Aldaris

I'd like to adress two issues that screwed my recent German campaign hard, despite completely dominating the seas. First off, army mechanics. It absolutely sucks that we have no way of influencing deployment or anything else, and that it's handled in such a non-responsive and arbitrary manner generally. I gradually took the Baltics and Finland off the Soviet Union. The problem: every subsequent war, those areas are guarded by like 30000 men, and then the Soviets attack with at least half a million. Now that might make sense at the start of a surprise attack, but there is no redeployment as far as I can see. Those areas should be reinforced. Forces should be distributed according to the war situation. But that's not happening. So in every war, I'm on a timer on how long it can go, before I pretty much automatically lose territories (which can completely skew war scores too. Losing almost undefended Prussia turned the war score from 250000 to maybe 5k to 250000 to 500000 in their favour). What also plays into this is army size. The thing is, our populations aren't that different - about 90 million for Germany and its territories and 140 for the soviets. I almost double their GDP, but our army-navy spending ratio is completely skewed. Germany spends WAY too much on the navy, I have stupid amounts of money, way more than I know what to do with. Something like 400 billion in the bank with 10+ coming in every month. While supporting a huge fleet. I recently built about 40 heavy cruisers simultaneously without going negative. And in every decision about finances, I favoured GDP over Navy budget, every single time. And yet, the army is severy underfunded compared to the Soviets. I mean, why? HOW? Why can I not say "look boys, I have several times your yearly budget in the piggy bank, maybe we should talk to the Government about some redistribution?" It would be very nice if there was some way to influence budget more, particularly when you have way, WAY too much. Or if the game noticed itself. The other thing - please, please please add an option to engage blocking forces in choke points. They should get the option to either fight or get out of the way. They are not doors, or walls. They're just ships, and if they're not willing to fight, they should not block anything. The current solution with the impenetrable red circle is completely infuriating. And dumb. Having a Naval invasion with almost a million tons of warships nearby fail because of a single ancient CA sitting in the way of them getting into the circle is enough to make me want to stop playing.

I strongly disagree. Having to do two refits instead of one is tedious, makes the ships in question unavailable for much longer, and costs a lot more money - on top of being kind of dumb and unrealistic. I'm not aware of what game-breaking tricks you mean - but we're talking about a single player game here. No one is forcing you to use exploits, and if you do, it'll hurt no one but you. Besides - why not simply fix the exploit, instead of making us jump through even more hoops when it comes to refitting? That system is janky enough as it is.

Yeah, that sucks. Same issue frequently pops up in the red sea and near Gibraltar. Small enemy task force blocks all movement, and the player is unable to engage them, to force the passage. There REALLY should be a way to specifically click on an enemy task force to try and force a battle with them. If they don't move (or don't move far) there's a fight. If they move, do a comparison of range and speed and see if the players force could have caught up. If yes, battle. If not, fair, they got away, but the way is free. That's stil not ideal, because it still costs you a turn to force the passage, but it's better than being stuck, minutely moving your task forces around in the hopes that the game will finally realize that yes, there's an enemy force RIGHT THERE that's been sitting there for 5 turns.

Nah, that's been happening for a while. Just as he said - once certain techs that increase overall weight (like the example super torpedo protection) are researched, they're automatically applied, and if you've built your design pretty close to the displacement limit, the design will become invalid to build as a result. REALLY annoying. That's one of my two major bug bears with tech progress. The other one is better guns making future refits impossible, because the new model is too big to replace the lower mark ones, and you don't get to choose if you want to replace them. Just want to add radar and better engines to that old design? Yeah, you're out of luck.

Relax man, not every ship can be built to do the stunning 14 kts of HMS Warrior.

Speaking of home waters, in most campaigns it's friggin' impossible to find any, for example, British ships actually near Britain. They're mostly sailing around the coast of Africa or around the red and arabian seas and SE Asia, in wild, aimlessly dancing shoals of warships. What I'm getting at: the AI seems REALLY bad at splitting its fleets up to cover several theaters. The way it currently looks reminds me of newish RTS players box selecting and a-moving everything that's on their screen as soon as they see an enemy unit.

Much appreciated! And now get some sleep, you madman! 😉

Yeah. Maybe a toggle "we're open for business / nope, we're not building your ships" could be added? It's especially annoying when you have mothballed old ships you want to sell - you need to be careful then what you dismiss in the "nope" click orgy, and where you actually want to say yes.

I do similar things, and it works, most of the time (typical mid to late battlefleet of mine is 3-4 BB, 3 CA, 2 CL, 6 DD). Subs rarely sink anything of mine. Even in my earlier example of Spain with 200+ subs, they got a grand total of 3 ships over a multi year war. My Problem with subs is that they're not fun. The core of this game is designing ships, and using them in real time battles. The rest is there to give that a frame. Now, I get that subs need to be in there in some capacity for a whole lot of the relevant tech in the game to make sense. No need for ASW without them. But. There either needs to be more in depth gameplay with them (design/battles) for that to be fun, or they should be limited in some way as a proportion of the surface fleet. Yeah, Germany in WW2 had a small surface fleet and hundreds of subs, so, historical realism, blah blah. I don't care. I want to play Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, not Ultimate Admiral: Autoresolve 5 times a turn for 20 VP per sunk sub. That's simply not fun.

Just to illustrate the VP issue again: This is the situation. 19K for me, 10K for Spain. Not enough difference for peace. What has happened to arrive at that score? I lost: 1 CA, 1 CL, 1 DD. Spain lost: The Canaries, The Azores, The Balearics, and Morocco, and about 20-30 subs. They don't have a fleet I can fight, so I have to gather VPs by naval invasions only, and hope their 200 subs don't do too much. That seems slightly off to me. And it results in the most boring war of all time. Declare invasion, wait 6 turns. Repeat. Oh, and by the way: Why am I fighting the soldiers of 4 NATIONS I'M NOT AT WAR WITH?

Your GDP is practically nonexistent. That's a major factor. Another thing: when you build ships for another nation, you're paying for the build while it's happening. You get an advance, and you get a lump sum exceeding your build costs at the end, but in between, you have to pay for the actual building - which makes sense, considering it's happening in your shipyards. And churning out this many ships is killing you with the monthly overhead. You're also exceeding capacity by a fair bit, meaning it'll take a good bit longer to build everything you've queued up, meaning your actual payday is longer off. So, when building ships to make money, make sure you a) have the shipyard capacity spare and b) you can afford the build costs while it's happening. Otherwise, you're shooting yourself in the foot instead of benefiting.

Another thing: VPs for successful Naval Invasions seem severely underscaled. Conquering Morocco, the Balearic Islands and the Azores gave me a grand total of 15K VPs. Not enough to offset the one heavy cruiser I lost to the Spanish submarine swarm, that gave them more than 5K, enough to not quite give me a margin of 10K to allow for peace. That is completely bonkers. Also, Spain (and other countries) doesn't really have a navy, they just have a million subs. Another extremely annoying thing that happens frequently. Subs don't allow me any gameplay. I can't have battles with subs. They give almost no VP when destroyed. They're an annoying irrelevance who avoid the actual game. How am I supposed to fight a war with that? Find their two CAs and hope it's enough? Fighting Subs is like fighting an excel sheet in an RTS. It's not fun, and I mean REALLY not fun.

Italy has a bug in the research tree - I got the Modern Heavy Cruiser II before modern Cruisers, which gives modern heavies and lights I respectively.

Yepp! Yes to all of that. I'm playing an A-H campaign right now, and the economy is completely unsustainable. I'm in a constant state of war, because I'm getting dogpiled all the time. Japan or the US declares war, which stays forever, because we have no fights, all of my neighbors pile in. Sometimes we have multiple wars and peace agreements before that war with Japan or the US is resolved. Which leads to constant economic decline - despite having a rather modest fleet and having made several territorial gains, I'm losing 30-40 million a month, in wartime, with all my fleets in port. And being able to organize my fleets before a battle - be still, my heart. That is too beautiful a dream.

That's a bold armor scheme, Mr. 61000 tons British battleship.