imp44791

It's a good list. Spotting is the most annoying issue at present, so it's good to see it addressed. Most people have pointed out good and important improvements in addition to your list. For me the three things that would immediately improve the game would be: 1. Pre-battle deployment orders. Not in detail perhaps, but a basic set of options like the ones that Jellicoe had at Jutland "deploy to starboard/port", or setting the direction/distance of destroyer screens, or a break up in divisions. 2. The option to take out the shell contrails. It's the one graphical choice that is unbelievably arcade-y and out of place in a game that makes so much effort at historical accuracy. It looks like the ludicrous depiction of Actium in Cleopatra with ancient wooden ships somehow carrying flammable material on them so that they can lob Hollywood-style flaming balls. Leave the contrails for those who want them, but please let's have the option to eliminate them. 3. Historical battle setups, perhaps with a twist of designing a different ship class for one of the main participants. That's more of a Naval Academy thing, perhaps: e.g. what if instead of the Blucher, the Germans at Dogger Bank were having a different type of capital ship (a pre-dreadnought, a couple more light cruisers etc)? But definitely have the option of refighting these classical engagements from this era: Dogger Bank, (bits of) Jutland, Denmark Strait, Surigao Strait, Java Sea, Tsushima. These are the stories that brought us to this game in the first place.

Came back to the game after about 5 months. I am replaying all the naval academy missions one by one to get a feel for any changes in the design/battle system. I just got to the "Torpedo the Dreadnought" scenario again. The game has become extremely easy in this direction. Make sure your crews are veteran (I put them on the 84 level which is the threshold. 12'' main guns are basically sniper rifles at this level without any fiddling with barrel lengths. Heavy AP shells blow everything out of the water. The enemy ships are sponges who fill up with water after a couple of hits ("Excessive flooding" is about 90% of all my sinkings). I get it that it was extremely frustrating to pump AP after AP round to enemies without any impact in past iterations. I actually don't have many problems with the damage dealt by shells - historically it didn't take that many hits to wreck a warship. BUT the accuracy has to be toned down for that to work, and the flooding of ships has to be taken down a notch too - again, historically more ships were crippled by gunfire than lost byoancy. I haven't tried the campaign so far (as in, Ever, and I've had the game for over half a year). It really doesn't sound like my kind of thing. I may have a look during the holiday season when I will have more time. Oh, and please, please, please give us an option where the stupid contrails of the shells can be toggled off. It looks like Hollywood's impression of ancient battles (the TV had "Cleopatra" again the other day and I had forgotten how silly Roman ships lobbing fireballs at each other looked). We have been asking for that forever: it can't be such a difficult thing to do - just don't put the contrails if the user doesn't want them.

Thank you! It's gratifying to see that bug reports get noticed and acted on.

Some serious thought must be given to checking the battle UI and the information it gives to the player. I'm not asking to be more accurate/damaging or to sink the enemy more easily, but if I'm told that my main guns have a 31% chance of hitting and are shown to be aimed, I would expect on average one in three salvoes to at least straddle, especially when the number of shells fired increase. I have done a crude test with very long range gunnery and pretty much emptying my magazines (so we're talking about a reasonable crack at the law of large numbers working its magic) and the realised probability is nowhere near that indicated in the UI (be that 1 in 3, or 1 in 10).

Latest patch, any naval academy scenario: recurring CTD whenever I try to save at the beginning of the battle. The "building ships" phase ahead of an engagement in naval academy now takes substantially longer and scenarios occasionally freeze on endless disk swapping (having eaten up all my physical memory) on the "loading level" stage. Did I also mention that the balancing of some ships (e.g. Advanced Armoured Cruiser II in the Pocket Battleship scenario) has gone completely out of whack? Other than that great patch.

I have mentioned before that I am a very new player. I am also, above everything else, annoyed to death at the invisible ships and the gamey responses (=suiciding/charging DDs to sight the enemy, thereby telepathically transmitting visibility to my battle line behind) that are necessary to combat them. Let me go beyond this: I actually don't give two figs about the campaign, and regret all the effort put into it, which seems to be futile from what I see from the bug reports after 22 (!) patches. I want to have a fun skirmish sandbox and, if possible at some point in the future, a set of historical battles to play. I'd love to try to win Dogger Bank as the Germans (or wipe the Germans out completely as the British), or Tsushima with the Russians and so on. Aren't such counterfactuals what draw people like us to historical gaming? In fact, when I bought the game I was attracted by the possibility at some point of having a modern version of the old Dreadnoughts early 90s game which did try to do this with historical scenarios, as much as by the -truly novel and hugely fun- shipbuidling part of the game. To bring this back to spotting: I am not complaining that these historical scenarios are not created yet - I can wait and hope. What I AM complaining about is that with the game design as is, these can never be made properly, since the game system necessitates breaking out of formation and suiciding light ships to gain a sighting advantage. The sighting system needs a complete overhaul and the player must be given tools to understand what is causing the visibility situation. Now, beyond having (or not) radar/RDF and general weather, we have no clue why in some case we can see the enemy or not AND WHY HE CAN SEE US. Is it our target signature? Is it our smoke interference? Are we showing against a setting sun a la Jutland? And what about starshells or searchlights? What about gun flashes? I still have no clue why in the Pocket Battleship scenario I can't see the enemy but he can see me. I imagine that he spawns with DDs close to me and they see my masts, but I (battleships and DDs alike) can't see him - then his DDs telepathically transmit my position to his BBs, and down rain the shells. How is this (pick one) historical/fun/strategic? And why isn't the player given any rules to understand what is happening, but is forced to random guessing, gamey behaviour? How is reloading to try something differently random fun/strategic? Unfortunately, the intense efforts of what is after all a small studio with limited resources seem to be wrongly directed to the hopeless chimera of the campaign, while the base of what makes the game fun (the shipbuilding and the actual sea fighting) takes a back seat. Witness all the bugs that are reported and don't seem to be addressed; in my short time with the game I have pointed out two-three possibilities myself (the ammo non-reset at reload, the possible memory leaks at the "loading battle" stage) and they are still around after 10 patches

This issue with the impossible to spot enemy raining down shells and torpedoes on your ships is also present in the Jeune Ecole Has Failed scenario. I appreciate that the spotting technology of the enemy (towers in this case, as the scenario is pre-radar) may be better, but the player has to be made aware of this in the scenario briefing. I built about the best possible battleships allowed by the scenario, being super careful with smoke interference. Nothing. Shells rain down from the invisible opposition. So, once again the only way to have a meaningful fight is the death ride of the secondary ships who dash towards the opponent in the vain hope they can see something. It's very frustrating and precludes any strategising. EDIT: And the bug where the ammo counter is not reset on reload is still here. Basically, every time you reload you start from the ammo level you have reached before. So, even if you load at the start of the battle you start with fewer (or none, if you had run out before) shells. Surely this must be the easiest thing to debug, I am a fairly crap programmer myself but these are the easiest bugs to squash.

In the "pocket battleship" scenario there is still the extremely annoying "invisible enemy" situation where my two modern destroyers and two modern cruisers with RDF and best possible towers cannot see the enemy at less than 6 km away, while he's happily peppering me with shells and torpedo salvoes. Around 5 km I can finally see him with my surviving boats but of course can't hit anything. EDIT: The Enemy BC AI is also infuriating as it keeps running away (to keep the distance presumably) despite the explicit description in the scenario and despite its being supposed to protect the transports. In the latest attempt I got rid of 3 of his destroyers early on, then finally located the transports and slaughtered them easily as the BCs preferred to simply turn tail and speed away at a ridiculous speed. So, of course I can't win the scenario since I can never catch them, they simply run away. EDIT 2: No, I won after all. Just sinking the transports is enough. Very poorly made scenario though, sheer frustration and no strategy. Might as well have rolled dice.

This is half a question, half a request. Is there a way to switch off "tracer" effects on travelling shells? By all means show the actual travelling rounds if you wish, but these comet like trails feel a bit arcade-y for a game that is otherwise admirably striving to be historical. I looked in the settings but I couldn't find something obvious. If there is currently no way to do this, can we add it as a (low priority) cosmetic option? In the various Total War games (Empire, Napoleon), users came up with an easy mod to get rid of tracers.

Having come to the game late, I am still working through the naval academy missions and haven't dabbled at all in the campaign. A couple of bugs I saw are: 1. I saved a battle right at the beginning (I like to do this to experiment with tactics). I then proceeded to play but started to run out of ammo. I therefore loaded up the mission again with my save game (which to remind you, was made right at the start before a shot had been fired) but the ammo counters were not reset, i.e. I started the same scenario with the used up stocks from before. No matter how many reloads I made the ammo counter kept running down from the previous level reached. Obviously some variable doesn't get properly reset on reload. This should be easy to catch. EDIT: For what it's worth, this was on the "Sink the Raiders" scenario. 2. Very often when I first design a ship to start a mission and launch it, the game seems to experience some sort of memory leak because it gets stuck very badly on the "loading mission" stage of the scenario creation with the hard disk light on my machine going almost permanently on and about 80% of my physical memory being in use by the game. No matter how long I wait (well, I give up after 10 minutes) the scenario won't finish loading. Killing the process and reloading the game fixes this, as the scenario will subsequently launch reasonably promptly (thankfully ship designs are retained). This leads me to suspect a memory leak, as I said. EDIT: Latest example of this in the "Modern battleship" scenario, but it has happened in others including the target practice one at the beginning. I haven't found an obvious correlation with the type of scenario, it just tends to happen some times. 3. In general, the scenario launch is oddly programmed to say the least. If you alt-tab out e.g. to use a second monitor while you wait for the mission to load, well, the mission will apparently stop loading - especially when the AI is on the ship design stage. I.e. you need to keep the game in the foreground for the process to complete. Again, I haven't left it for hours alt-tabbed away to see if it eventually completes, but it is a very clunky process. You can't expect the user to give up the use of his machine for long stretches (and this is necessary when the fleets become large) with the game in the foreground while nothing is happening. The game is extremely fun as a conception, even without the campaign (which judging by the bug reports here, still has a long way to go).