Carl_Bar

@Nick Thomadis With the disclaimer i haven't tested for a few updates. Are you saying the in game shell trails are actually acurratte to the simulated shell ballistics? Given some other things in patch notes i'd dismissed them as strictly visual fluff with the actual shell trajectories worked out behind the scenes being completely seperate. As noted a few posts back i don't think the major cause of the problem is in the ballistics as transports take hits as expected whilst warships don't. But if the shell trajectories are supposed to be acurratte it probably helps a little in explaining the difference between what people are expecting if my suspicions about them are right, (i need to do some testing to say for sure).

there's just been a patch so we'l have to see how that tweaks things but the issue at the time of your writing this seems to be an overly high ratio of deck hits to side hits coupled with some weird incorrect pen value usage at various points resulting shells being able to pen the deck when they shouldn't and a difficulty hitting the sides of the ship in general.

Your hull makes a huge diffrance as there's a fairly hard upper limit on the tower capability. My last campaign i had Modern Cruisers in late 1910's and as a result i had fights where my 14k ton CA's where spotting 4-5k Ton enemy CA's at ranges greater than they could see, (around 10km), without radar.

Thats pretty extreme compared to what i've seen, but i am playing on normal ;). Also don't know if this helps the devs any but observed somthing just now and confirmed it in custom battle. Whatever is causing the massive numbers of deck hits does not affect transports, ratios are what you'd expect for them when engaging at short ranges. I did build a couple of opposing CL's with 0 armour everywhere to test if that was a factor but they once again took endless deck hits and few belt hits. Hope that helps finally find the cause.

I can't be sure but i suspect the massive AI fleets are in large part down to it's fondness for obsolete tech. Displacement has a huge impact on cost, as do several tech options. Take a look at these 3, the first is an 1890's UK custom battle BB, the Second is a 1905 UK Custom Battle BB, and the third is a schizo tech 1917 BC from my current campaign, (it has significantly worse support techs and mostly worse guns than the 1905 custom battle one, but much better engines and base hull): If the AI is mostly using the first design it can have 4 and a bit for every one of the last design i have, so if i had 10, (i actually have 16 plus a lot of cruisers, but no BB hulls or DD's), the AI could have 45 of the first design for the same cost. You can build 1890's light cruisers that cost around a million apiece. Thats 45 CL's for one of my BC's.

Something in the hit assignments is still broken as hell. I'm seeing endless deck hits at short ranges and also deck pens when my shells don't have remotely enough penetration to actually go through the enemies deck armour. Something has to be assigning shells to decks with the pen values inherited from the belt values. Not sure if the high deck hit rate is a symptom of that or if it's seperate. Would help immensely in troubleshooting this for you if the info scroll would include things like angle of impact. We could at least get some idea of whats going on. Right now all i cna tell you is somthing wrong is happening but not why it's wrong.

Honestly there hardest part about critiquing the AI atm is that whilst we can see whats happening in broad terms where often missing many of the details which makes it hard to figure out why the AI is doing somthing silly. I did consider previously writing out a complete decision tree, but i suck at doing those freehand and i can't find any free no sign up tools online. Suffice to say i strongly suspect the AI isn't doing great at making decisions.

You can see that adding the guns at the back is extending the citadel rearwards so the main belt is going further back which will be a factor. But also as has been noted previously the game doesn't seem to model centre of buoyancy. In the real world stability is strongly affected by centre of mass vs centre of buoyancy factors. In game only the centre of mass matters and thats going to make things very weird somtimes.

My experiance of the tech tweak is that it's better in terms of keeping up with the listed dates on techs but far from perfect, some categories stay ahead some don't. Still a huge improvement. I'd have to do some really detailed note taking but i suspect the issue is that growth has slowed overall due to transports seeming to max out slower, (this is good btw), whilst i suspect the maximum budget for each slider is tied to the passing of time, not the growth in GDP. Thus the cost of the sliders can rapidly outpace your GDP growth at some points. Also as a tip, a change in GDP is the same as an change in Naval Budget but with a delayed effect. Yeah my experiance is the AI tends to spiral down badly in at least a couple of cases very early on, (played 2 campaigns so far, a short 15 year one where i was assessing the changes with no tech focuses and a longer one thats still in progress where i set focuses). I'm pretty sure the AI underprioratises the transports slider and i suspect when it gets warned about spending it gets the same penalties as the player. Those penalties are actually really bad for your ability to meet bills unless you seriously cut your spending, and even then there's a small permanent longterm negetive to them. The AI can easily get into a spiral of repeated warnings that depress their GDP growth so badly they can can never get a positive growth rate leading to ever smaller budgets leading to more warnings, repeat until collapse. If i'm right about them getting the same penalties one of the best things that could be done for the AI is to remove the event penalties from the AI for this event. Would make it significantly harder for the AI to spiral like that.

That the inner citadel armour affected things like causing partial pens wasn't clear before this. The way it was described previously, i understood it to mean that it would cause pen damage to be reduced, not that it would convert full pens to partial pens. Some more detailed info in the damage log on if we went through one layer of armour and then bounced off another would be very much appreciated. It makes figuring out whats happening so we can provide good feedback much better.

As i noted myself previously this isn't restricted to guns tech. 6" of deck armour on a light cruiser is a LOT. It's no suprise your CA's are having issues. But thats seriously heavy even in game to do. Um no it's not just big gun techs that are slow. Since my last post on the subject i did a campaign run as UK where i maxed the tech slider but didn't set any focuses, every single tech branch was consistently behind by significant amounts.

Except this isn't true. 12" Mk II guns with a resonable shell type can go through such armour at a steep angle starting at 10,000m. Armour is inflated compared to IRL, but so is penetration. The Penetration of that 12" MkII gun horizontally is pretty much identical to the IRL values of the end of WW2 US 16" 50/Cal guns firing Super Heavy APCBC shells.

I think you misunderstood what he was saying. At best under ideal conditions you might see a Light cruiser stop anything with 24" of pen or less on the belt. The guns he's using have 26" of pen at 10,000m which is far greater than the range he's engaging at. there's simply no way for the belt to actually stop the shells. That said whilst this is all from what i saw in the previous beta, (going to start a new campaign soon on the latest update), my experiance from turning on low priority events is that very little is actually striking the belt in the first place. It's all hitting the deck and bouncing from there, (which often makes sense given the amount of deck armour in play vs the deck penetration). I've also noticed the excessive deck hits isn't completely consistent. Sometimes after sinking an enemy or switching targets under AI control it will revert to a more expected mostly belt hits. but it's not somthing i can make happen on demand.

Ok, that is behaviour i've never seen before. Nice video example :).

If your turning fast enough your turrets will be rotating slower than the ship is turning and thus seem not to track when they in fact are but can't track fast enough.