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The (hilariously absurd) last stand of the Zulu against my five German Large Torpedo Boats in 1910 campaign: Zulu eats 5x 18-inch torpedoes from two separate volleys. Flotation falls low...then starts rising again...stabilizing at 17%. Two minutes later, flotation still stable at 17%. Dodge 3 more torpedoes from multiple bearings at close range? She doesn't mind if she does... One minute later...I guess she needs two more torpedoes...to get her to 1% flotation...and again stabilized there while she continues to fight and turn in place. Let's approach a bit more slowly to try and get some torpedoes into her miraculous bow flotation reserve. Surely she is just a floating wreck and really I am just removing the now detached bow as a navigation hazard from the sea as her few remaining crew jump ship? Nope! Still fighting and spinning away basically in place. All the damage seen above to my boat except for one flooding furthest toward the stern dealt by Zulu over the course of a minute or two. Two more torpedoes and...not an immediate sinking, but a flash fire in, presumably, flooded magazines! Fire continues to spread forward through what should be a nonexistent two-thirds of the ship and with one more flash fire the final 1% is gone and we fade to black on the not-so-true-to-life story of the Zulu. The real HMS Zulu after a single mine strike on her stern: HMS Nubian after her bow was removed by a single German torpedo at the Battle of Dover Strait: Later they were joined together to create HMS Zubian.

AI does not get any bonuses that you can’t also employ. Player has huge advantage against AI in regards to torpedoes because you can use divination to observe what’s happening aboard any spotted ship.

No doubt we will eventually encounter the mighty German BB...Pinguin. (I was already forced to build a big armored cruiser named Cormorant in last campaign).

Likely because fleet-type battles are "rolled" relatively rarely, and groups of BBs are not suitable for the more common mission types that are generated. If you are saying that if you only build BBs then you should only get full fleet battles, well I'm not sure that makes sense. You really should immediately lose the campaign do to inability to properly project power and protect own coasts.

Then likely the issue is only having BBs. This probably pulls a BB where normally it would pull a cruiser.

Do you think, maybe, they were wrong?

I don't think Sea Control is a task for BB fleets in game terms. You are probably telling all your BBs to go out and raid or patrol individually.

I think if you put ships on Sea Control they are much more likely to go out raiding or patrolling on their own. I only put fast CLs and CAs on sea control and have not had this happen to me, although I've had several 1 enemy vs. many of mine battles.

I sort of agree, but everything I've said above applies to the current system only looking at the conditions, not the visuals. The visual discrepancies just reinforce the weirdness of it all.

Probably flogging a dead horse here, but there is going to be constant friction between the relatively realistic system of gun range and penetration (thus creating realistic immune zones) and the very unrealistic spotting (far more restricted than reality in many circumstances, too influenced by artificial tower tech setting a hard visual range bubble that has nothing to do with reality) and targeting ("borg" targeting where if any ship can see a target, all ships can engage the target without regard to their own visibility). This creates the impression that ship's are running away out of possible visual range (the only hard limit should be the horizon unless obscurants like precipitation, mist, fog, smoke are present; everything within that should be a probability of spotting based on conditions and target visual signature) when they are in fact seeking effective gun range which often exceeds the artificial visual limits in game. 1. Ships should only be able to target ship's they can themselves see with their eyes. This would mean that in restricted visual conditions ship's cannot run away out of vision to more effectively use their guns.* 2. In clear conditions, the limit of vision should exceed the possible range where guns can be targeted at all (at least for capital ships), much less targeted effectively.* *Only second-generation radar overcomes this limitation. First gen might allow a ship to find a potential target and spot it easier visually once brought within the limit of vision based on conditions, but second-generation fire control radar is required to circumvent the need to see a target to effectively use guns against it. Note also that under clear conditions finding an enemy by radar and by sight are largely the same since funnel smoke is likely to be visible beyond the visual horizon (which is also the radar horizon in these conditions). To some degree second-gen fire control radar may be able to overcome the need to have a ship within the visual horizon (or range of vision based on obscurants) to effectively target it, as it may be able to range on large shell splashes extending above the horizon, thus being able to judge short and long fall of shot without seeing the ocean surface out to the range of the fall of shot.

Since it is not in the change notes, I think we can assume WIP.

You can mount 6-inch Mark I and II singles in these positions with normal arcs showinng if you rotate them from their default mounting positions.

It doesn't even show as a possible mounting location for 6-inch, even with nothing mounted in the main wing turret position, so there is no way to check for possible interference. 6-inch selected, no mounting points shown. It looks like her main side turrets were in reality taller than they are in game, and possibly the side center secondary positions somewhat lower in the hull. Maybe the main barbette in the hull side could be raised to get the main turret up a bit higher and allow for a greater variety of guns to fit in the secondary positions?

French Ironclad Battleship III cannot mount either 10-inch or 11-inch single turrets in the center side hull positions. Massena had 10.8-inch single turrets in these positions. The largest you can place there are single 8-inch guns. On French Battleship II, you can mount 10- to 11-inch guns in the wing positions as on the Bouvet (actual guns 10.8"). However, you cannot mount 6-inch single turrets in the positions immediately next to and below these wing main turrets. You can mount 5-inch guns, but as the actual ship had 5.5-inch guns, I'd argue 6-inch should be allowed also (and interference with the main position adjusted if needed). You can mount 6-innch guns in the front and rear side hull positions abreast the 12-inch gun turrets. Also, you can't mount 4-inch shielded secondary guns anywhere in the towers or funnel superstructure, whereas Bouvet had 4-inch (10cm) guns in several superstructure positions.

Thank you for looking into this Nick! It does appear to be working now. That said, we still need more ways for the player to adjust weight distribution within hull itself. Armor is now the only real working lever the player can adjust, but most designs tend to bias toward a strong fore weight offset, and adding more armor to the back of the ship versus the front is not really a logical design choice. One other thing I just noticed is that conning tower armor weight appears to be applied to the center of the ship rather than the forward superstructure. While some designs did incorporate both forward and aft conning towers, the aft conning towers seldom were of the same size and protection as the forward conning tower. However, applying the conning tower armor weight to actual location would exacerbate the tendency toward forward weight offsets, and as noted above, there is little the player can change to offset this in a realistic way.

That would certainly work a thousand times better.

Yes, doesn't make sense. Powerplant design in general could use a rework as there are several elements that really don't make sense and are a detriment to authenticity:

The new French Armoured Cruiser II and III are the only pre-dreadnought Armoured Cruisers in game that can mount anything near a proper battery of 6-inch guns (I think; definitely can't on Brit and German armoured cruisers as I've found in the campaigns so far), like almost all armoured cruisers carried historically, which is ironic because the French were one of the few not to consistently mount 6-inch batteries on their armoured cruisers (although 6-inch in game is probably the best equivalent to the 5.5-inch guns the early French ships did typically carry before they moved to 6.4-inch batteries on ACs). That alone makes them much more powerful in their intended role compared to the others, but the super-firing main turrets put them quite literally far into the future compared to their contemporaries. Still under-armed with 6- to 8-inch guns compared to their historical counterparts, however.

It works on the front with the Mark I guns up to 13-inch, but of course that doesn't help with the weird academy mish-mash missions that make you use later mark turrets. The later mark 12-13" turrets (at least the Mark IIs) will fit on the back, but you have to hold CTRL to place them further back than the default mounting points. Part of the issue here is that many of the French pre-dreadnought towers includes davits with boats behind them that you are forced to fit onto the front of the hull severely limiting your ability to gain more deck space up front with smaller towers (and also obligating you to either place a funnel immediately behind the tower or leave a weird empty deck patch). @Nick Thomadis could the boats on davits included with Tower I-III automatically be removed if we place the tower back past a point where they will fit, the same way that boats on the hull are automatically removed when an object added to the hull would interfere with them?

This was not a destroyer in the form of the torpedo boat destroyer / destroyer hulls in game, but something more in line with a Torpedo Gunboat. However, torpedo gunboats were important in the 1890 timeframe and are a good suggestion for an addition to the game. Also probably reading too much into Destructor’s name as the originator of the concept. There were quite a few different concepts being tried out at the same time to serve the purpose of destroying torpedo boats and the term “torpedo boat destroyer” was in use before Destructor was laid down.

Are you putting them on "Sea Control"? I've only had one of these missions and it was vs. AI BB.

One ship designer item that desperately needs a rework is the boiler draft selection and tech development. This makes no sense at all currently, as both induced and forced draft were already developed before 1890 (and balanced also, since it was simply a combo of the two), and forcing was more a choice in engine operation not design (using forced draft to achieve maximum power and thus maximum speed had limits). You couldn't have the top trial speeds listed for warships of this era without forcing, and in fact speeds for ships from the start of this era are often listed as both max speed with natural draft and max speed with forcing. Draft as the sole choice of boiler design also provides a rather limited selection of possible developments and tends to tie them to somewhat fake stat items (e.g. smoke production / interference would be a product of using forced draft to push speed, as well as wind direction in relation to the target, not to the design of the boiler to be able to use forced draft). Rather than selecting draft type, we should be selecting boiler type / design (which might have some elements of the draft / draught system in it). I’ve been reading Norman Friedman’s British Cruisers of the Victorian Era recently, and the intro includes a nice overview of early developments in warship boiler design, which were central to the pursuit of more power (and thus more speed) in cruiser development (I will underline and bold some key developments and their time frames): That only really takes us through 1900 plus or minus a few years with the cylindrical fire-tube boiler as the 1890 baseline, and already there are several important developments that could serve as authentic design decisions in game, replacing the fake boiler draft choice that is inherently limited and requires somewhat made-up stat bonuses / maluses. Developments from there would continue in pursuit of higher and higher pressure with new boiler technology, culminating for the game’s era in the U.S./German-type very high pressure systems. @Nick Thomadis, any chance we could see this replaced and improved? Drachinifel also has a compact overview on the subject: We could start to put together a basic tech progression for boiler design: 1. Cylindrical Fire-Tube Boiler (lightweight Locomotive Boilers should also be an option, but impractical for large ships or long range due poor efficiency and reliability at sea) 2. Water-Tube Boiler 3. Three-Cylinder (or "Three-Drum") Water-Tube Boiler 4. Small-Tube Water-Tube Boiler 5. High Pressure Small-Tube Water-Tube Boiler

French Ironclad I-III are a bit odd as their rear tower and main turret placement positions allow for easy placement of super-firing main turrets at the back long before this was really "invented" as a technology. The displayed anchor points for the rear tower are actually limited and preclude this if you use them, but holding CTRL you can place the rear tower forward to past the center of the ship. While this is kind of "cool," and I do prefer more flexibility in placing towers and funnels, it breaks logical design progression as you then lose this ability with all the post-1890 pre-dreadnought battleship hulls that are supposed to be more "advanced" (and of course isn't allowed on the other nations' pre-dreadnought hulls). That said, it is great to see some more early designs making their way into the game.

My guess is your not supposed to be able to win the 1920 German campaign if it starts in an at war condition. I mean, it should be unwinnable if historical starting conditions are used. You are basically starting a war as an already defeated naval power with a wrecked economy. I’d just edit the files to get the 1930 start as the whole unlocking thing is stupid.

Torpedo boats are absurdly resilient to gunfire. Just had a seemingly unending battle to attempt to finish off a force of 1x CL and 2x 200-ton TBs vs. my CL. Circled the last TB repeatedly pouring fire into until it had taken 31x 4" HE and 5x 6" HE hits and was reduced to single digit hull and flotation. Decided to stop firing to see if it was actually doomed at that point (surely it must be). Nope! Continued to fight its 2" guns and started to recover both hull and flotation, then moments later destroyed my forward 6" turret with a flash fire following a 2" hit. Well now, guess I'm not finished yet! Took at least 6 more hits to finally put it beneath the waves. Never stopped fighting its guns and continued to spin stationary in place constantly pointing its stern at me (the bow was where the miraculous flotation reserve was located). This was all HE ammo, but every hit over-penetrated, even if shooting down the length of the ship. IIRC, British tests in the early 1900s (I believe, would need to look up the reference) indicated that a single 4" hit would be sufficient to knock a TB out of action. Shells bursting in these ships would have nothing to stop splinters from passing through a good portion of the boat. A hit just about anywhere would tear holes in the hull and probably kill multiple exposed crew members and wreck equipment.