akd

I don't think they can ever correspond to reality because the armor design (where in the ship the armor actually is distributed and which areas go without armor) does not correspond to reality.

Time compression at will, no restrictions, but a menu for events that drop time compression (and set these by default to "don't die stupidly" selections that the player can alter if they wish).

I would like to point out that battles initiating during a cloudy night with smoke spotted on the horizon is a bit ridiculous, nevermind the complete lack of features to support night fighting (environment, star shell, spotlights, proper separation of radar spotting from visual spotting, etc.). Please remove night battles from the game until they are properly supported. Also, the way smoke on the horizon works in combination with poor visibility (besides being on its face nonsensical) is extremely frustrating. Because the AI does the magic thing where it constantly steers a precise course to sail directly away from you, and the bearing updates are intermittent and extremely imprecise (actual smoke spotted on the horizon would come with an exact bearing, of course), you find yourself in a situation where you steer to close the enemy, but as you get closer (and are forced into lower time compression, drawing the whole thing out), the AI steers to sail directly away toward the unlimited horizon, then you get a "smoke" direction update later find the enemy is at a new bearing, steer to correct, then have the same thing happen as you close again. You can end up chasing the AI in an unending circle around the compass.

Repeating things said years ago, but the whole "propellant" choice as part of ship design seems a bit silly (not that it wasn't an important area of development in naval warfare). 1. Use of newer propellants tended toward a steady progression. Not necessarily all adopting at same time, but generally moving from older tech to newer tech without a lot of positive vs. negative decisions (aside from cost considerations). 2. Because there weren't real trade-offs like this in the development of propellants, either fake or exaggerated bonuses and maluses have been added to make the choice meaningful. Despite the separation of explosive choice (inherent to the shell itself) vs. propellant (independent of the shell), propellant choices are still doing totally nonsensical things like making shells themselves heavier. Since these choices are not entirely grounded in reality and totally disconnected from the ship design itself (and apparently very confusing in their effects), it would make more sense to have propellant technology just progress in the background with research and then be applied automatically to all ships when unlocked. Replace the propellant "choice" with something that has direct impacts on ship design (e.g. more choices to tailor fire control equipment on a ship).

But it’s not used in the flight and terminal ballistics for the shell itself, correct? Because the description still implies that it does, but is on its face nonsensical.

Sounds like they forgot to update this after separating explosives and propellant. Propellant should not be affecting shell weight. I guess in theory it could affect the weight of powder charges carried in the ship, but those don’t go out the barrel.

If you were significantly faster than the enemy, then bringing them from smoke on the horizon to mast up should not be very long (but the visibility system in game has nothing to do with reality). Also as mentioned elsewhere, running away from smoke on the horizon should be very circumstantial (convoy, yeah turn away; cruiser division, not going to run because they see smoke unless it is full fleet), but the AI (and you) know exactly what the smoke is before seeing them and act accordingly.

I see a pretty fundamental issue with the way battles are initiated in a campaign (rather than canned single battle) setting: My first battle was an encounter between my 4x German CAs vs. 3x British CAs. I entered the battle with only smoke sighted, and presumably it was the same for the British. The British apparently started running as soon as the battle began, as I never gained visibility. Also, they seemed to do the very artificial thing (based on the change in smoke bearing) where they constantly steer a course directly away from your nearest ship, rather than picking a direction of retreat that is connected in any way to the real world (e.g. a retreat in direction of home ports) that might allow you to make tactical decisions about pursuit, or complicate a retreat depending on the relative starting locations. Questions this raises: How do I know exactly what I am facing if only smoke has been sighted? How does the enemy know and make the decision to run before we even see each other? Would 3x CAs retreat from 4x CAs in reality (or is this core problem of battles in a campaign being devoid of any real context, and so just artificially comparing some numbers)* Are the battle maps in any way connected to the campaign map, or will battles always take place in a strange open sea space with no connection to the campaign map? *I would contend that the British would never have retreated in this circumstance historically, unless the cruisers were acting as a scouting force for a larger fleet and seeking to bring about a larger engagement by drawing the enemy deeper into friendly territory. Campaign context matters more than comparing numbers in an artificial arena disconnected from the map.

This was the whole motivation for mounting large numbers of very short range, rapid-fire, small-caliber guns like Nordenfelt guns up through the 1890s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-inch_Nordenfelt_gun It was generally assumed that TBs would only attack in conditions where they could approach to close range without being detected (e.g. night port attacks) and that once detected they would have to be very rapidly engaged to have any chance of stopping or disrupting the torpedo attack (against your likely immobile ship). Another piece of evidence of this mindset was the tertiary battery guns mounted directly on the tops of main gun turrets for a time: these could not be manned and operated while the main guns were firing, but were there because it was assumed that they would in use defending against TBs in circumstances where the main guns would not be in action.

This was not my experience in my first 1890 campaign battle with cadet crews (my 3x CA vs. Brit 1x CA, 2x CL, 10x TR). Destroyed all the enemy ships in less than an hour, only using torpedoes on 5 of the TRs. Average gunnery distance was probably around 1000-500m with a few very close passes on TRs and one close pass on the CA to finish it after it was already crippled (rather hilariously the CA blew up after a 2" penetration of the main belt).

A caution, however: I'm not sure the distribution of misses is actually normal. It seems like misses may be artificially clustered around ships rather than conforming to a real world distribution. Really hard to say, but that could distort the effects of damage from splinters.

I would like to see near misses have a chance of inflicting shrapnel damage with ability to penetrate scaled to shell size up to around 3" plate able to keep out even large pieces of the heaviest AP shells (HE tends to produce more, but smaller fragments with less ability to penetrate), but this goes back to the whole hit water = shell no longer exists or has any effect in the world problem. That might add some realistic deterrence to TBs that approach under a high volume of fire in good visibility conditions.

The whole idea that unlocking choices is good gameplay design is erroneous.

Another important one:

That would be a shame, because it is pretty central to the feel of naval combat in this time period (big guns shooting very long distances).

Will be back for some campaign testing. The very artificial build for single missions part of the game just doesn't do anything for me.

The game has huge issues, but I have serious doubts that not messing with probability to make the player feel better is one of them. As Madham notes, the issue is more likely communicating info better and setting reasonable expectations for a game that covers a huge time period during which there were monumental changes in gunnery.

Maybe there is nothing to fix here? Just usual human inability to comprehend probability in a rational way, especially gamers who aren’t wargamers.

This game is doomed if the “fix RNG” crowd is showing up.

So what you are saying is that you never want to be HMS Hood, you want the game to make sure that only your opponent is ever HMS Hood?

Because the game starts in 1890, so you clearly need to add some qualifiers to the claim that most shots should hit at less than 8km regardless of target / own motion. Look at some of the hit rates achieved in gunnery practice (not battle) against stationary targets in the years before WWI.

In 1890? no.

Please remove this information. Wargames require fog of war.

A proper sandbox campaign for this era would have its own treaty-making mini-game. Arbitrarily imposing historical treaties makes no sense.

Very cool update! One note: “Captain quarters gun in recoiled position“ Gun would never be “recoiling” (i.e. in use in a fight) with the Captain’s quarters in this state. All of this (hammocks, curtains, furniture, doors and even cabin walls) would be removed and stowed away if the ship was in action. It would be impossible to fight with the guns if the ship were not properly cleared for action. Not the same deck, but illustrates a ship cleared for action: This contains some detailed descriptions of clearing for action: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23408071?seq=1