Hi Devs,
My main reason for buying this was to fulfill my dream of designing the optimal ship with the technology available at any one time, and fighting historical enemy designs with it. Old naval warfare buff, so probably not alone but probably on the upper age/historical knowledge side of the player base.
I'm having fun enough to care about how you proceed, so here's my feedback:
DESIGN
While you've done a great job of creating a procession of modules, gun types, and other technologies, the more artificial limitations are just annoying; hull type and layout place severe restrictions on how I get to set up the modules of a given ship(especially early era), making the design part of the game more a matter of tweaking to see where I can squeeze out a few percentages - so I end up sort of hunting for hidden bonuses on every new version you release. You could argue that the hull types are part of a historical limitation, but given the level of experimentation going on historically, and the fact that a key feature of the game is 'build your own stuff within these limitations' you need to be careful about restricting things artificially - for me, this subtracts directly from the 'fun' column and adds tedium and frustration. I realize you will always need to work with abstractions at some level - hence 'hull types' with ready-made stats - but please leave it up to the players to decide if they want to limit the number of main guns on an 1890s battleship or create a cruiser with a single tower.
Ability to choose ammo layout and shell design? LOVE it. Shell designs should be researched/era dependent though, forgive me if they already are.
FORMATIONS
Ship formations still suck. Come on guys, I start combat with two BB's sailing in a straight line and touch nothing, and the trailing ship immediately starts wobbling from side to side. It's a far cry from anything resembling a simultaneous turn or even a simple turn-in-succession. Line ahead? If I'm lucky I'll eventually see something like a wedge. IMHO this part is screaming for improvement - I'd suggest going for 'perfect formation behavior' first and add in crew skill/weather/signals stuff later. Wishlist:
- simultaneous turn
- actual line ahead
- all ships in formation come to heading X
COMBAT
It's getting better I guess... As long as you don't move to a ballistic shell modelling and use dice rolls, I'll never be happy. In my current campaign I can guess how many hits a salvo will do as soon as the shells leave the tubes, by seeing which shell is going towards the target and seeing the rest of the shells miss by a mile.
CAMPAIGN
WIP, yeah.... I'm still stomping everything AI throws at me with BB-only fleets. Sorry, the more ships I have in combat the more frustrating the ship formations part becomes, so 'jeune ecole' strategies are on indefinite hold.
Task Forces are a good start to giving the player some more decision on fleet composition, excellent addition!
Best regards from Norwegian Old Salt