Fangoriously

Just started a 1930 AH campaign, and everyone with no oil rich providence, AH, Spain, Japan, has some kind of stack overflow for barrel amount.

Longer barrels and higher velocity create flatter trajectory shells, if they hit the deck it will be at an extream angle, makeing the effective armor the actual thickness plus half the beam of the ship. If you want high deck pen you need to set your guns up like mortars. Choped barrels with only like 15 km range, super heavy with tube powder to slow velocity more, then shot will hit the deck at a favorable angle.

Pen related things seem to be in a good place, did a bunch of custom battle BB duels with the full gambit of gun size and shell type and I couldn't just get away with capped sap on everything anymore, even on 20in guns. At least standards are needed for a main belt/deck full citadel percing one shot. And I certainly never saw a 20in get blocked ever.

-Fixed error which could torpedo 3d models to not get their proper size during the 3D combat. yay! like to se polish like this -Fixed gun range calculations inconsistency which caused the range of both AP and HE shells to change when we switched to a different shell component. Gun ranges calculations are also further improved. just glancing at the stats everything looks much more sane range wise. The results of light shell min maxing for velocity looks much less out of control but still looks like a competitive option compared to damage and pen maxed super heavy, its nice to have at least 2 viable directions to build out your guns. Noticed the lighter HE shells got a pretty significant range nerf across the board, always did seem odd that they would more or less match the AP shells for range. That and all the other updates sound great,things are looking more dialed in with each update. *edit played through some missions, high MV guns are still very accurate but not insanely so, but it seems like the problem of ships sinking due to extensive fire with full float-ability and 75%+ structural left has gotten worse, pretty sure i sunk a cruiser with just caped sap 15in AP shells, wasn't an ammo det or anything.

when i hit 1938 in my UK 1930 start campaign and unlocked triple base propellant, it was time to experiment. With the buff high muzzle velocity just got to range and accuracy, and the massive nerf my preferred style of shorter barrel low MV plunging morter fire got, i wondered what i could do with the changes. Turns out its tube powder mostly at fault for my shorter barrel guns having range in the mid teens all the sudden, that lack of volatility is definitely at play inside the barrel now and you would need to spend tonnage and money on longer barrels if you want to keep defaulting to using it, its safe but junk now imo. At least cordite and dunite is MV neutral, and safe enough with some citadel armor. Triple base actually buffing muzzle velocity, TNT2 a tiny bit too, throw on light shells, ballistic caps, and its like giving your ship a 1980 refit with space age powder and sabot flechette shells. Take a 1940 mk4 15 in gun, At stock barrel length your standard AP shells are over 1100m/s with over 40km of range, at as low as -15% barrel length your shells can still be chugging along at around 850m/s with at least 25km range, all you really need. Its not just the main guns that get this quantum leap in performance, anything the mains don't sink get killed by extensive fire from an unrelenting hale of tiny 2.9in +16% barrel length secondary that can shoot out to 16km. Other secondaries are a bit supurfalace at that point, though 6in can reach out to 25km and 8in all the way out to 30km if your into that. I'm used to ROFLstomping the AI but now my ships don't even take damage anymore, the enemy ships die to quick. While refitting my ~25BCs and BB to this spec, the 30 CAs I refited first deleted 6 rival navies with 11.9 and 2.9 in gun fire alone. Japan and France dissolved, Italy is so traumatized all it does is crank out subs now, Austria Hungry had Croatia revolt and suddenly had no ports, china and the soviet union are so far too big to fail. I had 91 provinces conquered before i unlocked triple base, if only my tiny 2 million man army wasn't stretched to thin to further capitalize on this.

Just had a 'task force attacks undefended port' mission that had a few enemy warships and a bunch of transports, the mission ended as soon as the warships sunk, not after i could sink the transports, like they thankfully do now on the convoy raid missions.

yikes, after the 1.7 patch my reduced barrel length main guns that still had at least 22km range before are down to 18km range. Thats a bit hard to work with in the 1930s if I'm at any sort of speed disadvantage😬

Sent an in game bug report, but ya something is up after the long range accuracy changes mentioned in the patch. So, main guns don't often fully elevate in this game because standard length or extended barrels have range beyond a ships spotting distance. I on the other hand lower my barrel length to about what my spotting distance will be, and waist no tonnage or reload rate on my ship builds, along with getting much better angled plunging fire as another bonus. Any tiny accuracy malady is effectively erased by moderately trained crew. there's really no down side to short barrel main guns because muzzle velocity doesn't seem to effect damage or even pen rate, and all damage is scaled off the bursting charge, even over pens! Sure they might not pen belt armor as well as higher velocity shells, but why would i want to shoot the most armored part of the ship? Anyway, the bugs. firing these short barrel guns at near maximum range and thus maximum elevation, sense barrel length changing were introduced, often does not visibly fire a shell, the projectile impacts the gun model or something. Shots calculated to hit instantly explode, cause a fire effect, smoke, and impact sound on your own ship, but the damage is instantly dealt to the target. a minor visual bug for my edge case play style. The new bug is that the reload animation on these main guns isn't cycling in the UI, but the target ship is taking all these phantom hits at a rate higher than the guns could possible reload. I think i can recall something similar happening with secondary guns at much closer range in the past.

There should be a refit/modernize mode, with more limited options than now, and a rebuild mode where you have full access to every option, but it takes almost as long to build a new ship if you change things like the dimensions, citadel, engines, and main guns. Refit modes should build in all the passive research improvements. Make gun mk upgrades toggle able, restrict engine type upgrades,like if you have a turbine, you can upgrade to geared, but not replace it with diesel. Certainly you can't change your armor quality, and a superstructure change or moveing barbets should be the largest scope of things you can change in a refit.

Barrel length has a single to double digit % bonus to practical accuracy, having a decently trained crew can have triple to quadruple digit % accuracy bonuses, rendering long barrels little more than a very costly way to get around having a well trained crew. Have you ever even checked on your 'range found' bonus in battle? it trivializes every other bonus listed on the side combined, most of all any benefit from barrel length. There was quite a lot of nerfing and balancing on this exact thing in the beta based on my findings and feedback alone, comical you think i might not know what i'm talking about. the Iowas having reduced charges available to try and duplicate the ballistics of the 45 caliber guns on the previews 2 BB classes is not a broken game mechanic, shooting at the belt at all was going out of vogue right before naval artillery went out of vogue entirely. People should stop complaining that the wrong tactic is extra not working due to bugs and use the right tactics instead. The belt armor pen calculation bug isn't the main reason your setup is ineffective. If a decent battle pops up in my campaign ill record and post it and show just how devastating and accurate my short guns can be.

Again, even if belt armor wasn't bugged out and close range 50 cal guns were shooting as flat as they probably should, plunging fire is still king. Your always going to be hitting targets most under 20km anyway, trying to make your guns shoot farther is pointless, even if there weren't a ton of downsides associated with long barrels. Those are only going to give you plunging fire at 30km, and your not going to hit anything reliably, maybe not even spot them, that far out anyway.

Stop lengthening your main gun barrels, all that does is skip your shells off the deck like its a flat stone thrown at a pond, or hits the apparently bugged belt armor, that even bug free is the most resilient part of the armor scheme to try and shoot through anyway. You don't need mains with more than 20km-25km range in the age of radar, even less than that at earlier eras. Reduce the length of the barrels till they have range no more than your own spotting range, and all your shells will drop strait down perpendicular on the deck and deal catastrophic penetration damage. longer barrels only have a purpose in maxing 2.9 in gun effectiveness, and giving other secondaries a longer range, adding length to a main gun is about the most counter productive thing you can do, its nothing but disadvantage.

I sure would like to be able to naval invade Gibraltar while playing Spain, my country being split in half and the medaterainian being compleatly blocked at both ends by britan sure is an untenable situation. Espesualy when I have enough naval tonage to conque it, or level it, easily. Heck, why isn't my country trying to Take it in a land invasion?

I hope so, had a BB that got down to about 75% structural in mission, checked on it back in dock and it showed 99% damaged needing 12 months to repair. The yard space is so incredibly limited that this happening over and over totally paralyzes your navy and further ship building efforts, and loses you all minor allies when you can't possibly fill any orders.

light cruisers sort of go in and out of vogue, early on before destroyers the protected cruisers can smoke up, torps BBs, and gun kill torpedo boats pretty well, after destroyers are introduced though they are out run and priced out of that niche though. I believe that at all times they can get the highest ASW score though, and pretty much always can protect capital ships from subs on a 1 to 1 basis. That would be the only reason to build them until proper light cruisers that can mount deck torps are unlocked, then they become quite useful again. These days i always design the smallest light cruiser possible, usually with just 5in and 2in guns, and torps, sort of 5-7k ton super destroyers to keep my capital ships safe from subs. On their own if you can put enough torps on them they can threaten and keep up with pretty much anything. these are very cheap to build and run, but pretty fragile, I often just tell them to retreat when a battle actually starts. I find large CLs utterly pointless, unless perhaps the superstructure is small enough to fit an ass load of torp launchers on it. I'd rather build capital ships for offense though. With the right hull, 10in-11in gun heavy cruisers can have a niche. If you have a lot of imperial holdings i build them to protect shipping and project power out of foreign ports, they are still almost always cheaper then an older hulled battle cruiser, but when they are not, and i only have a home territory, they are skipped. Your typical 8in gun CA i find utterly pointless. They don't hit hard enough to be a threat to anything larger than themselves, 8in don't really kill smaller ships that much better than 5in- 7in, and they seem hardly optimized for launching effective torp attacks. If i were to make changes to cruisers, I'd make the main gun range for CLs be 4in to 9in, and at least on certain hulls having main gun caliber casemates. 'Modern light cruisers' hull would be the proper hulls used to build treaty restricted heavy cruisers, if you wanted to do that, plenty of those CL hulls can be built to over 10k tons. Wile the heavy cruiser hulls would be for restriction free large gun Panzerschiff cruisers. I'd make the possible main guns be 8in to 13in for them, again with at least some having main gun caliber case mates. Trying to actually put 9in guns on a CL, or 13in guns on a heavy cruiser might sound like a pretty impossible ask, but the same goes for tying to put 20in guns on any battleship. If they don't physically fit, you cant place them. Hulls that shouldn't be carrying them, cant.

Pre patch this ship's with this seasoned crew would have had bout +140 range found bonus, now its up to +513, the nerf looks to be walked back about half way. Aiming seemed to hold more steady, wouldn't flicker on and off as easily or randomly. we'll see how it plays like this i guess. As for the too durable destroyers ive harped on about, they are big boys and cost more to build and run than my light cruisers. This one took 15k damage from my BB's main guns to go down. I then went into custom battles and built the largest destroyer i could, everything maxed out at 4500 tons, faced it off against 10 other destroyers to see how many torps and damage it would to to kill it, and the results are a bit shocking First of all, it is REALLY hard to intentionally get hit by torpedoes lol. Anyway destroyers, with max beam and draft and at the 4500 ton max, get ridiculous with their ability to resist damage, in the build screen this ship had a -11% to torp damage on the stat column on the right. This one is alive, though soon to sink, having ate 15 23in torps and over 100 5in shell, with 55% structural remaining. Even at only 3000 tons like the one I've encountered in the campaign they are over the top. Just an FYI i guess, that the resistance curve approaches infinity when destroyers are scaled to their max.

I'll refer you to the pictures on the first post of page 61, a destroyer taking 3 tops for a total of 175 damage, needing 20k additional gun damage to destroy. Another taking 6 tops and controlling its flooding well enough to stay aflot and need to be finished off with guns as well. Im not sure which hull this is, or how long this hull has been this durable, but I've only just now noticed it. These British destroyers looked to be a large, modern destroyer leader, and are as durrable as battleships with only a max of 1.5 inchs of armor on any surface and more resistant to torps than a BB with anti torp V equiped. My battleships were able to sink them easily enough with thier 13.9 inch main guns, but its an absolutly hurculean task for a light cruiser to counter them.

Couple of bugs I've noticed with the release candidate, started a 1930 Spain campaign and noticed, same as the 1930 France I started 2 patches ago, the US starts with an extremely minimal fleet Bug 2 is the return of destroyers of unusual durability. First from a 1 vs 2 of my CL vs 2 brit destroyers. This UK destroyer ate 3 22in torps and is barely phased, took hundreds of additional hits to sink taking about 20k damage. I hit the other destroyer that had sank already with a 6 out of 6 torp launch from 1 side, which didn't sink it, took dozens of extra gun hits to kill. This is a pic of all the damage my CL dealt to kill only 2 destroyers. during a fleet battle i chased this destroyer down with my CL escorts, again taking hundreds of hits and over 15k damage to sink. Bug 3 is that after every single surface battle, every ship i have deployed on the map automatically returns to the closest port, if they were involved in the battle or not. Bug 4 is i can surround Gibraltar on both sides with all my ships and cannot initiate a naval invasion of it. Managed to get a turn without a battle, so all my fleet didn't return to port, and the naval invasion option was still grayed out. Bug 5 is that the crew aspect of gun accuracy was nerfed by an order of magnitude fro no reason, and now 13in is about the maximum size with a reliable hit rate below mk4, 14in and 15in need mk4 to hit well enough, and 16in and up would need mk5 to be usable. If you want to see mk3 16in guns in action, its in the vid of my last post.

This small battle looked like it could make for an excellent vidio to document the effects of the literal order of magnitude nerf to the crew training bonus from "Range found", a stat that displays when you mouse over your targets, and your guns have the "aimed" condition. Currently this yields a tiny +138.1% with these seasoned, nearly veteran, crew. Before, id expect a bonus like that, with a 0 on the end with crew this experienced, 1380% would be about right. What complaints were there that guns seemed to accurate? The hit rate i was getting with my very well built ship and expert crew aided by radar assisted firing control felt just about right to me, now the best i can pull off is sub 'great war' gunnery at most. I had to engage these heavy cruisers at under 5000km to have any hope of hitting them with these large main guns, acting out a battle from the 1890s, before i would have stayed between 15k to 20k km and had them both dead in 5 minutes, not 15. oh great *Nick Thomadis has replied Show Reply* just posted a huge patch right as I'm about to post this, wonder if this has all been improved and is no longer an issue. *edit Its no better of course, the most gigantic nerf in the games history lives on, with no compensation for this loss in any other area or stat pool. At least the weapons tab doesn't lag the game to death anymore.

I must second the use of light cruisers for escorts in place of destroyers, even in just a 1 to 1 ratio with a capital ship they always seem to protect from submarine nonsense. They are also much more durable and capable of doing a destroyers job in actual missions, of course at a much higher cost, but not even 3 destroyers could protect that dude's BB. As for destroyers, I only make cheap as possible mine layer frigates to leave at ports to make mine fields, they are not for use in combat, except against other destroyers. with just 2.9in guns and a few single torp launchers that reload fast, those actually counter enemy 5in gun, ~8 torp, anti capital destroyers quite well. If i can't make a decent 11in gun platform out of the available CA hulls, i wont even bother designing CAs. They need to be able to at least threaten capital ships with guns alone, and being able to drop their own depth charges they don't even need escorts. I station these around my distant imperial holdings to protect shipping, wile i use my BBs and BCs for exclusively offensive operations.

Sorry guys, I really should not have posted this, showing the devs what the main factor in gun accuracy was in their own game. In the very next patch after this post they nerfed these values by an order of magnitude, and guns any larger than 13in simply do not work any more, hits are thanks exclusively to blind luck regardless of how stable a firing platform the ship is or how veteran the crew. Conducting battles at 1890 engagement range in 1930 ships barely helps.

This is the state of the 3 way invasion on the last turn before it failed, where my commie forces outnumbered the commie Germans at least 5 to 1. imagine D-day x100, with naval fire support from ~100 ~17in gun barrels, and instead of 23000 paratroopers, there was instead 3 million man armies marching from home territories flanking those holding off the beach invasion. All of which was completely blunted with minor casualties from the defender. This outcome is absolute bullshit. This is the battle hardened army that steamrolled over 50% of colonized Africa, controls 90% of Mediterranean ports and territory, and caused Brittan, France and Spain to cease to exist at least once each. My Italy has been at constant war for 10 years, has a 131,000,000 gdp, 8 minor allies, produces 23000 barrels of oil, has a 100% content population, controls 30 provinces and has an almost 5,000,000 man army, all of these stats are double what Germany has. No amount of bad rolls or RNG can account for this outcome.

Those german ships also in the naval invasion circle just bumped up the tonnage to over 700k, last turn it was just a bit over 500k with just my ships there. in game bug report sent.

That max of +30 is just modest window dressing, here's how big an impact its actually having when your ship is selected, and you mouse over your target, a few other stats appear in the column on the left. Most notable is that huge +780 'range found' bonus to accuracy. Just from a 'regular' trained crew, giving a mere +11.5 constant bonus, far from a vet's +30. Vets can get this number over +1500. The second of my BBs has a modestly trained cadet crew, giving a constant -8.1 accuracy "bonus". They have fired numerous salvos and still don't have a fix on the target, yielding a further -37.1 range finding 'bonus'. I actually quite like the system this way, there really would be this large a gulf in capability in someone crew that barely understands whats going on and those that have a year at sea. Keep in mind any tool tip you mouse over with accuracy tables is showing what clueless cadets could do with the guns, be unafraid of the supposed poor accuracy of 16in+ guns, as long as you have your crew at least up to 'regular' level. Also the single or double digit accuracy bonuses from using long barrel main guns on your ship is a joke compared to triple and quadruple digit 'range found' bonuses from crew. Never waste tonnage on long barrels, chop them down till they have a max range you find acceptable, then pair them with stereoscopic range finders. If your guns only reach out to 20km, then thats considered 'long range' by the game, and you reap maximum benefit wile also being physically at relatively close range, were accuracy was already going to be pretty good. Also, long barrels will have you hitting mostly the thickest belt armor, short barrels will drop shells perpendicular on the thin deck. Did i mention short barrels also reduce reload time too?

If you want to know what the effect of a highly trained crew in combat is, besides the constant +30 for vets, pause the game and mouse over the target once your ship is zeroed in on it, and you will often find an accuracy bonus over +1000 listed, all thanks to maxed crew training. Even regular status will give you a high hundreds bonus, huge advantage over the mostly cadet ai crew. Any tool tip you mouse over, espesualy on the realy large guns, that's only showing you what cadets can do with them. Complaints that 8in or 12in guns are OP and 17+ are terrible just by looking at raw stats, ok sure with cadets maybe, throw a +1700 range found bonus from your vet crew on any huge gun Salvo, and you will still get hits very often. I only ever build capital ships with 12 of the biggest mk3 guns I can fit, with the barrels choped to give me at most 20klm range, never skimp on crew training and decimate everything with close range plunging fire.