AdmiralKirk

I didn't report it but this same thing happened to me. I designed a battleship, and then about a year later I decided to make a new variant of it with some better techs. When I used the Copy function in Constructor, the new design weighed in at 75% of the old design's displacement. After I finalized the new design, the build menu showed it as coming in at well over my maximum tonnage and costing way more than planned. I wasn't able to build it because it was overweight. I deleted the design and returned to Constructor, then built roughly the same ship from the empty hull up—this one behaved normally and my available displacement was much more sensible.

I understand why the devs don't want UAD to feature-bloat its way into being a Paradox-style 4X, but I think it would be sufficient for player agency purposes if your role was as a sort of supreme military commander with direct control over the details of navy logistics, and authority (but not direct control) over the rest of the armed forces. So you can choose when and from where you invade—which you can already do using the Naval Invasion option; that's clearly a combined army/navy operation—but you don't need to manage production of infantry equipment, recruitment of army personnel, control over particular divisions, etc. That stuff is fine to remain abstracted and AI-managed. Just having a big arrow from one province to another is totally sufficient for this game—all I would want is the ability to draw that arrow myself. In general I respect the desire to limit this game's scope to naval operations—indeed, that's why I like this game: I can't be bothered to learn all the ridiculous minutiae that's required to be competent at something like Europa Universalis. But I think this approach results in a frustrating lack of agency in some places, and while the devs are of course free to create the game experience they think is best, I would personally err on the side of greater player control rather than less.

Yes, that's a real problem and it ultimately makes DDEs/frigates untenable at the moment. I would really like this game to have deployment options for commerce raiding and commerce protection—we can already design adequate ships to do the job, we just can't order them to do it yet. For the moment all destroyers really need to be fleet destroyers. Actually one idea that comes to mind is to have the player designate an escort destroyer design that automatically populates in convoy defense missions to simulate escort assignments; then you wouldn't need to handle the logistics of manually supporting your convoys in every operational area. I don't know whether implementing that would be easier or harder than assigning ships specifically to commerce protection, though.

EDIT: This test was in Update 20, not RC1. So I tested ASW score for five different types of ship for the US Navy in 1927. I built all five ships with maximum RADAR, sonar, and depth charges, and otherwise built them normally. Here were my results: 1500 ton destroyer escort, minimal equipment. 1114 ASW score at $7,000,000. 0.74 ASW/ton, 0.16 ASW/$1000 2000 ton fleet destroyer, typical equipment. 1425 ASW score at $21,000,000. 0.71 ASW/ton, 0.06 ASW/$1000 3000 ton destroyer leader, similar to above. 2863 ASW score at $37,000,000. 0.95 ASW/ton, 0.07 ASW/$1000 7000 ton light cruiser, balanced loadout. 3732 ASW score at $56,000,000. 0.53 ASW/ton, 0.07 ASW/$1000 15000 ton heavy cruiser, balanced loadout. 1258 ASW score at $80,000,000. 0.08 ASW/ton, 0.02 ASW/$1000 I would conclude based on this that building frigates/DDEs is economical in terms of overall ASW effectiveness per dollar spent, but those escorts aren't capable of doing much else. The most efficient proposition appears to be a large destroyer leader type ship, delivering high ASW score for its tonnage while being an overall capable warship. Thankfully sanity prevails and heavy cruisers aren't good anti-submarine escorts.

The updates are going really well on this, my Italy campaign has had several battles now and the behavior of my ships/divisions has been much improved since a few patches ago. The fishtailing effect that others pointed out earlier in this beta is still present to a degree (I had experienced it in my France campaign actually, but I just assumed it was pre-Dreadnoughts being trash as is their wont), but the ships do shape up after a few in-game minutes and follow the charted course. A little irritating, but it's functional now and my ships do go where I want them to. I don't prefer this behavior to the totally smooth sailing of 1.09, but I can accept this as working-as-intended if that's what you guys want for realism or whatever. I've never served in the navy and I don't know if warships actually behave like this under steering, maybe they do and this way is better. BTW I don't know if you've altered the peace negotiation mechanics to be more likely to give the player what you ask for, but in both this campaign and my earlier French one I got exactly what I demanded from two different peace deals. Please keep it this way if there's any doubt about it. There is nothing more frustrating than fighting through a war, trashing the enemy navy and blockading them into ruin, and then getting nothing for your trouble. I understand that you don't want the player to have complete control over what your nation does, but agency is still a really big deal and being rewarded for successes is a fundamental part of what makes a game fun. I want you to know how satisfying it was to have my French dudes tell Spain, "Yeah, we want Guantanamo Bay and a bunch of West African territories, losers" and to have Spain be like "Yes okay just please stop shelling us".

@Nick ThomadisI actually did have shared designs enabled in this campaign (though I don't know yet whether the AI has had a chance to use them), and I did not have this yard size issue in a previous 1.1 campaign I played as France 1890. When I get a minute tomorrow I'll launch a new 1900 campaign as Italy without any custom ships and let you know if I have the same issue. EDIT: Oh, it seems I am not alone on this and @admiralsnackbar beat me to it. If it would still be helpful for me to replicate this issue in a new campaign just let me know, otherwise I'll get back to hitting Austria-Hungary so hard they go back to being two different countries >:)

I streamed about three hours of a new campaign last night (Italy 1900), and I noticed a couple issues: I started in 1900 with over 140,000 tons maximum displacement and over 230,000 total tons construction capacity. I don't know if the second figure is larger than intended, but I'm sure I shouldn't be able to build supercarriers before Dreadnought battleships were invented. Despite ordering my fleets out into the Adriatic and the broader Mediterranean on Sea Control and stationing my navy at mostly Adriatic ports, I was unable to ever develop tension with Austria-Hungary, and in attempting to pursue a war with them I could only degrade relations using the Politics screen. I'm still not sure exactly how the tension mechanic works, maybe this is the intended behavior. Between turns, the UI info box at the bottom left reports battles twice. That is, it'll show the report of "X fleet clashes with Y: [order of battle]" twice in a row. Seems to do it every time. I don't know if it applies to player battles yet because I haven't gotten into a war so far. There seems to be no way to know the status of your relationship with the minor nations, or to influence it as far as I can tell. It would be nice to have a submenu of the Politics screen that deals with this—at least for your nation, if not anyone else. Alternately, there could just be an overview screen that appears when you click on a province controlled by a minor nation showing your status with them. What I'd really like (and what I've seen the AI player do occasionally) is the ability to deliberately plan wars or annexation against minor nations and take their ports, maybe at a big diplomatic penalty. Doesn't have to be a "Declare war!" button exactly, but the action chain I'd like to see is "I want to own the Bosporus Straits" > send huge fleet to Ottoman ports > Ottomans get mad and demand I withdraw > "lol no" > WAR > "I own the Bosporus Straits!" > "Wow, everybody hates me and thinks I'm a horrible bully, how did that happen?" Please, please, please make the world map wrap horizontally. I have to say, I am really happy with this update so far. I was very excited and I'm not disappointed. The new Politics screen is massively improved, it's terrific to be able to see the composition of my opponents' fleets and to directly influence my relations with them. I really like the interactions with minor nations—forming alliances, selling them warships, it adds so much to the strategy layer. In this campaign there was a Russo-Japanese War in which Japan allied to the Ottomans—and I don't think it's fully implemented yet but I think that's supposed to close the Suez Canal and the Bosporus Straits to Russia, which is amazing (and hilarious).

Well this sounds like the best update ever, holy cow!

I played an American campaign up to the save reset, and I was really enjoying myself. Some of the issues I was having are things that have already been addressed/planned—resupply at allied ports, occupation of minor nations, turrets rotating into the superstructure. But for the US specifically, I was really missing appropriate hulls for flush-decked destroyers and standard-type battleships. Not sure what hulls you have planned to include in this update besides Maine, but I think those two things are really important to capturing the look of the early 20th century US Navy, and the standard type hulls would help a lot compared to the “South Carolina but bigger” options I had in this campaign.

I think there's room for a bit of middle ground here. I would like to be able to use hulls from other nations, but I would still like there to be a different feel when playing as various countries—otherwise I'll end up gravitating toward the hulls I feel are best for the task, and my fleets will look similar. I don't know what the final research tree system is intended to look like, but I could imagine developing particular components and paying a penalty in cost or research time if I choose to deviate from what's "normal" for my nation. So I could have an N3/G3 hull as the United States, it would just be more expensive or take longer to design, incentivizing me to go with a Standard Type hull form instead. Edit: You could even make it easier/cheaper to develop a hull that other nations already have or buy designs directly from them—possibly at the risk of diplomatic penalties or losing a ship under construction, depending on the political situation (poor Greece 😥).

I always give my ship classes theme names so it’s easy to tell which is which. I had a class of Italian battleships named for Roman emperors. If I’m planning to build a lot of destroyers I’ll just give them numbers.

I completed my Germany 1930 campaign last night, capital ships only. Not too much to note, but I do have a few observations: It seems too hard (impossible?) to conquer your enemies. I was at war with Britain and France multiple times for years. While I was able to claim Malta, Gibraltar, Corsica, and Tunis, Britain twice refused to cede Cyprus in their peace negotiation, and both nations remained on the map after their fleets had been demolished and their coasts blockaded. I assume the reparations system will be reworked in later versions, but it is extremely frustrating to win a long war decisively and have the AI just decide not to accept my demands. Realistic, maybe, but totally unsatisfying. My final war ended with no negotiations; suddenly I just wasn't at war anymore. I assume one of my allies accepted Britain's surrender? It didn't say so in the events window. Judging by this thread it's apparently just me, but I was almost never able to keep my tech budget over ~70%. Probably skewed by (a) not knowing how to mothball ships for most of the campaign and (b) only having BBs and BCs in my fleet. But I remained fully competitive on tech for 20 years despite this; in wartime I sometimes dropped research to 0 for budget reasons and that was fine long-term. 12" Mark V guns are insane. My smallest ships were a class of battlecruisers on the Large Cruiser hull with 3x3 12", and with a 39 knot top speed those ships were incredibly accurate, virtually impossible to hit except with torpedoes, and had enough punch to reliably kill BBs. I'm so glad the real Kriegsmarine didn't have this ship! Late-game Germany is somewhat lacking in tower and gun layout variety. All my ships looked like Bismarck.

I certainly agree that altering the ship construction logistics and interface is a huge change, and it doesn't make sense to implement it in the short term even if it were simple to write the code—and I do not by any means assume such. Developing the balance for something like that would take a whole round of beta testing by itself. In the short term a band-aid solution to the fleet stacking problems most players are having seems necessary (I would add in another report of massive opposing fleets in both overall numbers and size of individual engagements, despite having made no modifications to UAD besides the reshade package used in the devs' own promotional material). I just think in the long term this game has the potential to do much better than simply artificially restricting number/type/size/cost of ships in either the player or ai fleets from the top down.

I think the economy issue that makes this possible for the AI applies to the player too, especially if you build mediocre ships and don’t max out crew/transports/research (as most of us do). If everybody had considerably less money or monthly costs for construction, repair, and maintenance were a lot higher, such a fleet would cause the AI to bankrupt itself. As it is there’s practically nothing stopping me from building absurd numbers of even the biggest ships. Not to mention in my experience with 1.08 each of those 260+ CLs can tank more shells than Warspite… One other suggestion for (possibly) fixing this problem and imposing an interesting constraint on the strategy layer is to limit the number of ships you can actually build of a particular size range. Currently you have a maximum size allowed and unlimited slipways and drydocks within that size; if I can build up to 100,000 tons, then *everything* I build can be that size, with budget being the only constraint. But in real life there are physical limits on what individual yards can build, which require new construction or structural changes to increase. So it would be both realistic and interesting to break down your construction capacity in terms of individual yards—maybe even localized to particular ports!—so that you could have, say, five really big yards capable of producing or repairing a BB, ten big enough to build cruisers, and twenty only big enough to build DDs (all these limited by length or tonnage or both). This might be implemented by overhauling the Ship Design screen with an overview of what’s being constructed, which slipways are in use/available, and which designs you’ve made.

So I've been very much enjoying my campaign. I started in 1910 as Austria-Hungary and it's now 1930; I've had two wars against France, two against Italy (sort of? see below), and one against Germany. I've built a large and fairly diverse fleet starting from dreadnoughts and going all the way up to the Super Battleship. Observations I've made, both positive and negative: Costs and construction time of new ships has been reasonable overall, but refits can be a little iffy. I can apparently rebuild the entire engine (switching from geared to double geared turbines) in a couple months, but it takes over a year to change funnels. I like that the construction of my fleet over time encourages me to make choices that are very expensive and wouldn't have made any sense in 1.05 due to cost (high speed, RDF, turboelectric drive), and the refit system makes it very worthwhile to keep older ships around and modernize them, as was done historically—though I would argue it's a bit too easy to keep old ships relevant; by installing more modern machinery and switching to oil fuel I can easily get dreadnoughts to make 30+ knots, and I'm not sure that's realistic. I was able to actually win provinces in my wars and take over the ports! I took Tunisia, Corsica, and Heligoland, which were strategically useful—you can put a pretty large fleet in Tunis later on. I've had little problem finding battles. In this campaign I decided not to use Range as a dump stat, and I don't think I've built anything with less than average Range. Possibly as a result, I've been able to get in a lot of fights in the Mediterranean, and when I stationed my fleet off the southeast coast of England I got plenty of missions against the High Seas Fleet. The mission variety has been good. I haven't had any engagements with hundreds of ships like some people have, and there's been a good mix of missions involving different numbers and types of ships—large engagements with multiple capital ships supported by escorting cruisers and destroyers, smaller battles pitting light ships against each other, DD vs DD skirmishes, asymmetric fights between a single capital ship and a fleet of smaller ships. Convoy missions have some issues. I still have the bug (?) where if all the warships are destroyed the battle ends immediately and doesn't count the transports as sunk. Also, Transports seem to be worth very few VP; I've sunk a whole convoy of 10+ transports and only gained like 50 points for it, and I've even had engagements where I sunk the whole convoy and escorts but lost a DD or something, and the convoy are worth so few VP that it counts as a defeat. Italy likes fighting me even when they apparently like me. During my war with Germany, I had deployed a large fleet to the North Sea when suddenly I found myself blockaded in the Mediterranean—by the Italians. The Italians were listed as allies to the Germans, but my relations with them remained positive and we were not apparently at war. But they continued fighting literally to the last ship (sure, Italy, your one destroyer can take on my whole navy by itself). The fighting only stopped when I signed a peace treaty with Germany, and I wasn't able to claim any reparations from Italy. This same thing happened during my second conflict with France; I had a formally declared war with France which Italy joined as an ally on the French side (though their relations to me remained positive), and I'm fighting battles against Italian ships, but the campaign doesn't acknowledge that war. My design screen is getting very cluttered. I have implemented multiple refits of various ship classes, and I'm not allowed to delete some of them even when no ships of the class exist any longer (such as with the first group of Dreadnoughts, which I scrapped when they were no longer worth the upkeep). I also still don't like that I can't build the refitted version of a ship directly but instead have to build and then immediately refit the original type—which could take over a year of additional construction time. And we still can't switch ships under construction to match an updated standard (which was definitely done; lots of ships had changes made during construction) or refit ships that are being repaired. I don't like the forced obsolescence of components even while those components are in service elsewhere in my fleet. I started with Cordite II and Tube Powder I, and I chose to use Tube Powder because of the flash fire and reload speed bonuses. Later on I developed Cordite III, and all my new construction was forced to use it, even though I still prefer the benefits of Tube Powder I over Cordite III and most of my fleet is already using Tube Powder. The Big Guns research tree is good at giving me things I don't really want. By the mid 20s I was building battleships with 15-16" primary weapons, and I was prioritizing Big Guns in order to get to Mark III+ 16s (which is what I have now). But in order to get there I had to slog through the Mark IV 9s, 10s, and 11s first, and while those are useful on heavy cruisers, I'm prioritizing Big Guns because I want better capital weapons. It would be nice if there were three categories for weapons: 2-6" (secondary weapons and primaries up to light cruisers), 7-11" (heavy cruiser/panzerschiff/battlecruiser weapons and heavy battleship secondaries), and 12"+ (capital ship primaries). What I use 9" guns for is very much not the same thing that I use 15" guns for, unless I'm being an idiot. I wish there were more options for funnels and towers across multiple hulls. I understand that each hull is designed around a historical ship and should come with the towers needed to model that ship, but I'd like it if I also had access to a random assortment of other nations' superstructures to make ships that look really weird. Austria-Hungary already has a strange mix of components modeled on German and Italian ships (since that nation ceased to exist after WWI and never built anything after that), so why not allow more variety? The models already exist in the game, so I doubt it would be hard to make them usable on more hulls. I want to be able to make an Italian ship with cage masts or a German ship with Queen Anne's Mansions! This was particularly a problem for me with funnels, since I think I researched all of them and I still can't use Mega and Uber funnels on my big battleships (though I can on my Modern Battlecruiser). I also really dislike the towers I'm stuck with on both modern cruiser hulls—they restrict my turret layout so that ABCXY and ABXYQ aren't really possible, they have built-in barbettes that I might not want to use, they waste a ton of space if I don't need both funnels and make it difficult to have more than two funnels, and they're wide enough to restrict placement of secondary weapons and torpedo tubes or place strict limits on decreasing beam. And they have the effect of making all my modern cruisers look generic and samey—Belfast and Koenigsberg were both light cruisers but they look nothing alike. I have a lot of money, and during wartime I'm able to build up a surplus to over a billion dollars easily. But refits and new construction are expensive, so I'll often bounce back and forth between building a huge reserve and running a large deficit, which blows through the reserve quickly in exchange for building a lot of ships. I like this balance. I'm being encouraged to build ships that are ridiculously huge. Yamato had a displacement around 70,000 tons, but the Super Battleship hull starts at like 80,000. I don't mind having loads of displacement to work with, but I think there ought to be some more restrictions or limitations on building ships as large as a modern supercarrier—especially when we're building ships that don't have to devote any resources to the heavy anti-aircraft batteries that ships of the WWII period needed. I think it's a little too easy to increase your tonnage limit to build this big, and I'm not saying I shouldn't be able to, but right now there's very little stopping me. My role options don't seem to work properly. During peacetime, I can assign my ships to Limited, In Being, or Sea Control. When I'm at war, my options for ships in port become Limited and In Being. Going to sea allows me to use Sea Control, though.