DougToss

I agree with most of what you said, but you are describing a primary armament. If you have lots of heavy guns, those are you main guns. Now, if you are arguing that a ship laid down in 1900 should have the main armament arranged in broadside, either casemates or like in the age of Nelson, I think that's absolutely absurd and should not be allowed, because it would never be designed or built. Fantasy or no, there has to be some grounding in reality. What nation would allow a 20, 000tn vessel costing what would be roughly $267,606,118 USD in today's currency (based on Dreadnought) with an armament that they would know, from the earliest napkin sketch, would be totally ineffective? I like that players have freedom to design imperfect, even bad designs, I don't think there is any point allowing them to design impossibly terrible ships, especially since that is a recipe for frustration for players that don't understand the theory and practice of ship design.

1. My understanding is that this is more or less how things work already, with NotHood being added recently. Nations do have different hulls available. 2. I agree. 3. Unequivocally no. Members of this community worked very hard during testing to find all sorts of references, firing tables, contemporary and historical work in naval gunnery and ballistics. The simulation will work better (and the game will be more fun) when the ballistics model matches the real results. It makes testing and "balancing" every other system easier because the results are known and can be compared to well-documented reality. A simplified model will radically depart ship designs, naval doctrine and combat from reality. I would argue that it is better to teach players about reality to inform their designs rather than breaking any pretext of realism to accommodate uninformed designs. 4. Semantic, but sure. Regionalized naming could be interesting, different navies used different forms of designation. 5. I don't have a problem with guns under local control in some contexts or before central control, firing or directors were developed, but I'd prefer fire control and gunnery to hew as close to the real theory and practice as possible. If some guns, in some mounts, in some navies were under local control in some situations, I think it ought it be allowed. A main battery of a BC split to engage multiple targets in 1920? No chance.

Is that the difference between bagged and QF charges? Does mechanical versus handling play a role?

The manual for John Tiller's Naval Campaigns is 90+ pages long, I'd say that's pretty close to the gold standard. The Rule The Waves 2 manual clocks in at 75, and it is suggested that players also read the Steam and Iron manual which sits at 18, plus the campaign manual which is 11. The GWAS Jutland manual and playbook are hefty tomes, plus Avalanche has outstanding online articles, like this one on gunnery. It's worth having a good manual, I know it is a lost art, but it is really, truly worth it. I still have the Falcon 4.0 manual, years after switching to DCS because at 580 pages, it still teaches you everything you need to know about air combat, avionics, the F-16 and so much more. Imagine what you could learn from a 600 page book on designing and fighting warships from 1900-1940?

I think in a technical sense, there are a lot of ways the ship designs could be freed up. More placement points, altering hull form and so on, I'm all about it. I think players should be able to design anything a naval design board, naval architect or shipyard would allow, plus or minus some eccentric concepts that while not ideal or practical, were certainly possible. That means putting up with reasonable penalties that would have been found acceptable when they were discovered in the design stage, in trials or in combats. I think casemated 12" guns for example were just on the edge of technical possibility when the game starts, and while they are terrible and inefficient for a variety of reasons, there were apparently plans for Russian predreadnoughts with large calibre main armament mixed between turrets and casemates. 8" secondary armament would be another example. A terrible idea, considering the British found 6" guns useless as secondary armament, bagged charges are much slower and harder to handle than QF shells and so on, but designers then and players now did wonder if it would be better to have guns that could disable a torpedo boat in a single hit. Beyond limiting designs that would immediately capsize, sink during sea trials and so on, the reason I would like some limit in the ship designer is that many players are coming in without any knowledge of warships. I don't care about preventing them from designing ships that are bad in gameplay terms, that's part of the fun and learning process, what I mean is that it may be better to make something actually impossible in the game, rather than explain to the player why it was practically impossible. If a ship would evidently capsize as soon as it was launched, nobody would allow the keel to be laid. A 500% penalty to accuracy is essentially "useless in battle" so again, that is never leaving the design stage. I guess my standard for this would be the designer should reject designs that no shipyard or even the most eccentric designer would sign off on. If a design would evidently be useless in combat and no doctrine could incorporate it, I just don't see how or why it could be built. Basically, nobody would allow for the construction of the Matsushima in 1900, ship design had already moved on, it had proven ineffective in combat, the design philosophy and doctrine of the Canet gun was refuted by the Spanish-American war and would shortly be even more so in the Russo-Japanese war. However I don't know how you can tell the player that (tooltips, encyclopedia, manual), or teach them through gameplay, so restricting them from doing that is effectively saying "you are playing as the head of your nation's naval design board, and what you want to do would not be possible for someone in your position". I know in X-Plane you can design every part of your plane. Do players who don't know about aviation design a plane with one wing, and when it doesn't work get mad quit the game? How does the game teach them how to design a plane, why planes are designed the way they are, and to boil it all down, how airplanes work? I'm still working out my thought on the interplay between player education/training either through information or gameplay, and the designer. I'd love to hear what others think because it really is a puzzle. How to you allow people with no knowledge of warships to design ships, without them getting frustrated when their ships don't work the way they want or expect, for reasons they don't understand, and quit?

I was just about to say, none of those worked out. Even the Hull there, probably the most successful of the bunch, only had that gun for a while. That's with a 8" gun on a 2800 ton ship, an 18" gun is what, 150 tons minimum? That's before whatever kind of ungodly reinforced mount you'd need so that the keel could take the firing and to manage the heel when firing broadside. The Japanese experiment with Canet guns was not successful, Matsushima didn't exactly cover herself in glory.

This will definitely have to be looked at. Both in terms of (sigh) player flexibility with unusual armament arrangements, but also for the campaign where centreline armament will presumably be developed and slowly progress. There was a generation or more of warships designed before all-centreline and super-firing main armament, and it's worth getting right. In the interim, RTW style templates with pre-arranged placement for cross-firing and a weight cost of reinforced decks will do the job.

No light cruiser could withstand the firing of an 18", so I don't understand what the point of the exercise would be. You couldn't even get it out of the yard.

I keep saying historical teaching tools would be great. I would recommend everyone read the books in the reference section of the forum here, and also check out the relevant Osprey titles. They are offering free books weekly during Covid as well. For the Devs, I would suggest making, or hiring someone to make something at least as in-depth as Civpedia. Naval architecture is a complicated business, and designing warships even more so. Possibly, budget permitting, I would reach out to Osprey and see if one of their authors would be interested in making encyclopedia pages outlining the principles of ship design, a glossary of terms, labelled cutaways, diagrams and so on.

I know people have mentioned RTW, I'd like to mention Avalanche Press' Great War at Sea Series, probably the best naval system in a board game ever. I came across it because it is used to train naval officers, and I can see why. Even if you don't want to spring for a copy of one of their titles, the Avalanche website is fantastic and has many fantastic articles on ship design, fleet doctrine and management, and of course combat. I hope some of those Designer's Notes are read by the Devs ( @Nick Thomadis 😉) because I think they thoughtfully outline their principles of game design and balancing granularity and abstraction in a naval game. A computer lets you do more calculations than a table or dice roll, but the principles are the same.

Some of the suggestions made to balance the game based around the Academy missions are ridiculous, and I think that grounding those missions in reality will go a long way towards finally convincing people that 20" guns were not the norm. How could players not be crying out for more accurate and powerful secondary guns (already far, far more accurate and powerful than any such guns and mounts in reality) if a lone capital ship is expected to flight off a flotilla of 40kt destroyers single-handedly?! Having arcade scenarios shapes perceptions of the game's design and goals, especially considering that for many people this is their first expose to naval combat in the first place. Of course it is causing bias towards arcade suggestions. If the scenarios are missions that were imagined as part of real doctrine, and consequently real ships were designed for, fighting those scenarios can be compared to the historical actions, both in testing/feedback, and in the player's conception of naval warfare. When players participate in actions similar to those that were fought, historical combat records can be analyzed and compared to player feedback during testing empirically. That makes the design process and tester feedback process more effective, and to account for my own bias, results in a more realistic/accurate/authentic game. Rather than feeling ships are "unbalanced" or guns "don't feel right" and so on, it would be much more useful for feedback and design changes to see if 4" guns are performing in an environment where the historical results are known. That way there is a point of reference and bias and emotive, "gamey" reactions are taken out of the equation. To put this in concrete terms, if the purpose of Academy missions is to teach players how doctrine, design and combat work, posing realistic questions will better educate them. Let's say we want to teach the player how to design a German Armoured Cruiser. That's a reasonable training goal, and a skill that we can expect them to use in the campaign. We know the doctrine and missions real armoured cruisers were designed for, and we can see those factors at play in the design of the Scharnhorst-class. The situations presented to players to use the ships will influence how they design and employ them, just like real naval architects, staff and flag officers. We want the players to design ships along the same lines as the real people tasked to do that, so for the lesson to work they have to be posed with the same problems. All else being equal, given the problem of designing an Armoured Cruiser to fight the Battle of Coronel, the player should reasonably come up with something along the lines of the Scharnhorst. If done correctly, through practicing the scenario, they should also be able to handle armoured cruisers in this action even if the historical ships are substituted for their own designs. They may not come out as skilled as von Spee, but they should be trained through gameplay to approach the situation in roughly the way he did, with the tools he had. From the design and testing point of view, the feedback from players approaching this scenario can be compared to the historical data. It will be easier to see if guns, armour, ballistics, propulsion, damage, crew effects etc. etc. are working as intended since the inputs match a historical example for which the results, including detailed firsthand accounts and statistics, are known. The empirical feedback from players is simply matched to the extant historical empirical data and the game parameters are adjusted until they align. What players are being asked to do now is "Design a German Armoured Cruiser to fight the Battle of Coronel, where a King George V-class battleship is present on the British side." My problems with this are as follows: What sort of feedback is supposed to spring from that? How can any of that feedback be quantified? There's nothing to compare it to, nothing of the sort ever happened. What information exists, or could exist, that could provide comparison? Are we hoping players can provide meaningful insight into the performance of a 1905 8.3" gun versus 1939 14.7" armour? In short, from a feedback perspective, what is the point of the exercise? 2. How does this train the player in gameplay and prepare them to fight the campaign? Are we teaching players to design ships for scenarios they will reasonably never encounter, and therefore teaching players to design bad ships? What does this exercise teach players about naval doctrine and combat? Does the lesson imparted gel with historical training and doctrine, and thus translate them into acting as a real naval officer would given the same forces and mission? Are we teaching players to manage their fleets and building programs in such a way that they have to design ships in 1905 expecting them to fight state-of-the-art ships 35 years on? In short, from a gameplay training perspective, what are we teaching the player to do? 3. Does this improve players understanding of gameplay mechanics, which is to say, naval warfare? Most people will not be coming into this title with a body of knowledge. The gameplay, academy especially, will shape their perceptions, and as outlined above, those perceptions colour their feedback to devs, but also their approach to the campaign, design and combat. If a player does not know what a Protected Cruiser is, seeing it employed in the environment for which it was designed is more meaningful than a task for which it was ill-suited (Taking on the aforementioned King George V say) . An easy example of this would be seeing the utility of protected cruisers for scouting, cruiser warfare, etc. rather than in match-ups with heavier ships. The lesson ought to be, "this is what a protected cruiser does" rather than "a protected cruiser is weak, and should be 'upgraded' to 'stronger' 'units' like heavy cruisers and battleships. Only when that lesson is learned will they have the conceptual tools to design and fight ships, and manage their fleets and building programs on the campaign layer. In short, from a conceptual perspective, what are we teaching the player about naval warfare?

There is a difference between depicting a few battalions of infantry in Age of Sail and representing a real amphibious operation like the Gallipoli Campaign, which involved nearly a half-million allied troops. Considering that naval gunfire support could be delivered from over 20km away, you would be looking at the largest wargame of all time. I would say that abstracted operations and support are important for the campaign, and could generate interesting battles such as "lay mines in this channel to interdict enemy logistics" or "sortie at night to disrupt enemy transports", but asking for any kind of fidelity (RTW2+Combat Mission/Graviteam played on the same map) is impossible.

This is a great write-up on the RTW campaign. It's a fun little read and I hope to be making all of those same choices in Dreadnoughts. Crucially, reality was not balanced. The UK had a different budget, different fleet composition, different design philosophy and different capabilities than Austria-Hungary. That is rooted in so many historical, geographical, geopolitical and economic factors that any game in which Austria-Hungary starts out on a "balanced" (read as: even) footing as the UK for all intents and purposes does not take place on Earth. A maritime power with a globe-spanning empire, incredibly strong naval tradition, civilian seafaring tradition, economy based on maritime trade and the first power to industrialize is going to be incomparably more powerful than a central European land power with a short coastline, where the mission of the Navy is A) Protect the coast B ) Exist as a fleet-in-being and maybe fight the Italians, C) national prestige. If you really want to get into it, you could make the argument that the nature of the Dual-Monarchy after the Compromise of 1867 meant that it could not have a naval administration as effective as the Admiralty, and the dual power structure would mean that any attempts to expand the Navy would be resisted by Hungary, which as a landlocked nation, would not see as naval expenditure as being in the national interest to the same (if any) extent. Beyond that, without going too far into the racial and national composition and tensions within the empire, the coastline, while important, is a long way from Vienna and not inhabited by Germans or Hungarians, which means the sea and naval power were peripheral. Finally, the process of recruitment, selection and training of a national navy is complex in a state where many, if not most, citizens have never seen the sea, and the military operates in six languages. I'm not saying the player should figure out how to recruit sailors from the Czech regions of the empire, or if ships should be crewed by a single nation, mixed crews separated by department (historically, many gun crews were Hungarian, for example) or if mandatory language instruction should be part of every sailor's training (and good luck politically deciding on an official language for the sea service!), rather that AH should have a harder time building the navy than the UK. It made a difference that every British schoolboy knew English, grew up within sight of the sea and had been told stories of Trafalgar and the Glorious First of June from infancy. Ideally the player should be able to learn why, if they are historically inclined, but these differences matter in real concrete ways that should have real concrete implications in the game. It is critical that difference be represented in the campaign, because if these factors are abstracted away in hopes of "balance" and the only difference between nations is start position, then you might as well be playing Chinese Chequers on a nautical themed board.

I'm glad UI is getting some love. Tooltips or an encyclopedia explaining some of the principles of ship design would go a long way to initiating the non-grogs. Explaining what secondary armament is, with recommendations for mounts, calibre and a quick summation of its usage would go a long way to mollify complaints that secondary guns aren't accurate or hard hitting (historically, they weren't and weren't expected to be). Just one example but there are so many examples of posts here like "Why can't my ship (do thing no ship could be expected to do or has ever done)?" Top speed is an example of this, where people who have never been at sea and haven't previously been interested in warship design think that "speedy" and "manoeuvrable" ships made 55kts and handled like Ferraris. Explaining that a ship that made 30kts and could turn in radius xyz were handy would help. These little educational prompts help match expectations to reality, rather than making the game purposefully unrealistic to match uninformed expectations.

More favourable media coverage on the heels of the last update. I agree wholeheartedly, and as a grog hope to see depth and realism be real considerations as the title continues to be fleshed out. This title has the change to be a once-in-a-lifetime wargame, like Harpoon, which wargamers played in various iterations from 1989 until 2013 when Command: Modern Air Naval Operations came out. If grogs like a game, they'll play it forever. Let's get this one right.

Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts was featured in a Wargamer editorial. Grogs are excited for this title, and I hope the "no fun brigade" is listened to as development continues. Wargamers may not be a huge market, but they are a loyal one.

"RTW2 but 3D" is pretty much what I'm wishing for here.

I like many of the changes here but protection, gunnery, propulsion and damage still need systemic reworks and not just more features. For example, I really like the flash fires but the armour modelling is still very simple and belt and turret armour is not very granular. Belts are huge, extending from just below the deck to what seems to be the waterline, and that shapes how protection works, the same is true for turret armour. I'm not saying that the bulkheads and layout of every hoist, magazine and turret be modelled, but that the flash fire feature will work much better when damage, damage control, protection and gunnery are more fleshed out. The game still doesn't really model why British BCs exploded at Jutland, at least not until ballistics, penetration, turret roof armour, shell handling procedures and something modelling crew complacency or the tradeoffs of safety-vs-speed is modelled. Lots of steps in the right direction though.

It would be nice if belts had vertical height thickness instead of being from the deck to the keel. I think that would made a huge difference, as some ships had thick yet narrow belts.

A warship weighing several thousand tonnes cannot reverse in any way that would be meaningful in combat due to simple physics. Tugboats and harbour craft weigh less, move with less momentum and are designed for manoeuvres like that. "Reverse" on a warship is intended to slow the vessel or for moving about moorings, not battle. I don't believe there is a single example of a ship in combat moving backwards.

I mean it makes sense to me that they'd want to make sure all of the systems in ship design were working with pre-designed ships before they removed all constraints. There are still issues with hull form horsepower requirements and floatation, I can't imagine what it would be like right now with the system showcased in the video.

I believe the dev blog about the new update mentioned which is which but I suppose I can go take a look as well

Absolutely. It has to do with the accuracy curve of different calibers over range being flattened in the latest update. Basically, by making smaller calibers more accurate, coupled with their rate of fire, the relative advantage of large calibers is greatly reduced. I've posted about it a length before, linked below: Now, because the accuracy system is somewhat opaque to mean I can't determine is this is all the effect of caliber per se, or the modifiers applied to secondary mountings. The effect is the same though, the purposes for and advantages of unitary caliber all-big-gun armaments are reduced. I don't believe this problem lies with the rate of fire, and I certainly don't think it (or any factor!) should be "balanced", but rather reproduce historical results. Which is largely does. Of course past a certain shell weight, hand-worked guns are not faster than mechanically handled ammunition of a larger caliber. A 4" shell may only weigh 33lbs to the 6" 100lbs, but on a rolling pitching deck and passing ammunition by hand from ammunition lockers, there will be a point of diminishing returns. As British and German testing shows, greater rate of fire did not lead to greater rate of hits by smaller caliber guns. Without this factor, smaller calibers are presently "deadlier" in UA:D than in reality, by a large margin. In so far as their relative lack of explosive filler or penetration is outweighed by them hitting more often. In short - why is a 7in gun relatively deadlier than a 13in? Because it is more accurate than it should be, and therefore hits more due to its higher rate of fire.

Brilliant work. Paging @RAMJB, @Steeltrap, @arkhangelsk

The easiest way to do that would be what RTW does: Have historical templates for the overall layout, and use realistic parameters so the AI can build ships with the firepower/mobility/protection suited for countering their strategic threats, with their available technology, budget and fitting into their doctrine. Creating arcade "balance" will never lead to historically correct player or AI ships, and letting players run completely buck wild will break AI designs as any good AI would attempt to build ships to counter threats that never existed in reality. What would a battleship look like if 7in guns were as deadly as 13in? That's the situation we're in now.