SodaBit

Literally had the same issue a while back. Tried basically everything there is to try when hunting subs. It seems to be tied to this exact region of ocean, when a hostile submarine group tries to dock at Muscat, and winds up just sitting outside the port forever b/c it feel into enemy hands. Pretty sure all you can do is wait at this point. Sucks to suck, I guess. Same issue occurring in pretty much the exact same spot. Doubt it's coincidence.

Got some feedback here with regards to both campaign AI and battle AI. Got tasked with invading Madeira, and had to fight the Portuguese fleet stationed there. Which, for some reason, is larger than the Japanese, Chinese, and Soviet navies put together. I had no idea the Portuguese government was willing to spend so much on their navy, let alone afford so many ships. However, they proved unable to command such a fleet, as they assumed a massive, and quite dense, battle blob, which caused a large portion of the fleet screen to be destroyed whilst unspotted, as they were incidentally hit by shells that miss the capital ships they were actually aimed at. Despite there being so many TBs and DDs, they never elected to undertake a mass torpedo assault in support of the battleship engagement, with some DDs actually breaking off to try to chase down my own DDs... Who, having dumped their torpedos into the massive blob of hostile shipping, had already begun the journey back home, as they could not safely engage such a large formation in a gunnery exchange. The capital ships were dealt with rather quickly, as they were mostly obsolete American dreadnoughts, with a couple of first generation fast battleships in the mix. This left the still massive fleet screen with nothing left to escort, so the logical mover would be to launch their overwhelming torpedo assault now, since apparently they had a good reason for not doing so earlier. Instead, they sailed around in circles at about 25 km, letting themselves get picked off one by one, which made a nice bit of target practice for my gunnery crews. The result was the complete inverse of what the numbers at the beginning of the engagement would have suggested. In just under 2 hours, the Portuguese armed forces suffered more casualties in a single battle than it did during the entire First World War. The take-aways from this incident must be clear: The AI of minor nations, like the AI of the playable great powers, must be able to scrap obsolete ships while purchasing modern vessels, and the battle AI needs to improve the way it handles massive formations. Realistically, this battle should have been a hard fought Portuguese victory at worst, not one of the darkest days in Portuguese history.

I've got some quick feedback regarding submarines here. Specifically regarding the exploits of the Royal Navy submarine E7. That's her, right there. Surrounded by 3 taskforces who sole purpose of being in this region is to sink E7. 8 M Class light cruisers, who boast a staggering 600 recon value and almost 3,300 ASW, backed up by 4 destroyers, which have a slightly more modest 325 recon and 1600 ASW. In the face of such overwhelming force, the 330 ton submarine should have been hunted down and destroyed within a month of these taskforces arriving to protect German shipping, but alas... Every single month, For The Past Year, E7 has somehow managed to evade my forces and strike out against Somehow Undefended convoys. Either the captain of E7 has made a deal with Cthulhu, or submarines aren't working as they should. Also, I recall there being a poll about whether or not submarines and mines should be removed from the game, and there was an option to leave the choice to the player when they start the campaign, so that those who didn't want to play with these assets didn't have to. Is that going to be implemented at any point, or am I just going to have to grin and bear? Update: Finally caught her. Still, It Took About 4 and a Half YEARS To Hunt Down a Single Sub. And, if the tooltip here is anything to go by, E7 was only caught and destroyed because she pushed her luck too far. If she hadn't committed suicide by Kriegsmarine, this song and dance might have lasted several more months. There needs to be a better way to hunt down subs rather than simply waiting for them to fall on their swords.

I think what Gregg means is a way to block updates without withdrawing from the beta. Doing what you suggested would cause steam to download the 1.3.9.9 version of the game, which is almost certainly incompatible with 1.4 beta saves. Given that players can sink a dozen or more hours into a single campaign, it makes sense that they would want to see each one to conclusion, and not have them thrown out because of an update. While saves do sometimes need to be wiped during a beta, players should still have the opportunity to finish the campaigns they want to finish, and it should be simple to do so in game.

Am I right to assume this update will see saves reset?

Seems there's still some issues to iron out with troop numbers during land battles. A report from the front, if you will. Summer, 1902, The German Imperial Army's advance into Slovakia has proven costly for both sides. Despite the brutality of the combat through the region, the fighting spirit of the men on both sides remains unbroken. So Much So That Troops On Both Sides Have Overcome Death To Continue The Fight. One can only speculate as to the physical state of these undying soldiers, but I'm not sure their wives will be too happy to see them when they return from the front anymore... Seriously though, the troop counts need a bit of fleshing out. If reinforcements are being sent to the region to help, that should be reflected in the tooltip. A better tooltip might include two categories for each party: "Active Troops" and "Losses."

Just enough to block HE often correlates with just enough to arm the fuse on an AP shell, no real good solution on what is the best amount of armor Citadel athwartships NEED to be added into the game. I'm honestly not sure why they haven't been added yet, and if they are in the game, there's no way in hell they're working properly. It feels like we're protecting our citadels with an armored corridor with only 4 sides rather than the armored box with 6 sides almost every ship in history actually used.

Slight issue which has dragged on for quite some time at this point: Having to fight soldiers of countries you aren't at war with. E.G. French invasion of Spanish Western Sahara. 2 things are worth noting. 1. Over 21,000 British troops are present to assist the Spanish and Soviets (who somehow teleported ~1,700 comrades to the Sahara) Despite Not Being At War With France. 2. The Japanese, who are allied to the French, have also committed troops to the invasion, Despite Not Being At War With Spain. But wait! It gets worse. As I said, Japan is allied to France, but they're Also Allied To The British. The Japanese are actively killing soldiers of a nation that is supposed to be their ally. And we're not done yet, of course. Further South, my army is invading British Upper Volta. It's not going particularly great, and, like my French counterparts, I'm fighting soldiers of nations I'm not at war with... Including the Japanese. Which means the Japanese are fighting alongside the British in one theater and fighting against them in another. What The F***?

Neither Austrian nor Hungarian Empire scenario Again. Completely separate to the ghost soldier issue, can we please address this issue as well? It seems like whenever AH gets its ass kicked (which is still pretty often, it would seem) it's always Austria who's first to Declare Independence From The Empire They Established. That's Not How Empires Work. This is like England declaring independence from the United Kingdom, Prussia declaring independence from Germany, or Russia declaring independence from the Soviet Union. From a historic point of view, this is completely nonsensical, and should not be allowed to happen in game. An empire's core territory and ruling people should remain loyal to the empire to the bitter end, as loyalty to the empire is loyalty to themselves. It should be Czechs, Croatians, or maybe even Hungarians who are the first to say "F*** Austria," not the Austrians themselves, same as it was the colonies of the British Empire who were the first to say "F*** Britain" instead of the Brits themselves.

AI still needs some help with range management. (And a few other things...) DKS Konig here was charged with defending a convoy. However, instead of doing that, she decided to run away from 2 USN CB's sent to destroy said convoy. However, there were 2 main problems with this decision. First, she's slower than the USN cruisers that are now tailing her, with the convoy having been destroyed in rather short order. So, unless she can manage cripple both ships, she won't be able to out-run them to safety. Second, she has shorter range guns than the CB's, with a max range of only 20.1km, as opposed to the CB's 45.8km, meaning that the CB's are going to be firing at her pretty much the whole time as the range closes. Now that the range is close enough for her to open fire, 44% of her crew is dead, one of the rear guns has been knocked out, with the other moderately damaged by enemy fire. As far as the game is concerned She Has Only Just Entered This Fight, But Is Already On Death's Door. Konig can only take a handful of casualties before she surrenders, and has to deal with 2 intact CB's. The Only Way For Her To Run Away Is To Sink Or Disable Her Pursuers. This Has Been The Case From The Start Of The Battle, But Now That She's Actually Trying To Do That, It's Too Little, Too Late.

Range finding is completely broken at the moment it seems. Inflicted over 8,000 casualties in under 24 minutes despite 16" guns having a 64 second reload, because they landed multiple hits with every salvo, including the first one. I can snipe DD's and CL's going full speed at 15km away with the first salvo fired at them because of the magical "Range Found" accuracy buff Nevada just switched targets, but is going to take her first salvo at an enemy 19km away w/ a 2,900% accuracy buff because of magical USN range finders How are you supposed to counter this? No amount of speed, damage instability, or bad weather can offset that much of an accuracy buff, and if you don't have the armor to survive the impact, that's it, game over. There's no point in building anything but fast battleships at this point because everything else is just going to die instantly to heavy capital ship grade shells fired from outside the range of whatever guns you put on your cruiser or DD.

I always do, but that doesn't change the fact that the AI is still running around with units that should have been decommissioned a solid decade before they would be destroyed in combat. Also, I feel like they should update the French historical AI to accept that the Jeune Ecole didn't work, and start building more BB's/BC's in the 1920's rather than just spamming cruisers and torpedo craft and make it so that the Brits actually bother to research Big Guns rather than using the same outdated Mk.1 guns into the mid/late game

This actually might be the case, as I've noticed that several nations have stopped scrapping ships in my current campaign. So if the AI is trying to go for a certain tonnage, then it will just keep obsolete units around to make up the numbers? That's got to be one of the worst ways to build and manage a fleet I've ever heard of. Fleet building should be based on a pre-defined plan, such as the 2 power standard for the UK or the 8-8 plan for Japan, rather than 3,000,000 tons of whatever crap you can find floating around in port, with no regard for actual usefulness.

Can we PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF F*** make it so that the AI DOESN'T run when all running away does is delay the battle by several hours. This has been in the game on and off for what feels like forever, and it keeps coming back randomly. PLEASE, JUST GET RID OF IT ALREADY THERE IS NO POINT IN WAITING 3 F***ING HOURS TO FIGHT ONE DD ALL THIS DOES IS DELAY ONE DD DYING HORRIBLY BY 3 HOURS, IT DOESN'T CHANGE THE OUTCOME OF THE BATTLE

AI still needs help scrapping ships it seems. The fact that they usually build 5 ships per turn, but can only scrap 3 per turn means that during long periods of peace, where they aren't suffering any ship losses due to combat, they will accumulate a massive back-log of ships that need to be scrapped, but won't be scrapped for years to come. Raising the number of ships that can be scrapped to 4 will help mitigate this issue, while raising it to 5 will allow the AI to maintain numbers while gradually modernizing its fleet, rather than having obsolete "Sink By Themselves Squadrons" running around in quite theaters, waiting to be picked off by modern player ships. E.G. 1930's engagement off the cost of New England between RN cruiser squadron and a single USN BC: Squadron was a mix of 1 modernish CA backed up by obsolete CL's, while DD's were somewhere in the middle. Oldest unit was HMS Melbourne, which probably should have been scrapped around 1925, but is currently seeing action in 1932. She is, in short, a floating coffin for over 500 British sailors. Her opponent is USS Iowa Yorktown-class battlecruiser USS Ranger. HMS Melbourne has no business tangling with the current generation of USN CL's, let alone anything larger. If the British squadron consisted solely of modern cruisers and destroyers, then they might stand a chance at dealing significant damage, if not outright sinking a modern BC, and living to fight another day. Instead, the only real threat Ranger has to deal with is the one modern CA, a fight she can very easily win. The rest of the British squadron is just cannon fodder.

I've got some quick battle AI feedback here. It would seem the AI is still rather bad at using light scouting forces. HMS Melpomene has spent the last 2 hours sailing around doing nothing. That's not an exaggeration, She Has Literally Sailed Around For 2 Hours Doing Nothing. British casualties in this battle are currently at 6,634 crew lost, and the crew of the Melpomene decided that the best thing they could do was sit around and watch their countrymen die. While I cannot see the orders the AI issues, given the original size of the AI's fleet in this battle, I'd wager that they had a few units set to scouting duties... against a single BB division. Said BB division has been engaged for the past 2 hours, and is operating alone in the area. Once all enemies are spotted and engaged, there is no further need for scouting, you're not going to find anything no matter how long you scout for or how hard you try.

So, it would seem that the auto-resolve function simply does not work properly in its current iteration Clash of "Fleets" against a lone A-H TB, and a kinda crap one at that. Somehow managed to outdo Taffy 3. Thankfully, you can save scum the campaign, and fighting this battle manually will result in one of two things: Either the battle ends after 30 minutes because contact wasn't established and the AI decided to run rather than commit suicide Or the AI decides to commit suicide After over 1,600 hours of playing this game, the only place I have seen TB's do so well is in auto-resolve. This result is not in line with how the game actually works when you fight battles manually.

I should clarify that I am speak on a purely gameplay level. From a narrative/historic perspective, yes, there will be much chaos in the ruins of any great power, as there was historically after the collapse of Russia (both in 1917, and 1992) and Germany in 1918. However, this doesn't mean that the game has to depict this chaos happening on a battlefield, as it does with the current version, I.E. we can cut out the gameplay elements of these events and have it be generally understood as a consequence of an imperial collapse. Instead of an event saying that the people of Scotland have risen up against Ungoverned Territory, then having a Scottish army fight the army of ungoverned territory (which exists for some reason? Didn't think you could have an army without some sort of central administration, but hey) for control of the region, we could just have an event that says that Scotland has risen from the ashes, and assumed control of their historic territory. The main reason I'm suggesting this is that in the current version there is a chance that the ungoverned territory's army beats the Scottish one, not just once, but over and over again to the point where the territory will likely remain ungoverned until 1950 rolls around. In my current campaign, Austria Hungary collapsed before 1900, it's currently 1932, and Slovenia IS STILL UNGOVERNED TERRITORY. From a realism perspective someone should have been able to establish a government in the region, with a large enough powerbase to fashion a Slovene nation out of it, rather than over 3 decades of absolute anarchy. Ungoverned territories shouldn't just stay on the map forever, but the main reason that they do stay on the map is because the revolts to re-establish or centralize control of the region always fail. As far as I know, there's only been two or three such revolts in my campaign that actually worked, and that's with both Russia and Great Britain being dead, and their colonies being spit out as ungoverned territories. After a certain amount of time, whether it be a few months or a couple of years, it only makes sense that someone comes along and unifies the region, similar to the Chinese warlords after the collapse of the Qing. For something like a former island colony in the Pacific, it might take less than a month for someone to establish themselves as El Presidente, and restore order to the place. A region like Siberia might take years to unify, but the end result is the same, a new, neutral nation, rather than just wasted space on the map.

Can we PLEASE get the option to push the government to invade neutral countries/ungoverned territory? I'm getting kinda tired of invading a Great Power and having them collapse before I can annex all the territories I wanted, or worse, having little enclaves of ungoverned territory Within My Own Borders. Adding an "Other" or "Minor Powers" option to the politics screen, with a Naval Invasion button next to it would do just fine. Select it, and you get the usual drop down menu, where you can select a province to invade, provided you have ships stationed in its local sea zone, and your army has some way to actually access it, either by ports or a land border. This would allow players to "Mop Up" after a war, start new wars by invading neutrals, and generally have more influence over the map, and options for expansion, rather than letting ungoverned territories languish on the map for longer than they have any right to, or relying on RNG to to throw them a bone and let them conquer a new territory. Also, I should mention that the "Revolt to re-establish control of ungoverned territory" is kinda nonsensical, seeing as if there's an army large enough to stop said revolt in its tracks, the owner of that army could form a new government of their own for that territory with said army. Instead of having a little land battle that ultimately results in the ungoverned territory staying ungoverned, a new government could simply form in the power-vacuum, and establish control over the region without further bloodshed.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the main cause of failed invasions is army logistics. I was able to successfully invade both Australia and the British Home Islands because the British Army only had between 5% and 15% logistics for the entire war, while I stayed at 100%. If logistics does play a factor in Naval Invasions, then it's likely That An Enemy With 100% Logistics Cannot Be Successfully Naval Invaded, Regardless Of Tonnage Committed.

There is absolutely something wrong with port repair priority. I just fought a battle in the Baltic Sea against the Italians. Only one of my ships, SMS Kaiser, partook in the battle, and was only superficially damaged. Both Danzig and Pillau are set to Very High repair priority, and Kaiser was also set to Very High repair priority prior to the battle. Naturally, I would expect her to either return to Pillau to get a new coat of paint, or nearby Danzig if the crew wanted to mess with my order of battle a bit. I WAS NOT EXPECTING HER TO MAGICALLY TELEPORT TO THE SOLOMAN ISLANDS. It would take the fastest ship in my navy ONE WHOLE YEAR to cover this distance, and SMS Kaiser did it over night. The port of Honiara is, of course, set to low repair priority To Prevent This Exact Thing From Happening In The First Place. If anyone in Honiara's local cruiser division is damaged, the port is big enough to provide them with adequate repairs, but this should only happen for battles that take place in that region, for ships stationed in Honiara itself.

I've got some campaign battle feedback here. The AI isn't too keen on fighting against overwhelming odds, so usually retreats if there's no hope of victory. If it can outrun the player, there's no reason for it to not do this, and subsequently, no point in entering a battle where the enemy will simply run away faster than you can chase after them. In such situations where the AI choses to live and the player choses to let the AI live, the battle doesn't need to happen at all. Except, for some obscure reason, it DOES actually need to happen. Once I load into this mandatory fleet engagement, the AI will run away, and I'll be left staring at a dozen cruisers for a few minutes before I can actually get back to playing the game. Please, just let players withdraw from battles that neither side actually wants to fight rather than forcing players to "fight' a pointless "battle."

Got some task force feedback here. Whilst the implementation of the taskforce crew limit has made things significantly better, there are still ways for the AI to put together a doomstack it would seem. All of these DD's are of the same class, and only have 97 men aboard them when at a full crew complement. While the Chinese may be "Very Behind" with regards to technology, they can probably still have about ~10,000 men in a single task force, while I can manage 15,000 men in a single task force at my "Very Advanced" technology level, meaning that if I were to create a DD with less than 100 crew, I could deploy 150 DD's in a single Battle. There needs to be a limit on the number of ship you can put in a task force, (I'm thinking about 40ish?) along with the current crew limit.

I've got some feed back here about rump-states, or former "Great Powers" who have been reduced to a single colonial holding, with no hope of ever retaking their homeland. Currently there are two in my campaign, Italy and Spain. Both have been pushed off of Europe and are continuing their shenanigans overseas, with little regard to their reduced influence in the world. So much so, that Italy, despite having no army, has launched an invasion of Ethiopia. Apparently, they seem to think this is going to work somehow. The only way for them to conquer Ethiopia would be for someone else to come along and do it for them. There's also the small factor of these nation's GDP, and their ability to produce and pay for warships. Somali isn't exactly the richest country in the world circa 1913, and even today many of its people live in abject poverty. As of 2021, it's total GDP was about ~$7.6B. The Italian government in this campaign however, can call on over $17B GDP. They are by no means the worst offender here though, Spain, with a GDP of over $20B, is somehow raising all their money from... Just the Northern Marianas. A region with a population of only 20,000. When I annexed the European territories of Italy and Spain, I was kind of expecting to be able to integrate their economies into my own. Instead, they seem to have dumped everything of value into a portal to some random colony overseas, and are continuing on as if nothing happened.

Got some quick feedback about the new weather systems. In almost every battle, I've had to deal with stormy weather at one point or another, but a lot of the time the weather really isn't worth fighting in, or simply cannot be fought in with current technologies. E.G. 1902 Bay of Biscay battle: I've only got 1st generation rangefinders on my ships, no RADAR, no RDF. Somehow, someone has "Spotted" enemy smoke to the North-East. How they managed to do this is completely beyond me, as I can barely see the next ship in my own formation with the naked eye. Even if I was able to find an enemy in these conditions, it wouldn't be much of a fight, and more of a waste of time, fuel, and shells, given... That the best my guns can do is fire blindly into the darkness and pray they hit something. I know that the weather might improve, but until then, there's nothing to actually do in this battle, except hope that I might be able to score a dozen hits and not eat a torpedo in return. Having battles at least start in acceptable weather would be a welcome improvement, even if there is still the chance for the weather to get foul later on.