brothermunro

After my experience with the last beta I’ll probably wait until the devs start talking about ‘release candidates’ before I start work porting DIP v2 over to 1.6 so please be patient 😇

A feature request primarily for modders although I think it would also be helpful for the dev team as well (there’s two options, either would work in my opinion so whichever is simpler): Configurable armour minimums Rather than the current minimum armour in shiptypes which only applies to the main belt; strings are added for minimum main belt, fore/aft belt, fore/aft deck, superstructure, & conning tower Calculated armour minimums The current minimum armour is changed by a configurable scaling factor for the other armour parts, for instance main deck minimum = 0.5*main belt minimum This would help modders & the dev team guide the AI towards more sensible design choices

Boy am I aware of it. I had the auto builder working pretty well and then the developers ’improved’ the builder logic and now it’s back to tin foil ships. It will take me a while to work out how to make it be sensible again.

Adding components is a thing that can be done but it makes the mod more complicated to install so it’s not in scope until I can make some sort of installer package (which is a long way off!)

Seems decent to me! If you did want to make any changes you could do any of the following to free up weight: Reduce the gun length - DIP v2 makes long guns not terrible but they are heavier and slower to fire, sometimes a slightly shorter barrel gives you more bang for your buck Your mid deck armour is very thick and quite heavy you light be able to shave it down a touch (or make the citadel smaller, see below) The modern tower V is also very heavy, you might get some weight back with little performance impact from a smaller, lighter tower (especially if you can also get a smaller rear tower & shorten your citadel) Hope that helps!

Let me know how it goes! V2 of DIP is a bit of a change from the first version, and radically different from vanilla in terms of feel and ship design it can take some getting used to but I’ve been finding it a lot more interesting and enjoyable (If you’re curious as to why cruisers are harder to build now it is because they now follow the same under the hood rules as the bigger ships rather than having their own weird rules that led to the AI’s beloved hyper speed ships)

If you’re referring to the ‘how to build heavy cruisers’ video I did a while ago there’s some significant changes for DIP v2, especially if you are building an early game Armoured Cruiser: Speed: The ideal design speed of CA hulls is more of an aspirational target. You’ll need better engines and probably oil fuel to reach optimal speeds. Going over the design speed is going to make engines very heavy. Reducing beam helps a lot! Armour: You need less armour in DIP v2 overall but it’s worth pointing out that iron plate is really bad. You probably won’t have really solid protection until you get decent steel. Generally speaking an 8” belt is actually very good on a CA now. You don’t need a lot of deck armour. Extended armour should only be enough to keep out HE shells from other cruisers and (optionally) 5” or lower AP shells - 1.5” does the job just fine. Firepower: Depends on the hull but for a typical 10,000 ton ish modern heavy cruiser you’ll be looking at 8-10 8” guns as a sort of ‘medium’ balanced option. You don’t need a ton of armour on the turrets - 10/5/8 is plenty. Torpedoes and secondaries can add a fair bit of weight so if you upgun your mains that’s an area you can cut back on. Best thing to do is to look at the bottom right of the info panel in the builder and look at the weights (it’s ordered by heaviest to lightest). I’d expect the top items to be hull, fuel, & bulkheads. If anything else is up there then that’s a good place to look to for weight reductions.

It’s on the to do list!

Yup! The only way to affect component choice is to mess with the ‘weights’ in components but this affects all ship types equally. There’s no way to tell transports to follow different rules in the text files so sadly beyond modders.

I would never say ‘get good’ but I would say “you must unlearn what you have learned”. Cruiser design is much more challenging now, the max design speed of the hull is a theoretical ’maybe if we push it’ number until you get engines that aren’t terrible. Long range ships are very hard to do until you get coal. Iron plate is rubbish so proper protection is hard until you get some decent steel etc.

Nexus messed up the upload, should be working now

DIP Version 2 This major update affects nearly all of the modded files, it is NOT compatible with v1 save games or designs so it is recommended to clear out any saved designs you have and start a new campaign. What's new? Gun stats have been completely reworked using some NAR data (thank you to the Baron for helping me with this). Guns should now perform reasonably predictably. Effects of changing gun barrel length have been reduced significantly, you should no longer see long guns having terrible accuracy or short guns being extremely cheap for instance. When new marks of guns are unlocked has been reworked. Expect to be stuck on mark 1 guns until the 1910's. Mark 3's probably won't show up until the 20's, 30's for mark 4's, & 40's for mark 5's and so on. You should see higher marks of guns unlock sequentially from smallest to largest for the most part. Belt penetration has been reworked to generally make guns less punchy and to make realistic armour thicknesses viable. Changes to how weights for light and heavy cruisers are calculated to make them more in line with bigger ships. Overall this means that cruisers should have less spare displacement. Multiple torpedo tubes are now slightly more displacement efficient making quadruple and quintuple launchers a more attractive choice. Mine laying, mine sweeping, and depth charge components have been 'removed' (by making them torpedo boat exclusives). This was done primarily to stop the AI wasting displacement on these parts. Engine costs have been rebalanced, turbo electric is slightly more expensive, diesels are cheaper. Overall ships should no longer reach ludicrous costs unless they are very large and very fast. Auxiliary engines have been cost rebalanced to make high end options more viable & to stop the AI making obscenely expensive ships. Propeller upgrades have been rebalanced and are now slightly less effective but cheaper. Standard bulkheads will now become obsolete, this forces the AI to use at least reinforced 1 bulkheads which helps it not make crippled designs. Adjusted the appearance of auto loaders, sonar, and radar to be somewhat later (late 1930s to the 1940/50's). Radar 3 and autoloading guns will likely now become unlocked after you have mark 5 guns. Standard reload will now become obsolete. The AI builder is also more likely to use better reload techs if it can. Adjusted component weights for shell types to encourage better AI decision making. For AP shells this means the AI is most likely to pick the 'rightmost' AP shell it has access to. Base detection of torpedoes lowered to 500m to make hitting AI ships more likely. Increased ammo detonation damage, secondary ammo detonations are now quite dangerous. Increased flooding sinking threshold to 75% of flood-able compartments (ships have 10 compartments). This means that ships are slightly more survivable but also sinking via flooding is more predictable and obvious to the player. A ship whose citadel covers at least 3 compartments should not be able to be easily sunk by hits to its extended belt/deck. Reduced maximum speed of some ship classes to plausible but still very fast values. (BB 36, BC/CA/CL 40, DD 45 knots). This is primarily done to help the AI not build ridiculously fast ships with no armour. Heavy Cruisers now have a maximum secondary gun size of 5" rather than 6" to avoid problems when ships were designed with both primary and secondary 6 inch guns. Other attempted improvements to the auto builder, such as trying to persuade the AI not to put very large guns on small ships. Increased the partial pen threshold to 80% and reduced partial pen damage. Whilst HE is still very useful for destroying the upper-works of a ship a properly armoured battleship can now withstand a considerable amount of punishment. Rebalance of the fuse and ricochet effects of shells to make shells behave more predictably. Rebalanced unrest modifiers to be lower overall. This makes AI countries quite stable unless they suffer a string of defeats and/or conquer too much territory. Adjusted map colours of Spain to match the yellow of their flag and China who are now a darker orange. Submarines have been removed completely from the research screen. AI personalities changed to encourage AI nations to be more aggressive with bigger fleets. The Naval Academy has been completely rebalanced to act as a tutorial rather than a challenge mode.

Version 2 is out now! I fully intend on keeping 1.14 around until the end of UAD 1.5. V2 will be in 'beta' until 1.6 is released onto the live branch. Please note that v2 saves and designs are not compatible with v1, I recommend a fresh save and a cleared out design folder. If you still experience weirdness try deleting the custom battle save.

I can tell you why they can’t let you build old ships, or rather why the game obsoletes hulls. It’s relatively trivial to turn this off and have all hulls available all the time which is great for the human player who can make sensible choices but the AI builder is a different kettle of fish. It basically chooses from the available hulls at random, it has no way of evaluating if they are any good. So you’d have the AI in 1950 building pre dreadnoughts. Hilarious yes, but fairly terrible for game balance.

A small update, probably the last one for version 1 of the mod. The Spanish 'Advanced Small Battleship' now has an optimum speed of 28.5 knots like the other hulls of a similar type, and to make it a viable and attractive choice for late game Spanish empires that need such a ship. My plan is to release version 2 in the next few days, I imagine that UAD 1.6 isn't too far away but I will make sure that DIP 1.14 is kept updated for 1.5.