[-=Beta v1.4 Planned for end of next week=-]

773hrs logged. As thrilled as I am with the mentioned features, I'd happily trade them all away for the dev team focusing exclusively on the longstanding quality-of-life fixes and game mechanics fixes already requested in this thread.

[-=Beta v1.4 Planned for end of next week=-]

On 9/2/2023 at 2:59 PM, Zuikaku said:

For the mental health sake please fix AI running away as soon as battle is started, without even bothering to make visual contact first. This is especially frustrating in Cl vs. Cl missions.

And fix now useless submarines. They can not sink anything since the 1.3 and new mission generation mechanics.

Zuikaku, totally agree - running down the AI single-ship task forces is arguably the most tedious part of the game in its current state - I get around this by creating very fast ships of any class, and shamelessly using the 'retreat' button to find the exact direction of the enemy ship. AI cheats by running away directly from wherever I am, so I'm cheating right back.

[-=Beta v1.4 Planned for end of next week=-]

5 hours ago, brothermunro said:

Hello @Nick Thomadis & the Team!

I hope the development of 1.4 is progressing well, and I wanted to ask you to consider making a balance change to the 'Range Found' bonus.

I understand the mechanics of it from a game and realism point of view, if a ship hits another and gets its guns dialled in then that's a very powerful advantage. I appreciate that the bonus builds over time to represent the crew refining the firing solution and getting more and more accurate. All of that is great! The problem for me is the values that the bonus can get to. I regularly see the bonus going over 1000% and can go as high as 2900%. This poses a few issues, but the main one is that if I win or lose a battle with such a bonus it doesn't feel like its something I did, it feels more like winning a coin toss. The values can get so much larger than any other modifier that it makes all of them irrelevant, a -50% damage instability debuff is fairly insignificant for example when it should be crippling.

Please consider capping the range found bonus at a significantly lower value, I would suggest that 100% is more than sufficient.

(Tested on totally vanilla gameplay)

What brothermunro said, just more details:

- the 'range found' bonus appears to jump by an order of magnitude if a ship keeps firing a number of salvos at the same ship for a long time. 

- The jump occurs after a(large) number of salvos, you consistently will see it happen sooner for the smaller quick-firing guns. It WILL eventually happen for the big guns as well, but much later in the battle.

- The effect is there for secondaries as well as for primary guns; this is why you will sometimes see your secondaries be vastly more accurate than your main battery guns, even over large distances.

- The bonus is so large that it essentially renders all other bonuses irrelevant.

- Since the AI switches targes more often than a player who mircomanages the targets of his ships, it's much easier to see this bonus for the player.

It appears to be a calculation bug in the way the 'range found' bonus increases over time, and should be easily reproducible in any battle lasting for some time. It's gotta be somewhere in the math guys, happy hunting! For me it's a gamebreaker, once you realize what's going on it's hard to see all that work on my big ship desings rendered useless by the laser-accurate low-caliber guns of my cruisers.

 

[>>> Update v1.05 Feedback<<<]

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