llib

I think munitions costs are abstracted in maintenance. And yes I know, that gets paid whether or not ships takes any part in combat, though there definitely is some combat out of player control being abstracted so it doesn't break immersion. I have noticed there are repair costs but not their height. Repairing heavily damaged ship should be costly, though.

There are number of things here... 1) Smoke screens... them giving malus to aiming is fine, ships blowing smoke would get almost covered in it, this would make rangefinders harder to align. Not so good that smoke screen isn't staying, though... and not sure if its currently obstructing the view beyond it or not (it should). 2) Bearing to smoke on the horizon... yes, that should exist, or at least be better than 90% degree range we have now. A bit complicating this issue is that campaign isn't probably going to be what I hoped it to be (i.e., campaign where actually ship positions are controlled and tracked and combat starts when ships actually meet) rather than chance encounters we look we are going to get, which means there is need for some abstraction in some unintuitive ways (in real life, you could not shoot at first contact because ship could be yours or neutral). 3) Need to check weather/time indicator, indeed - got my first night battle, and oh is it easier to get torpedoed at night... 4) Spotting distance... this probably needs some tweaks, though sometimes it feels right, sometimes it feels wrong one way or the other, and I haven't been watching the weather indicator usually. 5) Not sure right away but crew levels may matter in this.. how much and whether sufficiently, not sure, but recalls recalling yesterday watching Drach's video on UK involvement in Baltics where they sneaked torpedo boat on Soviets and blasted them from point blank range, and Soviets were definitely shooting someone/were in combat...

I think it's safe to assume these things are going mostly in order/schedule of the devs and trying to organize it for them is pretty futile. Also apart from bugs and maybe torpedoes sometimes seeming to operate proximity fuze (for bad and for good, works for and against ai) don't see anything obviously wrong/not working as intended to be honest.

Speed+protection+torpedoes rather rule. With the torpedo boats, two variants: One is gunboat, this works wonders against unprotected designs (such as contraption light cruiser with 10x5-in guns, but only 4x3-in gun secondaries and no torpedoes. Transports are likewise eaten alive by those.) On the other hand, against heavy cruisers and battleships, gunboat variant sucks, because it doesn't have speed to close quickly into torpedo range, maneuver/flank etc. There I find speedboats much better - single 2-in gun, single torpedo tube, 27+ knots speed(which at that point is waaay faster than anything computer does). AI does not compartmentalize that much, and this means even single torpedo usually means crippling damage (particularly in loss of speed, which results in more torpedo boats closing in for the kill). In the first campaign, AI has put torpedoes on their cruisers. In the second, it has not, and overall the desings were weaker. They were also cheaper, which meant early on they had numerical advantage and this did translate into more transports lost in calculations. However I have turned that around with better ships and it's just been going downhill with Germany.

I'll be adding more feedback as a separate post to not confuse what was added in edit. -In one prolonged battle, the gun/torpedo circles as well as targeting lines (the red ones) kind of seemed disappear under water for the most part in the later part of battle. I tried to check I had the "gun ranges" feature enabled (by turning it off and on couple times) but this did not help. The captions of the circles(what is it for and the distance - for example Torp 0.9km - still were visible. -In the same battle(where above behavior was observed), I was torpedoing few ships that were already dead in the water (heavily damaged). However, the torpedoes went under them (or just through them). This was not one torpedo, but at least three(I think four), with three different ships being targeted (one was torpedo boat, but two were heavy cruisers). Eariler torpedo hits were fine. Dunno if something happened with the sea level plane, or if maybe the engine calculated hit position in the wrong direction (partially flooded ships would have deeper part in water, meaning hit zone would be elsewhere, I don't know if game is trying to calculate that, but if it is, one possibility is it's having substraction/addition switched in some place. I need to emphasize I only saw this in one battle which was rather long stern chase. One other possibility comes to mind, whether the ships firing torpedoes may have been deeper in the water (I mean flooded). While this could in theory be the case, I don't think it was the case of all of them, and in any case torpedo should float fixed distance from surface, not fixed distance from launcher that fired it.

Hi. Haven't noticed originally the campaign was released until couple days back, but have played a bit of campaign. 1) Launcher suggestion: Although I have only played for about three days, after two of them update was triggered, and this either deleted or made unavailable my old campaign. Please consider adding the option to select whether automatically update game or not into the launcher(should be just a tick selection). I actually thought there was such option but don't see it now. 2) Question about ship design - when I copy existing design, I can't add more modern system. For example, after researching new version of 2-in gun, I could not replace it in existing design. That's not good for convenience of updating existing design slightly, also should there be a feature to upgrade/retrofit ships(and there definitely should be one) that would make that feature almost useless. 3) Is there currently ship upgrade feature? Haven't really searched for and had not much opportunity to look around. 4) On the campaign menu, the box with information needs to be scrollable. 5) Fleet menu needs to become better and allow more organization, ideally to form units into squadrons and fleets. 6) In situation where one side has more ships and the other has better ships, the "fair" 1:1 battles can be annoying. This should probably work together with 5 in that units can be organized and operate together in predictable manner. Though I do realize this is going to be a bit difficult to balance. 7)To be perfectly honest, I expected game campaign to be real-time with control over fleet operations, reconnaissance, actions and reactions, rather than turn-based and random chance encounters based on ships in areas. And with turn-based campaign and chance encounters I guess it's never going to be quite what I hoped for, which does not mean it will be bad game just not as great as I thought it would be. If this is what you are currently implementing (i.e. this isn't just placeholder) probably switching to RT would be too big effort, so maybe leave that to version 1.5 or 2. 8 ) Ship design wise, I let the AI design ships first round, and they weren't bad, though Germany got better BBs first time, their CA's had torpedoes (mine did not), CL's on both sides got torpedoes. For the second campaign I designed my ships, and I went for fewer but better, as a result I outclass the enemy one on one in all classes. Weirdly enough, for the non-torpedo boats, Germany only has side launchers on their battleships and no launchers on their cruisers. 9 ) Torpedoes... early on, they are very effective. And perhaps a bit too much so. I don't think the issue is that they do so much damage, that's probably accurate and typically with enough bulkheads ships can survive hits, however perhaps the issue is that they work a bit too reliably in terms of not malfunctioning(no duds), going in perfect straight lines (although I don't really know much about early era torpedoes, I know later torpedoes had many issues and I would expect early ones to have them too). 10) Damage persistence - it looks like there is now no way to persistently disable engines in the battle. That's a problem. This leads to weird cases like torpedo boat getting hit over and over into engines (including hits with torpedoes), but if it stays alive long enough that damage is always repaired and ship sails on like nothing happened. I think this should change. I don't mind ships sometimes surviving huge amount of damage, but there should at least be possibility for them to be disabled for the battle. This can currently happen to guns, but seems not engines. EDIT: 11) Probably more than one campaign in progress should be allowed 😉 12) In the ship designer, when trying to set target speed, the popup blocks the speed view. This makes it impossible to see currently selected speed and is very frustrating/annoying. Please do something about that, two possible improvements: -In addition to mouse dragging, allow mouse selection of the edit field but keyboard finetuning, so that the popup window can be someplace else when changing speed. This is probably good idea to do anyway, because even with unblocked window finer selection of particular target speed is tricky and mouse selection would be better. -change the way popup is triggered or how long it stays EDIT2: Wanted to add, also had lot of fun with the game already. So developers, thank you so far and keep coding 🙂

By the way one thing I wonder is following: -Most of people here probably know how few lucky hits could have decisive effect on engagement, even if all they do is cut some cables which disables fire control. Has anyone actually tried to design and use timed/bursting shell against ships? I mean one that would effectively cover large area with relatively small shrapnels, taking out all exposed electronic/equipment/manpower on large area of ship... Or if not that, were things like 15-inch shrapnel shells of QE/Rewnown/Hood/Revenge classes ever used against ships? Or were the special Yapan anti-air 18-inch shells fired against the opposing DD/DE's? I'd expect both of those to have competely debilitating effect on enemy ship...

So the changes make some mission extremely difficult, in particular semi-dreadnought one - no matter what you do you end up with inferior ship, and the more numerous large guns are decisive at this point and you can't hope to have more firepower. I just had a CL hit in the bow belt extended with 2'' gun and CL exploded in seconds. Now my understanding is that even the BC's that so infamously blown up did not had essential ship parts virtually unprotected? So this kind of damage would seem ridiculous. Unless it could have been forward firing torpedo magazine, but how do I even find out whether ship has torpedo in that position, and how do I find out which parts are protected by main armor and which parts are not? Now with regards to effective defense against destroyers(resp. torpedo attack) - my understanding is that there was only one, that is to turn stern to face enemy, speed away, which will 1) Reduce your cross-section exposed 2) Increases distance (more torpedoes can run out of propellant) 3) Gives maximum time to detect torpedo and have chance avoiding it by maneuvering The only negative is that you get less effective spotters. I think most of here know how did the battle off Samar go, and that typically, destroyers did not tended to be blown out of water by ranged naval gunfire too quickly and charging into them was not the best idea ever. There are of course other examples such as battle for Narvik (first and second) that also make point that at close range they can be killed, and torpedoes can be lethal. For that matter, I understand that major part of warships design was separation of engine and boiler rooms into multiple separate units, which had drastical impact on survivability. But this is not possible to control any better than number of compartments, so it is for example not immediately clear how many engine rooms there are (I don't see it anywhere in the stats either). By the way, I would hope we would get ability to save ship desings for custom battle and eventually desing(or chose from saved) all categories of ships.