SonicB

These are all great ideas and I completely agree in the long term. But let me just re-emphasise if the devs are reading, the option to disable the fake lasergun tracers would be a very easy modification and I for one would welcome it.

Update on the collision avoidance stuff - yeah this is getting silly. AI was bending my ship's course at this range and I had to default to manual rudder. As I have had to do at one point during almost every academy mission I've played since patch. It's also interfering with internal formation logic. When a ship leading a formation gets hit and can't maintain speed, it tries to join the back of the formation. But since the patch I've found that behaviour causes the next ship in line to evade, and pretty much destroys the formation. Think I'll be giving up on formations and using manual follow commands from now on.

I'm seeing a fair few arguments that nerfing torpedo reloads would make destroyers useless in the current game. Bear in mind that we haven't even seen how useful they will be in the campaign. They will probably be invaluable for strategic roles such as scouting, ASW and convoy escort, with only a secondary role of escorting heavier units in surface combat - as was the predominant case historically.

This please! I like pew-pew as much as the next sci fi fan but it would be great to get a realism option.

This. I've played a few fleet battles now, and it's looking like the new evasion rules are causing more trouble than they're worth. It's now very difficult to maneuver one formation around another without causing the first formation to break up. Can I elaborate on this idea and suggest an alternate remedy? The root of the problem seems to be that under the current logic, both ships are required to evade. In reality, under maritime law where there is a risk of collision, only one ship is required to evade the other (determined by certain situational rules.) The other ship is called the 'stand-on' vessel because it has an equal duty to maintain its course and speed so the 'give-way' vessel can maneuver safely to avoid it. In reality, even in peacetime, any destroyer skipper who causes the Admiral's flagship to take evasive action is going to be in trouble. Therefore, in the game context, it would make sense to develop a consistent hierarchy of who gives way to whom. Broadly, I would say the more maneuverable vessel should give way, and in the case of formations of equal ships, the flagship/lead ship should have priority. Any vessel under 'manual' rudder control would have highest priority as a way of overriding the system.

Okay, after a couple of battles I'm pretty positive about this change. It certainly seems to have fixed the speed issues, and I think the lower fire rate of small guns definitely feels more authentic. That said, it seems to have accentuated a problem whereby every battery insists on waiting to fire in salvos, but the time taken to fire a salvo with large numbers of small (especially single) guns is so long that that waiting seems to seriously cut the overall fire rate. Either that or I'm reading the reload display completely wrong. I get that any long-to-medium range fire would have to be coordinated by salvo rather than under local control, but I can't see any reason why small gun batteries - or any guns, for that matter - need to leave a second between shots. Historically, even 16" salvos could be fired simultaneously. Speaking of salvos, ideally, I'd love the option to switch batteries between directed and local control, sacrificing long-range accuracy for the ability to target multiple opponents and an increased rate of fire.

Thank you for keeping us informed, and for listening to the issues raised over stationkeeping and gunnery. Can't wait to play it! In terms of upcoming changes to formations, is the stationkeeping AI at the stage where you are able to add more formations, a turn-in-sequence/turn together toggle, or even a manual formation editor like that in Battlestations: Pacific?

My point isn't that the vessel is slow, but that it's an unquestionably worse hull compared to the equivalent Monitor, and therefore makes the difficulty inconsistent between the two missions. If that's an argument for the Monitor to be nerfed rather than the Virginia buffed, so be it, though I would argue the latter, since this mission is obviously intended to be a tutorial and that any adjustments to this hull won't affect the campaign or custom battle. Also, that's an interesting bug to report given that the maximum speed you can get on that hull is 10 knots? I absolutely agree with your general point, though, the AI generator really needs to be reined in to some more common-sense rules in general. Make it leave the outlandish experimentation to the players and give us consistent, sensible, realistic designs for the class and era, please.

The Virginia hull still suffers from serious weight distribution and hullform issues that make it impossible to design a fully-armed and balanced warship. It loses a very unrealistic amount of momentum in turns, and forget any kind of forward armament if you want to get good weight distribution. As such I'd say it makes the mission very difficult in comparison to the Monitor one, and only really consistently winnable by cheesing 5" HE rounds until the opposing monitor is a barbeque.

Just to drop this in as a minor fix request - it's looking like the 'shell weight' information for guns is incorrectly stated in the designer. It's instead describing the 'all-up' weight of shell and charge, and even then needs some work. To take a well-known example: the British 15" gun fired a ~870kg shell, which would make it light according to this game, despite British practice of preferring heavier shells with lower muzzle velocity to their German counterparts. However, add in the propellant charge of 195kg cordite and that gives you a 1,065kg round, which is almost 'medium' in game (and, I would argue, should be 'heavy' according to conventional doctrine.)

I mean the devs have for several months... but also, so when you said: what you meant to say was that "it is also not irrelevant when combined with other factors," correct? In that case then of course I would agree.

Would just like to add that @Hangar18's conclusions, while they may be drawn from subsims, are still broadly accurate in the real world where you're trying to figure out the speed of large ships at fairly long ranges. In general, I don't think it's harder to estimate a higher speed. Under some conditions, it is easier to tell the speed of a faster vessel through visual observation, due to the increased difference of bearing and target angle over time, and if you have access to additional readings from a rangefinder that's wider than most of the boats I've sailed, so much the better. (Of course, even WWII gunnery officers didn't have 4kW, >50nm range modern marine doppler radar with computerised course plotting, so I guess that's a fair trade.) Under other conditions, it can be harder, especially in difficult weather and sea conditions when observation and visual cues are limited - but if we abstract that into game terms I genuinely don't think it should be a factor on its own. Once again, disclaimer is that my experience is based on trying to avoid large ships, not trying to sink them. As satisfying as that would be on occasion.

Question for the devs: I've seen a texture mod already in the screenshots folder, and I'm guessing a lot of people (myself included) are going to be interested in modding the game textures to add new ship skins, such as WW1/WW2 camouflage (blending, deception, dazzle etc) or the glorious white/tan/black paint schemes of the Victorian era. I realise at present this involves extracting and reworking original game assets, so I would like to ask three things: 1) out of respect for your work, I'd like to know if you are supportive of amateur modders reworking and adding content to the game at this stage, or would you rather it wasn't discussed on here? If so, will this change once the game has launched? 2) do you have any plans to unlock the textures, allow an 'override' folder, include Steam Workshop integration, or otherwise make modding easier once the game has launched? 3) do you have any plans to add ship skins of your own, either as cosmetic options, or as technologies with actual bonuses vs ship signature, identification, and targeting/aiming speed?

You tease! Seriously, please enlighten us. It's a unity game, so renderdoc and texmod?

Yep, speed penalty due to a fundamental flaw in the gunnery model. It affects basically the entire game at this point, in terms of what classes to use and how you design them, and yet it seems to be quite low priority on the fix list. Hopefully it'll be addressed before the campaign comes out, otherwise you'll see some pretty ahistorical metas all over youtube and twitch in the first few days.

Okay to return to the original question (sorry Nick but hope the discussion was useful!) There's a bug when grouping ships of different classes which I don't think has been mentioned recently. For example, if I select a DD and attach it to a CL, sometimes the formation will end up with the DD as the leader. This makes little historical sense and also contradicts the game UI - logically, the way to get the DD as the leader is attach the CL to the DD. If this is difficult to fix, could we please have a simple option to designate the selected ship as formation leader?

Out of interest, are you talking sim or IRL experience, because agreed, immediately judging the angle on bow of a ship in visual range is very possible. On a clear day, close enough to make out the ship's main features, with a good set of compass binoculars and a non-maneuvring target... I mean, completely innocent cargo vessel... within five degrees is pretty achievable and I don't do it for a living. Completely agree, given that the most reliable way of calculating speed is also through bearing and course observations. Yeah but the speed penalty has zero maneuvering involved. That's the issue. Exactly the point of the second half of my sentence

I agree with a couple suggestions here and would like to thank @Hangar18 for the mathematical proofs. It seems to me that the solution is as simple as applying speed as a multiplier to the 'target maneuver' malus rather than as a separate modifier. The only reasonable effect (within an achievably simple model) that speed can have on targeting is increasing the area that a ship could possibly be occupying after it completes a maneuver. If I'm shooting at a 5kt target that starts a turn, I know it'll still be within a reasonably small cone on my gunnery plot even if I don't know its turning radius or how much rudder it has on. A 40kt target starting a hard turn, however, could generate anything up to a few hundred yards of lateral separation from its previous course in a matter of seconds. Regarding estimating speed: it's always going to be a factor in gunnery, and I'm willing to be corrected by anyone with gunnery or Naval experience, but if I could put in a little bit of personal observation: I'm a yacht skipper in my off-time with a few thousand nautical miles' experience of playing Frogger in busy shipping lanes, and unlike estimating a turning vessel's position, the difficulty of estimating a vessel's speed doesn't exponentially increase with that speed. To elaborate, you can estimate pretty much any speed within a fairly comfortable range based on: - Bearing and course observations over time, combined with your known course and speed. - Direct visual cues (bow and stern waves, wake height, exhaust smoke, interaction with sea conditions, spacing and location of the standing waves versus a vessel's likely displacement) - Knowledge of the vessel type, its capabilities and its likely operating conditions - If you have it, radar or AIS (vessel transponder) signals In fact, based on the first two datasets which are most applicable here, I would probably have a greater margin of error in estimating the speed of a vessel doing 10kts than one doing 30kts, because there is less variation between the regular bearing and course observations, as well as fewer and smaller visual cues. Of course, the consequences of getting it wrong tend to be on you much more quickly at 30kts, but that's a story for another time. TL;DR: targeting difficulty due to maneuvring increases exponentially with target speed. Targeting difficulty due to target speed does not.

I was able to play the game yesterday just fine! As for the launcher, there was no error, it just showed me the 'install' button this morning instead of the 'play game' button, then wouldn't install because the game files already existed in there. I haven't moved any folders manually or messed around with the registry, so I can only assume something in the launcher changed overnight and it stopped recognising the game as installed. (As for the error message when I tried to run build.exe outside the launcher, I believe that is intended behaviour.) I've had to remove everything from the UA:D folders in both %appdata and c:/games and totally reinstall the launcher and game, and now it seems to be working fine. I'll definitely update this thread if it happens again.

So this is a weird one... I installed UA:D on a newly built computer yesterday, and today the launcher is refusing to recognise that it's already installed. Furthermore, it won't install in the chosen (default) location because it has to be empty, and all the existing files are there. I checked manually and the game starts fine, then quits because it hasn't used the launcher. I'm going to have to manually remove the files and reinstall, but just thought I'd report this bug in case there's been a new launcher upgrade overnight that caused it.

Nick, thank you for the update. I appreciate you guys are busy, but please keep posting development updates, roadmaps and blogs if you can! Everyone who paid for the advanced edition is invested in this game and would love to hear how things are going, good and bad. If everyone here on the forums is better informed about progress, I have no doubt there'll be less grumbling and more understanding. You have a very special game here, and I would much prefer you take the time to get things right and make a game you're happy with. It deserves to be a success on launch.

Reading this after over a year, a lot has changed... I absolutely agree with @akd that torpedo spotting is pretty fantastical, but then, DDs and other fast torpedo-launching warships currently get a fantastical speed boost from the gunnery maths, and an equally fantastical reload time.. Here's hoping the devs can find a better balance for torpedo use that doesn't depart so far from historical facts. Personally I would love it if, as in history, the surface-launched torpedo is most effective as a threat, not as a weapon. We can see this already when I can threaten the AI with light vessels in order to take the pressure off my heavy ships. Right now it doesn't work that way for the player, as my primary torpedo defence is to see it coming and dodge, not plan my maneuvres to minimise the threat in advance.

Maybe that's why gunnery is kinda broken right now. If my gunners are crying with laughter it makes sense that they can't aim straight! Damn, this is a detailed simulation.

I mean, for the custom battles wishlist, I'd love the ability to: a) design all of my ships, not just one class b) design the AI's ships, or pick from a list of my custom designs c) select the AI designer's logic and priority weighting (eg: firepower, armour, speed.) That said, the priority has to be asking for the simple fix of ctrl-placement for all objects. It's possible with turrets - why not towers, barbettes and funnels? Finally, and relatedly... it would be really nice to restrict the AI designer's turret placement some more. I keep having to restart multi-class battles because the AI has given me some ridiculous-looking abortion of a warship with a pair of 4" secondaries stuck on the extreme bow right in front of its main battery.

I'm quite new to this game, and finding this out is pretty disheartening, tbh. I often encounter gunnery bugs and was prepared to give the game a pass, in the full expectation that they'd be fixed in the future. At the very least, I think it would really take the pressure off, and manage expectations, if Nick could publish an official development/bugfixing roadmap for Alpha-8 and beyond. "This is what we're working on now, this will be worked on in beta, this we won't fix before launch." Otherwise, the devs have built a really incredibly platform, but... maybe we should all be arguing for just one thing, and that's modding ability so we can fix things to our own liking.