Dman1791

If I understand it correctly, it means that a shell will not have more than 50% of its penetration upon encountering the first citadel layer. If I am correct, the function would look something like this: if pen/2 > cit1 and pen > belt + cit1: return true #penetration return false #non or partial penetration Importantly, I'm pretty sure citadel armor only covers important systems (machinery, magazines). So if you sacrificed some belt armor to pump up your citadel armor, you'd be keeping the critical systems better protected but making the rest of the ship more vulnerable to being damaged.

Honestly I'd prefer an option to divide up a TF into subgroups, and have the repair priority apply to each subgroup. It makes no sense to head back to port with the whole fleet when only the CAs got mauled, but at the same time it's a royal pain to have everything out and about individually. Essentially just a system for specifying "these ships should stay together" and base repair decisions off of that, rather than the whole TF.

As far as I'm aware, draft in this game is represented as having a taller (and heavier) hull, rather than a lower-sitting one. Basically, a larger ship rather than reduced freeboard. To add to that, I'm pretty sure changing draft does have some minor effect on gun accuracy.

You can use ctrl- or shift-click to select multiple ships at once to set their states at the same time. It also works for setting the port you're building a ship in. Doesn't work for scrapping, though.

The last time I bothered with the campaign was back in 1.05, when it was only the short 10-year stretches. I do like most of the changes that have been made, but there are a lot of issues still, both new and old. I also have some suggestions. I'll probably add more at some point. Campaign map I think it's meant to be them going back to port to repair, but most task forces entirely dissolve after one or two battles. This would be less jarring and annoying if the task force at least tried to stay together, but it seems that they often scatter to the hills. On a related note, ships sometimes seem to just decide to move ports at will sometimes. I noticed this most readily in some possessions I had in the Mediterranean as Germany, where a force of cruisers in Tunisia meant to protect my trade kept showing back up in Germany. The UI for for moving ships desperately needs a tonnage total. It would also be great if ports told you their current tonnage and future (incoming fleets included) tonnage. The lack of a Kiel Canal makes me sad. Campaign mechanics Fleets causing tension when operating nearby makes sense at peacetime. It doesn't make sense for Britain to get pissy when I'm just trying to fend off France. It leads to a weird cascading effect where one war tends to cause more and more nations to join in. I'd suggest that the tensions only rise when one of the following are true: You are at peace There are no enemy fleets near yours I'd really like to have some way of cooling things off outside of events. It feels bad that the only tool I have for diplomacy is making them angry with fleets. I'd also like to see some way of managing port expansion. If I'm Germany and don't think Russia is a threat, I'd like to be able to expand my bases in the west at the expense of my bases in the east. A simple weight value would probably work reasonably well. Another huge one I'd like to see is the ability to form divisions. I prefer to keep battleships grouped by class, so that I don't end up in situations like a division of 21kt dreadnoughts being slowed down by an old 18kt BB. A division would stay together at all times as far as ports and task forces go, while battles would almost always draw from preexisting divisions. Ship design Copying a ship seems to block out modules that have been researched since the source design was built. I'd like to be able to make an entirely new ship after copying; it could really cut down on the tedium in 1895. Some hulls seem to, by default, be absurdly front-heavy. You can heap on aft armor and put literally every module you can aft of center, but on some hulls even that barely makes a dent. I feel like something's broken there. I can understand terrible pitch and roll in older hulls, but weight offset really shouldn't be such a consistent and insurmountable issue. Some guns still have massive outlier stats. I used 8.9"/+20% guns on my CAs as Germany. The Mark 1 version of these had something like 40% accuracy at short range, which was easily twice everything else. Even Mark 2 9.0"/+20% only had something like 30% on the same hull. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but I get a lot of battles where the tonnages are comparable, but the classes of ship are completely out of whack. Something like 3 CL vs 2 CA. If the current mission generator is trying to even out tonnages, I really think it should place some more emphasis on classes. Battles Please, PLEASE allow at least x5 time acceleration at all times, and be more liberal with x10. I'd honestly prefer generally uncapped time acceleration, especially when ships can't see each other. I imagine the main reason for this is to prevent physics weirdness, but when I'm chasing retreating smoke I'd like to be able to leave it on x30 until I sight them. Large battles are completely unplayable. I don't mean performance wise, I mean control wise. It's not at all feasible to pay attention to so many ships at once, so you have to leave a lot of the fleet to the AI through things like Scout and Screen. But the Scout AI especially, and AI in general, are suicidal. Scout TBs have it the worst, committing ritual suicide by CL. This is to say nothing of the issues with over-eager ship avoidance, but at least that can be turned off now. Please fix the forced deselection whenever a ship sinks. It is infuriating, especially in large battles where there are TBs and CLs dropping like flies. I feel like the auto-resolve should be a lot more decisive in situations where one side is massively outclassed. A few 1890 CLs should not be able to get away with light damage when encountering a task force of 1901 CAs. DDs and CLs seem to have an extremely annoying issue where they will refuse to aim their weapons if they're turning at any appreciable rate. This makes them almost worthless at shorter ranges, which precludes a lot of their uses in the early game.

Laminated armor, that is, an attempt to emulate a thick plate via slapping two thinner plates on top of each other, is weaker, yes. But properly designed multi-layer armor is much more effective than a monolithic plate in many cases, one of which was mentioned by @UncleAi in armored decks. The first layer of armor is able to cause damage to the projectile, saps its energy, and, if sufficiently thick, starts its fuse. If the next armor plate is thick enough and at an appropriate distance, the shell may shatter against it or explode prematurely. Additional layers of armor also limit damage due to spalling or splinters, by having some armor between the fragments and the delicate internals. The effects of spaced armor are one of the reasons that the "turtleback" armor scheme was so effective before ranges got too far and air attack became common. Shells that made it through the main belt would be severely blunted, greatly slowed, and have their fuses set, leading them to explode on, glance off of, or simply shatter against the sloped deck armor behind the belt. You can see some of these ideas in the armor scheme shown for the KGV battleships above, where the main armor belt has an additional layer of armor behind it, presumably to catch splinters and prevent explosions from propagating inwards. There is another layer after that over the magazines, further improving the likelihood of shell failure and reducing the chances of collateral damage. You can also see that the fuel oil is kept between the main belt and inner layer, which would further hamper enemy shells due to oil's much higher density and viscosity compared to air. It's really quite complicated, and as far as I'm aware we don't really have any definitive empirical answers to just how effective various spaced armor schemes were, such as the Italian "decapping belt." Honestly, I'd suspect that there's not much tangible benefit to having more than about three total layers of armor anywhere, maybe four over the magazines. By the time you're up to four or five layers, those last one or two are probably protecting very little of the ship. As a result, I'd expect the system to work something like this: The first armor layer acts as expected. It's a slab of steel. Having a second layer of sufficient thickness leads to the armor being better than the sum of its parts. I'd expect this to take the form of a buff to the first layer's effective thickness if the second layer is substantial enough, with the total thickness (including buff) being the number to beat for shells. Full pens become rarer due to the improved armor, and partial pens become blocked shots or have their damage reduced considerably (depending on how close they were to a pen, and the thickness of the second layer). The third layer and on serve mostly to reduce damage taken, rather than change hit types, and reduce the chance of critical hits. If a shell has made it through your two thickest layers of armor, it's likely quite deep in the ship at this point due to spacing, and clearly had a lot of power behind it, so you should still be taking some damage at this point. Third and on layers, being so deep in the ship, would likely be found only over highly important areas, primarily the magazines. As such, they should reduce the chances of ammo detonation in particular and critical hits in general.

Alternatively, the game could display the correct amount of armor penetration on the guns, taking into account the armor's efficiency. So if you have armor that's 150% effective, guns only show 2/3 of their raw penetration values.

Yeah, something as simple as "3.2in (5.44in eff.)" would be great

That has to be one of the most severe sins I've seen the auto designer come up with

It's pretty ludicrous how accurate 9in guns are compared to everything else, at least later on. I find that 9in is often 150-200% as accurate as 6in, 8in, or 11in guns outside of very short range. they're usually the most accurate gun at any particular range by a significant margin. Only in years where 9in guns are comparable in mark to 12in guns do they seem to ever get beaten. I don't think I've ever seen any other gun get base hit chances above 1% at the gun's maximum range. It makes 11 inch guns kind of useless since they offer effectively zero DPM improvement while being much larger and heavier, only improving things if the 9in can't quite punch through enough armor.

My main gripes with the lead ship retiring to the rear are the fact that it often happens far earlier than necessary, and that it is done poorly. The ship always tries to pull a 360 degree turn, even when its formation will have long past it should it do so. It should pull out of line and slow down before rejoining at the rear unless the line is long enough that a full turn would work. I've also seen it pull ships out of the lead when they've barely been scratched, unnecessarily breaking up the formation and slowing things down for no benefit. A simple toggle as to whether lead ship swapping is allowed would be nice, or a button that tells the lead ship to head to the rear. The biggest problem is lack of control.

The problem with this, at least in my experience, is that you can generally bring ~20-30% more guns into battle if you're using TBs instead, even if you focus on guns for the DDs. The biggest reason I'd pick a DD over a TB currently is range, since TBs seem to top out at around ~15k km range. I'm able to cram 6 centerline 4in guns onto a 31kn 1900 destroyer (using wing torpedoes to maximize gun space), as well as armor it, and end up with a cost of ~$3.3 million. By comparison, a TB with the same speed, same torpedo armament (though centerline mounted due to roll concerns), and 4 centerline 4in guns comes in at ~$1.8 million. If you forego as many torpedoes as possible (1x1 tube), the DD can cut its price to ~$2.9 million. Sure, each gun on the DD is a bit more accurate, which probably about makes up for the lost number of guns, but you lose the redundancy of having more ships, as well as most of your torpedo capability.

I find that, often, one DD costs 2-3x what a TB does while mounting little to no additional armament. Armor and smokescreens are the only things they have going for them, but 1.5in of armor is woefully insufficient even against many HE rounds, and the smokescreen doesn't help much when the enemy is bringing 1.5x as much firepower due to fielding cheaper TBs. As an example, if we go for 30kn speed with 1900 tech, I can make a TB that fields 2x2 torpedo tubes and 3x1 4in guns. If I decide to use a DD instead, I can field 2x2 torpedoes and 4x1 4in guns. Granted, the DD has much higher range, and (at least in this case) has some armor protection, but it also costs twice as much. You can cut down on torpedo tubes to make room for more guns and so have just as many guns, but at that point you may as well just use the TBs.

One thing to keep in mind is that rather than the target ship being in range, it is the solution that needs to be in range. It doesn't matter if the ship is within the circle if the point you're aiming at is far outside of it.

I recently got a new GPU (6900XT), and have noticed flickering with FreeSync enabled. One of the main causes seemed to be hovering over guns, which I found odd. It's not a huge deal for this game, since I can just turn off FreeSync and use VSync, but I was curious about why. It seems that there is a significant reduction in frame rate when hovering over turreted guns, and a much smaller drop when hovering over anything else (including component buttons, but not menu options). I've attached screenshots showing the severity of the drop. I just figured that I'd let you know about the issue, though I don't know whether it's a game issue or a driver issue. Not hovering over anything: 187 FPS Hovering over component button: 162 FPS Hovering over turret: 73 FPS