GUTB

I don't know why this is so hard to understand. The game menu says the 18" shell damage is 8x higher than the 12" shell damage. This is the exponential damage increase. It doesn't make sense in reality, but whatever let's go with it. The POINT is the in-game effectiveness of the shell (ie, the ability to sink ships) is MUCH higher than what the damage stat suggests.

There's something definitely wrong with 18" Lyditte 2. Just try it. Super heavy, 30km range. Switch to HE, and watch as ships get gutted on single deck pens. There's some kind of internal multiplier which is blowing them out of proportion.

It boggles me how someone can't tell the AI is cheating. Even if you're willing to pretend the AI has the same accuracy and penetration / detonation chance, etc, as the player, you absolutely can't fail to notice the AI's miraculous damage control. Hey where can I equip a mass teleporter bilge pump?

You're using the wrong funnels. But I'll admit that I thought the OP was showing a BC, not a BB in which case the hull layout isn't illegal. Trying it as a dreadnaught I was able to achieve the 15% accuracy at close range....now obviously 9" guns are useless to a player vs the AI, but vs a player the rof and being stuck with non-enhanced damage control and protection / penetration it can spell trouble.

I like how no one points out how the AI cheats like crazy. There's no way that ship is getting to 15% accuracy at that speed at tech level. Also that hull maxes out 22.5k t, the AI just slaps what it wants on it and doesn't care about weight restrictions, possibly up to a limit. That hull is also illegal, you can't arrange those funnels that way. I know because I just tried building it -- the closest I could get it messing around with funnel options and accuracy got up to 9% or so at close range...that's with a particularly slow AI. Also, the AI cheats like mad in damage control. No amount of money or weight can be scarified to get AI-levels of damage control cheating. The AI just cheats. The player is forced to build ships with maximum stability and gunnery tech to get decent accuracy -- that also means not having 3 funnels generating huge amounts of smoke interference -- while the AI just cheats. Simple as that.

The AI's brutal cheating with flooding makes these missions a huge PITA.

I believe the armor values you see in the menus is some standardized minimum strength steel. The figure you see in the armor thickness settings is the same but normalized via weight and cost. Eg, 10" is 10" regardless of what kind of armor type , the difference is how much each unit costs and weighs. I believe this is why the in-game tooltip shows extremely high armor values sometimes, it's representing higher quality armor via thickness of minimum quality armor to provide an indication of relative strength vs the armor piercing value.

If you want to see how messed up the damage model is, try building a BB with 18" super heavy lyditte II guns for a custom engagement at 30km. Use HE. You can literally one-shot stuff doing this. One penetrating hit can completely gut an enemy BB. The huge bonus to deck penetrating hits at that range seems to allows HE shells to penetrate the typically thin deck armor the AI puts out.

Just ran a test of 12 inch vs 18 inch effectiveness of sinking a battleship. 12" = 264 penetrating hits to sink 18" = 7 penetrating hits to sink. According the game the 18" shells have over 8x the damage compared to 12" shells. However, the 18" shells had 38x the effectiveness. It's very clear the model heavily skews upward as gun caliber goes up.

Is there even going to be a campaign mode at this point? Things appear to be moving really slow. I wonder if they've already released to the game and just called it an alpha.

Generally I find late game tech triples are better than twins because even though individually each turret causes greater pitch, adding more turrets to the hull results in a much increased pitch vs using less triples. For example in the following layout: [2] [2] (Sec) (Pri) [2] [2] you get two pairs of super-firing twin turrets putting 8 barrels on target. With [3] (Sec) (Pri) [3] you get 6 barrels on target, but the pitch is greatly reduced resulting in a significant accuracy buff meaning even after reduction in ROF and accuracy you'll still come out on top since you can use the weight savings for larger caliber guns which is always better in this game than having more smaller calibers. For example, [3x18] (Sec) (Pri) [3x18] will always be better than [2x16] [2x16] (Sec) (Pri) [2x16] [2x16].

Does the game model ballistic computers? I assume that is baked into tower tech levels.

Another area of unbalance: BCs vs DDs vs BBs. A lot us know that the game isn't balanced against torpedos. If you send a high speed BC armed with nothing but torps against a BB the BB stands no chance. If you try to do the same thing with a DD, you'd think a DD would do as well given its much smaller size; if a BB has so much trouble hitting a BC, you'd think a DD going a few kts slower would be just as hard or harder to hit...but nope. You'll find secondaries have a decent chance to hit DDs no mater what.

Well....look. Historically all ship classes could be fit with hydrophones, and it's completely a-historical that anything larger than a light cruiser in this game can't have them. BUT! What's even more a-historical is the virtual reality drone camera coverage of the battlefield which includes not only information on whether a ship has fired their torpedoes or not but also the remaining time for reloading them! That's straight up cheating and which does at least partially counter the lack of hydrophones. There's another a-historical thing too -- in reality someone on the bridge of a ship which detected a torpedo launch would be doing math to plot the course of the torpedoes to figure out when and how to evade. In the game we get no aid whatsoever, it's up to us to just eyeball / feel it out. Ultimately this game's subject matter is big ships, things which were rendered obsolete by torpedos even as the dreadnoughts were in their prime. When naval planes with radios came on the scene the battleship was also screwed.

A couple of things. I notice that Naval Academy missions often cheat. The other thing is a lot of people don't know how to play this game so you see youtubers who make bad ships by just cramming as many guns as possible into a hull. Stability, tech and speed have a huge impact on accuracy. The stat you want to pay attention to when building a ship is "pitch". So, you pick a hull with the highest Stability, then when you are putting it together you pay attention to the pitch. Putting towers and guns closer to the center of the ship improves pitch. Multiple hulls, bulkheads, torp protection improves pitch. Armor can also help. Pitch will go out of control as you put guns all up and down the deck. The weight balance isn't very important even though the game alerts you with large text, maximize pitch even if it means there is a weight imbalance. What this does is greatly improve the stability bonus to accuracy AND the bonus to cruise speed (lowering the speed just below your full speed marker usually -- ie, if max speed is 24 kts, cruising around 18 kts will give you the max accuracy bonus). If you design a low pitch ship using the most stable hull and be sure to find your optimum cruise speed you will see a large accuracy improvement.

Also looks like they did a stealth buff to penetration after this last hotfix. In testing today I noticed that lower caliber shells, even 6 inch shells, doing ping damage pens / partial pens regardless of armor thickness. This is obviously an attempt to improve effectiveness of more guns, but it's still kind of silly seeing 15" shells penning 22" belts from 20k away for a few points of damage.

The 18" shell doesn't do 17% more damage, or 25%, 50%, or even twice the damage. It appears to do around 4 times the damage conservatively speaking. Another way to demonstrate this, build a ship with a 1x1 18" super heavy tube powder gun and slap something minimal on the other end to fill the 2 gun requirement. Armor it up to make sure it's safe from return fire, and do a 1v1 with the AI. Sail it up to close range with the enemy ship and try not to get torped while doing this. See how effortlessly you're 1x1 18" gun sinks the AI. In reality the US super heavy 16" shells had only a little less armor penetration compared to the Japanese 18.1" shells, and had a little less than half the bursting charge. In this game however, the 16" might as well be a airsoft rifle compared to an elephant gun.

Okay, try this. Build a US battleship with 4x3 17" guns, super heavy, tube powder, max tech and tower. Do a vs 5 Japanese battleships at 15k range, 1940. Then try it again except replace the guns with 4x1 18". Come back with the results. Spoiler: 4 18" shell salvos do more damage than 16 17" shell salvos. 18" shells weigh just 17% more but do WAY more damage. Damage balance is way out of whack.

Well after the latest update it looks like the high speed stealth field was fixed -- there's a major hit decrease but it seems like enemy fire can still hit me if I build a 40+ kt ship. Before the update having a high speed design was essentially a stealth field. With this update there's no point to go with high speed because when the enemy hits you, which is now possible, you lose your speed and the heavy sacrifices made to achieve that speed becomes a liability. 21-24 kts appears to be the sweet spot. There appears to be no reason at all not to always pick forced aspiration and turbines. Guns are still massively imbalanced. The highest caliber guns still do many times the damage of smaller guns as their weight difference would otherwise suggest. 4, 5 and 6 inch guns are useless, 2 and 3 inch guns appear to be just cosmetic. 8 inch secondaries can cause significant damage to DDs and CLs while 4 and 6 inch guns do plink damage. It looks like you still have to chose the largest possible calibers at all times, there's no benefit in selecting smaller calibers unless you're a big ship going up against DDs and cruisers in which case accuracy is more important because using high damage powder will one-shot these smaller ships. Being a cruiser going up against a battleship of any type is means you can't use guns, 11 inch are just ineffective regardless of range, you have to use torps and hope you don't get plugged.

Okay guys, let's talk about the balance of this game. It's seriously out of whack. A few examples: Secondaries are useless below 8 inches. Game puts way too much power emphasis on larger guns. For example, a 18 inch hit may one-shot something whereas it could take dozens of 16 inch hits or hundreds of 6 inch hits to cause significant damage. Balance between hulls vastly favors higher weight classes over lower weight classes. For example, a heavy cruiser can barely scratch a battleship unless torpedoes are used. Torpedoes are greatly overpowered / anti-torpedo design features are under-powered. No matter how much anti-torp and how thick your belt is a hit is still going to damage your engine making you a sitting duck for further torp hits. Lower tech designs can't hit the broadside of a barn and need to be at virtual point bank range before accuracy becomes respectable, but higher tech designs have great accuracy at over 20km away.

I beat this challenge on the first try. The CL was dropped pretty fast. The first hull torp put the BB dead in the water and the second hull torp sunk her. The guns easily overwhelmed the CL and were essentially useless against the 11 inch armor BB. As I suspected this scenario comes down to luck and the old BB not being able to hit the broadside of a barn while torps did the heavy lifting.

Haha trying to get this game into a historically accurate state isn't doable. It's more or less fantasy. Just throw together whatever looks cool.

The BB has a huge boost to accuracy and power. Normally a BC going over 30 kts has a stealth field but my first attempt with a 40 kt BC got racked at soon as I got close to him. So I tried again with 30 kt BC with 16 inch belt. My heavy 17" were unable to pen most of the time once we ended up in a stern chase while he had 100% hit rate on his 15 inches were mostly deflected off my heavily angled belt (chasing his stern) but even so the massive boost to power and accuracy the BB has would have eventually whittled me down so I quit. I figured, okay, maybe I need to finish him with torps. Too bad, no deck launchers available. Lol. Maybe next I'll try a broadside duel at longer range where the 30+ kt stealth field is still effective. Basically, this game is heavily unbalanced so the scenario designer wanted to give the BB an advantage because normally a ship of that design would be crushed.