Littorio

Really the background visuals should be a top priority. I'm hoping they can squeak some into this next patch, or if not then a full haul for 1.04. Until we have proper background visuals, we can't have real weather effects like rain and volumetric fog. That alone is worth it, but they have stated they won't touch the current spotting system until they do this visual stuff first, so it's even more important.

This is a hilarious bug I have to say

Got it, I had no idea the shells were not physical and that hits were predetermined.

They definitely seem to prioritize guns over armor, glass cannons. It's hilarious because that's just that many more magazines to go up in smoke from a random 2" shell

Build a balanced fleet. The AI often builds clown ships, so you can get away with fewer but more powerful vessels. If they have 10 BBs, you can probably get by with 6-7. Scale it like that for CAs, CLs, TBs, etc. If money is an issue for my preferred ratio, I leave the TBs out, simply because once I play one turn and get a second dump of starting capital, I can start work on lots of TBs. Yeah, there will be a few months where I won't have any, but you can them a lot faster than larger ships.

Focus on the existing mechanics with just two countries. That's the purpose of a beta: to figure out everything that can go wrong and work out all the kinks before expanding. Opening up to other nations will just muddle the water (pun intended) and likely introduce new issues such as the AI generator trying to start three-way fleet battles. I can just imagine the chaos something like that would do to starting positions which are still being optimized. In short - though I would love some expansion, as would most players, it's not the right time to do that yet. Add more of the base mechanics: finish the tech trees, add actual task forces and patrol zones, develop merchants a bit more, get mines and subs started, etc. That said - if it had to be a country I would vote for Russia right now - only to give Germany some use for it's Baltic ports finally. France has more models, but I think it makes a better 4th addition to the game. I would love to vote for Italy but we are nowhere near the Med yet

Very curious. So you're saying there is some sort of...."magnetism" at work when one vessel passes in front of it's ally taking fire?

It's a placeholder. It is not implemented yet. The economic aspects of the campaign are largely absent at the moment.

I've noticed similar things, but isn't this essentially just that all the shells that would go short are hitting the second ship in your line of fire because it's closer?

I understand what you are saying in theory. In practice, I doubt we will ever get quite that far. If UA:D does ultimately get fully finished in the next couple of years, I'd be happy to talk about some kind of mod to do this. You are correct in that many WWII-era ships continued to serve on into the 50s, 60s, and even 70s, with guided missiles of comparable range to large caliber gunfire. That said, the time period of 1890-1940 is already large enough and we have sufficient issues already getting just that 50 year period implemented correctly. Adding another 20-30 years will only scale mission creep. I applaud your courage in bringing this up though, and risking facing the kneejerk "NOs" from everyone (which occured lol). As I said, I wouldn't want anyone thinking of this anytime soon in any capacity, but in that bright sunny future where a complete UA:D is out and has no issues, a mod for 1950-1970 could be very interesting, as that time period is largely overlooked, as you say. People tend to think of warship tech that is more 1980-current. The transitory phase from gun to missile is largely missed by games. Something like Dangerous Waters by Sonalysts is a good example of a modern sea game, but I can't think of anything comparable for earlier times post WWII.

To begin, thank you for adding the friendly fire check last update. That was a big deal and from what I have seen, works well. Also, knowing that refits will be in the next patch is wonderful news and I'm sure everyone will be excited to see them. That said, I will repeat what I stated last month, but in a condensed manner with one addition. Overall, while there a lots of things people consider to be "important" to add to this game, I would humbly submit that many are thinking too long term. Suggestions like - "We just need all the countries," or "We need the advanced economy that allows different shells to be stockpiled" aren't very helpful. These are coming to be sure, but require many other systems in place first. What I suggest is instead focusing on things that can be immediately implemented to the betterment of the current state of play - such as we can see with the friendly fire system/refits. So I have: 1. Backgrounds/Weather/Time of Day - I have said from the beginning that this is necessary ASAP and I stand by it. Entering a battle where it is supposedly night with high winds and rough seas to see a sunny day is jarring and makes the game seem cheap, like a farce. I know implementing these visuals and the accompanying systems (actual rain, fog, etc.) can take time because you need to keep the game optimized and running smoothly, but please prioritize these visual effects. Not only are they important in of themselves, but they will set the scene for later additions to the game. Namely... 2. Overall Spotting Mechanics - To be more brief than last time, I will combine the battle and campaign map spotting overhaul into one point. I remember you told me before that you are waiting for visual additions and changes before even considering doing anything to spotting, at any level (and I agree with this approach 100%), but I must once again insist on the importance of this feature for the record. Once the appropriate visual elements are in place, consider making them an integral part of first the battle maps of course, but more importantly the campaign map. If I "sight" a hostile squadron via the mission generator, and the dicerolls or what have you say that the current conditions should be sunny, then perhaps that translates to more accurate classification of the foe and their strength. Then I can decide to engage or not. On the flip side, if it's a raging storm, all I might see are two vessels....but in reality there could be four! Or maybe I think I can see two BBs, but in reality it is just two CAs. Not all mis-classifications need to be negative for the player. But the entire current system of "Get Cruiser Duel from the mission generator - Accept Cruiser Duel - Don't see the enemy even though I already had to have seen her on the campaign layer to identify said cruiser and thus decide to engage - Steam at 10x speed following 'smoke' until End Battle appears" is extremely frustrating to all your players and moreso a completely pointless waste of time. A proper spotting layer on the campaign map that conforms with reality will vastly and quickly improve the quality of the game as it will liberate the player to make informed choices as to when to engage or not. We will not have to physically jump into every single battle just to see what kind of weather and time it is currently. This in turn, with implemented visuals on the battle maps, will finally allow a more realistic spotting system to be developed that will logically make sense, freeing players to worry about actual tactics and positioning, rather than searching the whole battlespace on accelerated time until you end the "engagement," never having seen anyone. 3. Intelligence - This will dovetail nicely with the above two points and is a logical extension of where the game needs to go. Simply said, I hate having to start a campaign and fight several engagements just to get an idea of what the AI has built this time. Players need to know what the AI has built for each class before our first campaign engagement. We need to know what the enemy has built/is building in order to know what to make ourselves. How else can we make informed choices as to how to design our vessels? This means a very basic intelligence collection system needs to be coded now, before expanding the campaign. Test it in this 1v1 sandbox while you can. My perception would be different if we simply had wrong or erroneous intelligence, and we built our ships in such a way as to not be very effective, but as it stands you could do so anyway simply out of total ignorance of the latest AI design. In short, it is another aspect of the game where the player is reminded of random dice rolls. These are necessary, yes, but the best implemented randomness is hidden from the player. Reminding us every time we start a game that we lack control and understanding of the campaign, with nothing we can immediately do to change that short of charging the nearest enemy and engaging, takes us out of enjoying playing. We truly do need a basic intel system to begin exploring this crucial area of naval conflict that was of extreme importance in reality. 4. Transport Mechanics and Transparency - Right now, the what, how, where, when, and why of transports is absent. I understand fully if you don't really want to touch them at all until you do a economic overhaul, but a few UI tweaks right now could help at the very least. The bottom line is that transports are and have been a black box. What I mean by that is their use is largely abstract and opaque. They play a crucial role in the progress or lack thereof in a campaign, and yet players have very little real control of them. Now, since the start things have changed, but both for better and worse. Initially, players sinking TPs ourselves seemed less impactful because we weren't given VPs in the post-battle stats (even though they were counted in the overall campaign tallies). That has since been addressed, but is countered by the fact that TP losses each turn from AI dicerolls are now hidden. As far as I can tell, it's not that you're TPs are not getting sunk, just alerts are not coming up like they used to. Taken together, you have a game mechanic that is very important reduced to minimal interaction with the player. The slider to produce more or fewer transports was initially very confusing to me when I first began playing, and was not inherently intuitive. It took some experimenting to figure out exactly what it was doing. This can be fixed with better UI, encyclopedia entries, or even a basic tutorial point. But the issue of TPs extends beyond strategic and operational concerns, but right down to the tactical layer. One of the most egregious things is the totally random gun layouts, often with misplaced guns inside the hull and/or superstructure that still fire, about which I have sent many bug reports. There should be some logic to how well-armed a freighter is overall, as well as to it's exact gun layout. More could be said but it is not immediately useful to the game so I will refrain for now.

Well I agree that they need to add more game concepts first. Otherwise a UI redo is pointless now, and will just need to be done again later.

Ah yes, training is a must. They need to turn regardless and track. I just don't know if the devs would feel comfortable adding three+ more buttons to the already somewhat cluttered UI, barring a whole redesign. Personally, I don't yet see a huge issue with torpedo launches as the game is, and not having direct control over them is in keeping with not having direct control of individual gun mounts. Now if something changes, we can revisit this, but short of tracking targets, I don't see the huge problem here myself. Not saying that system isn't plausible, but from what I have seen of War on the Sea (which I do not own), I'm not sure that fits here. I did not know about the ball joints! Very interesting!

They won't implement something like that. It would require some kind of alternate UI and control interface to account for all possible angles of launch from a given vessel, for each respective vessel in turn. You couldn't just have a basic "fire torpedo button" as you say, because where is it launching, at 90degrees to the side? Which one, port or starboard? There would have to be some kind of UI toggle, like an alternate mouse mode to swivel to the angle you want. And even there there will still be a delay from launchers turning. And this isn't even getting into toggling multiple launchers. Do you want to fire from one, or two, or many? How many torps per salvo? From which combinations of launchers? It would be a little easier for underwater tubes since their angles are pretty limited, but there is still more to this than you seem to think. Overall I think you just need to adjust your tactics. I don't seem to have all these torpedo issues. Just know where you are vessels are and be aware when you toggle OFF to the various levels of...riskiness of the torp shot. Precisely, even if all of what he wanted above was somehow done, the timeliness of it is still moot because of the locked position of the tubes and their lack of tracking. Personally, in the case of underwater tubes though, I think they almost track too much. I thought they were locked in place on a set, single angle, and yet I've seen some pretty oblique angle shots from underwater launchers before, certainly not clean 90degree ones.

Thanks for the tip. It's odd, I never had issues before the other night and now it's weird.

He has made many such statements like this regarding playing "to find bugs" being like labor, and implying that developers are "exploiting labor" out of people simply playing video games. No mater how broken a game, this is just ridiculous.

Terrible analogy right off the bat. Existing and living is something out of your control. Your parents just had you. You didn't ask to be created. You do have a choice of whether to buy a video game or not, even ones labeled what you call the horrible "eArLY aCceSs." Yes, the alternative to not buying the game is to wait. Then, when it is out of early access, you can try the finished game and complain less You really need to stop with all of these stupid car analogies. Even assuming the game not being finished was somehow equivalent to a "randomly exploding car," it still fails as a comparison because 1. Nobody is getting hurt 2. You need a car far more than video game For someone who likes this game and is happy, you sure complain a lot with no basis to do so. You aren't a victim here. There is nothing shady about openly labeling a game early access. People are free to choose to buy in or not, based on their own decisions. LOL it's ironic that you try to claim I am the one telling people they cannot have opinions, and yet you are the person saying that we shouldn't be free to buy an early access title and contribute to it's development. You have some kind of odd, leftist notion of exploited labor and see the devs as evil capitalists just out to save a few dollars by 'hAviNg eVeRyoNe bUg teST wiThoUt pAY!" Newsflash, people can choose to believe that or not, and those that do shouldn't purchase the game, and instead should stand on their supposed moral principles. In short, you are turning a simple offering of a WIP game into some sort of bizarre, socio-economic sin that should be denounced and shut down. I'll repeat, you are a willing participant in this game design process and you are not a victim.

They should add actual patrol sectors and task forces before expanding to include a third nation. Get the mechanics working with two first, then grow.

There is no set date at this time. It will come.

...And yet have you bought the game, yes? So you accepted that and no one forced you. Either buy in and accept you're an unpaid bug tester, or else don't and wait. Or even still, if the gall of these developers and their supposedly unscrupulous practices irks you so much, then simply vow never to support their products ever again. Delete anything you own of theirs. But your whole "Rahh rahh down with the devs free the proletariat I'm from Australia" vibe doesn't contribute anything of worth. You're playing a victim when you have nothing to be victimized over. It would be different if the game was listed as completed and at all full price, but it's not.

There's your problem, all BBs. I didn't know he had only BBs and assumed a balanced fleet. I don't know if it's even that complex. Right now fleet encounters are pretty barebones, and the logic behind it is opaque. Bottom line - field a mixed bunch of ships of varying classes until they get around to making things more visible and allow you to assign patrol sectors and create actual task forces that operate together.

I must agree and would like to add an addendum onto my above feedback post. After playing a full campaign, I can see that in many cases, often 1v1 duels, many enemies still immediately do a 180 degree turn and flee. How do I know this? Because I go "West" towards smoke sighted on 10x speed and the bearing of the smoke never changes. If they were trying to intercept me and find my vessel, but because of spotting distance we couldn't see each other, the direction of the sighted smoke would change, gradually through NW/SW to N/S as I moved by them, depending on whether they missed me in the fog to port or starboard respectively. Instead, I keep on a straight course the whole time, and the direction of the sighting never wavers. The only way this would be possible is if the AI enemy cheats. It must do some form of power calculation prior to visual contact, even though it should be impossible to know my stats, decide to flee, and then somehow know my exact position and bearing through the fog. I cannot overstate how annoying this is to players. Leaving aside the spotting system as a whole as I said before, this scenario I have described can be mitigated for now by at least having the AI REQUIRE A VISUAL IDENTIFICATION OF MY SHIP BEFORE DECIDING TO FLEE. It should be IMPOSSIBLE for an lone enemy to decide to retreat before even seeing me. As it stands these situations are just POINTLESS TIME SINKS that drain player patience and goodwill. Now, the game has improved since the first campaign beta, and I have gradually seen less and less of these situations, but they truly should be all gone by now. I can't see a reason why the AI can decide to flee, and know where to too, before even knowing what it is up against and the speed+bearing of my vessel. It is claimed that AI aggressiveness is being continually improved, but this scenario is the opposite of aggression, but gamey, cheating, cowardice that defies logic. And for the record, these are NOT enemies moving away in order to get into optimal engagement range for their given guns/armor vis-a-vis my own, since the enemy is retreating before even seeing me.

Does anyone else find it jarring to see some of the names used in the 1890s? I know now we can rename ships ourselves, but really we just need some better name lists to start with. It's not a difficult fix and shouldn't be too laborious. The Germans have it worse than the British in my opinion, but I'm sure there are examples on both sides. Admiral Scheer made his name at Jutland in WWI, and yet we have 1890s and 1900s ships called that. The worst is transports having battleship names. I'm sure there any many people on here who would be happy to contribute historically accurate or at least ambiguously plausible ones. Why don't we work on some lists and hand them off to the devs for an update? Would anyone be interested? Are there any name list updates planned @Nick Thomadis?

More ships on Sea Control, and check your ports often. The game shuffles your ships around (especially as Germany) and often moves them on returning from a battle. So they don't always go back to where you had them. Thus you might think they are going back to say, Emden, when in reality they go back to Pillau. I can't wait for this to be changed in an update.

True, but I am saying I can understand why they would hold off on touching spotting at all until the accompanying visuals for the conditions would be ready. Might as well do it all at once and focus on other things in the meantime.