Tepid

Being a native German speaker I change the names of German and Austrian ships where they are clearly wrong. Like being called "Bavaria" or "Saxony" instead of "Bayern" and "Sachsen". Also weird stuff like "Prinzessin" being followed by a male name and vice versa. Other than that I try to include the names of ships that I like. Monarch, Warspite, Derfflinger are recurring. I recently also started putting little asterisks in the names of ships after every battle they do particularly well in. Kinda like a battle star/battle honour system, to keep track of unusually successful ships.

I noticed that the maximum length of guns using the new length slider appears to have been severely reduced. This is a great change and I am fully in favour of it. Previously it was difficult or even impossible to make historically accurate gun lengths as the starting point was far too long, even with -20%. I am very pleased by this new change. It still results in oddballs like how /50 battleship grade guns historically were on the long end of the spectrum, whilst in-game they require you to reduce your gun length by a significant amount. But at least it is now always possible to at least actually build them in a time-appropriate era as far as I could test. Some of them end up looking quite disproportionately stubby compared to their real-life counterparts. I doubt that the barrel length itself is the problem there and I think the turrets are just a bit too oversized once you get to -10% or more gun length. Perhaps full turret size needs to change even more relative to the gun length than it does currently? However, I am writing because this overall great change appears to have caused some collateral damage. Secondary guns. This overall reduction in how long you can make your guns with that slider, has hit secondary guns really hard and it's now often impossible to make period-appropriate gun lengths for secondaries and for the main guns on cruisers and destroyers, especially in the 2"-8" range. Historically, guns at these calibers tended to be longer than contemporary guns of larger calibers. Take the Bismarck. You had /52 main guns, /55 6" secondaries and /65 4" AA guns. Right now it appears impossible in custom battles to get past /53 for 6" and /56 for 4" guns. Bismarck is an especially egregious example due to the long guns Germany favoured, but even a nation like Britain, that used relatively short guns historically, doesn't appear to have physical access to something as simple as the 4.7"/50. As their 4+" guns are limited to /47 as BB secondaries and /38(!) as DD main guns. From a mechanical and historical perspective it doesn't make sense for smaller guns in this "cruiser and below" size range to be relatively shorter than capital ship guns. I suggest that the maximum length for a late 1930ies (~Mark 4/5?) gun in the 2"-8" range should be capable of reaching above 70 in its upper bounds. This would enable us to create more historically accurate guns and would be more in line with the engineering reality that it's easier to make a realtively long small gun than it is to make a relatively long big gun. I realize that this could interfere with the ability to make short guns and of course it would be a shame if a 1930ies US design wouldn't be able to make either the 5"/38 or the 5"/54 (in custom battles, for a 1940 tech level, the US doesn't appear to have the ability to make 5" guns longer than /50. Insufficient for someone attempting to recreate the Montana class). I believe the solution to this problem is fairly simple. 2" guns (for some godforsaken reason) currently have a different slider from other guns, only going from -10 to +10% instead of the full 20%. This means that you can't emulate the variety of very long medium AA weapons in that size range, but it also means that it shouldn't be an issue to make the slider bigger. Perhaps the simplest way to solve these issues would be to make the gun length slider go from -30 to +30%, at least for guns in the 2" to 5" range. This could simulate the variety of both high velocity and low velocity guns that existed in this range. tl;dr: I love that you can now make historically accurate capital ship main gun lengths. I'd love it if you could do the same for capital ship secondary guns and cruiser/destroyer main guns (up to and including 8"). Currently, they are too short. In order to allow both high velocity and low velocity guns to coexist at the sizes where it makes sense historically and mechanically, consider giving smaller guns (up to and including 5") a +-30% slider instead of the 20%/10% sliders these guns use currently. I am sorry if this topic has already been talked to death elsewhere and I just failed to notice because I don't frequent the forums much. Also very sorry if I am posting this in the wrong subsection of the forum.