Sphere

Well known problem.

Just a general comment, but I think there needs to be some more thought put into giving cruisers a raison d'etre. The new features (subs, mines, scouting) now make DD's indispensable which is good. BB/BC's are still battle-winners. But CA/CL's still don't really have a roll to play that isn't done better by either DD's or BB's. And I don't think the new TF tonnage limits change this. I'm not sure exactly what can be done. Maybe exaggerate their their historic advantages (cheapness, speed and range) in their base stats. Or give them some advantages in terms of being able to mount more/better versions of the specialty modules (radar/range-finder/mines/anti-mines/anti-sub).

You can get the bonuses from a boiler even with a Diesel engine if you first select a boiler-turbine power plant, but then switch to a diesel. I haven't tried in on the current version, but in past versions you could jack your engine efficiency through the roof.

Damn ... someone reported it.

I think flaws should be class based not ship based. That's closer to history, and it would be better for gameplay. Right now you can just build more ships than you need and simply scrap the flawed ones. There's really not a lot of pressure to avoid flaws because you can always roll more dice. That's ahistorical and kinda boring. If flaws were class wide, players would be rewarded for being more careful. It'd be a good strategy to build a single prototype ship to discover the flaws of the class before queuing up 12 of them. That would add a level of gameplay were you'd be building ships more for R&D rather than just cranking out fleets for battle. And just as a general idea, anything in game that has the player making and trying out more ship designs is good because the ship designer is pretty fantastic and is the core of the game.

Kyiv....

I thought overweight ships were actually a really common problem. Vanguard was overweight by 2,200 tons, so yeah that level of error did occur. Designers had pretty rudimentary ways of estimating weight, and shipyards were given a lot of leeway in how the details of the design were carried out. But generally it was a problem with an entire class rather than individual ships.

I noticed something weird while building a british BC (I think it was BC hull IV). After I had shrunk and expanded the displacement a few times, I was unable to place a barbette/gun on the upper deck any more. It kept trying to place itself at the level of the lower deck level, i.e. it was burying itself into the hull. The mounting points had gotten stuck in a configuration for a certain displacement, which didn't match the actual displacement as set by the slider. I tried fiddling around with displacement/beam/draught to get it to work but to no avail. But when I exited/restarted the builder it worked fine. While doing this I noticed you could end up with some massive fore weight offsets. I think it's most prominent when you take the model all the way down to the minimum displacement and then up to the maximum displacement. I suspect that the center of balance might be also getting stuck in the wrong spot, and not corresponding to the displacement as set by the slider. Some previous tests with the placement of guns kind of suggested this. I might test this out further tonight, but yeah, something seems a little weird, especially when you expand out multideck hulls. I've never noticed any of this with single deck hulls.

For the player, I'd say just have the repair mechanic be completely manual. The player has to send the ships he/she wans repaired back to port. Maybe include some color codes for damage levels in the Task Force screen to catch the players eye. If the devs are looking for extra credit maybe even pop-up warnings for when a capital ship is severely damaged. I get that the AI needs an automated system to behave properly. But the campaign is simply enough that manually sending ships for repair isn't burdensome.

Pre-deployment would be nice, but improving the automatic fleet deployment would also help the AI be more effective in battle. It won't be a fun game if the player gets to perfectly build ships, task forces, and fleet formations while the AI is hopeless.

Yeah, it's something I noticed with British BB hulls (haven't tried BC's). I don't know if there is actually something wrong, or if it's just a feature of British BB/BC hulls I hadn't encountered before. But yeah, the weight distribution is confusing. You basically can't stack enough aft-weight to balance a single main turret up front. I thought about just putting a large secondary turret upfront and stacking up all my mains on the tail. Seems a little odd.

I think this is a known bug with mains getting interrupted by secondaries. If you aim your secondaries at a different target it should keep your mains firing on schedule. Same thing for torps.

This game should probably just stick to "dreadnought" battles. Get that right and get the campaign into good place and be content. That being said, the threat of aircraft brought a lot tension into warship design at the end of the games timespan. It might be interesting to introduce this late in the game as a third threat (the first two being shells, and torpedo's) that you have to balance your designs/fleet around. It's not obvious how you'd do this without ruining the core aspects of the game. I don't think CV's on the battle map would ever be a good idea, but you could maybe abstract them in someway. No need for it to be historically accurate, just a way to make the late game more interesting, because right now once you hit the dreadnought hull, designs get a little monotonous.