SodaBit

I've got some campaign/battle feedback here, And It Needs To Be Addressed ASAP. There seems to be a bug with the ammo supply system, and ships don't properly restock when in port. The result of this is ships bugging out, And Being Unable To Move Or Fire Their Main Guns In Battle. Not only is there a DD well within torpedo range, but he's got a BB as fire support somewhere further back. The best Katori here can do is sit and wait for the inevitable, as her 12 inch shell magazines are now home to a blackhole that has been gradually consuming the entire nation's supply of AP shells. I suppose I should have left this one for auto-resolve, yes?

Has anyone else had problems with division speed since the patch? After about an hour of moving around all my divs get their speed cut down to as low as 4 knots, but the second I disband the division, the individual ships can start moving at a reasonable speed again

Got some campaign feedback here, and I'm kinda surprised nobody's requested this yet (as far as I know) Please, For The Love Of God, add an "Advance to Contact" fleet behavior. It's pretty damn frustrating trying to chase down an enemy task force when all you have to go on is "Enemy Smoke Spotted North" and using the "retreat" behavior to try to tell the exact direction an enemy ship is in.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that hull forms shouldn't be restricted by nationality in the campaign. An AI with "historical personality" should learn more towards using hulls that its nation historically used, but seriously, there's no real reason I can think of that should stop folks from using the hulls they want to use. This isn't just going to be a problem for USN players. Between the years 1909 and 1915, Great Britain gets access to Dreadnought 3, 4, and 5, but a decent number of players won't use them, myself included, because the lines of this hull are based on SMS Seydlitz, meaning they can be a royal pain in the ass to balance, and limit the player's options with regards to armament layout. I really don't see why we can't give players the option of choosing what their hulls look like, as players who want to experiment with new designs would be able to do so, and players who want to go with more historically authentic designs maintain their ability to do so. Edit: And if we're going to stick to having flat hulls in particular, and not just hulls a player doesn't like personally, or are annoying to deal with, then we're going to have to talk about the Japanese. They start off with their Dreadnought 1 hull being flat in 1905, but it really is just bad news from there. The IJN has to wait until 1927 in order to get a new flat hull BB, in the form of Modern Battleship 1. And before anyone mentiones the Allegedly Flat Modernized Dreadnought 1, which is supposed to be, as the name suggests, a modernized version of Japan's original flat hull Dreadnought, I should note: That Hull Isn't Actually Flat. Also, if we're going with hulls similar to the ones nations used historically, why do the Brits get to use Seydlitz's lines? Was she really that similar to some of the super dreadnoughts that her lines are adequate for representing these classes in game?

Overall, this is a very, VERY good patch by the looks of it. I only really have one concern with regards to campaign balance. Various strategic technologies: Technologies that speed up the crew training, raise the maximum training level without combat, enhance the power projection/invade/protect capabilities or even reinforce transports with more armament (and torpedoes). All in all, the technology aspects have been rebalanced and enriched so that they matter significantly and require careful planning on which one to focus on. With the new tech changes, players are going to have a bit more to focus on with regards to tech priorities. In previous patches, there were techs you simply wouldn't bother prioritizing (Submarine Design, Minelayers, etc.) because they weren't implemented, so you'd just use your 3 priority slots on things that were actually implemented in order of importance. Now that there's more techs that are crucial to long term success in campaign, can we get a 4th research priority slot? Or, perhaps a system tied to either GDP or tech itself that can increase/decrease tech priority slots?

This is pretty much what I was getting at. The longer the "bait" lasts, the more time you have to do what ever it is you need to do. So, having bait that can last several hours can be a pretty massive problem. IMO, the AI should strike a balance between what is the biggest threat to it, and what it can realistically kill. A squadron of BB's should be able to dispatch a single cruiser with ease, but doing so might not be in that unit's best interest if an enemy battle-squadron is actively engaging them. The problem with the AI's squadron in the video is that they're doing almost the exact opposite of that, engaging a unit that they can't realistically kill, and that posses less of a threat to them than the BB's that are currently firing on them for free. While the CL can ram one of the BB's, at least it'd be sunk, and the BB it rammed would probably survive, albeit significantly worse for wear. So, seeing as it has no torpedos, a single 4 inch gun, and no real way to sink a BB without being sunk in the process, letting the CL do whatever it wants is probably the best option the AI has at this point. Instead, they're focusing all their efforts on sinking the obvious bait in front of them, rather than dealing with the real threats present. In order to improve the AI, either they have to be able to deal with the bait in an efficient manner, or ignore the bait outright.

Well, I did get bored after 9 and a half hours of sailing around in circles. Thank god for the x5 speed option. Range was about 15km, and they did have me spotted. The instant I stopped turning all Hell broke loose, with every gun the AI had opening up at the same time. I still think it's an issue that a single CA can spend 9 and a half hours in front of 50 BB's with out them trying to kill it, because they've had their accuracy so badly limited by maneuver de-buffs. If there was some way to limit the amount your accuracy can be reduced by due to an enemy's maneuvers, like a -65% cap, that'd be great, as the -186% I was able to achieve is way, way too high. Also, on a side note about conserving ammo. If I was commanding a ship on death's door, I wouldn't particularly care much if there was almost no chance of actually hitting a target, when the only way to save the ship is to destroy said target. Would it be possible to implement a "Fight For Your Life" mode for ships on low HP, where the crew tires to get as many shells down range as humanly possible in attempt to claw victory from the jaws of defeat? There's been more than a few occasions where I was simply able to gun down an enemy vessel without them actually fighting back, essentially having a BB go out with a whimper rather than a roar.

Once again, I have some feedback here, but it's pretty old news at this point. However, this doesn't make it irrelevant. If anything, the age of this issue just makes things worse. That issue is the absolute state of speed-tanking. I've decided to take the fastest ship I can make (46.2 knts,) and throw it up against 50 BB's. The result? Well, it's been a hot minute since I started this little experiment, but here's how things have gone so far. 30 Minutes In. Not much going on. Due to the excellent mobility stats of the IJN's Heavy Scout Cruiser, the loss of speed while turning is completely negligible at a mere 5%. 1 Hour In. The AI has sent a few salvos my way, but none of them achieved any hits. It's not that the guns are inaccurate, in fact the opposite is true. These are some of the best guns I've seen the AI use in a while, their accuracy actually surpasses that of some of my own capital ships, even if the broadside weight is rather low for a ship of this tonnage. 3 Hours In. Still nothing. This simply shouldn't be the case. The fire-control systems onboard the AI's ships, while not perfect, is still competitive by 1940's standards. A single CA has been sailing in circles in front of 50 BB's for 3 hours now, and hasn't taken a single hit. Here's why. A 186% Accuracy De-buff Caused By Maneuver Alone. Thank god we don't have multiplayer in the game at this point, I'd have a f***ing aneurism trying to fight with that kind of handicap. I don't think any amount of crew training or fire-control improvements can make up for that kind of de-buff. Imagine spending so much time on a design, running numerous tests on it during mock battles, improving it as you go, only for some meme-lord to come along with a clown-car that can outrun a long lance and sail around in circles until the battle timer expires. Sounds like an amazing, well balanced experience to be sure. I'll update this post when the battle is over. I'm hoping the AI eventually manages to sink the damn thing, but at this rate, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.

So about the whole AP ammo being worthless thing. Turn's out that might not actually be the case. Semi- Armor Piercing is actually pretty damn good, because as it turns out penetrating the enemy's armor doesn't actually matter that much. Case in point: This poor bugger. The average armor thickness my shells had to deal with was 2 feet, something they were never going to be able to get through with my current build, but the enemy is still very, very dead. By using High Capacity HE for the main guns, and SAP for the secondaries, I was able to insure that each hit did as much damage as possible, without any shell malfunctions. No big citadel hits necessary, no worrying about the enemy's angle, just click on target, make sure your ships' on the right course, and let the gunners do their work. It should also be noted that HCHE and SAP are some of the cheaper shell options with regard to weight, making them an even better option to pick. There's also the fact that SAP actually got an indirect buff recently, thanks to the armor weight rebalancing. With less armor over ships' vitals, turrets in particular, it's still possible to get full penetrations with SAP, and thanks to the +55% damage modifier of SAP, those full pens are going to hurt more than stepping on a Lego. All that is to say that maximizing your gun's penetrative abilities is a fools' errand. You'll be hard pressed to make up for what SAP brings to the table by penetrating an enemy's main belt with a APBC2 shell.

It's not just you running into this issue. I'm pretty sure that the End of Campaign screen is in its first iteration, and isn't feature complete at this time. You can fight half a dozen wars against one power, sinking hundreds of ships and killing thousands of sailors in the process, and have that listed as a "Minor Victory," and fight a single war against another power where neither side actually engages in combat for the entire duration of the war, with no men killed on either side and no ships lost, and have that also listed as a "Minor Victory." I've seen this sort of thing before, the AI seems to have trouble balancing out its research. I believe the way it works is that the "AI Personality" sets research priorities at the beginning of a campaign, but never changes them. From these screenshots, I would assume that the AI you're fighting now prioritized the small guns research tree, and completely neglected the cruisers tech tree, meaning that these hulls, despite being hopelessly obsolete by everyone else's standards, are the most modern iterations available to this AI in particular. Thus, you've got guns from the 1930's being mounted on hulls from the 1900's. I've seen it go other ways too, the German AI in one of my campaigns decided to build a 100,000 ton BB in the 1940's using guns from the 1910's.

I've got some more feedback here, but it isn't exactly news at this point. High Explosive is simply the only ammo worth using at this point, Armor Piercing is just there for show. Here's why. This battle is a pretty good example of how most fights I've been in in this patch go. Starts out with both sides slinging AP at each other with neither side gaining an advantage for about 45 minutes. I get one main belt penetration on the enemy dealing about 300 damage, with no critical systems damaged or disabled. I start getting bored and load HE. The Results are Immediate and Devastating. Within 15 minutes, the enemy is utterly crippled, numerus 18" shells have penetrated the aft armor belt, causing horrific damage across the entire back half of the ship. Soon there after, several partial penetrations along the main belt manage to achieve what the AP couldn't, knocking out 2 of the 3 engines, while the 3rd is knocked out by another hit to the aft belt, the splinters somehow bypassing multiple layers of protection and damaging compartments deep in the heart of the ship. The reason that the HE worked so damn well in comparison is down to a variety to factors. First is the armor scheme the AI uses. With a heavy preference toward a distributed armor scheme, non-critical areas of the ship are given armor that is insufficient to stop a shell from the ships' opposite number, but more than enough to arm the fuse on said shell. In this case, 100mm was unable to stop an HEBC shell, but did slow it down enough to arm the fuse, allowing it to explode inside the ship. Second, the way damage is calculated in UA:D. We've recently seen changes that heavy favor full penetrations over partial and over penetrations. While HE shells don't have the same penetrative capabilities as AP shells, their base damage is significantly higher than AP, meaning that an HE shell penetrating a non-critical area of the ship will actually do more damage than an AP shell penetrating a critical part of the ship. Third, AP's inherent weaknesses, and HE's total lack thereof. On paper, both shell types have weaknesses, AP shells can ricochet off if the angle is too steep, and HE shells can be blocked if the armor is too thick. In practice however, this isn't the case. AP shells still ricochet off of angled targets, but HE shells are rarely blocked by armor. Even against almost 10 inches of main deck armor, my HE shells still did acceptable damage to the enemy, up to 180 dmg in some cases, And They Always Set A Fire. ALWAYS. In this battle, the AI was set alight 76 times. About half the ammo that hit the ship was HE, and out of about 50 hits, only one was blocked by the armor, and that blocked hit set another fire. Of the about 50 AP hits, 1 ricocheted, doing absolutely no damage, and only about half of them set fires. Otherwise, the AP did about the same amount of damage on partial and over penetrations as the HE did on partial penetrations. The biggest difference came down to full penetrations, where the HE, despite penetrating a non-critical area of the ship, did about 5 times as much damage as the AP did when penetrating a critical part of the ship. So, there you have it. You can pretty much forget about the feature where you can choose how much of each shell type you bring with you into battle, all you really need is HE. Shame you can't bring 100% HE though. Just for the record because I have nowhere else to put this, the gun that was used in this battle was a British Mk.3 457mm/65 firing standard weight HE w/ Ballistic Cap and AP w/ Improved Ballistic Cap, using Tube Powder 3 and TNT 4. Range was about 16~18km throughout the battle.

Got some feedback here, but it's a know issue so I won't go into too much detail. The manner in which fleets are deployed needs serious work. We know that the AI can't fight effectively when commanding large formations, and I can't possibly imagine why. What I need for this battle is one line containing all my BB's, as they're all of the same class, and having them all in a single unit won't be an issue. Instead, I get this mess of a deployment. Sorting this out would probably be a private Hell for anyone who has actually commanded a unit in a real navy. Honestly, at this point, I won't mind the game just deploying all my ships in a single division. It'd be much easier for me, and probably a bit simpler from a coding perspective.

I've got some campaign AI feedback here, I think it mostly covers know issues but I still think it might be worth mentioning. So I decided to engage the British death-stack anchored at Limassol, Cyprus as a sort of "Final Boss Fight" for my campaign, and the results were kinda underwhelming. It was a total paper tiger. A lot of the ships present had no business being afloat in 1949, let alone as frontline combatants. A few examples are as follows. Again, this battle took place in 1949. What appears to be a 1890's vintage protected cruiser serving in the fleet screen Accompanied by her equally obsolete CA counterpart Even a few squadrons of first generation Dreadnoughts made an appearance to buff out the British battle-line. Needless to say, it ended very poorly for the older vessels, which are entirely unsuited for frontline service in the age of super-heavy guns and radar guided fire control. There's also the issue of the formation the AI had to manage during the battle. It looked a bit like this: With 96 ships to command, things got very messy very quickly. A lot of smaller vessels were sunk early in the battle by long range hits because they were ramming in to the BB's, and a near miss on the battle-line would hit the fleet screens instead, causing horrific damage. Commanding such a formation would be a private Hell for anyone on this forum. Fighting it was pretty easy on the other hand, just fire into the confused mass of ships, and you're bound to hit something. Might not be what you intended to hit, but chances are it was something you'd want to sink eventually, so no harm in getting a head start. So the AI had to command an overly complex formation, full of ships that had no business being there, and was expected to fight the most up-to-date designs I could build. When put into that context, the result was actually pretty predictable. An absolutely soul-crushing defeat for the British. Their big, scary death-stack yielded nothing but a simple turkey shoot, rather than the grand, decisive battle I was hoping for.

You've got permission for mine. As for the optics that would surround showcasing these ships, while it can be seen as mocking U:AD by some, it is also important to learn from one's mistakes. Chronicling U:AD's mistakes can make the game look bad in the short-term, but it will have a tangible long-term payoff as the various issues that lead to these designs leaving the dockyard are addressed by the devs. I've seen games make some pretty dire mistakes before, having played Destiny 2 since it launched. It was in horrific shape back then, a total slap in the face to fans, and an insult to Bungie's legacy as a development studio. While Bungie got a lot of flak for their mistakes, they recognized them as mistakes and learned from them. It took them a good long while before the game was what it was meant to be, and they had to bust their asses to get it in shape, but they got it done in the end. Destiny 2 is in excellent shape now, it's easily one of the top 5 MMO's on the market, but it sure as Hell didn't get there by pretending nothing was wrong, and ignoring its flaws. Lucky, U:AD isn't in that bad of shape. It still has flaws, but they can be fixed, and for this game to become what developers and fans want it to be, those flaws must be fixed. It isn't going to happen over night, and it'll probably feel like bashing one's head against a wall most days, but it can be done. The main thing that it's going to take is knowing what those flaws are, and having the drive to fix them. We on this forum might not have the capability to fix U:AD's issues, but we can point them out, and in doing so, save the devs a bit of time by identifying what issues need to be addressed, and how much of a priority we think they should be.

I've got some design balance feedback here. It would seem that late game tech is a bit over the top, especially in regards to the "Speed/Firepower/Protection" trinity that has been the hallmark of ship design for the entire age of steel warships. Case is point: A 50,000 ton BC that can outrun an M1 Abrams. This thing has 335,255 Horsepower in 1932. It's got more armor than the Bismarck class BB's, and has only taken a side-grade with regards to firepower, swapping out 8 380mm guns for 12 350mm guns. If it was possible to mount 380's on the Modern BC Hull for Germany, I would, but that hasn't been the case since 1.05 beta so, as far as recreating Bismarck goes, you can get away with some pretty insane design options and not pay much in the good old trade-off trinity. You don't need to make an design sacrifices if you play your cards right, you can be not only a jack of all trades, but a master of all trades to boot. I get that this is a sandbox with which you can design your perfect ship, but being able to design a truly perfect ship each and every time might be a bit of an issue in the long run. God forbid we ever get multiplayer campaigns with this sort of balancing. It'd be a nightmare for anyone making historically accurate ships, that have actual drawbacks that have been implemented to allow a desired advantage in another area.

Alright, I've got some quick UI feedback here, though it might be rather low priority for a fix. The absolute state of the damage feed is uh A bit misleading. I know the AI can come up with some crazy designs, but I've yet to see it mount 112 main guns, let alone 200 "main" towers. It should be noted that, even though I've destroyed an entire navy's worth of guns, two of the five main gun turrets on the enemy ship are still firing.

So there's now a limit on the amount of armor you can put on a turret. Kinda makes sense, the amount of space you have in a turret is quite limited, but I feel the values on the armor limits are a bit too restrictive. Given how much armor long barrel capital ship guns can penetrate, the amount of armor you need on a ship to see it through a battle with its opposite number has gone up by a fair margin. I can only speak for myself, but around ~635mm of armor is the minimum amount I'd put on a 1940's BB turret. That is no longer possible, as most calibers cannot support 600mm of turret armor, with 18" guns only capable of supporting up to ~595mm of armor. This is a pretty bad change imo, especially since it's being made in the name of realism. IRL, the main limitations on how thick a turret's armor was going to be was a country's manufacturing capabilities and how much they wanted to spend on a single ship. If a nation is capable of forging a meter thick armored plate for a turret face, and is willing to pay for it because they honestly thought they needed a meter of Krupp steel to protect their ships, we would have seen ships with a meter of armored plate on their turret faces. As far as I'm aware, the thickest plate ever manufactured was the 650mm frontal plate for the Yamato class BB's. Given that the Yamato's were explicitly designed to kill Standard Class BB's, the frontal plate was designed to be completely impervious to the largest caliber of those types of ships, the 406mm guns on the Colorado's. And it would seem that this would have been true in practice, not just on paper. But with the recent changes, this sort of design philosophy is no longer possible in game... to an extent. The maximum thickness for an 18" gun is ~595mm on the sides, ~310mm on top, and ~2000mm for the barbette. If we're going with the whole realism thing I feel like shaving a solid 4 meters off of the internal width of the barbette might be more unrealistic than shaving a few feet of the internal width of the turret. Honestly, I think this change should be undone in its entirety. If you still want to limit the amount of armor people can have on their ships, a better approach would be to add some sort of armor forging technology into the tech tree, where researching new levels of it allows you to manufacture heavier and heavier armor plates. I feel this would be more realistic, as the manufacturing capabilities of a nation played more of a part in armor thickness than space concerns, as early in the age of steam and steel, a lot of people were running around with only 4 inches of armor plate on their capital ships, not because they thought it would be sufficient to stop enemy gunfire, but because that was the thickest plate anyone could make at the time. This sort of armor forging tech solution would also add a bit more to the extended campaign, as there would be another avenue for nations to compete with each other with regards to technological advancements.

Okay, this isn't even open for debate anymore, Spotting NEEDS a rework. As well as DD's, and HE shells, but mainly spotting. I'm trying out the new DD spam META, and holy f*** thank god we don't have multiplayer yet, it would be the most toxic PvP on the market right now. 1940's PLAN BB can't spot 2 4,000 ton DD's LESS THAN 7 KM AWAY, FIRING CONTINUEUSLY. This isn't even a fair fight. If the enemy can't see you, they can't shoot you, and with out shooting you, they can't win. Even despite the close range, and good weather conditions, the Chinese crew can't see jack, because both towers have been destroyed. They were knocked out quite some time ago, and because of this, the Chinese have been sailing into an unending rain of 149.9mm HE without the ability to reply. They don't even know what direction to go in, as both RDF and Radar systems have been disabled with the destruction of both towers. They are, for all intents and purposes, dead men walking. The only reason their ship is still afloat is because I expended all the torps as the range closed to disrupt the BB's course. This wouldn't be an issue with a simplified spotting system. In my opinion, the way it should work is that if you fire your guns within 25km of the enemy, you get spotted. The only way to mitigate this would to be in a smoke screen, but you should still get spotted if you're within 10km. This simplified system would still be realistic, as light forces would still be able to sneak up on critical targets by holding fire and laying smoke, and would be able to withdraw using the same method. It would also eliminate the main issue with spotting in the game, the ability for light forces to fire on the enemy from close range with no fear of retaliation. We'll still need to address the new DD META, and the effectiveness of HE spam, but that's a topic for another time. As of right now, Battleships, Battlecruisers, Large Cruisers, and Heavy Cruisers are just a waste of time if they can't effectively counter light forces.

I've got some quick ship designer feedback here. I'm doing the usual post-patch rebuilds for all my 1940's designs, and I've noticed something a bit off. I'm pretty damn sure at this point that the weight offset calculations aren't working as intended. Here's why. I'm working on Amagi atm, and in previous patches this design usually had about ~20% aft weight offset, but now it's got this. Damn near 100% forward weight offset. It seems pretty nonsensical, so I did the math. With the center of gravity appearing to be at the base of the foremost 140mm barbettes, I've excluded those 140mm mounts and the main tower itself as "neutral" weights, given the 140's sit right atop the center of gravity, and the L shape of the main tower should distribute the weight rather evenly across this area. So, forward of the apparent center of gravity, we've got 2 410mm mounts, a barbette, and 10 40mm mounts, and the forward armor belt and deck for a total of 5,322 tons. Aft of the apparent center of gravity, we've got 3 410mm mounts, 4 140mm mounts, 4 40mm mounts, the rear tower, the funnel, and the aft armor belt and deck at 9,640.8 tons. I don't have a degree in engineering, but I'm pretty sure that should result in a significant aft weight offset, rather than a near-total forward weight offset. Even when we add in the previously excluded 140mm mounts and the main tower, that just brings the weights forward of the center of gravity up to 8,955 tons, closer to even with the aft weights, not surpassing it by leaps and bounds. There's also the issue of the main protection of the ship, which, in accordance with the layout of the ship's armaments, is concentrated more to the rear of the center of gravity, with 4,341 tons of deck armor, and 3,810 tons of belt armor to add to the equation. We also must consider the engineering spaces, another 982 tons, which, in correlation to the location of the funnel, is concentrated in the same manner as the main armor systems. Again, I'm not a professional engineer, nor particularly good with math to begin with, but this doesn't seem right. I've removed weights high in the main tower, getting rid of 40mm mounts, radar, and range finders, and it still didn't fix the issue. I've added 2 more 410mm mounts behind Z turret, over 5,000 tons of additional weight on the rear, and it still didn't fix the issue. This wasn't an issue in previous patches. I understand that not every design players want to build is going to be viable, but this sort of design isn't even that crazy. If I was making a super Richelieu with 4 turrets head of the main tower, then sure, give me a 100% forward weight offset. But a design that actually existed, that could have seen service in the second World War if things had gone a bit differently? That's a bit much. Even if the 100% forward offset is 100% realistic, and totally would have been an issue in real life had the Amagi's and Tosa's been completed as originally designed, giving them a massive penalty in the name of "realism" is not something I'd like to see in game.

Those conflicts were started by much, much more than a single DD roaming around less than 200km from home. The reasons being suspected sabotage of a major warship, murder of US civilians on the high seas, and a rather brazen attack on a US formation at sea. These Frenchie's have not attacked German naval assets, nor harmed German civilians. While the possibility is there, the French are very much doing laps in their own swimming pool, and do not pose a major threat to anyone in the North sea at the moment. There is no excuse for such an insignificant formation to raise so many alarms across such a large area, when it is completely within the rights of the French military to move units this close to home waters.

I've got some quick campaign feedback here, and I know I've already touched on this subject before but holy f*** this is absolutely ridiculous I've gotten into another war with the French because they had a unit in the North Sea causing boatloads of tension every month The cause of all this tension? The Feint Smell of Cheese. I Had To Choose Between Constantly Being Extorted By The French Or Starting A World War BECAUSE OF A SINGLE DD ONE F***ING DESTROYER JUST CAUSED A WORLD WAR PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD CHANGE THIS BEFORE 1.06 GOES LIVE PLEASE

2 things I'd like to see fixed Before 1.06 goes live 1. Decrease secondary gun influence on weight offset. 2. Lower meta-centric height of multi-deck hulls, as these units currently have a fair bit of instability issues caused by the starting position of the center of gravity not actually being at the hull's center before adding components.

The HP of a ship isn't set in stone. It's completely possible to "Overkill" a target, e.g. hitting a DD with a large caliber HE shell. It's also possible for a ship to take a truly insane amount of damage depending on where you hit it, e.g. hitting a ship in the bow after all bow sections have been completely destroyed will still display a damage number, but won't actually do any damage to the structure of the ship, meaning you'll need to hit other parts of the ship in order to sink it.

I've got some campaign feedback here, and you can probably guess what it's about. The AI's learned a new trick, and Mahan greatly approves. My CPU and RAM on the other hand, are not so enthusiastic about this. I've tried some larger encounters in custom battles, but I've never attempted something on this scale. This isn't even the largest fleet currently on the map, the Brits are operating a death-stack over in the Bay of Biscay, which I was going to try to take on originally. The game cannot handle this many ships in a single engagement. I'm not even sure how beefy of a computer you would need to keep 60 fps during this battle, NASA might have something that can pull it off? There's also the issue of the AI's fleet management during a battle this large. You probably can't see it without blowing up the image, but the top bar listing the AI's formations is just a bit cluttered. Had I played this battle out, I'd probably be hearing the sound of ships crashing into each other the entire time. I'm not sure how you can be expected to fight a battle like this, in order to have a shot at winning, you'd need at least ~48 ships, and good luck microing that many units. If you delegate some divisions to the AI, that's probably just going to slow down the game even more, not to mention the questionable tactics the AI might use with some of your ships. IMO, this issue NEEDS to be fixed before 1.06 goes live. There is no way in Hell anyone can fight fleets that large, let alone command one. The best you'd be able to do is command the main battle line and a few cruiser divisions, not an entire continent's worth of ships, and it would probably take 4 to 5 hours to complete. Side note: currently, the largest fleet on the map is 67BBs, 23BCs, 124CAs, 149CLs, and 113DD's. If anyone can put together a campaign taskforce that is capable of taking on an enemy fleet that large, I'd love to see it. If this issue isn't fixed, I'd also love to know how you managed to assemble such a force, so I can try to replicate it.

Not only is the AI still building way too many ships, they've learned to make deathstack tastforces. That's more ships in a single taskforce than the UK had in the Grand Fleet during the first World War.