[Weight offset calculation issues]

Definitely still seeing this weight issue. On any design, I have to place the aft turrets and most of the towers almost all the way aft just to offset the fore weight. Logically speaking, when you think think about the machinery, engines, etc..., you should have an aft weight offset issue and not a fore weight offset.  This should be very simple to fix depending on the way the game calculates weight.

[Enemy AI is worse - runs from battle]

The quote was mine but when I replied to your comment, it listed it as yours... Not sure how that happened.

[Enemy AI is worse - runs from battle]

7 hours ago, Norbert Sattler said:

Yea, maybe I could have been more specific about direction, etc... they were running as they were heading straight away from me and at no point did they attempt to angle to get position on me to fire. The entire time, both enemy ships only ever fired their aft turrets.  I also left out that they were faster than I was so if they were attempting to get position and turn, they could have done so however they didn't.

 

7 hours ago, Norbert Sattler said:

 

 

What I noticed is that recently the AI tends to go to extreme ranges, so it might look like they are running, but in fact they are "only" going to their prefered combat distance.
If they are going at an angle away from the ship that is their current target, they are just distancing. Only when they try to keep you at exactly their back are they fleeing.

In the former case they will turn side-on once they get to their prefered combat distance or lose sight of you.

 

This bevaviour sometimes makes them do some hilariously stupid things.

I once had a night-engagement one-on-one between an enemy BC and one of my own. The enemy BC kept driving away from me until it lost sight of my ship only to make a U-turn toward me. Upon spotting me, it immediately turned away again, only managing to fire off a ranging shot and one full salvo until it was out of visual range again. Thanks to this it never managed to get fully aimed again after the initial period when we were spawned in relatively close together.

It was quite hilarious because I had better towers and thus was able to see and shoot it the entire time.

This pattern repeated itself until it was a little below 50% structure and really did try to run away, but thanks to the damage it was too slow to escape my ship and thus died without having caused any significant damage, despite having the better guns and better trained crew.

 

[Secondary Barbette Suggestion]

I like the fact that more small barbettes are available in the ship designer but they're still, for the most part, locked to the centerline of the ship. IMO, If you can place a secondary off centerline, you should be able to place secondary barbettes there as well. This would help to create a superfiring setup to maximize secondary gun coverage especially on late-era ships.

[Enemy AI is worse - runs from battle]

So today, I ran through 3 custom battles. Each time, I was outmatched in # of ships and in gun caliber yet the enemy chooses to run instead of actually engage. For all three battles, I had to chase the enemy ships. Why is the enemy running from a fight now?

Battle 1:

Me - BB with 4 x 2/18in, 8 x 2/8in

Enemy - 2 BB's with 4 x 2/20in, various secondaries

Battle 2:

Me - BC with 4 x 2/15, 4 x 2/6in

Enemy - BB with 4 x 3/17in, various secondaries, BC with 5 x 2/14in, various secondaries

Battle 3:

Me - CA with 4 x 2/8in, 3 x 2/5in

Enemy - 2 CA's with 4 x 3/10in, various secondaries + torps
 

[Forthcoming Patch Announcement]

I don't post here much and I'm fairly easy going but when dev's can't meet their own deadlines it makes me wonder about how the dev team is led. We get a somewhat detailed decription of what's in the update, with the last line saying that it's schedule for this week. Now, it's next week because it's still in testing. Why make a point to highlight that the update was supposed to drop this week if you weren't 100% sure. That's customer service 101... you don't promise a customer something that you aren't completely sure that you can deliver.  And the dev's wonder why people are trash talking this game and how it's being handled... Like those of us that have devoted money to this game, I'll wait for the update to hit next week, play it, and hope that everything works as intended. 

[Hold Fire]

As a suggestion, it would be nice to have a "hold fire" option added to the weapons in game. While you have off, normal, save and aggressive currently... save really doesn't work right as it fires when the hit chance is under 5% most times, and if you select "off", the guns no longer track their target. Hold fire would still allow the guns to track but not fire until switched back to save/normal/agg.

[Gun barrel penalties?]

I tried searching the forum before asking but why is there a penalty for having turrets with more than 2 barrels? Why penalize a design that has triple or quad turrets?

[New post Alpha 12 bug]

Ever since the last update, about maybe 30% to 40% of the time when trying to start a custom battle, load times are either very long (1+ mins) or the game becomes unresponsive.  Event viewer gives the following error:

The program build.exe version 5.6.7.3267 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel.
 Process ID: 910
 Start Time: 01d7644bcd7e3be6
 Termination Time: 8
 Application Path: D:\Games\Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts\default\game\build.exe
 Report Id: 82d7989d-3472-45ce-8e06-2f44700def33
 Faulting package full name: 
 Faulting package-relative application ID: 
 Hang type: Unknown

Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: AppHangB1
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0

Problem signature:
P1: build.exe
P2: 5.6.7.3267
P3: 5c73fc7c
P4: 443a
P5: 134217728
 

 

I never had this problem, or any real technical problem for that matter, prior to the last update. My specs are (omen 15-dc1054nr) running an I7-9750H, GTX 1660TI, 16Gb Ram, Win10.

[>>>Alpha-12 Feedback (v86 3/6/2021)<<<]

Why is the very tall barbette still actually shorter than the tall barbette? I found a post all the way back to alpha 9 that pointed this out but it's still an issue.  I would think this would be a very easy change.  Also, when you guys decide to fix this, please don't make the height difference as miniscule as the current height difference between the two.  I would say that the very tall barbette should be at least 1/3 taller than the tall barbette.  Also, on the subject of barbette heights, it would be nice to have a taller huge barbette so the 18+ calibers can be mounted in a short-tall-short config (like the Rodney/Nelson).

Thx

[Some suggestions for the future]

I'm sure these have already been talked about in other posts, but I'm going to add my two cents (for what it's worth) on some improvements that I would like to see in game; Specifically around the custom battles, ship designer and battle mechanics.

Custom Battles:

90% of the time, I don't mind the ships that the designer creates for an enemy fleet (some designs are ridiculous btw), I would like to see more user control over the creation of the enemy fleet. For example, limiting torpedoes. There are times where I just want to create the biggest, most armed BB and duke it out with other BBs without having to worry about getting torp'd by an enemy BB.  Basically an all out slug-fest between BBs, BCs and CAs without using torpedoes.  It wouldn't be that hard to do.  Have a user selectable option that would keep torps from being available. If active, it would simply keep all ships from mounting torps. Since CLs and DDs used torps as part of their 'main' armament per say, maybe even keep CLs and DDs from being used if the option to remove torps is active, as they would be rather useless, except for the smokescreen they can deploy.

 

Ship Designer:

As stated above, sometimes the designer creates ridiculous designs for enemy combatants. I've seen barbettes normally used for main guns be mounted with 5in secondaries , I've seen main guns be mounted so close to each other that they shouldn't be able to rotate (but they do), I've seen ships so unbalanced that the designer shouldn't have created them in the first place (like 3 turrets fore / 1 turret aft). There should be a way to have the designer be more on point when creating AI ships. 

I would also change the mounting of the small barbette for secondaries from being locked to the centerline of a ship. There are times where, when creating a super BB for the German's for example, I can't place 8in secondaries on the sides because the slots aren't big enough. However, if I could mount the single small secondary barbette in those spots, I would be able to add the secondaries I want. If we're keeping the game grounded in reality, I can understand not having this ability, however, this game is not grounded in reality. One of the biggest lures for this game is being able to create your own designs and fight. 

 

Battle Mechanics:

I think having the option to specify ammo types independently for main and secondary batteries during battles would make the battles more realistic. With that, I would also suggest having a delay between firing when you switch ammo types. As it stands, you can switch from AP to HE in the middle of a loading cycle and then immediately fire the new rounds. In a real battle, when the order is given to switch ammo types, the guns don't immediately start firing the new ammo, they have to be loaded. This should be added as well.  There would also be a hard limit to the number of AP and HE shells that were on board. As it stands, all 800 rounds (for ex) can be HE or AP depending on what you have selected as the ammo type. For example, BBs typically carried more AP shells than HE shells however I wasn't able to find an exact ratio when doing research for this post.  HMS Hood for instance carried 120 shells per 15in turret.  In game, I would probably suggest a 1/3 ratio... 1/3 HE, 2/3 AP.

In a real world scenario, ships would able to target more than one ship with their main batteries. It would be nice to be able to have the fore and aft batteries target different ships as there are fore and aft directors that can lock different targets, especially for late era ships.

Ship speed is another area that needs reworked. Acceleration is okay, but slowing down takes forever; much longer than it should. In reality, doing what is called a 'full crash-back' (all 4 screws reversed from full ahead to full astern) in an Iowa Class BB took, from what I've seen, anywhere from the length of the ship to a little over a mile to come to a complete stop and begin reversing. In the game, setting speed from say 30kts to 0 kts without using the silly reverse engines that would actually damage your ship, seems to take so long to slow the ship that it's not even worth doing. My point is, if you set your speed to 0 and leave it there, the ship barely slows even by the time the battle is over. From the physics aspect, this is wrong. If a 50,000ton ship displaces 50,000tons of water ahead of it, in turn, the water resistance should slow the ship down faster than it does in game if there is nothing to propel the ship forward. This mechanic needs reworked.  Also, doing a full crash-back should not cause damage to the engines like done in game. 

Also, with the above speed issue in mind, turning a ship, especially having a rudder hard-over, should cause the ship to slow while turning. Again, basic physics.  Turning a 50,000ton ship going 30kts puts increased drag/water resistance on the ship and would cause it to slow until it finished the turn. In game, this doesn't happen and should to make things more realistic.

Again, my two cents for what it's worth.

Thanks....

 

 

[Alpha-12 News update]

Any specific day this week this update should drop?

[Some turrets not firing]

@Ink - thx for the reply. I've been watching more when playing and think this is still an issue even with the latest fixes you mentioned.  I guess it 'could be' an issue with the guns losing their aiming but when it happens i still have a lock and its even happened when at like 30%+ chance of a hit is showing.  As for movement, this happens even when at slow speeds against slow targets where the ships on either side are moving in a straight line with all guns well within their firing arc. 

Maybe something you guys might want to check out again when you have time.

[Secondary Barbette Suggestion]

Any chance at getting the short barbette for the secondary guns reworked so it's not locked to only be placed on centerline?  Visually I think it would look better and would also give the user a broader way of designing a ship.

[Some turrets not firing]

@Ink - Any update on when this will be corrected?  I'm noticing that when I'm playing it's happening more frequently. 

[Empty Barbette error after Alpha 11 update]

Not sure if you guys had a chance to look at this yet but I was able to figure out what the "empty barbette" message was referring to.  After this latest update, if there are any barbettes on the main or secondary towers, those MUST be used and cannot be empty.  When using custom battle I don't always use secondary's under 8in so I seldom use the existing tower barbettes.  

Hopefully this is an easy correction for you guys... 

Love the game btw

[Empty Barbette error after Alpha 11 update]

So when attempting to build out any of the new British hulls in the latest update, I can't launch after building because I get an "empty barbette" message.  I've tried many different barbette/gun combos and it gives me the message every time. My barbette's aren't empty and even when using just two of them (no secondary barbettes) I get the same message.

I attached a pic with the message.  If you need anything from me, I'll be happy to answer questions.

Dave