SonicB
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Posts posted by SonicB
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*straightens tie* okay welcome one and all to the New Serious Constructive Warship Design Critique Thread.
Today we will discuss the relative merits of 21-inch and 22-inch torpedoes, the important stylistic choice of two funnels or three on this season's fashion-forward predreadnoughts, and...
oh dear god what in the name of St Nick is that
"Give me a super Yamato, but... nine inch. I want twenty-four nine-inch guns. There was a special at the store and I bought the entire discount bin. Oh, and it has to do 39 knots."
In this parallel universe, the US Navy's famously competent Bureau of Ordnance takes one look at the truly awful Ise-class carrier battleship and decides "I want one of those! But we're constitutionally obliged to add MORE GUNS."
This was since justified by the ship being so front-heavy that the aft deck can be used as a ski jump in heavy waves.
We round out this month's clown ship appreciation post with What In The Cinnamon Toast Shrimp F--k Is That, a conceptual sculpture by an anonymous 1940s American artist. This collector's piece has the distinction of killing more US sailors than the attack on Pearl Harbor when it was broken in half by a light wave.-
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If the devs ever start running out of money, they can always bottle @Ink's patience and sell it.
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German Wrath is still a very weird mission. The awful spotting issues with the game in the WW1 tech era are on full display here, with my ship deluged by 12", 9", 7" and even 4" shells with no sight of the enemy. Additionally, the battleships provided by the AI are utterly useless 9" armed pre-dreadnoughts which look like bath toys next to my up-gunned but still 1913-feasible Bayern. If the pre-dreads at Jutland were fünf-minuten-Schiffe these would be lucky to last sixty seconds.
The mission ended in an ignominious defeat when, after absorbing numerous torpedo hits fromcloaked Klingon birds-of-preyRoyal Navy destroyers, my own destroyers hit MY flagship with a four-torpedo spread while it was doing nine knots in a straight line.
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1 minute ago, Skeksis said:
In short ‘Replayability’.
In theory we wouldn’t see the same enemy designs with each playthrough. Procedural generation systems are vastly superior to one dimensional/static pre-built enemies. All this work is for our benefit and it produces alternate histories, to play the 'what if', better since we already know what history was.
I'd suggest this is a pretty good argument for adding successful player-created designs into the AI repertoire, at least for custom battles.
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23 minutes ago, Stormnet said:
To be honest, my " Was this topic forgotten? I would love to see more crap AI designs..." was really to bring this topic back to the spotlight. By default, this forum runs on a "last reply date" order criteria. By posting a comment, it brought it back to the top. Im gonna do that to my last posts.
It is my fervent hope that this thread will eventually die out from lack of new content, but it is not this day.
This day we post a Japanese battleship hiding an entire light cruiser squadron under its... skirts? Someone give me an anime reference, I'm not cool enough to have one ready.
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9 minutes ago, o Barão said:
Not worth it. You are suggesting an feature that will take many hours of work that will be almost irrelevant in the battlefield and the AI will not understand why they are there unless the devs spend more hours of their precious time to tell the AI the propellant charge X have this effect, the propellant charge Y have this effect and in the end the AI will still not understand .So why to make things more complicated?
Always when suggesting this ideas try to imagine first how easy is for the AI to use them and then if is relevant to the battlefield. Your suggestion fails in both situations so not worth it. At this moment i am already "happy" with the general design ships , the shells/armor mechanic, battle formations performance and i think the devs should focus on the campaign.
Of course there is always something that could improve. For me as an example is to have torpedo reloads only between battles. For other players there is another aspect they don't like. It is impossible to make everyone happy , but in general i say that at this moment, don't lose more time and go straight to the alpha campaign.
Just because the player can use an advanced feature does not mean the AI has to use it. This has already been discussed at length with regard to custom barbette placement.
The AI can perfectly happily use one of the existing shell types.-
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Not sure if you're still looking for screenshots, but this analysis of South Dakota's damage at Guadalcanal has tons of pictures of 14" AP/HE/incendiary, 8" AP/HE, 6" and 5" hits.
http://www.navweaps.com/index_lundgren/South_Dakota_Damage_Analysis.php-
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12 hours ago, SPANISH_AVENGER said:
Indeed!
The trade off of AoN should simply be more chances of flooding due to the unprotected parts being hit below the waterline, overpens on these parts shouldn’t deal the structure damage they currently deal.
Alternatively, the amount of damage that could be dealt in the extended parts should have a limit, so that hits there still cause some damage, but couldn’t sink an AoN battleship simply by overpenning its bow repeatedly.
Exactly. The bare minimum requirement for any AoN warship was positive citadel buoyancy.
AoN schemes also frequently protected the shafts and steering gear, which is not reflected in the current game.-
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1 hour ago, Nick Thomadis said:
The idea of having a reload module on ship is very good, and we can do a bit later. Until then, we can balance out the present system to be more realistic.
Thank you! For the record, I'm also in the school of thought that believes deckmounted torps should have 0-1 reloads and hull-mounted launchers should have more (like the current 2-4.)
All torps should definitely also have a dud chance. Either a static % for simplicity, or for bonus points related to a) the newness of the technology and/or b) the angle of impact.-
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@Nick Thomadis if you're interested in specific turret/mount mismatches, the towers on British Battlecruiser V and N3/G3 (and possibly others) can still not mount the full number of secondary guns. Additionally, the Battlecruiser V can only mount up to 4" in the slots that DO work, preventing us from recreating Hood which originally had 5.5" guns.
IMHO all the turret mounts within this series of towers would be better treated as casemate weapons. -
On 2/25/2021 at 3:50 AM, coalminer said:
On the unique layouts i would prefer if the team built generic hulls (either with a stepped or flush hull) and through the use of barbette placement freedom, allow us to build such layouts. The integrated barbette and towers are quite restrictive and has been rather unpopular in the past.
This! I feel a better option would have been to create a few generic hulls that could then be customised to approximate almost every historical design by adding more varied cosmetic elements and superstructure placement options.
This is opposed to the current approach where we are creating many exact replicas of very specific ships and then playing mix-and-match, allowing such themetic absurdities as a Yamato pagoda mast in front of a Richelieu aft superstructure.-
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14 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:
Tactical map view is currently not considered at all.
I'm very sorry to read this. Other similar games like War on the Sea, Battlestations Pacific and World of Warships all benefit greatly from a top-down map. More to the point, actual fleet commanders would have had access to this information via a tactical plot on the bridge and the plotting rooms of the ship's fire control system.
I had hoped that this feature would be added further down the line and I still hope you reconsider.-
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5 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:
Increased the flexibility for all mount types. For every hull, you will notice much larger freedom in placing the various ship parts. Moreover, you can override the mount snap points by pressing the CTRL button so you can add the part (Towers, Funnels, Barbettes etc.) in a continuous area between the allowed space.
Superb. Thank you so much for listening to everyone who was asking for this change.
Looks like a great patch and hope to see it soon - I'm glad to hear integrating the new team is going well.-
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19 hours ago, Skeksis said:
Suspicious isn't it... or great minds think alike!
I've thought for years that the first thing to do when you start designing a new game is go on Nexusmods, search your closest competitor, find out the most popular QoL mods and implement them. Guess that would apply to forums too.
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On 2/6/2021 at 12:36 PM, SonicB said:
Because 'Murica, apparently.
Seriously, I cannot describe how happy I was when Nick announced this wouldn't be yet another WW2 Pacific default campaign.That said... having played the hell out of Cold Waters, I've now played a few hours of 'War on the Sea.' Though the interface is a bit clunky, in terms of information and control it's miles ahead of where we are now, from individual turret fire-control with accurately modelled director firing to a minimap with waypoint functionality. I confess I didn't fully realise what I was missing in UA:D until I played this game.
Very much hope the devs are looking closely at this, because that level of control should be a bare minimum at launch.-
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11 hours ago, CapnAvont1015 said:
Well now UA:D is not even out yet and it already has some more competition. However I already have some problems with this game and one them is THAT IT'S SET BETWEEN AMERICA AND JAPAN! (DEEPLY INHALES) WhY?!
Because 'Murica, apparently.
Seriously, I cannot describe how happy I was when Nick announced this wouldn't be yet another WW2 Pacific default campaign.-
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1 hour ago, Stormnet said:
A little late for the party but I found these ones:
Those 2 tripple 17" are kinda scary...
however, meme time.
DEVELOPER: Makes it so AI ships can't have empty barbettes
AI: You may have outsmarted me, but I undersmarted your outsmarting.
At least the barbette is being used for something...
To allow that lonely 6 inch to fire above all those 4 inch at the rear...
This one is not that bad...
Until I tell you the only armament besides those 5 triple 14 inch guns is...
...a pair of triple 2 inches.
Similar problem here. All the casemates in the world, and you put a pair of 4 inches, 2 triple 3" and call it a day.
Lets hope destroyers are something from an alternate reality... damn it!
Gotta give it to this one, 2x 23 inch quad torpedo launchers and reasonable speed of 38 knots...
BUT:
What is that lonely 2 inch doing in there?
Why are there 4x 1 barrel turret instead of 2x double to save weight?
Why did you put the torpedo lauchers in essencially superfiring positions and crammed those 3 turrets at the back?
What is that funnel doing there at the back and not next to the other one?
Also, where armor, 0?
Should I mention found all of these in a single custom battle where I was testing my
super-superbattleship?
Extra points because the comments made me spit out my coffee.
Hmm, maybe I should go through and rate all these on what-the-f*cks out of 10... -
18 minutes ago, 1MajorKoenig said:
Ok Sonic - I did play it from the US side now - after I failed with the Brits - and that was an easy win. And my two BBs did't do much but the Battlecruiser Lexington did some work. I had to use UNLOCK though as the US Battlecruiser was too small (33k?) and used one of 45k tons - which unfortunately turned out to look british.
Regardless, we killed all transports and the capital ships in roughly an ingame hour and the remaining two CAs were running.
Nice Scenario! - Although I still need to beat it from the Britisch side - which seems much tougher
Here is my USS Lexington:
Nice! I've played the scenario through a few times and I have to admit it would be so much better if custom battles were more... well, customisable.
The biggest problem here is that while I wanted to include the Lexington as constructed for Rule of Cool value, equal tech levels generally mean the two US battleships are more powerful than intended. As a tweak I tried lowering the US tech level to 1921 (the year in which Lexington's keel was laid) and that generally worked out more balanced.
Your Lex on the BC V (?) hull actually doesn't look far off published designs, with the exception of the cage masts which I doubt would have been present in the mid-20s. -
15 minutes ago, HistoricalAccuracyMan said:
Okay, so I've thought of a way to try and gather feedback about scenarios posted here.
As of right now there are 3 ways to react to a post: the Trophy (Thanks), the Crying Face (Sad) and the Heart (Like).
What if whenever we played a scenario it went like this: if you win, react to that specific post with the Trophy. If you lost that scenario, react with the sad face, and the Like reaction is pretty self-explanatory. This could be an effective and quick way to gather feedback/results about the scenarios we post here.
What do you think @1MajorKoenig @Cptbarney @Cpt.Hissy @BobRoss0902 @SonicB @Skeksis @Nick Thomadis and of course everyone else?
Good thought, but afraid that would only work for scenarios with only one playable side.
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Okay, I'll bite!
WAR PLAN RED 1930 - Episode One "The Battle of Cape Breton"Background: Negotiations for the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922 fell apart. Warship building continued apace, and the two largest surviving naval powers, Britain and the US, found themselves in the midst of a new arms race which a weary Britain could ill afford. In the late twenties, the UK sought to deepen the old alliance with Japan in order to counterbalance America's rising power and safeguard her Pacific empire, further damaging relations with the US. Old disputes over Canadian trade and border issues flared, coinciding with Britain's near bankruptcy and default on all her American loans in 1928. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash the next year, the US moves to seize parts of Canadian territory as collateral.
Mission: You command the strong naval escort of the first British troop convoy seeking to reinforce Canadian forces in Newfoundland, or the numerically superior but hastily-assembled US Navy force rushing to intercept before the British reach the Gulf of St. Lawrence. US naval intelligence reports a worn-out but still dangerous Queen Elizabeth class battleship is the convoy's main defence. However, this is somewhat incorrect...
Design Instructions and Order of Battle:(historical/planned classes given as examples)
1) Attacking Fleet - United States (1922)- 2x 28,000-35,000t BB - Tennessee class (33,000t, 22kt, 4x3 14")
- 1x 40,000-50,000t BC - Lexington class (45,000t, 34kt, 4x2 16")
- 6x 1,000-1,600t DD - Clemson class (1,300t, 36kt, 4x1 4", 4x3 21" torpedo)
2) Defending Fleet - Great Britain (1927)
- 1x 45,000-52,000t BB - N3 (St. George) class (48,000t, 23kt, 3x3 18")
- 1x 26,000-38,000t BC - Renown class (37,000t, 32kt, 3x2 15")
- 2x 8,000-12,000t CA - Hawkins class (12,000t, 30kt, 7x1 7", 6x 21" torpedo)
- 12x Transport
Victory Conditions:
1) United States:
- Sink 50% of transports within 5h
- Sink all British capital ships without losing more than two capital ships
2) Great Britain:
- Keep 50% of transports afloat for 5h
- Sink all three US capital ships
Thoughts on this match-up welcome! This is based on a real-world war plan - and if you doubt the likelihood of the scenario, recall that Britain and Germany had a very good, even friendly relationship even until the turn of the 20th century when naval rivalry began to seriously intrude.-
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59 minutes ago, DerRichtigeArzt said:
I like that a lot, I also have a sugestion, the forum is really dead, which mwans that the interest in the game is very very low. Naybe you should reach out to some youtubers
(benjamun magnus, deachinifel etc.) to promote the project a little. Not necessarily now, since there is not a lot to do, but at the end on 2021 before Christmas. It would bring in some fresh ideas and clear minds to the community.
I like the roadmap, and especialy the increase in feedback coming and going from the dev team. Hyped for crew and designer improvements. Have a great year lads.
Drach did a couple UA:D videos early last year around Alpha-5, most of which (iirc) consisted of "can we recreate (x) historical ship? Not really, no."
He's one of my favourite youtube historians, so perhaps it would be good to get him back again once the ship designer has been significantly improved. Give the update a bit of public fanfare.-
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On 1/21/2021 at 12:59 PM, Nick Thomadis said:
Furthermore, we confirm the allocation of another dedicated programmer who will focus solely on needed improvements for the ship design system.
Thank you! Thankyouthankyouthankyou 😍
I look forward to seeing more detail about the designer improvements once your new programmer has got settled in, but for now this news is very good news.-
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I've recommended it to one friend of mine on the understanding that it's most decidedly a WIP (he was a game dev, so knows the score.)
Whether I recommend it in beta and beyond to the many other friends I know from naval history and wargaming circles depends on three things:- Remaining 'gamey' elements (cloaking smoke, torpedo spam and other such fixes to the meta rather than the underlying issues) are reformed.
- The designer improves to the point where you don't feel held back by arbitrary restrictions.
- Modding is officially supported or at least easy to accomplish, acknowledging you can't include enough content for everyone in the base game.
Accomplish those three things and they won't need a marketing budget.
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23 hours ago, Cpt.Hissy said:
Yep, missed this.
A map / plotting table mode would be helpful. it could partially or fully replace the freecam for that "realism" feel as well. May be optional.This would be such a good idea. It would make misidentification and the spotting mechanic in general much more realistic once you can't immediately click-zoom to an enemy and confirm its class. This would then allow the spotting range to be extended to a realistic amount and reduce the gamey crap of destroyers popping out of nowhere.
I would allow a limited free camera but restrict it to within, say, five-ten miles of any friendly ship.
how is this beatable?!? prove your might
in General Discussions
Posted
Finished this mission back in Alpha-6 on (I think) my first or second try - I don't recall the exact ship configuration but I think I did basically the opposite of what you all did. My BC was lightly armoured but 38kt, ish, with 16" or 17" heavy guns. I banzai charged with the two light cruisers and the entire strategy depended on getting torpedoes off before dying, which they did, and a good dose of luck. The torpedoes took out the engines of the BB and a CA, and I was then able to kite at extreme range while using the convoy (and one surprisingly alive CL) to pull aggro whenever I got too close, all the while keeping 36kt+ and hitting the BB with plunging fire until it died.
The friendly battleship was, ofc, completely useless.
I wonder if the changes to the torpedo meta have made this strategy unviable but I might fire it up and test things out.