Schmiddy

My main ask for the campaign is historical template ships for the enemy and yourself, with the option of course of modifying your own templates. I love the ship customization in this game and I know the devs are working hard on the AI ship builder but honestly 90% of the cruisers and battleships look utterly ridiculous and would be an immersion breaker for me.

It's an issue with any game engine, that's why many games rather than use an actual particle system use a 2d scrolling image to imitate particles in storms and such. Probably the most noticeable example of this is in Minecraft where while raining if you look up there's a box around you where no rain comes down. Older FPS games often use a series of 2d textures stacked on top of eachother for smoke grenade clouds and such. Particles are just a ton of work on any GPU. As for this game in particular I haven't noticed lag almost ever but I also don't spend much time up close to my ships so perhaps that is why. Using a 3900x and 3080ti with 32gb 3600mhz ram in a well ventilated desktop.

When offering criticism you should ensure that your goals are aligned with the goals of the one you are critiquing. In this case you're missing the mark. The missions are there to give interesting scenarios that make you think about how you design your ship leveraging different mechanics of the game to achieve an objective. If the objective was "design an effective ship / battlefleet" there would be maybe 3 missions per nation and they would all play out the same. That's not the objective of Naval Academy. What you want out of the game is coming in the campaign where your whole job is to design effective ships and construct useful task forces. The game isn't done, just wait.

Laptops are very rarely upgradeable. Many laptops don't come with a graphics chip or a very low performance chip because they are intended for office/school work rather than gaming. You may want to explore a gaming laptop or a desktop with a graphics card. As for recommendations based on a budget I would suggest you head over to a computer tech forum.

The biggest problem with later year secondaries is that more and more of them are placed into fully enclosed turrets and become very large and results in smaller caliber secondaries being selected. Otherwise I think people are expecting them to do much more than they were intended. Secondary guns are only really there to allow the capital ship to engage screening ships at the same time that they are firing their main guns at another capital ship, at best your secondaries are worth a light cruiser or maybe a heavy cruiser on a super battleship. Throwing those extra batteries on the side of your ship is far cheaper than building a whole new cruiser to match that amount of firepower. For example, 12x 152mm secondary guns on a bismarck style ship tech year 1933 for a 6 gun broadside would cost a bit more than 1000k, whereas to build a new light cruiser would cost over 10x that amount. Another point is if you intend to use capital ships like germany did in WW2 as commerce raiders your secondary battery is a MUST, the secondaries annihilate merchants and it's important to conserve your main battery ammunition in case the enemy sends a capital ship after you in response.