AdmiralKirk

(Speaking from 1.05 experience which I presume would be more relevant to this thread) I actually really like my destroyers and I would never want TB instead of them. I find that with maximum reinforced bulkheads and anti-flooding equipment DDs are surprisingly durable, able to withstand at least 2-3 hits from cruisers and BB secondaries. Even before that becomes technologically possible, smoke and high speed makes them really hard to hit—TB by contrast are easy prey for just about any ship, however sturdily you try to build them. Destroyers in particular do well against them because it's trivial for DDs to draw torpedo fire and dodge it, and once a TB has launched its torpedoes it's helpless against a DD's superior firepower. Even in a matchup between 1 DD and 2 TB I'd still take the DD since the TB can't outrun it or outgun it. And if my DD can distract a battleship's main guns for long enough to take aim and sink it, that's precious minutes the BB isn't aiming at my capital ships or cruisers. TB can do that too, of course, but I find TB suicide charges end very poorly for the TB unless they're attacking pre-dreadnoughts. Outside the era where the comparison can be made directly, 1930s+ DDs can be really scary if built on reasonable hulls (looking at you, Germany...). You can pack a lot of 5" guns in there if you don't go for insane torpedo loads like the AI does. I tend to model my destroyers on the Fletcher and Gearing designs and they work very well.

I built this ship to see if pre-dreadnought era armored cruisers do, in fact, have unavoidably high pitch and roll penalties to accuracy (seems they do) but apparently it needs another main tower? I tried replacing the cage mast with a different one and had the same problem.

Some other things I've noticed: I've also had some issues with battles starting in the campaign. I started in 1930 as Italy, successfully got into a war with France but not Austria-Hungary (The politics system let me engineer the outcome I wanted, nice!), and then deployed my fleet against Toulon and Marseille. But the AI refused to actually engage my fleet despite having an advantage in tonnage and sheer numbers, and it took months to actually find a few relatively small battles. Despite the hotfix I still have way too little money. I ended up with an initial fleet of two battleships ($160M) and a cruiser ($100M) plus three destroyers ($14M). I recognize that my cruiser is too expensive—it was a bit of a meme ship—but even if I cut the cost in half and designed a CL at $25M, that's a starting fleet of 2 BB, 1 CA, 2CL, and 3 DD. Meanwhile all my rivals have more than double these numbers. It still seems like task forces don't do anything. I placed my full fleet at the shores of Toulon, met no resistance, set the fleet to Invade, and nothing happened. Is the torpedo dud chance related to the angle of impact or position on the ship? I've had several cases where I almost avoided a torpedo strike and it impacted right at the bow or stern, often as a glancing hit, and the weapon turned out to be a dud.

Thanks so much for this update, the citadel and gun customization is incredibly cool and I can't wait to play a campaign where research and ship construction actually matter. With respect to customization of gun caliber and barrel length, I have a couple of comments. First, I appreciate that I can enter a specific caliber, but I can only work in terms of percent for barrel length; could you perhaps make it possible to enter the barrel length in calibers so that if I want, say, a 5"/54 I can just have that instead of guessing? I also noticed that changing barrel length also elongates or squashes the turret mounting, which can look pretty silly, especially with partially enclosed mountings like the early single 5" guns on destroyers—if that was intentional or unavoidable, no worries; it's only noticeable up close and with drastic increases/decreases. One thing that probably is a bug is that duplicating a scaled weapon creates a copy that is (at least visually) the normal size of that weapon. I noticed this when attempting to build a ship for the Russia vs. Germany mission—tried to move some 3" guns around after I'd scaled up their caliber and the duplicated ones were smaller. Changing the gun dimensions again and then back to what I intended fixed the scaling problem. Related to this, I'd also really like it if weapons mounted in symmetry inherited rotation from the part that you place, so that I can orient weapons how I like without having to do the same on the other side of the ship. I also second the suggestion to change/rename or remove the Barbettes component since we can now set barbette armor directly. Might there be a way to have flash-fire and ammo detonation chance be related to your barbette armor thickness, replacing the component's functionality, or is that already incorporated into the damage model? I love this game, guys. Thanks you for making it.