captinjoehenry

I do agree but honestly as things stand right now the massive weight and loss of fire rate from the really big guns is already really noticable and has serious impacts. To the point where I've used designs with lots of 15" guns or a couple of 18" guns instead of 20" guns. As 20" guns are so heavy it's hard to mount more than two 20" turrets even on a SBB without some notable compromises. And their seriously reduced fire rate compared to other guns is already really noticable. As things stand 20" guns already take nearly 50% longer to reload than a 18" gun and you end up only mounting about half as many 20" guns as 18" guns while the 20" guns only deal less than 50% more damage. And not even 25% more pen. Mean while if you go for 15" guns you can mount quite a lot more of them than 18" guns and get almost as much range and pen. And this was back at the start of 1.06. there already was a lot of really valid reasons to not want to use 20" guns or even 18" guns. Now though with the unrealistic massive loss of accuracy there's straight up no reason at all to use the 20" guns. They'll almost never hit the target and even with their massive amount of pen you can still just ricochet or overpen or otherwise fail to deal any real damage. And in the time it takes you to land that single 20" hit a 15" gun would have landed probably multiple full salvos worth of shots dealing vastly more damage and still with high enough pen to get through virtually any armor you can come across.

This all sounds good to me. But the issue with big gun accuracy is not that simple. In all the cases I've been reporting have been in custom battles set in 1940. In that setting all big guns from 16" to 20" are mk 3 weapons. Which should imply most other factors are equal. I'm not at my PC right now but with those settings guns from 16" to 20" have roughly comparable muzzle velocity with otherwise identical techs. Given the way gun physics work that means the 20" should be the most accurate of the 16" to 20" guns in the 1940 custom battle setting. Which has been the case in all previous versions of this game until 1.06 patch 3. 14" and 15" guns are mk 4 in custom battle 1940 and that has largely worked out in a reasonable way in previous game versions where the Mk4 15" gun was more accurate and capable than the mk3 16" gun and comparable to the mk3 17" gun. It required going up to 18" mk3 in order to fully surpass the Mk4 15" gun in a major fashion. This makes sense by and large. But now that the guns straight up get less accurate as size increases when the guns tech level remain the same and the components on the ship they are mounted on also remain the same that is no longer the case As for gun reload time as the barrel length goes up that seems spot on the money to me. Longer guns take notably longer to train and elevate and longer guns probably are going to be using at least some additional gun powder as they now have a longer barrel that can take advantage of it. As far as bigger is always better that really hasn't been the case for quite a while. And even more so in recent patches. Frankly before 1.06 I never really used any gun over 18" as the 18" already had plenty of penetration and damage and mounting more 18" guns gave you a notable advantage than a lesser number of bigger guns. And in 1.06 that's even more the case. Even before patch 3 I found that 15" guns almost always dealt the most damage in a battle. As they had good penetration and excellent rate of fire plus low weight given their smaller size. The only reason I've started to use 20" guns are because of the introduction of the citadel mechanics. Which now allows using 2 quad 20" turrets to overall save weight due to the shorter citadel. But even with that the BC that mount 15" guns still tended to deal more damage before patch 3.

So just checked the BB big gun accuracy stuff. And it seems like between patch 3 and patch 5 for 1.06 the accuracy has been nearly unchanged for 1940. At 20km range max length german guns are still really bad. 20" has 1.6% 18" has 2.7% 17" has 3.3% 15" has 7.5% 13" has 11% Secondary's though seem like they've been made notably better: 8" has 5.4% 7" has 5.4% 6" has 4.8% 5" has 4.8% 4" has 4.2% All of these are with max length triple turrets at 20km range. All guns are on the same SBB at the same time. Super heavy shells, max tube powder and tnt 4. Secondary's are largely performing as you might expect. It's somewhat odd that 8 and 7 inch have identical accuracy and 6 and 5 have the same accuracy but other than that it seems reasonable. Main guns on a BB though do not make much sense. The sheer amount of accuracy drop off for bigger guns does not make any sense. If anything all other things being equal the 20" should have the highest level of accuracy. If for no other reason than the bigger a shell is the less it's effected by outside forces ( wind and such ) due to it's sheer inirtia. This has been the case the whole history of the game up until patch 3 for 1.06 so I'm not sure why this has suddenly changed so dramatically.

Exactly this. This is a pretty massive issue. In most cases assuming you have mature gun technology you should have good accuracy no matter the size of the gun. And the longer range a gun will usually mean that gun is going to be comparatively more accurate at the same ranges than guns with shorter max ranges. This has been the case in all previous game versions until 1.06 patch 3. There is a bit of a drop when the size goes up and the tech level goes down but in the past it has always recovered with one or two size steps up. And that makes a lot of sense with how guns tend to work. But in the current 1.06 patch 3 it seems to have gone completely out of whack.

Sorry I should have been more clear. I'm talking about the guns 3d model. Different 3d models for the same gun have different properties. Here's an example: Japanese 13.9" mk5 gun with with max barrel length: German 13.9" mk5 gun with max barrel length: As you can see with identical settings the German turret design ( 3d model ) weighs a decent bit less while having slight longer barrels. So the fact that the 11.9" gun has such a vastly different design ( 3d model ) than the 12" gun that alone can easily account for the 10% difference in weight between the two of them. So the 3d model of the turret that a gun is mounted in has various effects on the gun. Here's another example: German 3.9" mk 5 max length gun on a BB: German 3.9" mk 5 max length gun on a DD: As you can see the gun on the BB has a notably longer length (The value after the / in the gun name ) the weight is the same but that's likely just due to rounding. As gun weight seems to always be rounded to the nearest ton (Ammo weight mean while gets 1 decimal place) and given the weight difference is likely around 10% that likely means there isn't a sufficiently large difference in weight between these designs (3d model) of 3.9" mk 5 max length german guns.

Most likely it's due to the difference in design of the gun. The turret it you look at it is just the gun itself mounted on a pedestal with a tiny gun shield. While if you look at the casemate gun you can see that it has a much more substantial mounting and plating. Which I think would still have structural steel there instead of nothing. Same applies for the main gun. Both the 11.9 guns are in different turret designs so they have different weight. As when a gun is in different designs of turrets it has different properties. Some turret designs have longer guns than other turret designs. And the 12" is quite a bit shorter than the 11.9" gun and that gun length difference is why the 11.9" weighs more

Personally I do agree with you. When I was having two hand built fleets fight each other in custom battle in patch 2 the gun accuracy felt pretty good. It might have been a bit high but overall it felt like it worked really well. Long guns had a nice advantage of notably higher accuracy. And unlike other people I didn't really have any occurrences of 100% accuracy other than at fairly close range or against massive SBB at mid to close range. At the same time though my hand built ships don't tend to have too many parts. With 2 to 4 main gun turrets on average and between 4 and 20 secondaries at most and almost always far on the lower end of that range. That along with only having 1 or 2 funnels, usually just 1, meant that I probably had an average part count around 15 or so on my ships. And at that part count the exact excessive levels of accuracy didn't really occur in patch 2. And as was posted in the change log the accuracy issue was caused by part count on the target ship and most AI designed ships and a good number of player designed ships seem to have a lot more parts than the ships I tend to build. With notably higher count of secondaries and tertiary guns as well as torpedo tubes and a good number of barbets. If I were to guess the really excessive accuracy might have happened around 30 parts or more that lead to so many people seeing 100% accuracy at rather long range.

For the gun accuracy I agree it was definitely too high in the previous versions of 1.06 especially at extreme ranges. But the latest patch 3 seems to have really messed up the usual ratio of gun accuracy when you compare guns compared to more or less all the other patches. In addition to having some oddness with accuracy and over all rather excessively low accuracy for the biggest guns at most middle and low ranges. As for the turret damage looking at that picture I'm not seeing any damage numbers for a 18 shell penning the main gun turret. Just seeing a 5" partial pen on the turret doing minimal if any damage. As you'd expect from a 5" shell failing to pen the turret. As far as the 18" shell penetrating the main gun turret did you see how much damage it actually did? As the German SBB have some of the highest damage resistance in the game. It's very much their main trait. So that 18" shell might not have actually dealt that much damage. Like the German SBB can fairly easily get 75% or more gun damage reduction while the British SBB / BB has far lower damage reduction from shell hits. I'm not sure the exact number but I'd guess it's probably closer to 50% so everything else being equal given those reduction numbers your British ship would take twice as much damage from the same hit as the German SBB would. Also as a side note I'm pretty sure Germany has the exact same design of twin 20" turrets as most other nations. As most nations do not yet have unique turret designs for the really big guns (18" - 20") and a good bit of weapon properties do seem to be tied to the design of the turret. Like you'll see that different 3d models for the same gun size and tech level have noticably different traits. Like most enclosed turrets have longer barrels than open turrets along with other details like that.

Can confirm. Update 3 did odd things to big gun accuracy even into 1940. 15" and below guns seem to be largely ok but past that point the accuracy gets odd. Especially when going from 17 to 18". The guns tech level are the same in custom battle but the 17" gun is significantly more accurate. And depending on the components you can end up with odd situations where sometimes a gun is more accurate at a longer range than a shorter range. As an example when engaging a 130,000 ton SBB at 20km with a 140,000 ton SBB 20.9" max length mk 3 guns (max range of 70km) have less than a 20% chance to hit while the ships 8.9" max length mk 5 secondary guns (max range 25km) have nearly a 100% chance to hit. And a 40,000 ton BC with 15.9" max length mk 4 guns (max range 65km or so) at around 22km range vs the exact same 130,000 ton SBB has around 40% chance to hit. I can't remember the exact hit chance for the 15.9" gun but both the 15.9 and 20.9 inch gun are in quad turrets and the 8.9 secondary are in triple turrets. For the most part it seems like the tech level of the gun has a vastly greater impact than anything else in the current patch for 1.06 while previously going down a tech level for a gun aka 4 -> 3 or such would result in the next size up gun 15 -> 16 having the same or slightly worse stats at the same ranges now the impact is vastly greater. And the accuracy of secondary (mk 5 guns in 1940 custom battle) compared to main guns (Mk 4 or 3 for high caliber BB guns) currently vastly favors the secondary guns when engaging the same target at the same ranges. While in nearly all previous patches unless the range was REALLY short or the target was of a small very agile type the big BB guns would always have an accuracy advantage.

1. Fixed weight components. Radios in real life only weigh a few tons total with most radio components weighing quite a bit less than one ton. While currently adding radios to high displacement battleships adds 1000s of tons which is wildly out of whack with reality. The same can be applied to range finders, radars and sonars among a few other components. All of these systems broadly have fixed weight based off the tech. There should be some weight increase based off of ship class as DDs might only mount one radio while a BB might mount 4 or so. 2. Choosable enemy ships in custom battles. It would be extremely nice to be able to design enemy ships for custom battles or at least be able to choose the enemy displacement and weapon sizes. As when I'm using custom battles I want to be able to consistently test my own designs vs the same enemy ships. Or at least more comparable enemy ships as right now I pretty much need to restart custom battles until the enemy RNG picks a ship design that at least somewhat matches mine as taking 3 x 4 20" 100,000 ton BBs up against dinky 50,000 ton sub 15" armed battleships is just a waste of time other than just stomping defenseless and harmless AI 3. Choosable starting campaign tech. For most of the campaigns this isn't too much of an issue but for the 1930 campaign it can be entirely dessive. The difference between having and not having Radar II is massive and the same to a lesser extent with oxygen torpedos and Tube Powder

I have heard that those who bought the game before it went on steam will get a free key. But with steam limit on the amount of free keys that can be given out means it’ll take a while for everyone to get their key

Really loving the game and the various improvements that have come in over time! Currently I only really have two issues I'd want to see addressed. 1. For custom battles being able to set the ships or at least the hulls that the enemy uses would be really appreciated. As when I'm making fleets in custom battles I want to be able to take my fleet up against a broadly similar fleet. Like enemy ships having roughly a similar tonnage or similar main gun caliber for Battleships. Ideally I'd want to be able custom build the enemy fleet as well as my own so I can test my own fleet more consistently. For example if I make a change to one of the ships in my fleet and start a new battle currently each fight is mostly different which makes getting a like to like comparison between one change and another very hard. This is amplified even more in the 1940 time setting as taking a 120,000+ ton BB vs old dinky 50,000 ton dreadnoughts isn't really a good test setup unless you just want to stomp some harmless AI ships 2. For the campaigns I quite like them as they are given that this is very much the early development and testing phase of it. But there is one big issue which mostly just shows up in the 1930 campaign. And that is the starting techs you have. As in 1930 the starting techs you have can play a massive role. For example a campaign can almost be decided just on the basis of you having or not having the Radar 2 tech. As if you're enemy has it and you don't they get tons of free shots on you under almost all situations and the same the other way around. There are other techs in the 1930 that play a big role as well like oxygen fueled torpedoes and tube powder or other such options. This can be highly annoying as it pretty much requires you to restart the 1930 campaign over and over until you get good RNG on the techs that you have unlocked. This is also a bit of an issue in earlier campaigns but no where near to the same extent. As the campaigns before 1930 just don't have techs that have any where near the impact as the 1930 campaign. And I don't think it'll be as much as an issue in the 1940 campaign either as you unlock most of the major game changing techs in the 1930s which amplifies the issues with RNG tech rolls as pretty much in the 1930 RNG starting tech plays a vastly outsized role.

Currently in game adding radios to ships adds a percent based weight to the towers on the ship. Which mostly works alright but when you have high tonnage ships like BBs adding in radios adds well over 1,000 tons of weight which is really incorrect. Radio systems in WW2 are complex but each radio system tends to weigh less than 1 ton or just a few tons. Here is a pretty good website going over various WW2 naval radios including their full spec sheets: https://www.navy-radio.com/xmtr-ww2.htm You can see that even the heaviest parts of radios weigh less than 1 ton and it seems like most radios only have a small handful of parts weigh even that much. But it seems most of WW2 radios weigh less than 1 ton total. And this spec sheet seems to fully include the various antennas and other additional pieces of equipment that goes into the radio systems. My suggestion would be to probably change the radio component to be a set of ranges and tech tiers with fixed weights. As radio systems unlike pretty much all other systems that we can select in game have a more or less fixed weight largely independent of the size of the ship it's mounted on.

Partial broadsides have been a long time issue. Good work on figuring out a consistent pattern for it thought!

Further observations. When playing with the Super BBs the AI ship design does really really well when it uses twin turrets. The AI likes to spam turrets and when it does so with twin turrets it tends to end up doing a great job with all it's remaining displacement. But if it goes for triples or god forbid quads it ends up being rather stuck. It uses the same number of those larger turrets as the smaller ones but instead end up ditching most of the good stuff that makes the ships tough like armor and the rest.

As amusing as a bunch of the new ships have been I’ve actually seen a few good and one really great AI battleship. The great one had a 16” belt and a great mix of high end modules and armor and everything with about 10 17” guns. Only issue with the design was it used cordite for some reason. So even though it had great compartmentalizations and all the good stuff and armor it was a constant ammo explosion just from the ammo choice on a similar subject the AI does seem to still have some issues with picking good shell fillers and the latest armor types. But the ai has been vastly better with picking good armor types compared to before! shell filler though does let the AI down a lot still picking all sorts of old fashion fillers when TNT is avalible.

Well so far it feels like the new update is pretty nice! But the torpedo causing my main guns to explode when they hit for a small amount of damage is still there It's really annoying when your super BB is sailing around shrugging off tons of shell fire and then a single lone small torpedo bonks you and your whole ship explodes from a minor hit that should be a non issue based off of the damage numbers and such. Also annoying is how DDs continue to be able to shrug off multiple 8 inch shell hits with 8 inch shells seeming to always over pen them still. Highly annoying as in real life 8 inch HE shells should make fairly short work of any destroyer in very few hits But there definitely some good progress mad! I can no longer make quite as insane ships with stupid amounts of armor and everything And the ai are doing a far far better job designing their war ships! They still tend to be a bit of a glass cannon but the amount of armor they have still ends up feeling reasonable and something I might consider doing myself. Vs previously when I’d easily have like double the armor or more of enemy BBs now my ships only have a few more inches. It still makes a big difference but it’s a huge step in the right direction! and enemy ships now pretty often only carry a single set of torpedos. Reloading torps are still far more common and affordable than they should be but still it’s good progress!

Lots of good points from everyone One thing I will say is BBs and other big gun ships definitely did carry HE shells. Both for shore bombardment. And for use VS light ships like DDs. This is going off of the battle of samar where if the japanese used their 8" HE shells they would have destroyed the DDs easily but instead they were using AP shells which didn't do anywhere near as much damage. So BBs and other such ships should definitely carry HE as they do have valid uses in naval battles. Strictly vs really light targets when there aren't bigger heavier targets that they need to be shooting at. Probably the easiest and quickest way to do it is make HE never overpen. Beyond that just leaving it with only Penning and Partially Penning for when it hits armor enough to stop it but thin enough that the shell still explodes instead of just going splat. But when a HE shell hits thick heavy armor it should just go splat and do nothing like in real life.

HE are contact fused. They should go off more or less as soon as they hit anything. Frankly they shouldn't even penetrate a target considering how they surface detonate. There is technically SAP Semi Armor Piercing which is HE that has some AP power. But even that should easily fuse inside of a DD or any other light target. Frankly HE shells should have 0 chance AT ALL to over pen. With how they detonate on contact.

Christ. I mean I get how you can see a AP shell over penning. After all just look at Taffy 3 where the destroyers shrug off tons of AP shell hits because they don't fuse. But if they were hit by 8" HE shells they would just be deleted. Honestly it's just SUPER annoying that high explosive shells of all things are even capable of over penning considering they explode on contact. After all heavy cruisers should just cast deletus on DDs when using HE shells.

First of all I do agree that the ammo detonations happen rather too frequently espicially from torp hits. Other than that the update seems like a pretty good step in the right direction. The AI still doesn't make well balanced BBs but that hasn't changed since the start really Honestly the main thing I really want is someway to control the designs that I get in custom battles. Heck even just being able to have a fixed enemy fleet I can test multiple designs against would be great. Instead of trying out a new design and then just getting a bunch of weird and rather useless enemies over and over.

So I've been messing around with some nice 8 inch secondaries on my super BBs. And I've noticed that when they are fighting DDs and are firing HE they do a rather piddling amount of damage. The reason is the High Explosive shells are overpenning DDs. Which should just be impossible. These are contact fused high explosive shells. They should hit a destroyer and detonate almost immedietly with devestating effect. Which is exactly what happens when the 8 inch super heavy HE shells actually pen a DD and go off properly. They delete the DD as they should. But somehow almost all of them overpen when they should be contact detonated! Anyone else encountered this issue? Is there anything I can do to mitigate this?

Cool that's what I thought. Wanted to double check as I haven't played in a while

Is all or nothing realistic at this point? As in previous versions even using All or Nothing if you got rid of all extended belt and deck armor as you see in real life All or Nothing would mostly just lead to sadness and sinking ships?

Thanks. As some missions are fun. I just don't like the basic low tech ones.