Kirron

I don't have pictures for this one, but I have reason to believe that during the 1890 and 1900's start the crew training expenses growth actually outstrips the economic GDP and budgetary growth, at least when both crew training and transport capacity is set to max growth, for both the players and lower difficulty AI. This might also be what's leading the AI to consistently mothball/scrap more and more ships each month even when at war for the past two hotfixes during the early start dates. When crew training is set to 100% you are of course constantly adding the maximum number of troops each month to the crew pool, in addition to paying them and the existing crews the maximum expenditure and in return you gain veteran crews for your ships. However, I don't think this is properly managed by the AI during the early start dates, as the ships constructed don't actually use enough crew to put an appreciable dent in a nations crew pool unless you spam out 20 battleships, which has its own budgetary problems. This in turn leads to an ever expanding crew pool and training expenses, which (at least for 100% crew budget) outstrips the nation's GDP growth. But because having Veteran crews is so critical to performance in wars, both players and AI will merrily leave the crew training at maximum during the peace and war years, leading to them recruiting so many excess sailors/crewmen that it outstrips even their maximum budgetary growth for the 1890/1900 starts. This in turn leads to AI and players having to defund everything else because veteran crews are just that critical to the game, creating a horrible feedback loop where your expenses just keep growing, but you cant afford to cut the thing that's causing the ever growing expenses, either by building new ships because that's also too expensive or by cutting crew training because veteran crews are so utterly necessary. And while I don't know what the AI decides on, I think it seems reasonable from current campaign results to say that it prioritises maximum crew training as thing to keep, just like players, leading it to run out of money even when it has no active ships, nor is it blockaded. Comparatively, I set my crew training to 20%, 30%, 50%, hell even 70% and I don't end up having my crew expenses outstrip my budget growth during the peace years like some people have reported happening, even if they didn't identify it as what's happening. As a solution, I'd like to propose what seems a simple (but probably isn't, I'm aware of how these things tend to be) rework for the crew pool and training as a focus for a future hotfix. A few things under it but the key part is this: The separation of crew recruitment from crew training expenditure. Currently these things are married, meaning that in order to maintain veteran level crews you also have to recruit a few hundred people each month who will also take the same salary as the veteran crewmen even if they are just sitting on the land doing jack all at the time. Some other issues that could be looked into is the dev hinted at feature of linking crew pool recruitment to province populations and GDP and also the fact that quite honestly the crew pool in it's current form is just utterly useless and has been for a long time. I would have thought somebody else has said this by now but uh, for the longest time we've been able to build ships that use up more crew than we have available in the pool, have zero remaining for assignment so any extra ships built that turn are auto-mothballed. And then we'd just go into the ship view menu, click on set crew, put the slider up to maximum and all of sudden this fleet do battleships we were missing several thousand people to crew is working just fine with the, I don't know, spirits I guess? that we staffed them with out of nowhere. TLDR, Crew Pool and AI + player handling thereof needs a rework.

Research right now is simply too slow for proper functionality. Screenshot below shows time to several key techs at maximum spending for a 1890 start, two years in already. Without usage of the focuses which double or triple the length of non-focused research, several techs that are already 2/3's complete will take over 2 further years of research. Often, these are also the first ones in their respective trees, which players start with but still end up being required to research through. And when focuses are used, the slow down they incur in other projects is simply too prohibitive to use in anything but a few truly key techs such as getting the earliest rangefinders. Slowing down every other tech by 1.5/2/3 in order to boost 1/2/3 tech's research speeds by 3/2/1.5 simply isn't viable when the time to completion is already so long for so many trees that are also incredibly dense in techs (see Boilers, natural draft start -> lighter boilers -> small advanced funnels 1 -> medium advanced funnels 1 -> large advanced funnels 1 -> induced boilers, that alone takes over ten years without using the focuses and if you do use them, you are sacrificing almost every other similar module such as the control stations, engines, turret mechanisms, etc). TLDR; While some trees are roughly, vaguely, balanced for current speeds (range-finders, big and small guns) most other key techs take far too long to research (control stations, internal protection, boilers/funnels, Compound to Harvey armour, communications/radar, etc) for limited impact. They need speeding up.