Fangoriously

adjustments to part collision, especially in pre dreadnought era ships and the US dread 1 and 2, is welcome, every few patches they seem to have more red lines drawn on them blocking part placement.

That design single handedly speed ran a 1910 campaign, i deployed them in groups of 6, and again and again faced groups of 40 ships with 2 to 3 times my tonage, until there literally wasn't a german or Austrian navy anymore and they beged for peace.

The refit editor hates my turrets, says they are "too far from previous place" as soon as i enter the editer. the Q turret it doesn't mind for some reason, but i can't move or add main gun turrets anywhere else. At least tech i unlock is showing up to select.

With the new patch, I made another 1910 French campaign, that I unlocked legitimately, haven't edited any files since befor 1.05 first dropped. Anyway, I started with enough money to build 41 17 million dollars battlecruisers that I designed. Once I saw I could build that many, designing smaller ships seemed pointless lol. I can also maintain this fleet month to month with positive cash flow of over a million, even with all 3 budget sliders maxed. That seems like pretty genorious funding to me. If I tried to do an all battlecruiser fleet in 1.04 I'd only be able to build about half that many. At least at first, I'm planning to leave all ships at ports and see how often missions generate, wait till some new tech unlocks, do some refit system testing, and then send task forces out and see how often missions generate that way, becase they almost never did befor. Got my first mission in July, this enormous Austrian mixed fleet of almost 192,000 tons vs 6 of my battle cruisers, the mission spawned right next to the port those 6 ships were stationed at. I've been designing all my capital ships with increased ammo stores because most missions I've been seeing are these enourmouse fleet actions. I needed to hit the sack though, that mission would take 45 minutes to an hour to play though, I'll see how it goes after work.

Aww, was 10 years into a 1910 campaign, was looking forward to doing a major modernization on all my dreadnought 1s when refits got fixed.

Visualy shells seem to go all over the place, but actual accuracy, espesualy at its most basic in 1890, seems greatly improved

I'll have to double check the refit procedure when I get home, but the last time I was on the refit builder screen, no newly researced tech was available to select.

holy crap a mission! thats a lot of ships, with a lot of torpedoes. but my BBs have an 8 gun 12in broad side, and my CAs have a 8 gun 9in broad side, and 3 side torps, if i get decent weather i could pull this off. well 33 out of 40 aint bad. And the weather was awful. It was -5, -20, -18, -5 i think, detection range was about half a klick beyond their torp range. Once my last ship ran out of main gun ammo, (even though it had increased ammo stores because this is the exact kind of mission i've come to expect) i left the mission, the remaining ships were circling 3-5 km out, with their ammo exhausted as well, it was over. The heavy cruisers mostly stayed out of effective range to do anything, the light cruisers only went 18 knots, barely ever made it into torp range before my guns took them out, the TBs and destroyers were nasty little attack runners, after this battle i consider the AI mostly 'fine', my ships were just an order of magnitude superior pound for pound.

Yay, unlocked 1900 French campaign, by killing enough German transports off screen, never once playing a single mission in the 7 years it took.

I think having task forces too large might be preventing battles from happening, maybe. I had a group of 10 battleship parked outside Germany's western ports for years, sent 3 ships off to guard a shipping lane or something, and the remaining 7 immediately got attacked by 20+ German ships. Those 7 where all French ironclad 3s with 7 11in gun broadsides, it was a turkey shoot lol. From there I made task forces of no more than 3 ships, but never got another fight for 3 more years, so I don't know. From what I could tell of the maybe 5 battles I've had over about 15 total years of testing through 5 failed/refit bugged/abandoned campaigns is that 1890 battles are much more fun than before with gunnery that is dramatically more accurate under 2 km, if you know how to build ships that don't sabotage your base accuracy to death. The torpedo/big gun balance of power is about what I thought it was at 1910 gameplay. Not bad for a bunch of gunners bore sighting with no range finders! Did torpedo boat ai especially get a buff? I've seen them make very intelligent approach angels, turn hard and drop all but unavoidable tops several times now. Cruisers too, very deliberately entering torp range just long enough to drop one before backing off. Good stuff, almost no pointless running so far. Torp boat durability feels about right, 1 good 5 in hit, a couple of 2 in hits as well, that's usually enough to sink one. Certainly never seen one last more than 15 seconds after a main gun hit. I haven't seen anything I question revolving flooding so far, changes seem good. With the draft slider set as low as possible, many bulkheads seem to function about like standard would on a standard draft ship. That accuracy buff though... The mouse is bugged whenever its over any sort of UI element of any kind, be it the green weapon rage radius displays in the water or an informational window that pops up when you mouse over something. This freezes the camera in place until you move your mouse cursor back into an area with no UI. This means you can't move the screen with the mouse at the screen edge, in the ship designer especially, on either side there are UI elements. Arrow keys work, at least. Once you understand what's happening, it's not unplayable thankfully. Regarding refit being bugged, for the launch 1.05 patch, you could set up a ship refit in the ship designer, but when you apply it to a ship the ship ended up being equipped with the default minimum equipment. After the patch, when in refit design mode, none of the newly unlocked tech is select able, so even less functional than before.

The trick to building BBs at the start of 1890 for A-H is to select the cruiser and lower the new draft and beam sliders, that will lower the base tonage enough for it to become selectable, and you can build fairly narrow, monitor slammed BBs.

I need to hit the sack, or I'd investigate further, but i just want to say before i do that I just did a refit on 28 BB fleet in my A-H 1890 campaign and what i got was all those ships de-contented to their most basic default equipment, instead of all the new toys my refit should have added. and the chase cam unlocking itself from your ship when ever you mouse over anything that provides information is mad annoying.

If you guys gotta evacuate, smash that deploy .05 update button on the way out! But seriously, I hope you guys stay safe.

Split super battleships off as their own category as well. By far the biggest capability gap you can find in a ship category.

If you don't want the AI to run, don't put torpedoes on any of your ships, don't even bother fielding anything smaller than heavy cruisers. By the 1920 campaign this is totally doable, 11 inch guns heavy cruisers, even if you just have 2 forward super firing turrets, are just about the most cost effective ship you can build and a threat to nearly everything.

👀

These were taken yesterday before the last update, just now have had time to post about it. There's something wrong with our bloody ships today! In a 1940 campaign vs British, they built these spectacular 68k ton supper battlecruisers with 9 20in guns, superfiring aft of course to optimize AI retreat strategy lmao. Anyway, I'm attempting to take this extremely dangerous thing out with 4 light ships when its guns suddenly go cold, and I see that it somehow has no main gun ammo at all! it had over 700 rounds left when i looked at it right after identifying it. This is less than 5 minutes of play time into the mission, i just took out the ~10 transports it was guarding (running from), and suddenly its ammo is gone. All its other guns went silent as well, but at least their ammo hadn't disappeared. Note that there was no flashfires, no exploded turrets or anything that could explain this. Was there a flashfire that didn't go off correctly, deal no damage and JUST consume all the ammo? the heavy cruisers were packing 11 in guns and that things armor is awful light so maybe? it even happened again in the next mission i faced one of these super battleships, still not anymore explainable. this could almost be counted as a bug as well, the heavy cruisers they built for the campaign 2x2 7in, 1x3 5in, 2x1 2in, 2x5 torp launcher. thats it.

First, last month's post The more I find out about naval artillery, the more unsatisfied by the in game gun selection I am. Guns didn't come in uniform per inch/centimeter diameters, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_naval_guns_by_caliber and nearly as important is the caliber of the barrel (basically how many shell diameters long the barrel is). When you add a gun to a ship, sliders for armor thickness for that gun appear on the side UI box for 'armor', I propose having an 'armament' UI box appear for every gun type you use as well. But, also add new sliders to it that can adjust some new things. Slider for diameter from X.0 to X.9 inch, and whatever appropriate for centimeter. This could have a corresponding impact on weight/damage/range/penetration/etc Slider for barrel caliber from say 25 to 75. A visual change of the barrel even if for only every 10 units would be plenty. Having a corresponding impact on weight/muzzle velocity/long range accuracy/range/etc. Slider for shell amount from -50% to +150% current standard, in increments of 10% A new equipment category for 'secondary on turret range finders' that can mitigate the loss of central fire control or conning tower damage, both a -30% penalty if i recall correctly. If those are lost, this gives the individual gun a small accuracy bonus to compensate. In effect, the ship would stop salvo firing completely,each gun just doing its best on its own, maybe never having the "aimed" status. You can already see these on most of the in game gun models. an 'electromechanical analog computer' equipment category, ether for each gun type or for the whole ship, introduced some time in the 30s for unlock, essentially one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer Also by the time you can slot one of these, no one is using the conning tower anymore anyway, armoring it should not be especially necessary, and losing it shouldn't cause much of a penalty, just like the penalty for number of barrels lessens over time. Now each gun type can have its own stats, reloading procedure/shell weight/propellant/charge/rotation mechanism/Barbette thickness if 5"+/, its not a blanket setting for all types of guns, which is silly. I don't need 5000 rounds of secondary ammo when i just want a standard+ amount of main gun shells, i might not care to waste tonnage on an automatic reloader for my secondaries, and they don't need to be firing super heavy shells optimized to penetrate, I just want them firing picric acid, exploding on impact, and starting fires. Also a pass on "secondary guns" acting as "main guns" for heavy cruisers especially, ammo pools, etc. From 11" to 9", the stodgy rules apply for number of guns on centerline or side but not for 8" to 6". Centerline and side gun being different things at all on any ship is annoying, that whole thing with side and centerline 9"-20" guns not having the same ammo pool, or guns of the same diameter but different number of barrels having different ammo pools, but in the armor section at least, a X" gun is a X' gun. now some campaign suggestions for the new thread -campaigns at start years that start with a 5. 1895- Sino-Japanese War period, good excuse to add an east asia map and other nations for campaign use 1905- Russo-Japanese War period. This start date would be especially interesting, you start with max tech pre-dreadnoughts and research unlocks dreadnought 1 hulls and turbines right after the start. 1915- Would be pretty much the WW1 campaign start 1925- Would be a good time period for adding 'modernized dreadnought hulls' research unlocked right after the start, and the first 'modern' ships 1935- Maybe work in Anglo-German Naval Agreement restrictions into ship building? 1945- No ship yard size restrictions, actually able to build super battleships, all component tech unlocked, all guns mk5, etc. -enhanced Role settings. other then 'in being' and 'sea control' you could add other settings that cause certain ships to get certain types of missions. Here are some I thought of. There could be restrictions for what kind of ship could perform each type of role, depending on ship type, range, etc. Convoy escort- ships set to this are almost exclusively used in convoy defense missions. Enough ships with standard to very long rage assigned to this should all but prevent off screen transport losses. Commerce raider- these ships almost exclusively attack convoys. Ships with long or very long range could raid on the far side of the map and encounter minimal escorts Coastal defense- a good use for ships built with very low range, get convoy defense and coastal alarm missions that happen right off the coast Capital ship escort- (CA, CL, DD, TB) these ships will often tag along on missions that a battleship/battle cruiser/large cruiser finds itself in Task force- (BB, BC, CB, CA) like sea control, but for capital ships, and in groups. Projects power, causes fleet battle missions Blockade- have some indication for when its possible to blockade the enemy, unlocking this. The blockade will only be as strong and effective as you have ships assigned to it

The British 1930 campain I just finished was Super rough fundswise. The upkeep and repair costs are ludicrously high, I could barely support a fleet of 10 ships and had all funding sliders to 0 the whole time. Ended up losing over 50 transports but somehow killed enough capital ships to cause a revolution.

The more I find out about naval artillery, the more unsatisfied by the in game gun selection I am. Guns didn't come in uniform per inch/centimeter diameters, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_naval_guns_by_caliber and nearly as important is the caliber of the barrel (basically how many shell diameters long the barrel is). When you add a gun to a ship, sliders for armor thickness for that gun appear on the side UI box for 'armor', I propose having an 'armament' UI box appear for every gun type you use as well. But, also add new sliders to it that can adjust some new things. Slider for diameter from X.0 to X.9 inch, and whatever appropriate for centimeter. This could have a corresponding impact on weight/damage/range/penetration/etc Slider for barrel caliber from say 25 to 75. A visual change of the barrel even if for only every 10 units would be plenty. Having a corresponding impact on weight/muzzle velocity/long range accuracy/range/etc. Slider for shell amount from -50% to +150% current standard, in increments of 10% A new equipment category for 'secondary on turret range finders' that can mitigate the loss of central fire control or conning tower damage, both a -30% penalty if i recall correctly. If those are lost, this gives the individual gun a small accuracy bonus to compensate. In effect, the ship would stop salvo firing completely,each gun just doing its best on its own, maybe never having the "aimed" status. You can already see these on most of the in game gun models. an 'electromechanical analog computer' equipment category, ether for each gun type or for the whole ship, introduced some time in the 30s for unlock, essentially one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer Also by the time you can slot one of these, no one is using the conning tower anymore anyway, armoring it should not be especially necessary, and losing it shouldn't cause much of a penalty, just like the penalty for number of barrels lessens over time. Now each gun type can have its own stats, reloading procedure/shell weight/propellant/charge/rotation mechanism/Barbette thickness if 5"+/, its not a blanket setting for all types of guns, which is silly. I don't need 5000 rounds of secondary ammo when i just want a standard+ amount of main gun shells, i might not care to waste tonnage on an automatic reloader for my secondaries, and they don't need to be firing super heavy shells optimized to penetrate, I just want them firing picric acid, exploding on impact, and starting fires. Also a pass on "secondary guns" acting as "main guns" for heavy cruisers especially, ammo pools, etc. From 11" to 9", the stodgy rules apply for number of guns on centerline or side but not for 8" to 6". Centerline and side gun being different things at all on any ship is annoying, that whole thing with side and centerline 9"-20" guns not having the same ammo pool, or guns of the same diameter but different number of barrels having different ammo pools, but in the armor section at least, a X" gun is a X' gun.

Weight and balance in the ship editor, all the way back since the patch that added the campaign, is totally jank. Secondary guns started having an unbelievably huge effect on fore, aft and I suppose side weight offset, I can move them one increment fore or aft and get a change of .5% to 1%, and thats with a 3 ton 2" gun! At the same time i can move one of my ~1000 ton main guns 1 increment fore or aft and get a 0% weight offset change, I might have to move it 2 increments to get .3%. Ship designing has been an utter chore to make something balanced looking and actually balanced this entire campaign beta test. Armor is just as borked, I can put 100" of fore belt and 100" of fore deck armor on a ship with 0 change in weight offset too.

AI behavior after the latest patch. This CA immediately goes into full retreat of this CL but, it was actually different this time, improvements where made. So, it ran, and not even in a way that it could angle any main guns at me at all, guns that at medium to short range could wreck a light cruiser like this in short order, My guns being next to harmless against him. i've concluded that if the AI sees torpedoes it simply goes PRIORITY OVERRIDE, NEW BEHAVIOR DICTATED, MUST BREAK CONTACT WITH SCARY TORPEDO ARMED SHIP. It was content to run as it lobed behind it it's small supply of torpedoes through its pair of triple launchers, pointlessly because i had nothing better to do then watch for this exact thing wile the AI was doing its best to make the battle last as long as possible. When suddenly it did something I did not expect. With no torpedoes left it suddenly turned around and closed to point blank to do what it should have done in the first place, attempt to gun me down with extreme prejudice. Was barely able to torp it down before i flooded out, even my basically invisible electric torps were insta noticed and nearly all expertly dodged. I'm concluding now anything but fast torps are pointless to use against the AI, the sneaky torps exist just for the AI to use effectively against the player.

I took the picture when it was obvious it was just going to become another chase, very shortly after I was dead aft pinking away at it, luckily my ship was 4 knots faster, so i caught up and it got a torp fired at its aft. He turned to evade, which i mirrored, and then pegged him with my side torp followed by an aft torp to finish it off. 90% of kills are done this way in 1890, there's just no other way. Did essentially the same to those battle ships too, my light cruiser caught up and torpedoed them each once to knock out enough engines to slow them down, and force an actual fight. They had a better chance to hit the heavy cruiser so they focused on it wile my light cruiser did most of the damage, the heavy cruiser even landed 2 torps of its own and sunk the first one i slowed down when it caught up, before it finally got enough 11 inch holes punched in it by the other 2 battleships to sink. luckily it held on long enough for me to finish them off the other 2 immediately after. I'm pretty sure if the AI code sees that your ship has torps there's no question it just runs, at least in 1890. I cant imagine how long it would take to do a campaign that year with just guns, when i get through 1930 with the British I'll go back and test that theory.

every single time

beat the campaign through 1930 with the German underdogs, time to start over with the easy mode British. Without fail, no mater what, once they have sighted me they run, no coherent attempt to fight is made. Here is the most egregious example so far ar I mean, it was the right call but still