SonicB

Yeah, this and a few other basic issues of lazy, WoWs style arcade logic haven't been addressed in years, and devs have not given any indication that they intend to correct them. I had such high hopes for this game, but I hardly play any more and find I can't recommend it to anyone with my priorities. Maybe the devs just don't want to make the kind of game I want to play.

I'm genuinely amazed this hasn't been fixed yet. It's ridiculous.

Seems to be working as intended.

In the academy missions and custom battle? Simple, don't allow the slider so low that the design is going to be at low fuel and therefore slowed from the outset. The lowest it will go is always >1000km, which is very misleading since that would seem to leave easily enough fuel for a battle. In campaign, and more generally, I would have a realistic hard limit. If your ship burns more fuel than it has during battle, it stops, maybe loses power if it doesn't have auxiliary. If it ends battle low or out of fuel, it gets towed home but has a chance of being lost or suffering damage. Another penalty could be modelling loss of fuel caused by damage. For instance, Bismarck had quite a short range, being designed to challenge the French and British navies in the North Sea, and therefore had to abort its commerce-raiding mission as a result of being hit in the fuel tanks by Prince of Wales. This would incentivise adding redundancy.

Point taken - but whether you agree with the fuel mechanic's current implementation or not, surely we can agree it shouldn't be adjustable to the point where it cripples your ship's speed from the start of the mission. There is no usefulness in this and it serves only to confuse new players. This is distinct from a) my wider misgivings about the way this mechanic works in combat and b) the evidence that it's bugged when dealing with formations.

Coming back to the game after a fair few months, I've noticed that the game still doesn't like too many guns firing at once. If you have multiple fast-firing secondaries active, it takes much longer to complete a main battery broadside - sometimes some turrets just fail to fire. Turn off secondaries and the broadsides fire as intended. This also seems to affect heavy secondaries, for instance a mixed secondary battery of 6" and 3" will experience much slower 6" fire rates when the 3" are active. I flagged this several months ago, and a year before that, never got a dev response. Could I get a final answer if this is intentional or is it on the list to be fixed?

Found another interesting thing today - this CL's helm got stuck hard over after taking a nasty series of 13.5" hits, and I can't tell if this is a bug (boo) or a new aspect of the damage model (yay!) Either way, it seems to be really upsetting my gunners, because they've decided to aim for a patch of water approximately a mile away, presumably on the basis that it's causing them less motion sickness.

Fuel is a really important aspect of the campaign, as it should be, I completely agree with you there. But I'm really struggling to find a realistic justification for the 'low fuel' malus even when functioning correctly. As I said above, no captain in a life-or-death battle with 10% fuel remaining will suddenly tell the admiral he won't go above cruise speed. Better towed home than swimming home. (Besides, I need to go do some fuel consumption calculations and experiment a little, but I get the feeling that in-battle fuel mileage is way off.) Certainly in the academy missions and quick battle (which I'm playing mostly these days until the campaign mechanics are 100% sorted out) there's no reason for this feature to be included at all.

Thanks - I'm guessing this is the mechanic, but we're right at the start of the battle. I believe I chose a lower range in the designer, but to have one slider immediately cripple a ship's capability is surely not working as intended? Also, the speed reduction varies depending on the size of the division, so it looks like at least a multiplier is being incorrectly applied. Also, I don't like this new mechanic at all, even when working correctly. It seems pretty arbitrary and gamey. Any range you can choose is >1000km, presumably at cruising speed (~60% of top speed), which would give a range at top speed still well into the triple figures, even if calculated conservatively. A 30kt ship at full speed for a 1hr battle travels only 56km. Therefore it should be extremely difficult to run completely out of fuel - even after the battle, given that speed is life, any skipper would choose a tow home over a massive tactical disadvantage.

Anyone else getting a bug that arbitrarily restricts ship speed? Here I have five 36kt destroyers in divisions of 4 and 1. The group of 4 is restricted to 7kts; the single ship is restricted to 24. Even the single ship gets the message "some ships in division are unable to reach this speed" when I try to increase it.

Just a simple request to increase the image size restrictions on this forum to something sensible, like 1-2MB. It often helps to post images when discussing bugs, features etc, and it would make this easier and quicker if people didn't have to go to a third-party hosting service like imgur every time a point needs to be illustrated.

At last someone says it. THANK YOU! "National flavour" has no place in a game that's supposed to let you design ships the way you want them.

Are you trolling? That list is in no way helpful for beta testers to give meaningful feedback on gameplay issues, which was the point I was making. It helps if you read what I write before trying to be snarky.

Oh, if we're talking about arbitrary restrictions the devs have decided upon for each individual hull, I totally agree with you. Those used to be incredibly restrictive in early beta and have been dialled back significantly, but they can still be frustrating on certain hulls. It's my educated guess (and I believe it was confirmed one time by someone from the closed beta?) that these restrictions were basically put in to help the AI designer. If true, they would just add to the list of compromises we have to put up with (interchangeable hull segments, anyone?) because the AI still can't consistently design plausible ships and devs don't want to go to a template model.

Didn't have time to refer to wikipedia so yeah, I meant Ikuma. And the fundamental difference between Tone + the AI design above, versus Mogami, Takao, Myoko, Minotaur etc, is that two of the forward turrets are blocked, not just one.

The next planned design (Ikuma class, iirc) reverted to a 3-forward, 2-aft arrangement like that of the Mogamis. The 1947 planned Minotaurs were also 3-forward, 2-aft, not the same as the Tones. In any case, this isn't a good design in-game because the single aft turret negates any citadel weight advantage, and we don't have floatplanes. Despite the AI occasionally popping out a half-carrier half-battleship design in apparently wishful thinking.

Yep. Compare with this 1v1 engagement I had recently where I was unable to get pens, or even do more than 50-60 damage per hit, with superheavy 16" 54' firing Capped-Ballistic II at almost point blank range. The most damage done was with 5" secondaries firing HE. Main belt on the AI was about 16", front and rear 6" ish. There is something rather borked with armour and penetration values right now.

Well, aside from the terrible weight distribution, B and D turrets can't aim forward. There was a reason the Tone class heavy cruisers weren't repeated (the only comparable IRL design) and also a clear reason that the Didos and Atlantas had a three-step arrangement for their 6" guns. I'll admit that the cruiser tower with a mandatory barbette isn't helping the AI here. (Devs, if you are reading this, please make versions without?) I don't know which barbette you're referring to as I mean the one holding 'B' turret, which is far too tall and a smaller one could have been used instead. If you mean the ones on the side of the secondary tower, then yes, that is the fault of the limited secondary tower selection and I can't blame the AI for that. Although I can and will blame it for not choosing a uniform main armament.

I have to take issue with this. I know most of the people actually interested in historical accuracy have kinda given up and left the forums, but still. Naval architects (with a few notable exceptions) were not stupid people. Many different alternatives were explored in the last century, and honestly, some worked and most didn't. But they learned from these. If we are going to have a vaguely plausible game then it really does have to reflect a century of real-world experience. I've said much the same thing about the AI designs. That doesn't mean you can't experiment in campaign with how designs could have been if geopolitics and the demands on navies had been different - for example, the layout of the planned British G3 and N3 battleships had they not been cancelled by the Washington treaty. I love that layout. But experimentation for the sake of it shouldn't be encouraged by deliberately messing with the basic rules of warship design, which are determined by the laws of physics. This. This. So many open-beta devs are able to publish roadmaps. And that really helps a player base - who are desperately trying to help them - focus their feedback. As well as saving the devs and community managers from having to read through hundreds of posts saying the same thing. I get that the guys have been burned by the response to that early teaser showing the individual hull segments in the designer - which, let's be clear, should absolutely not still be being used as promo, but was fair enough at the time. The vast majority of people here are adults who understand they bought a beta, and won't throw their toys out of the pram if a particular roadmap feature has to be scrapped, as long as the reasons are clearly explained. To be honest, I don't know to what extent Nick is performing the role of community manager and how much this is being taken on by any remaining folks from the closed beta, but... they really should consider taking on a volunteer CM or two. (no, I'm not volunteering, but I recall several knowledgeable and passionate people saying they'd be happy to do it... assuming they're still around.) Yeah, again, this. I promise this is the last time I mention the clown car thread (it was my baby, I'm salty), but... that really was a textbook example of shooting the messenger. A good CM would have got on that thread like a goldmine. Treated it with good humour. Encouraged people to post the version and other ship info to help identify the bugs. Even gamified it with a clowncar of the month award or something.

Sorry, but that is not a good design. The ship will be unbalanced as hell (or really badly armoured forward) and the sightlines for the main turrets are worse than any CL ever designed (think Dido, Atlanta etc.) The 'C' turret barbette is far taller than it needs to be and the mix of three different types of 2.3" guns and torpedo launchers is ridiculous. The only thing I can say for it is it's not the worst AI design I've seen this month.

I'm not usually one to complain about difficulty - 90% of the time the solution is 'git gud' - but I have to ask if anyone else is finding this mission harder than the others (and way harder than it used to be?) As well as cruisers I'm finding two 35kt battlecruisers with 14-15" guns which are almost impossible to hit, even with Radar III, Rangefinder V and mk3 16" or mk5 13" guns. They keep opening the range and evading to the extent that my ship can't land consistent hits. The hulls we can choose from make it almost impossible to mount the horsepower to keep up or close with them. Furthermore, they are able to land the first hit usually within 1-2 salvoes and sometimes get through 9-10" deck armour, and it goes downhill from there. Sure, I could keep on min-maxing and throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks, but nearly all of these missions are winnable by tweaking a realistic, all purpose design, and that's the way it should be imho. Anyone else played this mission since latest patch? Any suggestions?

The response so far is to shut down the thread where people have been posting bad AI designs. So.. I mean, at least that's some response. But yes, the AI designer is still not consistently able to build competitive designs.

I can't believe the AI still thinks a hybrid battleship-carrier is a clever idea

Furthermore, since Nick decided (for reasons best known only to himself and God) to shut the clown car thread down again, I have no option but to post this triumph of naval architecture here instead.

Yikes. The previous patch actually fixed the bug that caused turrets and torpedo launchers not to turn when the ship was turning. This one has made the problem even worse than it was before. Exhibit A: this heavy cruiser which completed a hard turn to starboard to avoid torpedoes about 8-10 seconds ago. The turrets are still not much changed from where they were pointing previously. If this were a video you would see them twitching or jerking instead of moving.