justMike247

U.A.D rev 1.5.1.1 End of campaign thoughts So… sometime around the end of 1945 I finally finish a protracted series of conquests against countries that thought extortion won’t have paybacks. My fleet, or what’s left of it, is worn out, thoroughly beat to chit, and, well… lets be honest, with the nerfed economy we have to put up with now, most of my fleet is obsolete. Time to rebuild from a clean sheet. It took almost 17 years, cut my fleet size in half, but just after 1961 ended, I’ve a newly rebuilt fleet, totally state of the art, with just two surviving though thoroughly upgraded hull classes remaining from the 1940’s fleet. Despite my entire fleet being in home waters for over 15 years, apparently I’ve pissed off the yanks to the point where its time to kick some ass again… only… there’s a problem… The devs have released another nerf that’s basically made the whole game completely and utterly pointless. No, I’m not talking about the AI spotting advantage that would mean AI spotting tops would need to be over 300m high to spot me, I’m not talking about the AI’s ability to avoid torpedoes by turning figure eights in less than two ship lengths, nor am I talking about AI’s evident tech advantage in torps, that gives them the ability to ripple fire without reloads, reloads that have no issue running over 50 clicks with an unghodly ability to home on a target… Nope… none of them… this is a whole new level of nerfage that basically makes the entire game pointless… As spelled out, my entire fleet is refitted to best of what’s available in 1960’s tech, Gen III RADAR, Mk5 guns throughout, standard ammo weights and loadout, gas turbine engines, Modern II armour, whole nine yards.. all the bells and whistles that can improve long range gunnery and survivability, every one of my hulls has them… and fresh out of drydock, they’re all completely worthless. Why? Well, evidently, some devs have the idea that newly fitted guns come straight from the proving ranges already worn to the point that they can’t hit the broadside of a barn even from within spitting distance. None of them have fired a round yet, but still… nerfage means they’ll never hit any target they’re pointed at, because of barrel wear… or so we’re told. I tried… Lord knows I’d plenty opportunity. Over ten engagements per month, every month until campaign ended… each and every one with the same results; at best, my main guns achieved an accuracy of just 1.7% firing at ranges from 40km all the way down to just 3km… Fall of shot landing long and to target’s port side, broadside after broadside, exactly the same shot dispersal pattern. Sure, I sunk a bunch of ships, but never the ships I was actually aiming at, just some poor unfortunates that got too close to AI BB’s; as soon as they give their battle wagons some breathing room, my hits fall off to nothing. So… new campaign… still feeling sick over wasting so much time and effort with the previous, and I’m thinking, if the best of available tech means every gun fitted is just so much ballast to haul around, how much worse will it be with 1890’s tech? Is there any point building capitol ships at all when they’ll be lucky to land a shell within the same time zone as the targets? Torps, nerfed to the point of uselessness, secondary guns, unable to pen anything with more than 6mm of armour, and now main guns that can’t hit a damned thing they’re pointed at… I’m willing to try again, one last time… Call me stupid, but I still believe that with the right devs behind the game, it has the chance to be truly awesome. I’ve always believed that, to the point that I paid for the game, twice… But as the game stands right now, as a product, it’s no longer fit for purpose. I’m contemplating demanding a refund on my purchase. I could write a comprehensive list of what needs to be fixed before the game is fit to be called playable, much less ready for multi-player, but… no point… I did that exercise for rev 1.4.1.1… nothing’s been addressed.

Back in February, I spent three days writing a comprehensive bug list for U.A.D rev 1.4.1.1 . Now, three months later, and using rev 1.5.1.1, it's disappointing, but not entirely surprising to find that not one of the multitude of issues raised in that post has been addressed. On the contrary, if I were to waste a similar amount of time writing a list for the current rev, I'd need to double the length of the list. Now, we're going into battle with guns nerfed to the point of being little more than ballast with each salvo having a 98% chance of missing, range irrespective. This is irrespective of gun calibre, amunition weight and propellent type. From personal experience, at least 50% of damage received is from my own ships torpedoing ships they're supposed to be screening or being screened by. Latest instance of this; destroyer sunk by a cruiser it's supposed to be screening. Oppososing fleet was universally on the port side of my battle line, screening vessels had deployed to starboard of the battle line. No opposing vessels to starboard. Noteworthy new bugs... Task Forces set to "Follow" sailing in the exact opposite direction, or worse, proceeding in circles, at the grand speed of 0.6kts, initially with no damage, while refusing to engage opposing vessels closing rapidly on them. Every attempt to use automatic controls to extract them from this mess results in returning to turning in circles with next to zero boat speed. In Campaign mode, the game sets huge value on the importance of researching the latest and greatest innovations and tech, and yet, in battle, that tech makes not the slightest difference in improving targetting accuracy or ship survivability, begging the question, what's the point? I've lost count of the times that the opposing force has had double the spotting range of my fleet, despite their tech level being very behind, while my own is very advanced. I seriously detest having to be so negative all the time; if I didn't genuinely believe the game had the potential to be truly awesome I wouldn't have paid for it twice, but the way things are currently, with every update serving to ignore long standing reported bugs and merely increasing the crap-outage, I'm seriously contemplating demanding a refund; the product I paid for is no longer fit for purpose. And yet... the dev's believe the way things are, the game is in a good enough condition to launch onto a multi-player platform. Seriously?? There's no point at all in developing new features while the game is still crippled with a multitude of fundamental bugs. I'm neither against nor discouraging introducing new features or expanding the game platform, merely pleading that such development be suspended until the majority of the issues reported to date are addressed.

that would be an accurate RL reflection of fleet refitting, but in game, when it takes up to three months to refuel (something that takes mere hours to perform in RL, even while underway at sea) I'm guessing barrel replacement would mean refit time exceeding six months... Not that barrel replacement would affect accuracy any. With the latest nerfage, I'm having to resort to Nelsonian tactics and combat ranges. State of the art 1960's tech and I'd have more offensive capability throwing potatoes...

- Fixed remaining issues of accuracy. what... exactly was this patch supposed to correct? I've had two battles since installing it, and on both occasions, results were exactly the same as achieved in battles prior to the previous update, i.e. Mk5 gun accuracy with Gen II RADAR and Stereo V rangefinders engaging at ranges between 38k to 3k achieve an average hit rate of 1.5%. Of the misses, 100% of them were shooting long (up to 50% of actual range)and to the targets' starboard side, irrespective of targets orientation, which makes a mockery of any pretence of optical tracking and RADAR ranging, much less any attempt at correcting fall of shot.

Glad I'm not the only one to discover this. In my last 5 battles, Mk5 15" guns with Gen II RADAR managed to achieve main gun accuracy of just 1.5% shooting at ranges between 28k to 5k. Factor in the nerfed AP ammo that bounces more reliably than Wilson tennis balls, and what used to be a floating weapons platform is now merely a target burdened with some very expensive ballast. In three seperate battles, my BB's have shot through their entire stock of AP rounds for the main guns, achieving an average of 15 hits, for less than 300pts of damage. That's just 300, not 3k, not 30k, not 300k... I've no idea what they were shooting at at the time as every target in the opposing fleet was identified with the same question mark, and we all know how auto-targetting loves to ignore manual target selection. I personally don't see the point contemplating a multi-player platform when the dev's preferred error fix is to continually nerf player designs/equipment until they're just as bad if not worse than AI generated contraptions. Addressing the gun barrel erosion issue, even the Mk1 BL 15" design recognised that barrel wear was an issue, that barrels wore at a predictable rate that depended on the number of rounds fired by that particular gun tube, and had compensation for said barrel wear incorporated into the fire control. When coupled to "modern" fire control RADAR, those same Mk1 BL 15" turrets when fitted to Vanguard consistantly hit targets with an accuracy that even the New Jersey class could only dream of.

Strictly speaking, you're the only option for declaring war... opposing countries can make rediculous demands that you can refuse by declaring war on them, but they can't do the same against you. But to initiate hostilities, you need to push your target's "tension" as close as you can to minus 100 by whatever means available to you. The only direct option available is under the politics tab... Increase Tension... seldom does much, and all it takes is a sneeze and you're right back where you started if they weren't proactively hostile against you previously. Short of that, there's calculated responses to some of the random stuff that pops up occasionally... not knowing who a certain admiral is, blaming a country for espionage, pouring scorn on another nation's navy etc. Be patient though... it takes frikkin years of poking the bear to drive tension down to where they're gonna throw that rediculous demand at you that allows you to respond by declaring war against them... Aint no Chamberlin's Note in this war... Be careful what you wish for though... Just when you think you've engineered your own private global war, suddenly the whole frikkin planet's forming orderly queue's to come take a piece of your ass, and that causes things to go pear shaped in a hellova hurry thesedays.

in theory, it should work.. in practice however, if my experience is anything to go by, the results are pitiful compared to the expence and effort

how exactly are you supposed to build up a fleet in 1.5.0.7 when the basics of even major powers economy have been nerfed to the point where even trying to build ships for export has me constantly blowing the naval budget, incurring penalty in the form of lost naval prestige every time the navy budget needs to be raised. That lost prestige can only be replaced by combat wins, IF the AI eventually gets around to allowing such things to happen. For the game to be successful, it needs to be playable; building even a half decent fleet needs a half decent budget to work with, NOT a budget so damned tight that you don't have the funds to replace a single lost destroyer, much less try to keep pace with the rate merchant shipping is now being sunk. As things stand, with the current rev, the long-term campaign part of the game is totally unplayable.

if you mean meander all over the place despite being set to Line Ahead... yupp... not all the time, but often enough to make formation organisation a total nightmare...

Whatever nerfing of naval prestige that's happened since 1.5 was released seriously needs to be reversed. In my last 5 attempts to get a campaign off the ground I've had to endure watching prestigue tank repeatedly with zero opportunity to do anything to lift it back up again. It's bad enough trying to build a fleet with the naval budget nerfed to the point where even building ships two at a time causes bankrupsy, causing yet more prestige drop, but watching prestige fall off the cliff while I'm not building anything, much less daring to even think about using politics to instigate some form of fleet engagement is insufferable. Five attempts and I can't get more than 10 years into a campaign is crazy.

if my experience is anything to go by, you're wasting time thinking mine fields will be effective. In my current campaign, I've over 40 old CL's deployed at choke points specifically to set mine fields. More than half of them haven't set anything, they just sit in port ignoring anything passing by. Of the few that are apparently laying mines, the AI fleets cruise through them with impunity as if there was nothing there. The only part of your Q1 that works is setting ships in port to Defense means they won't be dragged all over the place on dumb "Missions"

U.A.D rev 1.4.1.1 Bugs List 1/ Fundamentally Messed Up 1a/ Battle Contact In 95% of engagements I’ve had to date, initial contact places my fleet well within gun range of the opposing fleet while still in a cruising formation, i.e. meeting the opponent head on, allowing them to “cross my T.” Invariably the initial roar of main guns firing even before the cam has found my flagship is closely followed by the secondary guns firing. I’ve learned to my cost that if I’m within secondary gun range, I’m well within range of the A.I.’s torpedoes, requiring some immediate, violent and radical manoeuvres to extricate my fleet from this furball, all while trying to reorganise my fleet formation into something better suited to fighting. This initial contact range makes an absolute mockery of any spotting/targeting kit built into my ships; what’s the point having a fleet configured for long range gunnery when you’re going to be dropped into the middle of a mess? 1b/ Division Tabs Am I the only poor fool forced to suffer Division tabs that have greater magnetic attraction to each other than rare earth magnets? I’ve lost count of the HOURS spent having to pause the game, detach and re-arrange divisions when they’ve decided to merge with other Divisions on the toolbar, and every time I have to do that, the AI decides their sailing order has to change, resulting in capitol ships chasing their tails rather than maintaining a battle line. 1c/ Maintaining Course This, admittedly, doesn’t happen 100% of the time; incidence rate is closer to 66%. If I have two or more ships in my lead Division, supporting divisions in Follow mode, invariably, the rearmost ship in the lead division sails a sinusoidal course. Rather than dampen out over time, the amplitude of error in the ordered course increases. If supporting Divisions are set to follow the lead, they’re forced to copy that sinusoidal course while trying to steam in line ahead, turning my entire fleet into a crazy mixed up mess as formations interlock with each other. 1d Auto-targeting While I’ll admit that auto-targeting is a convenient tool at times, it’s seriously frustrating when it decides to over-ride manual targeting. I won’t pretend to guess what the targeting prioritisation is for auto-targeting, but there’s something messed up when it disengages a manual decision to target opposing BB’s that are capable of one-shot-killing my smaller vessels, to prioritise ships that are no threat. Worse is when it repeatedly changes target, fires a range finding shot, then changes target again before the remaining guns can fire in battery. The result is simply wasted ammunition. 1e/ Torpedoes Do I really need to spell out how frustrating it is to see your fleet receive a ton of damage from being hit with your own torpedoes? Prior to the game’s release on Steam, it was nigh on impossible to launch torpedoes for fear of hitting friendly ships. Whatever tweak was made to make torpedo firing easier has gone far too far in the wrong direction and needs to be remedied. 1f/ Torpedo Range While I fully understand the complications associated with converging/diverging targeting, evidently whoever coded torpedoes didn’t, giving the AI the ability to not merely strike targets at ranges where the AI torpedoes would need to run in excess of 50KM, but also giving them a homing capability. I’ve witnessed torpedoes bending their track to strike a target that is reversing away from their original projected track. Player torpedoes, however, have been nerfed to the point of near uselessness. 1f/ Smoke Prior to the advent of centimetric wavelength RADAR, smoke was an effective way to obscure or obfuscate a fleet as spotting was entirely reliant on the Mk1 eyeball with optical aids. Atmospheric conditions could make RADAR spotting more difficult, but not impossible. Smoke became useless as a screening tactic. This should apply to game engagements following the introduction of Gen II RADAR. Currently, the AI uses smoke as an effective way to “disappear” with no adverse effect to its own ability to target. The reverse isn’t true for the player, the AI being able to engage targets irrespective of an active smoke screen while the players fleet is blinded by its own smoke irrespective of the screen’s coverage. 1g/ Armour Piercing Ordinance While I can accept that capped AP rounds have a slightly greater chance of bouncing from a target rather than a partial or full penetration, witnessing salvo after salvo of 16” super heavy APCBC rounds bounce off light cruisers with armour thicknesses in the 50mm range is a bit too much to swallow. The way AP rounds are currently “weighted” in the scripting, it’s bordering on pointless having them as they bounce more reliably than tennis balls. H.E. rounds are a more reliable way of dealing with a target, irrespective of what the target is. Strangely, those same H.E, rounds have a better record of penetrating both deck and belt armour too. 1h/ A.I. Tactics Invariably, whenever an A.I. fleet loses its capitol ships, the supporting vessels revert to milling around in circles, literally chasing their own tails rather than trying to press home their own attacks. From a gameplay perspective, once you find the range and auto-targeting finally makes its mind up which headless chicken it wants to target, the result is a turkey shoot. 1i/ Spotting Distances It’s increasingly frustrating to see the A.I. spot and engage my fleet long before I can return fire. Strangely, this happens irrespective of the ship classes involved. I was under the impression that the huge expense involved in giving a battleship the best fore and rear towers gave them the spotting advantage, but the A.I. demonstrates that even its destroyers can sneak in close enough to launch a torpedo attack from 8km without being spotted. Even with RADAR, although the ranges change, this disparity in spotting continues to favour the A.I. 1j/ Battle Locations When I have half my fleet invading Thailand, the other half attacking Southern China, it came as a bit of a surprise to find one of my taskforces engaged in battle just north of the Canary Islands. Yes, I want to engage and defeat belligerent fleets, but to engage them, being in the same geographic locality is a fundamental requirement. 1k/ Utterly Pointless Engagements Two types of pointless engagements, both similar. The A.I. has total control over engagements, plucking ships indiscriminately from port, plucking task forces from one ocean to have them fight half way around the globe from where they currently are. Occasionally the player gets the choice to withdraw without engaging, with a fifty/fifty chance of success. The pointless engagements both follow the same pattern; lighter but faster ships forced to engage heavier but slower opponents. Prior to engagement, the player has no chance to disengage and yet, when battle starts, simply retreating generates successful disengagement. The A.I. uses this same escape too, generating battles between a handful of CL’s and DD’s against a battle fleet, withdrawing successfully without ever being spotted, much less shelled. The only result from both engagements is frustration over utterly wasted time. 1l/ Unexplained Damage A Task Force just one month out of Plymouth England is mysteriously engaged by an A.I. Task Force just of St Johns, Newfoundland. They successfully disengage, causing the A.I. ships slight damage while receiving none themselves. Sure as hell, the very next turn, while still mid-Atlantic, “The Previous Fight is Not Over,” and a tiny fragment of that Task Force is re-engaged by the same opposing fleet, only this time, each of my ships has sustained about 10% damage going into the engagement. Where did the damage come from? 2/ Campaign 2a/ Task Forces When at sea, a Task Force has a circle projected around it, the size of circle varying according to the potential offensive capability of the forces composition. In practice, it’s impossible to engage an AI task force as the scripting has given this circle attributes of invulnerability utterly disproportionate to its force composition when compared to the attributes of the task force trying to engage it. This results in a force comprising a single light cruiser and a destroyer being able to blockade multiple entire fleets, and yet, the reverse isn’t true. Circles projected around player task forces are completely ignored by the AI, it’s task forces being able to pass through as if there was nothing there to obstruct it. A more frequent example of how utterly ridiculous this circle is occurs when actively trying to hunt submarines; they simply can’t be engaged unless the A.I. initialises the contact. 2b/ Conquest Why list the required tonnage for conquest as one value, when the actual amount required can be in excess of 10x that to be assured success? In late game, the listed required tonnage is, frankly, ridiculous; requiring in excess of eight million tons to be assured successful conquest of relatively unimportant provinces is absurd. Why not simply list the required value from the outset? Given that task force size is restricted by their crew count, the number of task forces required means it can take half a year to move them away from a conquered province because it’s physically impossible to select them when their icons are all stacked on top of each other. 2c/ Auto resolve Can someone explain to me exactly how a single destroyer attacking a 400,000 ton fleet succeeds in putting that entire fleet in for repair for periods up to 12 months while suffering only heavy damage itself? Under battle conditions, at least 6 vessels in that fleet could sink that destroyer with a single hit long before the destroyers own weapons are within range, assuming the AI doesn’t have the destroyer simply turn tail and run, so why the disproportionate damage? Are they armed with Harpoon missiles? 2d/ Special Missions As things are currently, any ship in port with a Sea Control status is fair game when it comes to the A.I. flinging them to lord knows where on the pretext of doing something. Evidently whoever thought this was a good idea has no concept of command and control. Captains abandoning a fleet to pursue some hair-brained scheme, usually against suicidal odds, crippling their fleet in the process would be court martialled, facing charges of either gross dereliction of duty or piracy. While I’m not against the concept of Special Missions, the way they’re currently forced down the throat of a player is, frankly, irritating in the extreme. If a players fleet is of a respectable size, the only way they have of ensuring they control their fleet is to spend a half hour selecting each and every ship in the fleet and changing its status to Defend. With a fleet in excess of 500 hulls, by the time I’ve done this, I’m losing the will to live and the last thing I’m interested in is chasing down a convoy. Special Missions CAN be an interesting addition to the game if they’re offered as a choice, giving a player the control to allocate proportionate assets to execute that mission. 2e/ Convoys Prior to the games’ release on Steam, convoys weren’t an exercise in clicking Auto Resolve, but had escorting vessels that either had to be engaged/chased away or could defend the convoy. In order to facilitate this, a player should have the responsibility of keeping a pool of vessels available for use in convoy escort. This would extend the useful life of older hulls that might not be at the cutting edge of available tech, but are still capable. 2f/ Task Force Merging In the early stages of the game, in order to provide roughly equal geographic coverage, often times, Task Force strength falls significantly below the max Task Force Crew limit. When multiple Task Forces are deployed for Naval Invasion purposes, invariably the AI chooses to lump nearby Task Forces together, treating them as one, creating a logistic nightmare when it comes to disengaging or redeployment. There needs to be a way to lock down Task Force composition to prevent unwanted merging. 2g/ Main Map Task Force Icon Scale To ensure successful Naval Invasion, a player *N.B. the A.I. isn’t subject to the same requirement* needs to deploy multiple Task Forces, compressing them into a tight enough area for their mass to count toward the success or failure of the invasion. To facilitate proper control over each task force, their icon size should scale down as a player zooms in on the map so that the icons don’t overlap each other. 2h/ Refueling In the age of steam, fuel is as critical as wind was during the age of sail which is why “friendly ports” overseas were critical for both mercantile and naval fleets. Those overseas ports would be developed to accommodate whatever the fleet might require, within reason. Granted, not all ports were developed equally; not every port would have heavy repair or refit facilities, but they would all be able to handle refuelling fleet expediently. it wasn’t a task that would take months to complete. And yet, in game, despite a Task Force being in a small overseas port for several months, over half that task force was still waiting to be refuelled. Currently the game prioritises refuelling ships by their tonnage rather than tending to ships with the greatest need for fuel. 2i/ Mine Fields When A.I. Task Forces sailing without mine sweeping escorts can stay in minefields with impunity, it merely highlights either how ineffective mines are as a weapon in game, or how skewed the game bias is in favour of the A.I. 2j/ The Previous Engagement Is Not Over Evidently task force integrity isn’t an issue for the A.I. when it’s struggling to generate pointless engagements, stripping away undamaged ships to throw them against grossly uneven odds. This begs the question, what caused these detached ships to become detached in the first place? Yet another example of a good idea crippled by pathetic execution. The engagement I refer to involves a pair of capitol ships, one month out of port being caught by a hostile A.I. fleet where each ship is merrily chirping its low fuel status. 3/ Politics 3a/ Rising Tensions When being provoked by another country, there needs to be another option to respond rather than the current two options of either going to war with them, or paying for a fleet you’ll need to face sometime later. More often than not, these provocations come from countries who are significantly weaker in naval strength. There should be a response appropriate to their status where their threats are simply ignored, or counter-threats issued. 3b/ Naval Invasion Why is it that a player is limited to a maximum of just six political moves against the same country per year? If I have sufficient fleet strength to deploy against multiple targets, I should be able to affect the invasion of those targets whenever there’s sufficient strength in the required area to be successful, irrespective of politics. Surely the logical limiting factor should be fleet availability, not whether some politician has left his evening suit in the cleaners. 3c/ Tension;- Fleets Affect International Tension This would be a good idea if it worked properly. Unfortunately, it becomes nonsense when fleets apparently in the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, East and West Mediterranean and Red Sea are apparently increasing tension while my entire navy is in port undergoing refit or repair. For tension to work, it should be relevant to actual fleet positions. As things are currently, it’s simply a scam based on nonsense.

what makes less sense is watching how the AI deals with invasion targets. Trying to take a port with 2 row boats, a yoghurt pot and half empty syrup tin. I've had instances when I've been able to hit that very same port the following month, and need 4 million tons to have 100% chance to succeed. Frustration is having three seriously powerful fleets blocaded in port by a pair of cruisers; my fleets can't move through their "force field" circles despite outnumbering and out gunning them by orders of magnitude. Yet we're told the AI's governed by the same rules and restrictions we are... <-- (insert sceptical cough here)

while that might be true for some smaller ports (5k tons max... seriously? that's not a port, it's barely a pier) it affected fleets sent to some larger ports too. It's details like this that seriously let the game down. Sure, logistics are a critical aspect of a campaign, but... infrastructure development runs hand in glove with that. It's damn near as frustrating as having dead time between political actions... definately as frustrating as having your own ships sunk with your own torpedoes...

Unscrew the deck caps, connect the hoses, open the gate valves and monitor the flow rate gauges... job done in a couple of hours or so per vessel when in port. So... why does it take multiple months to refuel a fleet? Months to repair damage, I can understand, but months to refuel?? Let me guess... 1930's tech = jerry cans and stirrup pumps, right?

while agreeing with most of the bugs mentioned above, I'm struggling to make sense of how invasion is supposed to benefit a player. Countries are split into provinces, and (I'd imagine) their GDP and ship building is devided proportionally between the provinces. Anyone who has invaded another of the major countries will be familiar with the AI's ability to spawn hulls at a rate that beggers belief, and that rate isn't affected in the slightest as you pluck each province off the vine, one by one... and yet... if you succeed in completely conquering... the provinces you now control don't contribute a damned thing towards your own shipbuilding. So... what happened to that capability? The result is that as you spread yourself thinner and thinner, making yourself increasingly more vulnerable while the AI continues to spawn cannon fodder at mind-numbing rates. Which begs the question... what's the point? If you put ships in to repair at a port you've just captured, it counts against your "home" shipbuilding capacity, always to the detriment of builds in progress until those damaged hulls are repaired. How can that make any sense?

flaviohc16 YOU sir... are a "steely-eyed missile man"... game changing piece of advise there

sounds like you're both over-stretching and getting your priorities wrong... irrespective of which country you choose, you won't have enough money, shipyard capacity, hull size or tech to build anything worth the weight of its rivets until mid campaign at the earliest... you gotta just accept that and suck it up. Learn to work within the limits imposed on you. Yea, I sound like I'm lecturing... sorry about that... Whatever your start budget is, right at the start of your campaign, design the biggest, baddest, most asskickin BB you can, but do it wisely... explore the guns available to you and forget about using anything that hasn't been tech-advanced beyond Mk3... Mk1's and 2's can deliver a bloody big thump, but only at point blank range... anything beyond that and all they're doing is killing fish. Once you're happy with your buttkicker, explore how many you can build of that type within your budget limits, (increase qty till the numbers turn red), then build HALF that many... you'll still need budget for suport vessels, right? When it comes to them, same principal applies until you get to DD's, then consume whatever's left in the piggy bank. Don't pin your hopes on torps, period, ever... they've been nerfed to the point that even in late campaign with the tech tree max'd, you've a better chance of getting a straight answer to a question from a politician than you have of hitting/doing actual damage with a torp. That's not saying torps don't have a purpose however. For whatever reason, the AI tends to loose its cool whenever there's a bunch of torps in the water despite its super-human ability to invariably find those pesky BB sized gaps in your torp-spread, and goes into run-away mode... That can be handy if your fleet has been optimised for max long range gunnery. You have optimised your fleet for long range gunnery, right?? Right..!! Forget about trying to do actual damage with torps and instead, use them as an "area denial" tool. Fit as many guns to your DD's as you can, and keep their smoke belching as much as possible. Fleet composition... It's ALL about delivering as much thump as you can, as quickly as you can while being on the receiving end of as little thump as practicable. So... Focus on battleships. Cruisers are handy for taking out opposing support vessels provided you optimise their ammo load for spamming HE as rapidly/accurately as possible while your BIG gun ships go after the main threat (provided you can keep pace with auto-targetting overriding your selections). More/smaller guns with good accuracy are always better than fewer/bigger guns with lousy accuracy; optimise your designs/develop your tech tree accordingly. Mk1 and 2 guns are noise-makers, period.. forget about them. Be wary of "allies" and their begging for you to build their ships. Their builds can rapidly fill your yard capacity. Sure, you can go beyond those limits, but the penalty for doing so is you create problems with the delivery chain; chit takes forever to build rather than the listed time on the actual design. Don't totally neglect allies, but don't give them all they're asking for, all the time; your yards oughta be at about 95% of capacity for as much time as possible, preferibly building YOUR ships, not somebody else's. If they're not happy with your service, they'll part company to subject some other country to their begging list. Don't sweat going over-budget for any meaningful period of time; you're the player, not some foreign NPC... what they gonna do, fire ya?? Never happens... relax... Don't be shy when it comes to scrapping vessels with out-dated hardware. Tech's constantly evolving and you can bet yer britches that the AI's gonna be hitting you with the most optimised hulls it can generate. The only time old hulls are worth keeping is when you've grown to the point where you can throw megatons around and do some conquering; at this point, it's all about tonage, but that tonage still needs to be capable of delivering useable thumpage when necessary. Provided you got your designs right to begin with, you might get about 15-20 years useable life from a BB... it's a sliding scale thereafter with DD's usually obsolete after about 5 years. If you can afford to do so, try to generate a "reserve" of small ships (CA, CL, DD) so that when your ships are hyjacked for "Missions", you can replenish from your reserve; I've learned the hard way that once the AI has its grubbies on a half dozen DD's and CL's, the only time you'll see them again is once the shooting stops, so... have spares handy. How... exactly... did the Frenchies manage to kick your butt??

put yourself in the AI's position... if you were a sad little piece of poorly coded scripting, equipped with a fleet designed by another AI that read a comic book about battleships once, then figured it can do a better job of designing these battlewagons, and tries to do so while obviously consuming substances of dubious legality, wouldn't you wanna run like hell when confronted by a significantly (hopefully) better intelligence equipped with weapons platforms that (touch wood) have a better than even chance of kickin some serious butt? I'm no chicken, but under those circumwhatzits, I'd run like the debil himself was chasin me...

sounds about right... *le cough*

stick it into a "friendly" port and under the Fleet tab, change its status to Defend. Tends to piss off the AI when it can't treat your toys as its own...

I wish it was as straight forward as just changing a ship's status. My bugbear is when a capitol ship gets beat up enough to need repair. Ya daren't detach it from a fleet to make its own way because subs, mines, ambush etc, so it's escorted to a repair port. Those escorts immediately get hijacked by the AI invariably to go play in stupid "Missions" hundreds of miles away from where they've docked, and that's the last you see of them. I've had four small fleets crippled for up to three years campaign time because their escorts are off doing something stupid month after month. Gawds it gets on my titz... If the AI wants to play with ships, surely it could build its own?

different day, different campaign... thought I'd give the French a try because up till now, I'd only suffered the AI's diabolical attempts at their ship design, n figured, they can't be that bad, surely? Turns out, granted, they're a bit... different... but certainly capable. HistoricalAccuracyMan, Thanks for the feedback... given me plenty food for thought there. You're right re what I build initially, though I try not to go toooo far overboard. The thing is, I experimented with the extremes of build cost a couple of campaigns back with Brit destroyers and found there wasn't a whole lot of difference in cost. Sure, my fleet numbers looked better, on paper at least, but when the rubber met the road, those cheap tin cans got chewed up and spat out by the opposition, where my original design has at least a fighting chance to deliver a couple of reloads of torps when called upon to do so. To date, my builds have been with minimal fuel; the theatre just isn't big enough to warrant the weight penalty, and I'm never more than 1 turn away from a friendly port for refuelling. I've kept the training budget maxed until I see Vets onboard. Re engagements, granted, initially I try to avoid them till training can start making a difference, but thereafter, I'm selective; I avoid the obvious suicide missions, try to avoid the pointless. This "mode" is my default at least until I can get the first new builds onstream. Up until today, it'd drive me nutz, the way the AI cherry picks my fleet for frankly insane engagements, and when over, the units involved would always show up in farthest flung ports. Education happens however; current campaign's turning out to be very different... I donno, maybe it's the garlic..

European campaign, 1940's, and curiously, the UK has not so much as a row-boat for a navy unless I design and build it. Insert dry swallow here. So... multiple re-runs of this exact same start point later, I've established a "reasonably" balanced fleet just about big enough to split to fight the two theatres I'm expected to be in; North Sea and Med. I think in the 20+ re-starts of this campaign, I've seen the completion of just 2 battleships subsequent to those built right at the beginning; campaign always gets terminated either a month before they're completed, or the month after. That initial fleet usually comprises 2x BB's, 4xBC's built on the biggest CA hull (36k ton) and about a half dozen DD's on the Flotilla Leader hull. I've learned the hard way that to have a hope in hell of being competitive, I need to keep crew training max'd, keep transports budget max'd, invariably research is a waste of money; campaign always terminates long before anything comes to maturity. So... those first couple of campaign years, I scrape, I struggle, I pick my fights carefully while the budget's wasted on the next batch of capitol ships I never get the chance to use, and building as many DD's as I can to try providing convoy escorts. Can't think why I bother with that; I don't recall ever defending a convoy with one of my own DD's riding shotgun, invariably it's either French or Italian boats the AI has created to be nothing better than VP pinata's for the opposition. Anyway... Try as I might, I can't figure where exactly I'm going wrong. I've zero control over Transport losses, so I do what little I can there With capitol ship engagements, I back out of the suicide missions unless there's a convoy to defend. I keep training budget max'd to have any kind of hope of hitting anything at ranges above point blank. My latest campaign failure results as follows Naval Prestige 16.6 Duration 2 years 2 months End Reason;- low victory points V's German Empire;- Stalemate V's Austro Hungarian Empire;- minor victory Ships Built;- 2x BB, 4x BC, 26x DD (all but 20 of the DD's built at start) Under Construction;- 2xBB, 6x BC, 6x DD Ships Lost;- Me- 1xDD Enemy- 2xBB, 1xBC, 8xCA, 6xCL, 5xDD Crew Lost;- Me- 1539 Enemy- 25297 Transports Lost;- Me- 48 Enemy- 35 I couldn't read the final VP count, but the month prior I'd something like 15k v's 7.5k, which baffles me, given the end reason being low VP's So... guys... I'm popping red flares here; where exactly am I going wrong? What am I doing with my tiny fleets that's so bad that warrants a forced restart just when I'm on the cusp of turning the corner and going from defensive to offensive? I nurse my budget like any typical Scot... aye, we're a canny bunch; can't remember when last I got spanked for going over-budget. On the plus side, I'm getting pretty damned good at creating designs that can take a whopping and keep on tickin' while delivering some serious ass-whoppage

Ohhhhhhh I got this beat... can totally empathise btw... so my campaign's in Europe, very early stages, and all I'm trying to do is transit a pair of capitol ships from where they've completed repairs to where I stage my fleet (from Hull to Rosyth). They never get there without getting pounced on by the AI. While the main map shows them in transit between ports, suddenly those very same ships (1xBB and 1x BC/CA) magically appear in the Baltic, offering to engage a small force there. I know it's those exact same ships because I only have 1xBB in theatre (other's in the Med)... Whoever coded that part of the AI was definitely on some rather dubious substances.