>>>Combat Feedback<<<

[AnonymousPepper]

Even when you get close, the secondary performance is just awful.

Like, for an experiment, I went into Modern Battleship, gave it a pair of single 457s, and then filled up the rest of the ship with as many 203s, 155s, and 57s as I could cram on, in that order. Grabbed all the ROF and accuracy buffs, slapped on as much armor as I could, and then loaded up Superheavy Lyddite 2 for maximum HE firestarter memes.

My two 457s did almost all the damage and killing, despite having somewhere in the ballpark of 40-50ish 203 barrels. It was beyond stupid. They just could not hit the broad side of a barn from the inside, while the 457s acted like freaking directed energy weapons.

What I would expect is that the 457s would blow nice big chunks out of the enemy battleships, while struggling to land solid hits on the DDs, and my 203s should just shred the DDs outright, burn the CAs to the ground, and do good chip fire damage to the BBs, thanks to an absolute barrage of the current best firestarting combo in the game.

I get that they went for the realism bit with 203s being no more accurate than 457s, but unfortunately while I think that's a good idea in theory and done with the best of intentions, it's not good from a gameplay perspective, because all it does is encourage you to just load up on the biggest guns you can get and drop everything else to save weight and dosh. Either the accuracy calcs against small targets needs a look from both sides, or guns need to get better payoff from better loading systems the smaller they get, or both. I mean, for goodness' sakes, the Des Moines was good for something like 10RPM from its autoloading 203s.

As a side note, I'm also thinking fire as a whole needs to be buffed. Flooding seems fine (skimping on bulkheads will get you instagibbed against torps), but if you haven't invested in good bulkheads at least somewhat, and especially if you nuked them to save weight, fire should absolutely spread a lot and potentially touch off magazine explosions. And do a lot more structure damage, if it's not just on the deck. Fixing the armor calcs might help some, but I can't help but wonder if fires themselves need a second look; fires on ships have historically been just about the most terrifying circumstance imaginable for most of naval history, but here they just seem like a cute little UI icon most of the time.

Edited November 6, 2019 by AnonymousPepper

[Lobokai]

If kitted out correctly and optimizing for them, the bigger secondaries are actually quite lethal 

[SoyIsNotMilk]

Hi devs!

First of all, great game so far, and it has so much potential!

However, the accuracy and aiming system has been frustrating at times.  It seems to be based on probabilities, with an impressive amount of factors generating a final accuracy percentage, resulting in your shells landing at random in a certain sized circle around the target.  This can be very frustrating at short ranges, especially when the turrets of your guns seem to turn away from their target specifically to shoot in front or behind it.

I had the thought that a simple change could be made to improve the accuracy and aiming system and make it feel more deliberate and less random:

Instead of the shells landing inside of a circle around the target, based on an accuracy percentage, the range finder on your ship could provide range, course, and speed estimates with a certain percentage of error depending on your base accuracy and long range accuracy numbers.  Each type of gun would have a natural spread, representing their innate accuracy.  The guns would then fire at the point of the water where the target is predicted to be after shell flight time is taken into account.  A bonus to the accuracy of your rangefinder could also gradually increase, the longer the target maintains the same course and speed.

So the overall accuracy of your gunnery would depend on your base accuracy and long range accuracy numbers, the natural spread of your guns, whether or not the target maintains its course and speed, plus the aforementioned impressive amount of factors already implemented.

I figure a change like this would be fairly simple to implement since it would not change the probabilistic nature of the system, it would just change what is randomised. 

Cheers

Edited November 6, 2019 by SoyIsNotMilk

[SoyIsNotMilk]

Hi devs!

Would it be possible to add little marker symbols above torpedoes once they get spotted by your tower?  They are very easy to miss currently, especially if you are managing multiple vessels.

Cheers

[Hellstrike]

8 hours ago, Finnwolf88 said:

Its a bug that can be fixed by switching targets for a while. 

How do you switch targets in a mission with only one hostile ship?

[Quinte]

I'm quite confused as to what "Barbette destroyed" actually means. It sounds to me like if a barbette is destroyed, the turret mounted in it should no longer be able to function, yet in game that's not the case. Is that intended?

[Nick Thomadis]

10 hours ago, Quinte said:

I'm quite confused as to what "Barbette destroyed" actually means. It sounds to me like if a barbette is destroyed, the turret mounted in it should no longer be able to function, yet in game that's not the case. Is that intended?

This is going to be addressed in next patch. The gun and barbette will be damaged in sync.

[HusariuS]

41 minutes ago, Nick Thomadis said:

This is going to be addressed in next patch. The gun and barbette will be damaged in sync.

Also try to increase the number of places for barbettes, we should be able to place them in 80% of hull spaces.

In addition, you could add second variant of medium barbette, but this one is much higher (look > Yamato 155mm guns above 460mm main guns).

[Steeltrap]

 

21 hours ago, SoyIsNotMilk said:

Hi devs!

Would it be possible to add little marker symbols above torpedoes once they get spotted by your tower?  They are very easy to miss currently, especially if you are managing multiple vessels.

Cheers

 

On 11/6/2019 at 11:54 AM, Steeltrap said:

if a torpedo is spotted there ought to be a dirty great big warning message splashed on the screen. Warships had people on duty 24 x 7 whose job was to watch for danger. Torpedoes were the most dangerous single threat any warship throughout WW2 could experience, regardless of the size of the warship. As soon as a torpedo was spotted, or indeed even if it was just a case of "it might be a torp but I'm not 100% certain", those lookouts would immediately alert the bridge and whomever else relevant. Lookouts calling out for what proved to be false alarms happened quite a bit earlier in the war with inexperienced crews, but the view was always it's better to react to something that proves to be false than have the lookouts want to be absolutely sure and thus call out when it's about 100m away, lol.

 

On 11/6/2019 at 11:54 AM, Steeltrap said:

Ideally I'd like to get a bit funky and initially just identify "a patch of ocean" in which you are alerted there are torps heading in a general direction, as that's more or less what you got until such time as the bridge crew could see them directly. Of course they would react immediately to the perceived threat based on their ship's handling characteristics, but often weren't able to see the precise tracks until they'd already started their initial evasion steps. The individual torps could be rendered once they got within a subset of the initial spotting range.

Yes, agree. Torpedoes ought very much to be front of mind for any captain once a report of them is made, so the rendering of them on screen ought to reflect that somehow.

[Steeltrap]

22 hours ago, Lobokai said:

If kitted out correctly and optimizing for them, the bigger secondaries are actually quite lethal 

Yes, I think we keep coming back to the issue of the main guns being so effective against everything they somewhat overshadow what the secondaries might do.

I suspect if the devs introduce the ability to select targets for each battery, or at least for main and secondary/casemate separately, that might alter to a degree. Indeed I find the auto target select will often use the main guns on the heaviest target while allocating the secondary/casemate guns to closer targets more likely to be hit and damaged by them.

Regardless, there remains the issue with the more modern tech BBs swatting DDs at 6km with their 18" that the massed 6" secondaries don't seem to be able to hit at all.

Edited November 7, 2019 by Steeltrap

[AnonymousPepper]

It's not just how good large main battery guns are. Small guns really do feel absolutely worthless more because their accuracy is absolute garbage at any range regardless of tech level, and the effects of fire are very, very weak.

[Steeltrap]

Just now, AnonymousPepper said:

It's not just how good large main battery guns are. Small guns really do feel absolutely worthless more because their accuracy is absolute garbage at any range regardless of tech level, and the effects of fire are very, very weak.

I did the "Armed Convoy" mission again (it's fun and I like trying different designs) and my BC sank most of the transports using only its secondary/tertiary armament while its main guns engaged warships. I more or less controlled navigation and sometimes shell selection but otherwise let the AI choose targets.

You DO often have to get pretty close, within perhaps 4.5km, for 6" secondaries to hit CLs reliably, but they will tend to rip up lightly armoured targets.

IMO fires ought not be exaggerated; if they're not burning everything to the waterline then perhaps people might have to consider AP performance more, which is how things ought to be. They do give "damage instability" penalties for the ship firing, they do damage things, and they can destroy them by eroding structure.

The damage model generally still has some issues of balance, however, so it's somewhat tricky to understand quite where things will land.

Magazine losses through fires were all but unheard of once ships were being built with the ability to flood them (I can't think of any off the top of my head). A flash fire is a different matter, but that's a phenomenon associated with the immediate effects of a shell penetration, not an accumulated period of fire.

I do wonder if part of the problem is HE can be more effective by far than it ought to be, AP somewhat unreliable, and so people are using HE a lot but not happy their target seems to be a huge bonfire but isn't sinking.

Guess we'll have to wait to see if and what changes to next update brings for damage models and shell performances.

Cheers

 

 

[AnonymousPepper]

I mean, yeah, AP is poor except with very, very large guns, but I do think that a ship shouldn't be able to be on fire in 3/4 of its segments and still be functioning, given how hard it is to set fires with the bad accuracy of small-caliber guns.

[The Fundamentalist]

On 10/20/2019 at 11:09 AM, Fishyfish said:

Noob question: Why does base accuracy increase when your warship is going at greater speeds?

because the forward momentum of the ship decreases the rolling effect induced by waves. There should be a massive penalty for getting too slow or stopping altogether on the open ocean, as you pretty much forfeit your structural integrity to the whim of the sea. Hopefully when the crew is added, they will add this as a modifier to efficiency. 

Quote

Oh please don't be like War Thunder, oh god.

No ship historically was 'lost' due to crew loss.

Ships blew up/burnt up/sank/capsized WAY before the crew were killed in those numbers.

IIRC some battleship in WW1 got shot the hell up and lost barely anybody, at least relatively.

War ships at sea will pretty much sink themselves without a crew to maintain them. The USS Wasp almost sank off the coast of Libya back in 2016 because a faulty valve burst in the well deck, for instance. You're correct, ships didn't become floating tombs that were basically adrift in the sea if they took major casualties— they basically just sank because they no longer had the crew necessary to keep firefighting equipment and bilge pumps going or because the equipment itself was damaged and unusable. While War Thunder takes it to a stupid extreme, there are plenty of historical examples of crews being overwhelmed by fires or flooding because of battle casualties or other byproducts of the damage itself, such as poisonous gas from fires. 

What the game needs is a dynamic damage system that is split between crew available to use damage-mitigating equipment (pumps, firefighting, bulkhead repair), the equipment itself, hull structure and hull integrity, which I'm sure is what's coming in the future. Right now there's merely the equipment (automatic), structure (bulkheads, anti-flood, ect.), and integrity (armor, armor quality), so it makes sense that there's a huge disparity. 

Hopefully in the campaign they add a mechanic to replicate fleet maintenance that adversely affects structure or integrity and crew morale/training. Historically this was typically reliant on the financial security and political factors of the reigning government, dependent on economic prosperity and domestic satisfaction. Furthermore, use of the ship at sea would degrade crew efficiency over time, especially after battle casualties. The Japanese and German navies in particular suffered horribly towards the end of WWII because of their crew loss rates, which correspondingly affected their ships' ability to conduct damage control operations. Hopefully the ability to recover the crew of sunken vessels will impact strategic readiness and naval effectiveness over time as well. 

 

[Nereng]

What I find most frustrating is the inability to tell the secondary guns what to shoot at. I usually load up the casemats with 7-8in guns and these will do a good job with DDs and LCs that come too close... unless a BB is within their range. Then they'll merrily shoot at that with a 1% chance of hitting and doing no damage, completely ignoring the smaller targets that they could actually hurt. It is really frustrating. Please give us a means to control their priorities!

[Steeltrap]

4 hours ago, Nereng said:

What I find most frustrating is the inability to tell the secondary guns what to shoot at. I usually load up the casemats with 7-8in guns and these will do a good job with DDs and LCs that come too close... unless a BB is within their range. Then they'll merrily shoot at that with a 1% chance of hitting and doing no damage, completely ignoring the smaller targets that they could actually hurt. It is really frustrating. Please give us a means to control their priorities!

Agree, absolutely has to be done.

My own experience is a little different, however. If I leave the target selection to the AI, it tends to use the secondary guns against the target it considers it most likely can affect.

I've done some odd builds to test that, including a BC in the Convoy Attack with a main gun turret fore and aft (you have to) and then a mix of things like 8", 6" and even 4" secondaries, plus the 2" that are sprinkled all over the towers.

Assuming I had identified all the ships, the main guns would tend to go for CAs first, BBs second, but also shift to CLs if they got to a range the AI clearly felt was "too close". The 8" tended to do the same, but was more likely to shift to the CL/DD targets before the main guns did.

The 6" and below tended to work the other way, firing at the targets they clearly felt they were most likely to hurt. They also tend to be the targets they most likely would hit, because I try to keep range on the enemy's biggest guns while dealing with smaller targets.

Trouble is once you select a target manually, it forces ALL your guns to shoot at it if that target is in range. They will only switch if that target sinks, gets out of a specific gun's range, or on occasion if something gets crazily close.

At present I work around this by setting my guns to "save" mode as that stops guns shooting at targets for which their hit rate is around 10% or lower. Stops the smaller guns wasting their time on those useless 1-3% hit rate targets. Clearly the AI doesn't do that as I've had battles where I've seen some of their guns run out of ammo.

At the very least we ought to be able to designate primary and secondary targets, as you said.

Ideally it would be nice if we could designate separate targets AND hit rates for all the different calibres, although I can understand if the devs think that's asking too much.

[Steeltrap]

4 hours ago, The Fundamentalist said:

What the game needs is a dynamic damage system that is split between crew available to use damage-mitigating equipment (pumps, firefighting, bulkhead repair), the equipment itself, hull structure and hull integrity, which I'm sure is what's coming in the future. Right now there's merely the equipment (automatic), structure (bulkheads, anti-flood, ect.), and integrity (armor, armor quality), so it makes sense that there's a huge disparity. 

I've mentioned it before that the damage model from "Great Naval Battles of the North Atlantic: 1939-43" is by far the best I've seen, and that was released in 1992 (!!).

Can't remember exactly, but I think each ship had upper deck (guns and superstructure) and hull modelled, split into compartments that also included vital machinery of different types (engines, boilers, magazines etc). You could turn on a ''shell tracker' and if you hit or were hit you'd watch the progress of the shell as it went into the structure, sometimes through a few compartments, before exploding. That could cause fires and/or flooding. plus damage those vital things. You had damage control resources that could do firefighting and repairs (including shoring up) and you allocated them to compartments as you saw fit. You also had pump resources, but importantly you could counter flood (and flood magazines individually) as stability was modelled and, as was found in reality, managing stability in the 10 minutes immediately following flooding was the most important thing.

Obviously the larger the ship the more of the resources you had.

Amazing system, but manageable because you weren't ever really dealing with large numbers of ships.

[Steeltrap]

Has anyone noticed that "ammo explosions" don't seem to do anything to the available ammo in those cases where the ship survives it?

Presumably dealing with the secondary/tertiary calibre munitions (seen it happen on transports).

Doesn't even seem to KO the guns themselves, as they seem to be treated as discrete hit boxes.

[DeiLwynnA]

i send in a formation of 3 destroyers, with torpedo firing turned off, towards enemy battleships, lead ship takes enough damage to pass on the lead ship role to next ship in line, torpedo firing setting is reset to normal... the destroyers prematurely fires their torpedoes... all torpedoes miss because well.. the ai literally reacts instantly to them... now i have to wait until they reload and by that time they have sunk 2 of my 3 destroyers.

all those firing settings SHOULD be saved in the formation itself, not just that one lead ship, same should go for when you detach a ship from a formation; it should retain the settings from the formation it was detached from

[Lobokai]

16 hours ago, Nereng said:

What I find most frustrating is the inability to tell the secondary guns what to shoot at. I usually load up the casemats with 7-8in guns and these will do a good job with DDs and LCs that come too close... unless a BB is within their range. Then they'll merrily shoot at that with a 1% chance of hitting and doing no damage, completely ignoring the smaller targets that they could actually hurt. It is really frustrating. Please give us a means to control their priorities!

I'd like to see something similar to Rebel Galaxy (the big ship one, not the Outlaw) where you tell certain mounts what to target. So in UA:D, you'd be able to set 5" to fire at DDs and lower, 8" CR and lower, all other guns at your chosen target only (or something like that).  Truthfully, just a UI choice of 3 secondary settings would be nice (like we have for formations or gunnery now)

[Steeltrap]

10 hours ago, DeiLwynnA said:

i send in a formation of 3 destroyers, with torpedo firing turned off, towards enemy battleships, lead ship takes enough damage to pass on the lead ship role to next ship in line, torpedo firing setting is reset to normal... the destroyers prematurely fires their torpedoes... all torpedoes miss because well.. the ai literally reacts instantly to them... now i have to wait until they reload and by that time they have sunk 2 of my 3 destroyers.

all those firing settings SHOULD be saved in the formation itself, not just that one lead ship, same should go for when you detach a ship from a formation; it should retain the settings from the formation it was detached from

I've found that having torpedoes set on "save" appears to have them working on a solution but not launching unless the AI thinks it's "likely" to hit (for gunnery it seems it won't fire guns until they have either 10% or perhaps 11% or greater).

When I get to a good position, I sometimes change them to "normal" so they launch right then if I don't want to get closer.

Formations are simply pretty rubbish. I don't use them at all because they can produce ridiculous behaviour no ship's captain would ever do.

[Mhtsos]

I tried the all-tech-unlock cheat in the semi-dreadnought mission for the lols/variety.

With a simple BC with good-decent towers/rangefinders/radar I and historical arrangement (3 X 2 12" + some 5") the enemy BB's accuracy is almost double.

When it had 15-17% accuracy, my guns had only 8-9%.

I use full speed, only small maneuvering/ course adjustments and no target change. The above numbers were after some time when the guns were locked.

The best part is that beyond 8Km the BB still landed multiple hits almost every second barrage.

What is happening? o.0

Cheating AI or just...works as intended?

[CaptMorg70]

32 minutes ago, Mhtsos said:

I tried the all-tech-unlock cheat in the semi-dreadnought mission for the lols/variety.

With a simple BC with good-decent towers/rangefinders/radar I and historical arrangement (3 X 2 12" + some 5") the enemy BB's accuracy is almost double.

When it had 15-17% accuracy, my guns had only 8-9%.

I use full speed, only small maneuvering/ course adjustments and no target change. The above numbers were after some time when the guns were locked.

The best part is that beyond 8Km the BB still landed multiple hits almost every second barrage.

What is happening? o.0

Cheating AI or just...works as intended?

Without seeing the specs of the ship it’s hard to know for sure why your accuracy was so much lower.

Maybe the placement of the 5” barrels effected your ship. Pitch and roll, along with smoke interference has more an effect on accuracy decline than aft/fore weight in the current build

[DeiLwynnA]

13 hours ago, Steeltrap said:

I've found that having torpedoes set on "save" appears to have them working on a solution but not launching unless the AI thinks it's "likely" to hit

this is exactly why i set it to "off", so they dont fire the torpedoes until i am close enough that i know the torpedoes will hit. with shells its not a big deal unless you are close to running out of ammo

[Accipiter]

On 11/8/2019 at 4:12 PM, DeiLwynnA said:

i send in a formation of 3 destroyers, with torpedo firing turned off, towards enemy battleships, lead ship takes enough damage to pass on the lead ship role to next ship in line, torpedo firing setting is reset to normal... the destroyers prematurely fires their torpedoes... all torpedoes miss because well.. the ai literally reacts instantly to them... now i have to wait until they reload and by that time they have sunk 2 of my 3 destroyers.

torpedo setting is NOT set to every ship in the formation but only the one currently selected, you need to set it individually on each ship.

if you select a formation and set torpedo to something other than Normal, then double click on another ship in the formation that isn't the lead ship, you'll see the torpedoes are still set on Normal. you need to double click on every ship in the formation and change it on each of them.

note that for some reason, this isn't the case when selecting AP/HE shell, which is automatically changed to every ship in the formation regardless of which one you clicked on when setting the option.

also interestingly, when you click somewhere to give a move order, regardless of which ship in the formation you had clicked on, only the lead ship will respond to that move order and the other ships in the formation will follow the lead ship as usual. BUT, if you give a rudder order using the rudder slider, then EVERY ship in the formation will switch their rudder as you imput, regardless of which ship you had selected when setting the slider. the game also doesn't highlight the one ship in the formation that you selected, and i suspect a lot of people don't even know about this and think you cannot select individually ships in a formation, and it always selects the lead ship regardless of which one you clicked on, which as i explained isn't the case.

overall formation controls are weird and unintuitive and really need to have a better interface and better AI. please, like i said a couple time, take inspiration from the Battlestations: Midway/Pacific series's formation control system, it was so simple yet so good.

Edited November 9, 2019 by Accipiter