deshara218

So I binged the first 1/3rd of the game's naval academy mode and I have some feedback, in no particular order. Halfway thru making this post I played the rest of the game too. Loved it, loved UGCW, please keep up the amazing work. 1) the UI is out of order for the hotkeys to be useful. The prime button space (1-4) is used up mostly by commands that never get issued, while commands that are needed to be toggled more regularly are relegated to the no-man's-land of 5-0. AI control being where it is is good, torpedos and smoke screen NEED to be moved to the left of the keyboard, rest of the gun control should. 2) Smoke screen command using the smoke screen of every ship in the group no matter what is kind of annoying since I assume (it isnt clear tho) the actual optimal use of the ability would be to pop smoke in the first destroyer in a line, run its smoke until it runs out and then pop smoke for the second destroyer. Assuming I'm not wrong, the game should have the smoke command tell the first ship in the division with smoke to pop theirs (& highlighting the command highlights the ship?) 3) I'm sure I'm not the only one to say this but having to change the rotation of side guns individually instead of in pairs is annoying. 4) when you set the AI to control the helm if the ship is damaged it will automatically set itself into retreat mode, when there is literally no reason ever for the AI to decide that for you 5) for a game where so much of the strategy is deciding which range-band to sit at while shelling the enemy it REALLY feels like there should be a "try to get to & maintain __ range from your target" button. ESPECIALLY since you're able to target gun groups seperately, the ability to set a enemy as a ranging target and then tell your guns to shoot a different target so you can tell your dreadnought to stay away from the enemy's torpedo boats while continuing to shell their battleship would feel perfect 6) the game kind of doesn't support bow/aft mounted torpedoes at the moment. The AI is just utterly incapable of using them, and because there's no "fire the torpedo now" button, even setting the torp to aggressive & manually ramming an enemy battleship usually isn't even enough to get them to use it (I just finished the last mission vs the french super-dreadnought with light cruisers equipped with nothing but torps & literally wound up ramming it to death try to get a single ship to fire their torpedos at the thing). The only thing I can think of that'd be a graceful solution to this would be taking the line/abreast button and making it so that setting the "abreast" behavior makes your ships go straight towards/away(if on retreat) targets for using aft mounted torpedoes & pursuit guns & fighting enemies you don't want to broadside 7) when you mouse over an enemy ship the top-right panel stops showing you your ship and automatically shows their ship diagram, and also a ship diagram pops up over their ship. It takes away the information about your ship, so it can show you information about their ship twice. It... should just do the over-the-ship popup diagram and leave your selected ship's diagram in the UI panel. 8) click a ship's name to select it instead of clicking the ship itself. In close range engagements this isn't an issue but the game very quickly gets to the point where you're firing on enemies who are farther than the draw distance and playing pin the tail on the donkey every time you go to select an enemy & messing up your move orders every time you miss click your target is anti-fun. 9) when a series of ship components are sorted left to right by an increase in weight or cost stat (like with ammo propellants) that stat should be at the top. Makes reading some of the more convoluted(not a bad thing) stats breakdowns a little less daunting if there's a clear pattern to contextualize them all off of right there at the top. 10) having the rudder control min & max be a few pixels wide feels awful. You're giving people the fantasy of commanding & helming a naval ship, the movement controls should feel closer to spinning a big wooden helm wheel than turning an incredibly fiddly knob. Put it so the center of the rudder bar is slap-dab in the center of the screen (where the torp control button is right now) and then make full-left rudder be the left edge of the screen & full right rudder be the far right edge of the screen. You can just move the formation & division grouping commands to the right of the rudder bar to make it fit, it won't matter. 11) GRAPH. THE. GUN. RANGE/PENETRATION/ACCURACY. NUMBERS. It's hell reading that stat & it'd be so much easier to see what the HECK is going on if there was just a line graph that populated with whatever gun you've selected. SPECIFICALLY make it so that it doesn't change from one gun to the numbers for the next gun until you CLICK that gun, so that the player can get their mouse onto the gun they want to compare the currently-selected one with, gets their eyes onto the stat they care about and then click it to see which direction it went -- seems like a small thing to specify but doing that instead of having it populate as you mouse over every gun gives it a +1000% to readability. 12) Funnel Capacity is a useless stat. I've at this point beaten the game and I could not tell you how a player is supposed to use that stat in a way that isn't better presented by the engine efficiency. What the game reeally badly needs is that particular bit of information to be presented in a fraction form of how many you have over how many you'd need that changes depending on what funnel you have selected so that if you have a ship with 4 spaces for funnels you can just click thru the funnels until you find the one with a denominator of 4. 13) Barbettes, anti-torp & hull bottom should give a very slight bonus to armor strength. Very slight. It's fine from a simulation stand-point for these three options to do nothing beyond ammo detonation & torpedo hits, but. But. buut. most ships aren't gonna get hit with ammo detonations & torpedoes, and from a gamefeel perspective there is an issue with having roughly half of all of the protection options do NOTHING for most ships -- it creates a sort of dead zone in the UI of utterly, 100% useless (most of the time) options and while it's fine to have it such that no amount of barbettes, anti-torp plating & hull bottom armor would ever be a better use of tonnage/money than just straight adding inches onto the armor plating of, say, a torpedo destroyer, it's better for the feel of the game for those options to do at least a little bit for every ship to have them even if they don't have a risk of ammo det or torpedoes. I feel like I'm not phrasing this well enough.. It's like, if you end a ship's design process with a bunch of tonnage left over, there's a satisfaction in getting to just blow those resources on picking a category of upgrades and just maxing them out just so to have stuff as upgraded as possible, there's an inherent satisfaction to that from maxing out stats that is diminished the more you know that a number of those upgrades even when maxed out do literally nothing for your ship. You can't get that satisfaction from maxing out propulsion upgrades because past a certain amount of engine efficiency you stop getting anything (which is fine because that means you get a different kind of satisfaction from min-maxing), and you can't get that satisfaction from upgrading armaments because the only upgrades that you need are ones to guns you actually have (which is fine because that means you get a different kind of satisfaction from personalizing your loadout), but protection upgrades the way they are in this game would be a lot more satisfying if maxing out every one gave every ship at least a little bit something, just as a little kudos for having the resources to spare, even if it's just a +1% on the last upgrade in each line only. 14) More than half of the propulsion upgrades feel... like protection upgrades. I think because of how involved fine tuning the fuel & boilers systems are with the funnels & engine efficiency stat is compared to how flat just plopping in a new engine, auxiliary engine or propeller shaft in is, plus the fact that the stat that funnels & boilers affect is the bottom-most stat (super easy to find) but the stat that engine & propeller shaft upgrades is is so far in the middle of the pile that I've literally never seen it in the process of me beating the entire game, despite the fact that engine efficiency & the problematic propulsion systems affect THE SAME STAT (acceleration), you get this really weird sense that engine aux & prop upgrades don't really affect maneuverability in any way. It's a weird perception problem, that could be easily fixed just by putting the acceleration & turn rate stat right above the engine efficiency stat so that while you're plugging away at funnels & top speeds to fine-tune a dreadnought for dodging torps if you upgrade your prop you'll see the difference that makes on your turn rate and get an appreciation for what it's there for, instead of the sense I've had the entire time I played the game that it was just there to make engine damage less likely (like I said, perception issue, the value of the different propulsion systems is presented to the player inconsistently). Also you could impress upon players the place those upgrades have relative to funnels & efficiency by putting a mission early on where you need to escape an enemy ship's short-ranged guns from a dead start, you have exactly 1 funnel to do it with and the only way to get it there is to up your acceleration with engine upgrades, and it spawns in an allied ship of the same design without them so you can compare what a difference it makes when you leave it behind 15) You know how there's an auto-design button to make a ship for you? A button to expend all of your left-over tonnage & money on upgrading armor in a sensible ratio wouldn't go amiss, the armor thickness panel is super daunting when you don't have a specific idea of exactly what your ship is gonna be doing and sitting down to click each + button in turn until you run out of spare resources is kinda tedious 16) The armor plating upgrade is super cool. I know this list hasn't really been the place for compliments but I just wanted to say, having a game designed around tonnage & cost restrictions and then putting in a armor plating upgrade that decreases the weight of your armor and makes it stronger while upping its cost is super clever. The way you wind up maxing out your tonnage or money while upgrading armor at the end of a design, and then go back to the plating and change it to reduce whichever resource you have spare of to free up what you've maxed out is genius. I am going to be stealing that idea shamelessly. The criticism; I didn't notice that until the third-to-last mission in the game. It could use a tutorial level to draw attention to that bit of design, because it really deserves to not be missed. 17) the game doesn't ever adequately explain that the radio upgrades the "FLG Near" radius in the mission. I had to tab back over to the game and test adding & removing a radio to confirm just now. It doesn't really come up at the moment since I managed to get thru the game without ever sending a ship outside of that radius but it's something to keep an eye on in the future.