Masonator

"The squadron flagship went down around 13:30 or so, and shortly thereafter the Rear Admiral, Light Forces came alongside aboard the torpedo boat TB.43 in order to transfer his flag. The Rear Admiral was brought aboard Caernarvon with little incident."

This might be just a nitpick, but I find it really annoying when the AI builds superbattleships as soon as the hulls become available, even if the player isn't using their own super hulls. Building historical ships is pointless, because the AI will always come out with a super-Yamato mounting 19- or 20-inch guns and all the module trimmings - even on obsolete dreadnought hulls, which just looks ridiculous and totally breaks the immersion. It would be very nice if the AI maximum fleet tonnage and gun calibre scaled according to the player's own tonnage and guns, perhaps up to a maximum of 120% or so. It's mildly infuriating to successfully sink an entire enemy fleet, only to have all of your remaining ships destroyed by a single super-ship, endlessly running away from you, that your heaviest guns can't even scratch. Does this bother anyone else? Am I going crazy?

I don't even want to know anymore. It was fighting this abomination, too.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/34030/Total_War_NAPOLEON__Definitive_Edition/

Fixed formation mechanics so the game is playable with more than 1-3 ships again. Other than that, some more cruiser superstructures for all nations would be wonderful, especially for the British and Russians. Some wicked cruisers out there, I'd love to build a County- or Sverdlov-class.

A penetrating hit deals most of its damage with the bursting charge after it's made it through the armour. The vast majority of its kinetic energy is spent punching through the armour itself. It's still a huge impact, but centered over a very small area. You only observe the "sledgehammer effect" as we'll call it from non-penetrating hits, where the full impact force is distributed over a wider area when the armour plate is rung like a bell.

Uh, yeah. That's literally how it works, dude. And how it works historically. The sheer amount of kinetic energy transferred by a 1.5t 15" armour-piercing shell smashing into your ship, even if it doesn't physically penetrate your armour, is still more than enough to knock off your propellers, cave in your hull plating causing rapid flooding, knock your shafts out of alignment with their turbines, knock your shafts clean off their bearings, jam your turret mechanisms, etc. There's a whole host of things that can go wrong. Here's a picture of a 13.5" hit on the German battlecruiser Seydlitz at Jutland. While the shell didn't penetrate, it buckled the hull, blew part of her armour belt into the sea, and let in thousands of tons of water. Here's a 15" hit, also on Seydlitz, though this time it did penetrate. You can see the shell blew clean through over 9.5" of solid steel, and impacted with enough force to shatter the surrounding plating like glass. No ship, regardless of how well-built or heavily-armoured, can shrug off naval rifles forever.

This. The game is developed by, what, 10-15 people max? This isn't a big-budget AAA production to begin with, and the bloody game is still in pre-alpha. I also have great expectations for this game, but I believe it's in everyone's best interests if we as a community set the sights a little lower here.

Semi-auto means exactly what it says in the description. Mechanical devices assist the gun crew in loading, but still require human input. An example of semi-automatic guns would be the Iowa-class, seen here. As you can see, the shell hoists and ram are powered mechanical devices, but the actual powder bags and projectile are handled at some point in the process by human crewmen to get them to the gun breech. A fully automatic loading mechanism would dispense with the loading crew entirely and complete the entire process with automated equipment (eg, a shell carousel for the projectiles, dispensers for the charge bags, etc). I don't believe such a system was ever used in practice by a battleship-grade weapon, but they most definitely existed for smaller guns. Totally agree that weapons ≥8" should be restricted to semi-auto at best, however reload times for capital ship guns need a buff across the board. The Royal Navy BL 15"/42 Mk.I (the guns used aboard the Queen Elizabeths, Revenges, Renowns, Hood, and Vanguard) had a practical - not maximum, but practical, ie sustained - rate of fire of 2 rounds per minute, or a reload time per-gun of ~30 seconds, depending on the specific mounting in question. Vanguard's MkI(N) mounts and Hood's MkII mounts reloaded in 32 seconds, while all MkI and MkI* mounts reloaded in 36 (Jane's). In-game, the only way to achieve this is with Light or Standard shells and Auto-loading, which is completely nonrepresentative of the historical design and capabilities of the guns in question. Until the USN 16"/45 entered service in the early 1920s, the 15" AP shell was the heaviest shell of any capital ship gun in the world, and the shell weights and velocities as depicted in-game roughly correspond to Heavy shells (as it should). The in-game Mark 3+ guns should thus be able to manage around 30 seconds per salvo with Heavy shells, while guns ≤Mark II should reload in around 35. These numbers simply cannot be achieved in-game even with autoloaders, let alone with Semi-Auto as it should historically be.

I present to you the mighty HMS Inflexible, the latest capital ship of His Majesty's navy! Featuring twelve (yes, twelve!) 14" guns in three quadruple turrets, in 1923, and absolutely nothing in the way of armour, internal subdivision, or secondary armament, these blisteringly-fast battlecruisers will surely show the Boche what's what in the name of the King. Britannia rules the waves! As predicted, they had absolutely no armour, piss-poor module selection, and minimum bulkheads. All four were sunk within the opening stages of the match, and the newly-broken formation system prevented my Queen Elizabeths from forming a cohesive battleline before the German dreadnoughts smashed them to pieces. Oh well. I guess I'll just go back to waiting for modern British towers.

Your radar set is older, and has a lower range - but it's mounted higher up relative to the water, so it's less affected by the weather conditions and can see further over the horizon. Conversely, the destroyers' radar is newer and thus has a longer range, but is also mounted much closer to the surface relative to your own array, and thus suffers from weather occlusion, sea scatter, and the horizon obscuring the return. All of which affects your equipment to a much lesser degree, due to its mounting position high on the tall mast of an already quite tall warship. You can see this effect historically during the Pacific Campaign of WWII - older carriers and Standard-class battleships frequently detected incoming Japanese aircraft long before their escorting destroyers did, even though their radar equipment was outdated by 1942. They could simply see significantly further out than the destroyers could because their radar emitters were mounted significantly higher off the surface. I don't see anything wrong with this. This is the way it's supposed to work.

Displacement in this game is way higher than it would ever be irl. I built my ships according to all of the numbers for USS Iowa - it came out at well over 71,000t for a ship that displaced 48,000t in real life. This can be observed on every type of ship across all nations, the hulls and components all weigh massively more than they should.

In custom battles, can the AI please stop building super-ships that are completely unable to be sunk by normal battleships? This shit is effing ridiculous. This monster sank two Iowas and barely took any damage in return. It's positively broken.

Barbette IV, Citadel IV (turtleback), regular ammo load, no torps installed. It's completely broken.

It weighs more because your speed is set to the same as it would be with turbines installed, meaning you're effectively installing a MUCH heavier engine for the same amount of power. This is why your total displacement is increasing when choosing Diesel II. As I stated earlier, this is because diesels have a significantly worse power-to-weight (P:W) ratio than turbines. For example, a diesel producing 8,800shp is only sufficient to drive a 5,100t warship at 18 kts at maximum load, while a turbine that weighs significantly less than the diesel produces ~23,500shp and can propel the same ship at 26 kts at full power, and even faster with safety restrictions lifted. If you lower your selected max speed setting from 27 kts to ~15 kts, you'll find the diesel is much more efficient at that speed. Maximum speed is the price you pay for the simplicity and massively reduced fuel consumption. They're listed under auxiliaries because a TED is a small, auxiliary engine (driven either by exhaust gases from the propulsion turbines, or less-commonly with its own steam supply), coupled to an AC generator in order to supply electrical power. On older ships, such as those during the period represented in UA:D, they were driven by smaller, auxiliary steam turbines. On modern ships, these are almost universally driven by diesel engines. It's not a propulsion engine, it's a generator set - hence why it's listed under Auxiliaries. Adding hybrid propulsion as I've suggested would require a rework of the current Engine selections, splitting them into two separate categories - Cruise Engines and Sprint Engines. Aboard most modern warships, diesels are your cruise engines - you trade slower speeds for the massive increases in operational range offered by the diesel's reduced fuel consumption. Modern warships only use their turbines as sprint engines, which are used where operational concerns (such as combat, tight maneuvering, higher speed requirement, etc) offset their huge fuel draw. tl;dr diesels let you go farther but slower, whereas turbines limit your range but let you get there faster.

Some theories I have on them: 1. The reduced weight for Operational Range, Fuel, etc. is the way the devs have chosen to model their reduced fuel consumption - in that they actually consume the same amount of fuel, but the diesel fuel simply weighs less and affects your stability to a lesser degree. Not the most accurate way to model it, but it works. 2. In the current build of the game, fuel consumption isn't modeled at all - both in the Naval Academy and Custom Battles. I'm positive they'll have a much greater effect in the campaign, where the reduced fuel consumption relative to turbines will offset their added weight. 3. Diesels definitely aren't lighter than turbines. Cheaper, less complex, and easier on fuel - absolutely. But lighter? Definitely not. I'm a naval Marine Engineer IRL and one of our gas turbines only weighs about 2/3rds as much as our propulsion diesel - which we can see is modeled accurately in the game. Diesels also produce significantly less power than a turbine (the price you pay for the fuel economy and simplicity), meaning you need a lot more engine to pull the same amount of power out of them that you'd get with a much smaller turbine. I wish UA:D would let us build ships with hybrid propulsion, such as CODOG/COSOD setups where the ship has diesel engines for cruising and turbines for action. Regardless, hope this clarifies something. They still need some work, but they're not completely useless - I'm sure they'll be monsters in the campaign, which is why they're your last unlock.

It's so utterly broken that the torpedo literally hit me at the extreme aft end of the ship (I'm talking in line with the rudderpost, or even further abaft it), and still caused an ammo detonation that destroyed an otherwise-undamaged battlecruiser, battleship, and heavy cruiser in one hit each. All three ships were taken out by the exact same type of hit. It's a complete load of shite.

Torpedoes detonating magazines is the dumbest addition to this game yet. I can go into custom battles, set myself up with 4 maxed-out super-battleships at 130,000 tonnes displacement, Anti-Torp V torpedo belts, bristling with guns, and face off against nothing but 6 destroyers. The destroyer squadron will win 10 times out of 10 because the AI will always default to 24" torps as soon as they're available, which are practically guaranteed to detonate magazines and one-shot whatever ship they hit, every time. It completely ruins the pace of the game and is positively infuriating to try and deal with. For reference, here's a picture of a custom battle I set up where a Dreadnought battleship, one heavy cruiser, one light cruiser, five destroyers, and a recreation of HMS Hood engaged a German transport fleet escorted by two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, a Dreadnought battleship, and 6 destroyers. Literally one single torpedo hit from a destroyer struck Hood on the hello kittying rudder, somehow magically detonated her magazines, and sunk her in one hit. Minutes later the exact same thing happened to my battleship, then again to my heavy cruiser. It's complete and utter bullshit.

Hey all, just a quick question for those that know; which hull is which in the shipyard? The patch notes for the most recent alpha version (Alpha-4 at time of writing) mention adding hulls specifically based on Bismarck and Hood, but the actual names for the hulls in the shipyard are left (intentionally) vague. Does anybody know which hulls are based on which real-world ship classes?