to draw a circle with the radius of the furthest point the body of the turret from the centre! Some ability to squeeze turrets together since they can rotate by elevating the berrels over other objects would also be nice, but that's a big ask. And last, but not least: Campaign. Creating our own fleet is great, but right now the simulation of the past 4 years before the campaign takes on average 15 minutes and if I try to let it run in the background, UA:D helpfully goes dormant until it is the currently selected window again. So much for watching videos while loading up a new campaign. Letting us spend some technology points instead of getting a random roll would also be neat, since for example in the 1920s campaign I've had some occasions where the best Mk.III gun I had was the 14-inch and I had Dreadnought III as my biggest hull, but on other occassions with similar naval budgets I've not only had 15" Mk.III guns (Even though you unlock the 15" Mk.I only after the Mk.III 14"), but I've also had Dreadnought V hulls available. Let the player have agency in this as well. Speaking of the campaign start: The amount of money to build your own fleet is only 10 months' worth of income as far as I can see. Having another slider here would be useful so we can start with much bigger fleets if we want. Heavy towers and radio tech: Now here's an interesting problem. I almost never put improved radios on anything larger than a CL in the campaign as despite the usefulness of RDF, the percentage cost and weight increase of the towers is almost never worth it. It should be the other way around, with your capital ships taking the hundred or so tons of equipment easily while your DDs almost never take it because it doesn't magically become 100x lighter like the main tower on those compared to a BB. In addition to this, the AI should NOT build battleships and battlecruisers significantly weaker than the player. I've had a campaign where playing as the Germans my capital ships had guns of calibres no lower than 16", but the British somehow decided that a 3x2 12"-armed battleship was the way to go. I shouldn't even mention how the 20000t CA I designed won a torpedo-free fight against one... We DESPERATELY need a proper save system for the campaign. Being able to start up multiple campaigns at once, just to explore some features while not overwriting other ones you've been playing for a week (Without going into the AppData folder to manually back up saves) Despite all of these gripes with the game, it has become a rather addictive addition to my gaming library. I have to congratulate the dev team on the job they've done with it. As an early backer I have to say: I am quite impressed already.

Santa Maria: A cross-deck firing dreadnought on the Small Battleship hull, 1908. Forward superstructure is the best one available, back is Rear Tower 5, Medium funnel. I have gotten the perfect offset only once and since it works diagonally through the CoM seemingly, you can't deal with it fully on these ships usually (Having cross-deck mounting points would be really good, since you can only throw on 4 centerline turrets at this stage)

Excellent news with the new hulls! This will make the game even more interesting! Although I'd like to ask for one thing we're desperately missing: A potential mousewheel stepping of tonnage, since 1t steps on 90kt-120kt will be extremely tedious otherwise

In regards to the echelon turrets: You have to fiddle with it a lot to get those proper placements. Maybe I'm asking too much, but some attachment points that are balanced on each side would really help that

Very saddenned by the current update. Note how it says "Design invalid" It does this on every new hull once you mount a smoke stack. I tried everything else-removing thm, moving them down, etc. I see no other reason for this than just the smokestacks doing something wrong. Mind you, I am using the attachment points. These messages have never appeared before, including weird errors which seemingly don't have the proper text strings coded in. I should add that this happens in any designer

Simple question I'd like answered: Under certain conditions with different ships you can't properly see enemy ships firing at you, with the difference in seeing shellfire and being spotted being several kilometers. Is this intentional to give smaller ships a degree of opportunity to hurt enemies at extreme range, or not? Personally, I feel like an enemy firing at your ship with main guns should be visible unless the weather is exceedingly terrible. Even during the Battle of the North Cape, Scharnhorst could see the flashes as the lighter forces engaged her early on (Norfolk and the light cruisers at the start of the engagement). This may be hard to implement, but would be a major QoL improvement for battles around the early 1910s where on occassion one side may not see the other side until several damaging hits had been scored by the opposing ships, reducing the chances of victory quite a bit, even while using top-of-the-line towers

I have to echo the concerns of other players here too. You're dodging torpedoes with your battle line, forget about the DD you sent to catch enemies unaware with a salvo and.... Suddenly the ship is 50km away from any enemy ship. Being able to go with greater zoom levels, slightly longer render ranges and the pseudo-minimap view (showing individual squadrons) would be a great benefit.

I quite like this idea, although I'll note that having a specific gun model only available for a single nation (13" quads) seems like a concept not worth looking at. While the very large BC hull is interesting, any chance we get some ship breaching 100k tons for the Royal Navy the patch after this one? Even with this improvement British battleships still decisively remain the lowest displacement of the major navies with Japanese and German designs being ones no British ship can match if both are designed competetively. All in all though, I've been waiting for proper British hulls for a long time, so I'm happy to see those.

Sadly we don't have mouse scrollwheel interactionfor fine-tuning displacement (Since the scrollbar is so small it has issues tuning by the 50t limits on BBs)

It is very hard on most ships to do 2 fore and 2 aft turret layout. More freedom needed

Torpedo range is less than 2 km probably... I found that out when trying to add torps to my CAs in 1895 in preparation for a custom battle against a BB.

The issue is, the game tries to encompass the outliers in each case, which just isn't possible. And then you take a look at the specs of most CAs and you realize that with 8" guns you could re-make then on CL hulls. So after contemplation of both sides, I believe it's better to add 8" guns to CLs, both for the ability to actually hurt well-designed CAs (As well as removing 4" guns from the primary gun category post-1922) and to help with designing said ships. Due to the treaties you have cases where literally the same hull was used to make both CLs and CAs (Wichita being a prime example), while the Japanese had the "Totally not suspicious" Mogami-class. That, and Edinburgh/Belfast displacing more than some County-class ships (As well as having belt armour in peacetime unlike some). This is why I'd advocate for the ability to place 8" guns on CL hulls. It'd differentiate the roles of CLs and CAs in a different manner. And it would set in the conundrum of CL 8" vs 6" guns (RoF vs. per-shell damage) as historically happened with the Royal Navy. At the same, let's not forget about the fact that we still don't have 6" guns on DDs (German and French DDs).

DDs should be able to stall larger vessels and pose significant risk to them. There are examples of this. (Sinking of Glorious, the Battle of Samar). They are the reason BBs retained a fairly heavy secondary battery during WWI since a concentrated torpedo assault would have devastating consequences for BBs. I believe we should be able to designate how many torpedoes to carry manually to improve the experience (Up to 3 reloads potentially)

I'd like to note a couple things: Gun barrels should count only to 50% lenght for firing restriction. As of now, you can easily increase most firing angles by rotating turrets in weird and wonderful rotations, thus by far increading what you can do. Honestly? If we could get the turrets to elevate over each other at long range too (Worcester-style), it would help with some of the later designs since you are restricted with barbette placement. Secondly, same-caliber weapons should get the same accuracy measurement if they have different barrel counts, even if the reload is different. This would help with certain designs where you use more than one turret type of said caliber (E.G. Conte di Cavour-style, or being able to fit only single 3" guns in certain spots while in others you can use twins and triples elsewhere) Lastly, on the subject of different hulls I'd like to see CLs be able to take up to 8" guns (Pensacola was classed as a CL for a time due to the armour she had). This would mean larger CLs could effectively engage the usually heavily-armored CAs in later-era battles with things other than torpedoes (Which are the only realistic way of whittling down AI designs with 10" belts and only 8/9" guns). Additionally, have you thought of separating the "Large cruiser" into its own category? While their role is still engaging cruiser screens, there were no designs for CCs with guns greater than 14" (B65, Alaska, Stalingrad all had theirs with 12" guns, plus one design of the B-65 called for their rearmament with Kongo's guns)

There's a large disparity between large cruiser hits on CAs and the other way around. Not sure how to fix, perhaps some accuracy buffs for higher marks of 12-14" guns since their effectiveness drops remarkably during the 1920s era as main guns due to the higher displacement vessels you're able to produce (Effectively allowing thick enough armour to have a large immune zone to those guns).

It was a direct flash fire. Happened a second time already in the "Modern battleship" mission. It doesn't display as ammo detonation, but as a "flash fire". The effect is EXTREMELY random, even going so far as to be a minor inconvenience on the level of "Turret destroyed" at times while other times it nukes the ship as hard as a magazine explosion without even spreading to adjacent guns

There is two things which bug me more than the formation finding. Flash fire randomness and the AI retreat. First, flash fires: The results are extremely random, basically turning battles in an instant. I was doing the "Destroy a full fleet" mission. I had a perfectly healthy BB and a heavily damaged one. The perfectly healthy BB had taken only two 14" hits over the course of the battle, while the heavily damaged came under fire from the entire enemy fleet and was holding steady at 35% structure. I was engaged in a stern chase of a BB when a flash fire with 13.8" Krupp IV armour and reinforced bulkheads suddenly disappeared my ship despire not spreading to the B turret right behind. No fanfare, nothing. A 98% structure ship with only a single upper deck section damaged just disappeared. And the enemy BB who I had been throwing shells at for several minutes from 4x as many guns (The BB had 15" turret armour, but at ranges where I was seeing a reliable feed of "Turret damaged" messages pop up). Despite this, no flash fires. On other occasions I quite happily sailed a cruiser squadron with each missing at least one triple 10" turret through an enemy formation. AI retreat: The AI decided to retreat with 3 ships in the previously mentioned "Destroy a full fleet" mission, retreating their DD, CL and BB at 60-70% structure without major vital parts damaged. thus I was unable to complete the mission as the ships motored out of range. On the other hand, the AI designer seems to be doing very well, but in some cases this results in older missions which were previously completely possible being now extremely difficult to accomplish. At the same time, this presents an issue due to the AI not having budget constraints and sometimes getting superior tech. The AI's designs which are mentioned as inferior in briefings sometimes carrying 17" guns when you only have access to 16" guns, or other times bringing 20" Krupp III armour on a 37800t design during missions. I even saw what was supposedly a battlecruiser capable of only 24 kts in a 1918 custom battle.