Lastreaumont

In my fight againt submarines I chose the path of specialized and optimized ships for that and for that only. The main goal for these designs is to maximize ASW and detection scores for a reduced cost. Of course the design is dependant of current accessible technologies, but I identified some common rules. - CL can reach higher scores than DD. - Smallest size for a given hull. - Very high speed, up to 40-42 when possible, and not too expensive. - Very long range to be able to follow the rest of the fleet, even with terrible engine efficiency. - Beam and draught to minimum. - 1 smallest available funnel, heavier funnels reduce ASW score. Don't care of engine efficiency. - Highest main tower. - Lowest secondary tower. - 1 smallest possible gun, with smallest gun length, few ammo. - No armor. - No rangefinder. - Highest radar available, up to 2, radar 3 gives smaller scores. - Highest sonar available. - RDF if available. - highest anti sub weapons. With Radar 2 and sonar 3, you can reach ASW scores higher than 10000. I use 1 of these ships for each BB and BC in my fleets. Theses ships are useless in battle, and very fragile, this is not their job, order them to retreat directly when battle starts. Additional Tip: to identify these ships easily in ships lists, I rename them with the same name, followed by a number. Examples: - US, GB: Escort 1, Escort 2, Escort 3,... - France: Escorteur 1, Escorteur 2, Escorteur 3,... - Japan: Goei 1, Goei 2, Goei 3,... etc. Hope I helped.

I started a new campaign (France, 1920, normal difficulty) with the last update and few years after start I encounter the same situation as with previous versions: I have plenty of monnay (several tens of billions, with a monthly increase of more than 1 billion, with all invest slides to max) but I can't use it to build new ships because my shipyard capacity is too small. This is less visible in a 1890 starting campaign because I can increase shipyard max size to increase shipyard capacity every 2 years but even in this case it remains my main ship building capacity limitation. I'd be pleased if I could invest monnay directly to increase the global shipyard capacity of my country, and avoid this situation where I continue to increase the max size of a shipyard having the capacity to build a ship of more than 300000T, just to (slowly) increase the total building capacity.

I wanted to create some designs available on some years, and started to be bored to redesign several times almost the same ship. I tried to just change the ship save file name but it is not enough. I found the date in the file (coded in hexa on 2 bytes, antepenultimate and penultimate bytes of the file). Changing it allows to see the ship at the selected year in the game. So copying a ship save file, changing name and date into the file seems to work (try done on a CL built in 1921 and copied to 1922 to 1925. But (there is always a "but") the available techs to refit the ship remains to ones available at the 1st build of the ship. So, no refit possible of the copied designs on later years. My theory is a ship save file contains the ship description and the "needed" tech to build it (i.e. what was available when it was built), and the game editor uses theses techs when we modify the ship instead of using the available techs at the current year. So, to have copied "refitable" ships, we should analyse the save file data to separate "needed techs" from "ship design", to be able to replace these techs by the ones of a save file done at the destination date.

With the 1.3.2 update, a part of my game came now in french. To be precise, a part of my game tries to be in french. So, how can I help to correct or optimize the translation?

I saw this also, since 3 or 4 builds. This seems to append during the 1st battle of a new war with a new ennemy. Alt+F4 plus restart the game and battle start is OK. I thought it was a bug of my campaign because I started it a few builds ago.

ASW and ships management. Ennemy submarines annoyed me trying to make holes into my nice BC and BB. (On another hand, this is their job and they did well if that annoys me :-) ). So I decided to invest into an efficient anti-submarine escort for my precious ships, a cheap ship with a maxed ASW score. I found a design, and tested it during 3 campaigns with different countries, starting in 1930. It seems to work. I have only 1 loss because of a submarine attack to report, and it was against a not escorted CA. But this design made me sad, because it is fully unrealistic. This is the receipe to build it: - take a CL hull. - push all the slides to their lowest values, except speed, that should be around 40 to 42 kn (they have to follow BC, and sometimes they have to escape). - add the best front tower - add the cheapest rear tower - add the cheapest funnel (engine efficiency is not a problem) - add the smallest one gun turret, with shortest gun. - set ammunition weight to light, and stocks to small (you won't be supposed to need them) - add best sonar, best radar but not radar 3, best RDF, but no range finder (you won't be supposed to need them) - add best ASW weapon. - set all armors to 0 (you won't be supposed to need them) With this receipe, you can have a cheap escort ship with an ASW value around 10000 in 1930, that can go higher than 15000 later with some refits. And, bonus, the recon value is high too. I use 2 of them for each BB/BC, but maybe 1 is enough (need testing). At start of each battle, I order them to run away. Battles are not their job. All of this to come to the 1st point I'd like to see in future updates: I would be nice if optimizing the ASW score or the recon score of an escort ship would not come to unrealistic designs like this above. The use of these specialized ships showed me some possible upgrades in ship management interface. - the status of ships in repair should be able to be changed, to avoid a ship to go in mission at sea directly at the end of its repair time. It is boring to have to do a multiple ships selection including an in harbor ready ship to change the status of my ships in repair to "limited" to prevent they leave harbor without the rest of their task force. - a ship that go back into harbor, for example because others ships of their task force need repair, should go back to her status she had before going at sea. I mean, I'm ok that a ship with a "limited" status that go at sea changes her status to "sea control", but I'd be pleased that this "limited" status comes back when the ship comes back to harbor. Yes, I'm a dictarorial admiral that want to his ships don't go at sea without his permission :-) . More seriously, when you have specialized ships, they must not go at sea alone. This is not only for the ASW specialized escort above, but also for mine hunters DD for example, or to avoid situations like: where is the escort of this BB that have to go back to the blocus of the ennemy? Oh, they are in repair in another harbor because they went at sea for a mission alone...

One of my task forces vanished. Problem: I didn't notice which precise action I did before this. Maybe it was when I set its route. I discovered this when I looked for it next turn. The ships which composed it were not in the ship list anymore. Without transition, I like the new dynamic weather.

Oh! I am not the only french here. Great! ☺️

Oh! I see! This simulates the typical incompetence of politicians ruling the country. Sounds legit. ☺️

I have a question to the developpers: Why, when I win a war, I don't always have what I asked for war reparations but, in the same time, when I loose a war, I can't choose if I give what the winner asked for or money?

IMHO because if you add aircraft carriers, the game will become Ultimate Admiral: Aircraft Carriers, and the dev seem to prefer developping Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts. I'm pleased with this choice.

Thanks for the information. 🙂

So, if I understand well, you noticed an effect of max Shipyard size on Shipbuilding capacity, didn't you?

I have a question about Shipbuilding capacity. Does someone knows if Shipbuilding capacity is linked to max Shipyard size? I ask this because in my current campaign with France, I choose to increase the Shipyard size until 96720t, and not more because I think this is enough to build ships when the available max hull size is 95000t. On the other side, I have all the budget slides to max, more than 1 billion of available budget each month, but and I can't increase my fleet much more because my Shipbuilding capacity is nearly 600000t and I already use it, and more. Current builds are: For me: - 3 BB of 85000t each - 4 BC of 32500t each For my allies: - 1 BB of 65000t - 6 DD of 1300 to 2000t each - 2 CA of 13500t each - 2 BC of 32500t each - 2 CL of 7500t each With the current repairs, I use for a total of 750000t of Shipbuilding capacity. Do I accept too many contracts of my allies?

My experience gave me the same result.

I found how to refit simultaneously multiple ships: In the list of ships to refit you have when you select a refit design, click on the 1st you wanna refit, then shift+click on the last one and all the ships between these 2 (including them) will be selected and can be refited with only one click on the "refit" button.

Today I decided to shoot in my foot and share a suggestion that will ruin a trick I use. All started with the ascertainment that the time a ship was built (especially the big ones in late decades), she isn't state of the art anymore. So the 1st thing she experiments just at the end of her commissionning, this is a refit. And here come the good question: if most of the time I refit a ship I just built, do I really need to build her state of the art, with a higher risk of flaws? So, I changed my way to design ships: 1) I do a state of the art design of what I want. 2) Before saving I change all the design options that introduce flaws probabilities for other ones, with no flaws probabilities. 3) I build the ship. 4) When build is done, I refit the ship to a new state of the art design. With this method I produce SOTA ships with less flaws, and sometimes in less time because options without flaws probabilities are often shorter to build than ones with. So, from a gameplay point of view I suggest to add this rule to the refit time/cost: - when an option added during a refit would add a flaws probabilities if added for a build, the refit should be longer and/or with higher cost.

I think I'm one of these players targeted by this. Effectively, all my ships have longest available guns. Why? Maybe I'm wrong but I started with the idea that if I wanna damage a ship, first step is to hit her. So I'm looking for maximising accuracy. Until then longest possible guns seemed to be a good way. If now the game mechanics change, I will adapt my designs but the goal will remain the same: maximising accuracy. I need to test and analyze this new game mechanic, notably to find the answer to this question: longest barrel guns are the worst according to weight and reload time, but if they aren't the best in accuracy anymore, does that mean I can find a lighter and faster gun design with equivalent accuracy, but globaly more effective because of these other qualities?

This demonstration of torpedoes tanking is interesting. I'm going to investigate this concept with lighter designs from previous decades.

On the same way, the Bismarck shown looks like a Nagato.

Or Trafalgar? ☺️

Same observation. My game experience is far better since I play with 2 computers: one for this game and another one for another game or other stuffs. Without transition. Concerning the "yes" buttons vacations, I noticed this happens after a played battle (autoresolve don't do that). Personal speculation: this could be an old issue because I noticed on previous versions that when I had an "ask for peace treaty" window just after a battle, I needed to wait some time (few seconds) to have a responding "yes" button. I'm not sure, but on these old versions the "yes" button seemed to be redrawed when it became functionnal.

As far as I'm concerned, my 12'' guns (325mm to be precise), are able to make holes into everything the AI puts in front of. Not at each hit of course, but at the end the ships are sunk.

Did you remember what were the weather conditions modifiers when you encountered these stealthy torpedo boats? (the ones given by the game at top left, not the nice vibe displayed) I suffered a lot during my 1st ambushes of my BB by small stealthy TB or DD. Now I take care about the weather conditions at the beginnig of the battle and don't use direct paths towards the enemy (or the direction of where it is supposed to be). The goal is to approach carefully to be able to start a tactical retreat before contact (*) and, the most important, before the massive torpedoes swarm launch. With some practice, stealthy tiny boats aren't a problem anymore. (*): How do I know I'm close to the enemy if I don't see it? If I don't have radar, I ask to the time accelerator... 😉☺️

I'm not sure that a nuclear powered ship with its reactor enough damaged to cause any trouble will stay onfloat for long. Ok, nuclear shells exist. So Abuse_claws' proposal isn't completly unrealistic.