Hibbidyhai

Some UI suggestions for the game that would be very convenient for the user experience: Show how many ships of a given class we have in our fleet on the ship design tab. Have a button to click on the ship builder just under the class name that randomly picks a new name for you. When we hover over a minor allied nations flag on the politics screen show us an approval rating similar to the one we can see for major nations. Have a tool tip appear explaining what impact our navies' "Power Rating" has in the same way that tool tips appear for Army Logistics, Oil Production, etc. Show us the total tonnage in our task forces in the tooltip when you hover over a fleet on the map screen.

All of the factors I already mentioned could have something to do with it. If the enemy is running twin turret long caliber 19-in guns with radar and an upper tier stereoscopic rangefinder on a very stable ship then 26km away is not too crazy. Since you fail to mention any of those things I guess just use your imagination to figure out what the problem is.

They'll need more info on the design of your ship to know if the game was working as intended or not. If you have a lot of objects on your hull (turrets, funnels, secondaries, etc.) it makes it easier for the enemy to spot you. Speed is also a factor. If your ship isn't very fast it will be easier to hit. Also, if you are taking heavy damage from distant fire you may not have enough deck armor to cope with it because the angle of the incoming fire is basically vertical. Were you sailing head-on to the enemy to reduce your target profile or sailing horizontal to bring all your turrets to bear, thus increasing your target profile? How big was your ship? The more tonnage a ship has the easier it is to spot and hit. The AI also may have gotten lucky with a hit that caused damage, and once your ship is damaged you become easier to hit and your accuracy goes down. Maybe you already know all of those things and there is a flaw or bug, but you'd have to provide more context for anyone to know what was going on.

I've noticed that on Italian destroyers the 2-inch Mk IV gun is larger than the 3-inch Mk IV gun. Probably should fix that.

I'm aware of that. But if you can get your ships to fire torpedoes in a more sensible way and if you launch enough torpedoes at once it will make it much more difficult for even an omniscient AI to avoid all of them.

The torpedo aiming seems exceptionally poor since the new beta, although it wasn't great before that. A suggestion...rather than setting targeting to 'Save/Normal/Aggressive' like on guns, what if torpedoes could be set to 'Ahead/On Course/Behind' so that torpedoes are launched either ahead of, on course, or behind the predicted course of the enemy. Using this method we could ensure a more proper spread of torpedoes from our ships instead of now, which all ships firing in the same direction (even when firing at different angles) which is very easy to avoid.

This ^^^ I would love to be able to choose whether or not to upgrade to the latest Mk of gun or keep the current ones. There are two reasons why this would be nice. One would be to continue using placements for primary and secondary guns where the newest Mk won't fit. The other reason would be to directly compare the old weapons with the new ones in the builder, giving the player a good sense of progression outside of the Tech Tree screen. The UI in the builder would basically be the same as now, with your array of sizes when you select a gun type (Main Guns -> Centerline/Side Guns or Secondary Guns) then when you mouse over a size (for example a 12" centerline main gun) have the Mk options appear above it. Then only have the tooltip stats appear when you mouse over one of the Mks. There could be some limitations, such as a 1910's Dreadnought maybe only getting access to Mk II-IV guns or a 1940's Battleship only getting to choose between III-V guns. It wouldn't make sense to try putting an 1800's era Mk I guns on a 1950's (or with the campaign extension, 1965) warship and likewise the machinery for a modern battleship being way too complicated to put onto an 1890's hull, even if it physically fits. Besides just guns you could also do this for torpedo tubes, although perhaps not underwater ones. My other big ask for the new patch would be to either allow the player to redesignate ship classes when they become obsolete or change the formation system so that it considers a ship's tonnage, weaponry, or speed when putting it into a formation. The problem is that old 12,000 ton BBs should not be in line with 50,000 ton BBs, especially when new cruisers are a better match for the old battleships in tonnage or weaponry. Since we don't have a pre-deployment formation system and are unlikely to get one, this is a way to exert at least a little control so that you don't have to manually resort your ships every time you go into battle. The first example would be changing an old battleship's classification from BB to CA (or BC) so it will line up with the cruisers and not the battleships. Or, if that can't be done, have the game consider a ship's tonnage and sort it into formation with other ships of similar tonnage at the beginning of battle. Another way to accomplish the same idea might be to auto sort obsolete hulls into their own formations regardless of what classification they are (so old CL would not be in formation with new ones) and position at the rear of the group. For those of who like the playstyle of refitting old ships and keeping them going as long as possible both of the above would be great additions to the game.

First off, I appreciate all of the work that your team has put into the game, especially under difficult circumstances. Some of these suggestions will be reiterations of what others have posted, but hopefully that is a sign of increased interest. This is in a rough order of importance: 1) A wrap-around feature of some kind for the world map (even if its just an optical illusion). 2) In the ship builder, the ability to choose if you want to switch to the latest model of a gun, or keep the old version, when you are doing refits. Being able to directly compare the stats would be great. But the most annoying thing is when automatic upgrades means your weapons no longer fit on the ship, or they make it overweight. Weapons of the same size but of different mark could just be assigned to different firing groups, just as guns of different sizes are now. 3: The ability to re-designate the classification of ships. The most obvious situation in which you would want to do this is when your old BB's are now the same in size or armament (or smaller) than new CA's. Being able to switch those old ship's classification would mean they would no longer get thrown in the battle lines with their modern successors, when they ought to be put in with the cruisers. The same for old CA's that eventually get outsized by CL's. That might make some of the formation headaches at the beginning of battles a little more manageable. 4, a: Better Barbettes: Allow us to adjust the height and size of barbettes. Sometimes you get stuck between ones that are a little too small, or too big, or they aren't tall enough, or the game doesn't allow you enough freedom to put them where you like. This would simplify the number of different barbettes that appear in the builder that are just different sizes of the same thing. 4, b: More superstructure parts. Right now we have main towers and rear towers, but it would be nice to have other parts with structure to them. Essentially more barbette type structures with some secondary or casemate gun emplacements built-in, and perhaps you can put some of them on the starboard or port sides of a ship, not just on the centerline. There are certain funnels that are already close to this in the game. 5: More diplomatic options for minor nations. Finding a way to nudge your government into wars with minor nations and take a little of the randomness out of how a player's naval empire expands. The most obvious examples of this would be when you are playing Japan and you would like to directly attack Korea, or the United States attacking Mexico, or Russia attacking the Ottoman Empire. With severe diplomatic consequences for the player, of course. 6: Add camouflage skins to ship models. I don't know how complicated this would be, but it would be nice to have. Ships had them in real life and it would add another layer of customization. Paint jobs wouldn't necessarily have to have any effect combat or ship stats. 7: Training missions during peacetime. These would just be generated events, but it would a way to maintain relations with major or minor nations, increase tension with a rival, have temporary crew training level bonuses, all at the cost of money and unrest. It would be similar to conquest mechanic where you have to send your ships to a location for a period of turns, but these would be out in the open ocean somewhere. 8: Corvettes and Frigates: This would be a way of keeping ships the size of small torpedo boats in the game into the more modern decades of the game. You can make small destroyers now, but these ships would have strict speed and armament restrictions. To avoid clogging up the game with thousands of cheap and tiny ships (I can imagine the AI losing its mind and spamming them) they might only be auto-generated in convoy defense/attack missions and you can only build them in a similar manner to how the game handles submarines and transport capacity.

During my French campaign I nabbed Helgoland from Germany, and Cyprus and Gibraltar from the Brits. The key to getting provinces seems to be that they have equal the value of all of the reparations you could receive. I saw Ireland appearing on the reparations screen after a couple wars with the British but couldn't ask for it, as it was worth more than the total reparations I could ask for. So, the answer seems to be that you have to beat the tar out of the AI, and continue doing so for as long as possible.

For my French campaign I named BB's through CL's after French painters, and let the TBs/DDs autogenerate their names. I only named the first ship in the class and managed to make it to about 1930 before I started running out of painters.

Aircraft carriers were such a paradigm shift in real life that adding them in only a tangential way as a campaign asset actually feels less realistic than having it be an alternate timeline where airplanes don't exist. Because if they had aircraft they'd be using them to devastate enemy battleships, and not just deal attrition damage.

I've also noticed the issue of severely damaged ships (like, basically dead already) joining battles. I also had one of my cruisers sink that I didn't even know was part of the battle until the end battle screen popped up.

I like the idea of a tech branch that affects maintenance costs and your ports (adding things like speeding up repairs, improving construction time, or increasing the range of ships, etc.) But I think implementing this as you suggested might complicate things too much, even if it did add some realism. Having separate inputs on your fleet capacity as a whole and your port capacity on a local level, or knowing which ports they may apply to, may not be obvious. It would simpler to have techs similar to what you suggested, but have them just apply easy to understand buffs (-10% maintenance costs, +10% port capacity, -10% repair times, etc.) that all apply globally. Since this is kind of a 'logistics' tech branch, it would be a good opportunity to throw in techs that affect your transport fleet: the ability to control if they are armed, and with what; equipping transports with radios so that they can receive basic orders; adding frigates to the game to guard convoys and/or defend ports; adding in replenishment ship techs that extends operations ranges. And a way to punish a player for building too many ships such that escalating maintenance costs aren't enough to prevent them from building more ships than they can fit in port, would be forcing them to scrap or mothball some ships (with an additional tech that affects how many ships you can keep in mothballs at once). It would also be interesting introduce gunnery exercise missions, where you get a mission to attack one of your own mothballed ships in exchange for a boost to accuracy or fire rate. Or add an option to offer up ships for sell to other nations as an alternative to scrapping or mothballing them. Could also add a small unrest penalty for scrapping or selling off old ships that have seen a lot of combat and therefore have a public following. So the option to turn old ships into museum ships could be another possibility (and if you turn a captured enemy ship into a museum ship you get a relations penalty with the nation it used to belong to).

This would be interesting. To differentiate between the 'historical campaigns' and the regular campaign, they could take the tech and shipbuilding out of your hands. You are only the admiral and you can only order around the ships you are given. You would get new ships as they were historically built, with the addition of planned ships that were never completed in real life. You could get specific missions from your government, such as attacking a specific port or ordering a fleet to a specific location in order to support an amphibious invasion, and you then carry those out at your discretion. If you successfully carry out missions maybe you get to select some bonuses, such as speeding up the construction of the next few ships, or boosts to damage (your nation is motivated to build higher quality ammo or something). Your naval prestige would also take on more importance, as you could lose the game by getting dismissed by your government if you lose too many battles or fail to achieve your mission goals.

There are already a lot of sliders in the game, too many more would really start to clutter things up. If the suggestion above was adopted the radar range could automatically adjust based on the above equation. And if you wanted a lighter radar on your battleship, sacrificing range, then you could pick a less advanced version of the tech. Or older radar heavier and less effective and the newer lighter and more effective (but more expensive), whichever is more accurate to history. I'm assuming more advanced radars were heavier though.