Panzergraf

Cutting the size of army forces in occupied territories makes some sense, but has also resulted in massively increased naval budgets. I went from a monthly balance of roughly 0 (+/- depending on number of ships at sea) to almost a billion +. More money than I can spend as shipyard capacity was also reduced with occupied territories no longer counting towards the total. I think shipyards in occupied territories should still count at least a little bit towards your total capacity.

I'm still a bit bothered by the inconsistent application of Unrest from the different types of invasions. There are three types of invasions in the game, all of them affecting Unrest differently depending on result: Naval Invasion (VS Major power) Success: -10 unrest Fail: +10 unrest (exact Unrest ammount will differ based on your government type, but I believe +/-10 is the baseline) This is fine, and as expected. You succeed, and your people are happy. You fail, and your people are unhappy that there are so many dead young men on a beach somewhere. Conquest Battle (i.e. a Naval Invasion VS Ungoverned or Minor Power) Success: Nothing? Fail: +10 unrest So with conquests you get +10 unrest if you fail, just like with a Naval Invasion. That's OK, fine by me. But your unrest does not go down if you succeed. This makes Conquests extremely risky in peace time where you have no enemy ships to sink to decrease Unrest. With, on average, a 50% success rate, half the Conquest battles you engage in will add unrest. Major Offensive (i.e. Army work VS Major Power, Minor Power, or Ungoverned) Success: +10 unrest Fail: Nothing? I get that the people living there would be unhappy with being invaded, but surely if you pull it off the population at home should be happy? I don't understand why this one punishes success. Especially as you have no control over when and where the army attacks. Again, when you're fighting a nation with a large navy, none of this is a problem, and you barely notice it at all, as defeating enemy fleets remove a lot of unrest. But in peace time or more low intensity warfare VS a country with no surface fleet? It becomes a big problem. I'd like to see this made consistent, preferably -10 for success and +10 for failure for all three. And ideally add some more events or something that decrease Unrest during peace time?

The "Range Found" bonus is supposed to represent that, yes. And it typically sits at around +200-400% or something. Which gives you reasonable accuracy after the aiming and ranging process has been completed. But when that 2900% bonus kicks in, you get levels of accuracy a Harpoon missile would get jealous at. And it sticks for a while too even if you/your target perform some wild maneuvers. I don't know exactly what causes this sudden accuracy bonus either. It just suddenly appears some times, and then goes away by itself after a short while. Maybe it's actually working as intended, but that still feels strange to me.

Then that's inconsistent. When a Naval Invasion is successful (against another major power that is) your Unrest goes down. Why is the conquered population OK with being invaded by sea, and not by land? And when a Naval Conquest (against Ungoverned) is successful, Unrest doesn't change at all. However, it goes up when unsuccessful (as expected). I would just like to see it consistently applied, either: Success: Unrest goes down Fail: Unrest goes up Or the other way around.

It's happening more often now that the Nationalist party won the election, I'm not sure if that's by design or just random chance, but if by design then that's a pretty cool bit of flavor. However, successful Army Invasions still add Unrest, for some unknown reason. Shouldn't a successful invasion decrease Unrest instead? This is the case when invading regions held by enemy major powers while at war too, but it's more problematic when it happenes in peace time VS Ungoverned territories, as you have no enemy ships to sink to reliably decrease your unrest level. To me this seems unintended.

I get that too, but it's better with the recent patch than it was previously. Also, related to Conquest missions: While a conquest defeat adds Unrest (like a regular naval invasion), a Victory does not decrease Unrest. This makes Conquests VERY risky in peace time where you have no enemy fleets to beat up to remove Unrest... Not sure if this is intentional, or an oversight. Also it seems the Army very rarely (if ever?) tries to conquer ungoverned territories, even if I have army forces garrissoned in bordering regions.

On some turns, after doing the mandatory pop-up battles, I get no notifications of transport losses. This seems to happen mostly if I save and exit the game before all battles are done (which I some times have to do if there are a lot of battles - I can't always keep playing for hours in one sitting), and then come back the next day to play the rest. I'd like to see the Log be improved, with multiple tabs that could be scrolled through: Battles, Transport Losses, Mine Damage, Research, Ships Built/Repaired/Refit/Scrapped, and so on. Currently the Log is quite useless as it fills up with too much info and you can't scroll through it.

0% chance to hit almost looks like the old target lock aiming bug, but I haven't seen it in 1.3.9.1 myself, or any of the later 1.3.9rx patches for that matter. But other than that, it looks like you're shooting HE. AP is the go-to if you want flooding. Also Mk1 20" guns are really not very good, in my experience. I still like building at least one Super BB late campaign with 20.9" guns, just to have the ship with the biggest guns ever (I pretend it gives me a propaganda bonus...). But overall I'd take 13.8" over 20.9" any day of the week. Because with longer barrels (and mk4 or 5 guns) and capped II, they punch hole after hole through main betls at close range (like the 7km you were fighting at) and cause a lot of flooding.

I would also like to see something related to this. So for example, before every election journalists could ask you which party you support. If the player has a lot of Naval Prestige, he is likely a big national hero. More prestige = more people swayed by player opinion. Of course that could come with some Unrest too, as a lot of people would likely not approve of the "hero admiral" pushing political opinions on the public (so there might be an option to not publically support either party, which could reduce unrest, too).

Can you please reduce or just remove the "fog effect" from overcast weather? I'm fine with weather reducing in-game spotting ranges, but making it so the player has a hard time seeing what's going on is too much in my opinion. It just adds frustration. Plus it looks ugly. A gray sky box would be enough to visually tell the player that the weather isn't perfect.

Yeah, you also need a fleet of 100k tons in the relevant sea reagion to start an invasion (even if the invasion itself might not require all that tonnage). For that purpose I wish the borders between sea regions were also drawn up on the map, it's not always easy to know where one ocean ends and another begins.

Hi! The "invade" stance on fleets doesn't actually cause invasions, it just makes your ships more aggressive towards enemy transports, and less defensive towards your own. To invade a major nation you are at war with, select "naval invasion" from the politics tab. To invade a minor nation, you just have to wait for a popup at the start of a turn, where your government has decided they need to be invaded... Sadly there's no way to force it. Japan does start with Korea under control if you go with a campaign starting year of 1910 though - and possibly 1900 as well, though I'm not sure.

Yeah, the 1950 end date could come with an option to keep playing, similar to the Total War games.

Britain hopes building more battleships will stimulate their economy. A bold strategy, I'm sure it will work. They had been at -20% annual GDP growth for years at this point, and it actually improved to -10% when they went to war with me. With -47 billion in the bank, I wonder why they haven't dissolved yet...

Or let the player choose when generating a campaign, both a start and end year? So if a player chooses, he can start in 1890 and end in 1950, or start in 1890 and end in 1900, or 1900-1920, or whatever. I don't think it would be too hard to implement.

Could this happen naturally if the player was playing a long campaign (for example starting year 1890) and after many decades the AI was just really really behind in technology?

Better smoke reports, please. I want to know which of my ships is spotting the smoke. North of Ship A might be North-East of Ship B If there are more smoke on the horizon, I want to know. Not just the closest. Give me some sort of visual clue from each ship, similar to RDF but more vague. Hunting convoys pre-RDF is such a pain.

I get that insane range found bonus from time to time too. I believe it's a bug because of how it jumps from a reasonable 200-something% to at least 1500% and some times close to 3000%, with accuracy some times jumping up to almost 90%, and then after a few salvos it's back down to the regular 2-300% and accuracy around 10% as you would expect. The range found bonus is fine when working as intended, it's just when it jumps to 10x what it should be that it becomes a bit silly.

Task force sizes are limited by total crew numbers, so you won't get 43 BB's in one battle. But I had it happen back in 1.08 or something, before task force sizes were limited. Lots of fun.

Seems minors will build ships designed by majors, including the player nation. I often see them building ships with names obviously belonging to major nations (for example Russia or Japan). I've seen minors I've not been allied with build my designs too, and ended up facing them when that minor nation was allied with an enemy major nation. Not sure if it's bugged or just how things work.

AI splits its fleet into too many tiny task forces currently, making it very hard to get those large satisfying battles. Moreover, they spread the ships out too much and don't even bother with having any kind of home fleet. I think it would be better if the AI tried to have at least some max limit task forces. If you want big reparations with lots of territory, you often need to make use of naval invasions to make the wars last longer so you can farm more victory points. Especially later on in the campaign, where the value of each territory is much higher. 200-300k VP should be the goal.

Would it be possible to let us take transports as war reparations? It was done in real life, and would be useful after a war where the enemy has decimated your transport fleet.

Previously in my German campaign (in version 1.3.4) when I invaded Eastern England, the British navy sent what they had left in the pacific home to try and defend, and we had a nice big battle. All good. It could have been just a coincidence, but the way they acted seemed to make sense to me. Now, currently in the campaign (1.3.8r) when I invaded Wales, they wanted nothing to do with it. They have a 200 ship navy, and every new ship they build gets sent to the pacific. They have nothing around their home islands, even as I'm invading them. To me that doesn't make a lot of sense. I think protecting their starting regions should be the number one priority of the AI - with a 200 ship navy they should be able to spare at least a few dozen to act as a home fleet. "We will fight them on the beaches... in Thailand, where the weather is nicer." -Leo Churchill (probably)

Refit: Click "View" on one of your ship designs in the Ship Design tab, along the top of the screen is a Wrench-like icon. Click it, you are now designing a refit-design. Once done, save it. Back into your Ship Design-tab, you now have a refit available, click it and select which ships of that class you want to have refit. Only ships that are in port and not being repaired can be refit. I hope that made sense. Selling old ships: You can do that. Mothball the old ships you want to sell (mothball = move the Crew slider to 0 in the fleet tab), and next turn one of your allies might offer to buy it. The price they offer to pay is usually around half of the original value. Some times more, some times less.

Crew pool is how many crew they have to spare, not in ships. So with that many ships in service it makes sense for them to not have that many left over. It does mean they will have problems crewing any new ships they build though, and if they have that many in service it typically also means they're not scrapping much and a large part of their navy is horribly outdated. Which is a problem. Doing them a "favor" by sinking a lot of ships in battle (not hard, especially if their ships are old and outdated) does help though.