Stlaind

On the reload side of things, increasing reload time when increasing barrel length makes a LOT of sense. A piece of naval artillery is a beast only mostly related to big pieces of land based artillery, and almost entirely unrelated to anything in small arms that you might be more familiar with. In even land based artillery for the most part you can set elevation and reload with the gun elevated, but not always. Some tanks for instance can only reload when the barrel is level, and in terms of large caliber guns those are quite small in a naval sense - capping out at about 5". Land Artillery cannon typically top out at around 6", with some mortars as large as 8". To reload any of the larger pieces of naval artillery like a 16" gun, there just will not be enough space in the turret to load the breach with the gun elevated, so the barrel must be brought back to a loading position. In order to do this there's a LOT of machinery to move the barrel that will be needing to function, and as you lengthen your barrel you actually put MORE leverage against that machinery than just the extra weight of the barrel because the point of rotation is typically inside the turret face even. So as you lengthen the barrel on a piece of naval artillery, the machinery has to be more and more and more heavily built and needs to run slower in order to ensure that you're not breaking anything ... and that means your time between salvos is longer even if you have a round waiting to be rammed into the breach from a ready stock inside the turret. Trust me, you do NOT want a 16"/50 to start oscillating because you started moving it too fast - and while that's a historical size and length from an Iowa it's STILL shorter than what you can built in game. If you start talking a 16"/78 like the game allows or even crazier a 20"/78 ..... you're going to be doing a LOT of movement VERY deliberately. Even with an autoloading system, you probably will not be able to avoid this by the way. Having to move all of the auto loading mechanism along WITH the barrel in elevation adds a HUGE amount of complexity and that added complexity leads to a LOT more ways that the system can break. On top of that, building the autoloading mechanism to elevate with the barrel still requires space, which means that you'd need a larger turret, which means that the turret needs more weight in armor for the same protection, and that it is ALSO a larger target for incoming fire to hit. There's a reason that fully auto loading naval artillery were VERY rare until after World War 2, and I'm not familiar with any above 8"/203mm.

I've had the same thing and allowed it to run overnight for over 8 hours, it never completed. For my system it's entirely repeatable with French 1890 or 1900 campaigns and when I'm going to war with Austria-Hungary. Doesn't seem to happen when the AI Britain and AI Germany go to war which has consistently happened before my war starts. Given my specs, if it can't complete in a few minutes then there's likely something gone awry. It is worth also noting that this is a soft-lock really, I can use the menu to exit back to the main menu and attempt to load the save. Sometimes I am able to load the save (others get stuck at "....Other....."), and when I do it is the turn before the soft lock. Upon ending the turn, it soft locks identically. CPU: 5950X RAM: 64GB GPU: 3070Ti