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[RedParadize]

17 minutes ago, arkhangelsk said:

Well, the boats fought back, as did the real Germans. In fact, the real scenario had a few more things going for the Brits, such as the real Germans only having puny 50mm guns which AKD wouldn't let me call pom-poms while the computer created his with at least one 4" gun (so it could shoot back a little bit).

I think at some point you might notice you are spending most of your time trying to "dodge" the historical and simulation results. Sure we can make excuses but really it just isn't looking too good, isn't it?

Pom pom refer to the Qf-1(37mm) and Qf-2(40mm) autocanon because of their sound. So yeah, the 50mm gun is not that.

You can perceive it as me trying to dodge your "historical and simulation" results. Could I not say exactly the same?

You discarded the +-1/12 bypass argument because:

1 hour ago, arkhangelsk said:

The changes mean a lot more "real" penetrations than before, and the 1/12th little gun hits auto-bypass, even if it also happened before this hotfix, must have hurt a lot less when the hit rate was realistic than after they buffed it, which gave the battlecruiser substantially more chance to hit the destroyer at least once or twice before it died.

[RedParadize]

How did that got double posted?

Anyways, I am not dodging your argument. I just don't agree with them.

Edited December 28, 2019 by RedParadize

[Steeltrap]

I already laid out in considerable detail what the devs are dealing with and why I think the hotfix was substantial overkill, making changes to ALL the primary processes of tactical gunnery resolution instead of addressing perhaps one at a time.

IMO they'd have done better with the first hotfix addressing only those SPECIFIC concerns about accuracy of secondary guns, which were largely around crazily high "target ship size", "target high speed" and "target manoeuvre" penalties.

If they then wanted to do something about "ships being hard to hit", there were several ways to go about that. Even so, it could be a second hotfix.

And so on.

I'm surprised anyone might seriously think the hotfix wasn't overkill or really makes much sense in a game making claims to being a reasonably (with allowances for game play/fun) realistic/faithful presentation of the design, operation and combat of the 1890-1940s gunnery navies of the world.

[RedParadize]

The end result is overkill, that's for sure. The question is why?

To make it clear, I said that at the very beginning of alpha 3. This patch may have overshot. I am still uncertain of how much accuracy contribute to this. I suspect the moving target penalty, armor model, lack of citadel and the high armor bypass ratio to be the dominant factor at play here. Regardless of what accuracy end up becoming I think these factor need to be corrected. Then and only then will we be able to judge if a given target die to quick or not.

[arkhangelsk]

For your reference, let me show you how a person that feels uh, strongly, about the hotfix, reads your post. 😀

On 12/19/2019 at 9:14 PM, RedParadize said:

The accuracy buff and mechanics change is quite nice.
In big ship vs big ship, secondaries are now definitively worth their mass. Before this patch I was playing Pre-Dreadnough era with the all big guns logic, not anymore! Post 1910 secondaries are still quite good, but not as much as before. The main problem is the roll penalty you get form adding them, its huge. Considering a Battleship have few thousand tons of belt armor on  each sides its a bit extreme to get massive base accuracy penalty for a few extra tons off center.
As for smaller ship, it became really bloody at close range. I think its fair, at 2km it should be pretty deadly. But DDs battle should happen further away, specially in late game. Now we do not have late game DD hulls and bridge, DDs vs DDs have to get very close to each other to even see each other, so that may change in the future.
But one thing worry me, a DD can now relatively easily own a CA with just its gun. I do not think its due to small caliber buff. Turret still behave strangely during maneuver, they turn away from target in sharp turns. AI do pretty intensive maneuver, for DDs and CA it often it result in them not firing for a long period. I do not want to include needless detail, so I will cut this short and simply list things that I think need some improvement:1- Roll penalty is too high.
2-Belt and deck armor weight should be added to Roll penalty 3-Sharp turn make the turret turn away from target.(it should still be able to make them lose target however)  4-Penality when firing against DD is too high. Aiming penalty should be tied more closely to ship size.(to target signature maybe? that too need to get better balanced)  5-AI handling of DDs need to be tweaked so that they stay more far, specially in late era. (Atm all ship turn around their target, regardless of the other foe in the area)
Now I am of the opinion that this patch may have overshot a bit, but its hard to judge unless the problem mentioned get addressed. I think once these are fixed accuracy could be nerfed a bit as these change will make small caliber even better.

You might have meant for other places to be given more weight, but readers don't always give emphasis to the same places as the writer.

The speed and armor models have been there since Alpha-2. The citadel and 1/12th problem are either new (in which case a revert will kill them as well) or have their "true significance" revealed in this hotfix. Since the most obvious change in the hotfix is the small caliber buff, that would be a clear first target, but you seem to really want to preserve the accuracy change despite its manifest implausibility and lack of historical substantiation.

[RedParadize]

So this is how you read my text. Well that explain allot.

[arkhangelsk]

8 minutes ago, RedParadize said:

So this is how you read my text. Well that explain allot.

I hope it does. I'm sure all of us will return to more balanced reading comprehension once this problem gets solved.

1 hour ago, Steeltrap said:

IMO they'd have done better with the first hotfix addressing only those SPECIFIC concerns about accuracy of secondary guns, which were largely around crazily high "target ship size", "target high speed" and "target manoeuvre" penalties.

I agree with the basic concept, though I won't begrudge them if they just adjusted the 1000m zone first, and perhaps just changed the curve so the % modifier for 35 knots becomes the modifier for 45 knots (curve flattening) and then observed the splashes before continuing.

[RedParadize]

@arkhangelsk Well, you will have a bumpy ride over the next 6 month. This alpha, not the end product, balance will go in all direction until the very end. In the main time, if I may suggest, place more emphasis on peoples arguments, because what you highlighted left out all of them.

I said this in many post, including the very post you highlighted. But let me try one last time. The reasons why I believe the short range accuracy buff was necessary are:

1- At the turn of the century, secondary battery need to be relatively effective at 5km against large ship. Not as much as big gun, but enough to justify their presence. Without this, pre-dreadnought will be built as "all big gun".

2- By ww1, destroyer was be the primary defense against torpedo run, because that's what they were design for. For that to be true, Destroyer guns need be a treat to other destroyer.

As long as these two are true, I will be happy. If they are not, the game will differ from reality substantially. Now, I do not particularly care if its done trough accuracy or else, but you can't fix both of these without effectively buffing short range accuracy at least a bit compared to Alpha 2. If, for whatever reasons, you think its not the appropriate way. It is still possible to make all target "bigger" trough Target Signature. At the end, result will be the same.

There is also the question of what to do with small secondary after WW1. AA and ground support may not be in the game, that leave little use for guns under 6" as secondary in late game. If nothing is done then Iowa tower will be better empty.

Is it easier to read?

[arkhangelsk]

Let me give my impression - you are not so much trying to line the game up with reality than trying to line it up with what naval theory blubbered, or worse what naval theory hoped would happen. Now, I don't mean to say they are stupid, but the blunt truth is, modeling techniques were darn primitive back then. Heck, until 1916 they did not even have Lanchester's Equations. So what passed for naval theory is a mix of what superficially worked (or did not fail catastrophically), very simplistic calculations, intuition and prejudice along with some conditional experiments (like firing at a dead hulk which while valuable clearly had limitations).

To show you how accurate naval theory was, let me cite from Warships 2018's article "The Battle of the River Plate: A Tactical Analysis":

Quote

 

British Tactics from the USNWCMR
With their speed advantage the British can dictate the terms of the battle. Strategically, their objective is to sink Graf Spee, or to cripple her so that she can either be intercepted by one of the eight other forces hunting for raiders, or rendered unseaworthy and interned in a neutral port.
The USNWC rules suggest that Ajax and Achilles should close to under 12,000 yards, where they can smother the German ship with a high volume of hits. They should close rapidly, to avoid a chance hit that might disable their propulsion machinery. Engaging at long range was likely to be unsuccessful, as their shells could not penetrate their opponent’s deck armour unless fired from over 21,000 yards, at which range hits would be scarce.
Exeter should engage at ranges where her guns could penetrate Graf Spee’s deck armour and place a plunging projectile in the German ship’s engineering spaces. Alternatively, she could engage at closer ranges where she could penetrate Graf Spee’s belt armour, but the shell trajectories would make a disabling engine room hit less
likely. She would also be unlikely to survive Graf Spee’s fire for long. At longer ranges, it would be a roll of the dice whether Exeter or Graf Spee would first hit the other’s propulsion machinery. With Exeter’s more rapid rate of fire, the odds of landing such a hit would be in her favour. The USNWCMR would suggest that the British ships should operate independently to complicate the German fire control, but on the same side of Graf Spee, allowing only half her secondary battery to engage.

British Tactics from CB 3011 War Game Rules
...
CB 3011 and the USNWCMR agree that Exeter was outclassed by Graf Spee at all ranges. However, they show a surprising difference in the match-up against Ajax and Achilles. At 12,000 yards and less, the USNWCMR has the Fire Effect of the light cruisers 1.5 to 3.5 times greater than CB 3011; at 13,000 yards and above CB 3011 is 3 to 35 times greater than the USNWCMR. CB 3011 expects many more hits at long range and fewer at close range than the USNWCMR, by a very wide margin.
...
Guided by these expectations, it would make sense to drive Exeter in to close range. Her rate of fire was higher than the German’s 11in, so she could expect to hit faster. The German ship would more likely blow up first. If the light cruisers engaged at 18,000 yards, CB 3011 predicts that Graf Spee would be destroyed in 30 minutes (21 minutes if fire from Exeter is taken into account). In the rules manoeuvring did not affect the hit rate; that might have been the conclusion of the British naval community in general, and explains some of the conduct of the battle.
The surprising conclusion is that the two different sets of wargaming rules would recommend the British commander use almost diametrically opposite tactics.

 

We are in 1939, and the wargaming rules (in which is summarized the naval theory of two nations) can still disagree so heavily on topics leading to cranking out different tactics. At least one, or both clearly had it wrong somewhere. In short, while contemporary naval theory might explain why ships were built a certain way, or why certain tactics were attempted, it is very far from guaranteed that either is correct. It is likely no exaggeration that if this game is made properly, it'll be able to wargame ship combat to a far higher precision and likely accuracy than any predictive tool the contemporary navies had.

As such, the primary calibration should be to historical combat results, and to objective realities (which we can model much better and more systematically than back then) than then naval theory.

The more so since the naval theorists themselves in the case of A ultimately discarded their mixed battery ship - in fact, they did it soon after they got in some modern naval combat results. This suggests the mixed battery was the weaker idea for at least some time before the Battle of Tsushima, perhaps a very long time - someone just blubbered something that made superficial sense or continued a long tradition and everyone just went with it without ever having the chance to wargame it out with the requisite rigor.

As for B, we are getting to the naval theory "hope" part of the equation. The secondaries clearly aren't going to hack the mustard, so we try making destroyers and sticking whatever guns we can on them. Can they do the job? We aren't sure, but they are our best hope because the secondaries definitely are feeling the limits. 4 inch guns may not be enough? Well, but the 6-inch won't really fit on it, right? So we have to use the 4 inch and hope it works - it's not like we can do better.

In short, neither of these theories really have the kind of weight that we should break the game's modeling just to accommodate them. Hope that expresses my position.

[akd]

One thing that would help would be to get the delta between big gun and QF gun reload times in battle conditions during the early era closer to correct rather than artificially boosting accuracy.  That would greatly increase their relative value, and even lead to natural accuracy advantages in certain situations.

But forcing the “hail of fire” doctrine to succeed under a broad set of circumstances simply because it drove some historical design decisions will just lead to a distorted model.

Edited December 28, 2019 by akd

[Hangar18]

@arkhangelsk

after looking through some files, i have determined that the shell weight of the 5" guns is not even close to what it should be. The penetration of the guns is not far removed from historical values when accounting for the 118% quality modifier (considering the iron value is shown in port)

[akd]

What data are you using?  Based on any comparison I can find, penetration is significantly overstated, and totally absurd when compared to the maximum ranges listed.
 

Edited December 28, 2019 by akd

[Hangar18]

3 hours ago, akd said:

What data are you using?  Based on any comparison I can find, penetration is significantly overstated, and totally absurd when compared to the maximum ranges listed.
 

The pen shown in port is for Iron. if you adjust it to krupp 4 then its pretty close to historical.

[akd]

1 hour ago, Hangar18 said:

The pen shown in port is for Iron. if you adjust it to krupp 4 then its pretty close to historical.

Yes, I'm aware.  Again, what is your data that shows penetration of Krupp steel that high?

[Hangar18]

2 hours ago, akd said:

Yes, I'm aware.  Again, what is your data that shows penetration of Krupp steel that high?

It makes no mention of what type of steel is used. it would be whatever the USN used in their testing, im assuming the game is just modeling the best steel of the period. I think part of the issue is that the shell weights are extremely off. by about double by default. This is combined with a muzzle velocity already above what it should be by a few hundred M/s

So I could be wrong in the assumption that "krupp 4" is whatever the USN used for testing. But either way something is very very off.

 

[Steeltrap]

Something my own work background has drummed into me, and I'm sure I've mentioned it elsewhere, is that when one is "defining success" it's just as vital to specify things that MUST NOT happen as it is to get all the other requirements correct.

[The requirements, both positive and "must not", will filter through to your technical AND user acceptance testing regimes. In our context here the devs do the technical testing, then give us the version and we're the users. Our "user acceptance" is trying out each version and saying what we found that strikes us as a problem. Obviously the greater the detail of "expected results" we get the more specifically we can test how well we see those]

Those "must nots" often come from legal requirements in the sorts of environments in which I've worked for 20 years, but in the case of this "tactical combat simulation" element of the game I'd suggest they ought to include things like "HE shells MUST NOT be more effective than AP at plunging fire against a properly armoured target ".

To do that, the devs really need to have a clear view of the level of technical fidelity they want. As a minor illustration, do they want to list real pen values in so far as they might be determined per navweaps.com and other sources or are massively inflated ones acceptable because the net effect in-game is the same? My own preference here is to stick to ONE system and not move them around between updates. 

Lots of the discussions we've had are around "What's a decent definition of success? What must NOT happen (extreme results), and what are to be regarded as results in the realms of acceptable?"

Regardless, and I know I've said this, too, the more definite the devs are about their choices and defining what they see as "success" the better we can "test".

Edited December 29, 2019 by Steeltrap

[Hangar18]

Honestly loading up a few 18" guns, heavy shells, and lydite 2 and spamming HE is way easier than it should be.

HE doesn't behave like HE. It bounces, so its more like a SAP round. I have no idea why AP bounces so much, and does so little.

If HE pens, it should do massive damage. but it shouldnt be able to do that unless the target is thin. AP should be penetrating bows, i have no idea why crossing the T was made into a disadvantage. AP to the bow just bounces, meanwhile your broadside on, and likely to eat massive damage.

[RedParadize]

Well... that's a 18"!

[RAMJB]

1 hour ago, Hangar18 said:

Honestly loading up a few 18" guns, heavy shells, and lydite 2 and spamming HE is way easier than it should be.

HE doesn't behave like HE. It bounces, so its more like a SAP round. I have no idea why AP bounces so much, and does so little.

If HE pens, it should do massive damage. but it shouldnt be able to do that unless the target is thin. AP should be penetrating bows, i have no idea why crossing the T was made into a disadvantage. AP to the bow just bounces, meanwhile your broadside on, and likely to eat massive damage.

You have to account for many a thing here.

First - magazine count. You load your ships with X ammount of shells. T being the number of turrets on yout ship, your ammo will have a X/T ammount of shells in each turret magazine. Out of any specific loadout you pick and choose for your ships, HE will be a Z % of your loadout so you'll end with X/T*Z/100 number of HE rounds in each of your magazines.

Once those are spent from a given turret, that associated turret is done firing HE. In real terms, anyway - in game we have a "general" magazine which contents we dynamically pick each battle by choosing the ammo we fire.


This has several branching results: First one is that  we begin a fight, with say, 900 rounds for our 9 main guns. That doesn't mean each magazine holds 300, as it should be; the 900 is an overall number. You can't deplete a single turret magazines - all guns keep on firing until the "global" magazine round count is 0. This makes tactical decision making on when to fire and when to hold fire, and from which angles and from which turrets, negligible.

But more importantly, we also have "dynamic" shells. Each one is dual purpose, and what it's good for is decided by the time is fired, depending on your ammo choice for the moment. If each magazine had a, say, 15% shells of HE, 25% of SAP and 60% of AP (a perfectly believable loadout) that translates into a reality where you're running out of HE by your 15th salvo - not to mention, each turret has it's own loadout and you can run out of a specific ammo for that turret alone. Which can't happen in the game right now.

It's a convoluted way to say that the usage of ammo type right now in the game is quite skewed and far from what it should be. And the effects of this particular issue is branched out on fights against other capital ships.


Because, simply stated, loading HE is "easy", yes. Specially on the AoN era there are quite wide stretches of the ship with little more than plating armor. An exploding volkswagen with highly volatile burst explosive is going to make a number on those areas. It's a way to say "you're going to deal damage with most of your hits" vs "you're going to deal damage with your penetrating hits only". HE seems attractive - but only so on the surface.

Because under the hood, it's not that attractive of an idea. First because unless you go for completely bonkers loadouts (once those are implemented), you'll run out of HE very soon. And woe you then when you really need HE shells and you have none. It's less optimal than AP too, at least against ships with noticeable armor protection, because those shells won't reach any internals. The enemy can rearrange your superstructures with HE all day long if he wants to, but if you're putting shell after shell in his machinery areas and potentially, magazines, guess who's going to be the winner at the end.

And once more, this is without accounting the realistic loadouts we should have in the game instead of the abstracted "global", "dinamic-pick-a-shell" system we have now. Once those are in, the "window" timeframe you'll have to just stay put and fire HE rounds will be severely restricted...unless you go for insane loadouts with maxed HE, and no AP - which then will mean your ability to truly hurt enemy capital ships is tremendously limited.


This is a long winded way to say that HE looks far more attractive than what it really is right now, and it'll be far less attractive once believable magazine loadouts are implemented. Which should be, at some point in the future.
 

Edited December 29, 2019 by RAMJB

[akd]

12 hours ago, Hangar18 said:

It makes no mention of what type of steel is used. it would be whatever the USN used in their testing, im assuming the game is just modeling the best steel of the period. I think part of the issue is that the shell weights are extremely off. by about double by default. This is combined with a muzzle velocity already above what it should be by a few hundred M/s

So I could be wrong in the assumption that "krupp 4" is whatever the USN used for testing. But either way something is very very off.

 

Indeed, very off.

[Steeltrap]

On 12/29/2019 at 8:31 PM, RAMJB said:

This is a long winded way to say that HE looks far more attractive than what it really is right now, and it'll be far less attractive once believable magazine loadouts are implemented. Which should be, at some point in the future.

While all that is true, the real problem with HE at the moment is it highlights that the penetration and damage models right now are pants.

If firing from bow/stern aspect you're far more likely to detonate any target, including BBs, by using HE. It's even worse with plunging fire where, as I've said many times, AP will bounce and then HE will damage all the way to the keel, start several decks' worth of fires, and flooding as well. Assuming it doesn't detonate a magazine.

The penetration (and thus damage) system is simply broken at the moment in certain situations. Unless they fix the penetration system HE will continue to make it stupidly easy to destroy things; doubly so if they continue with the bulkheads largely being the be all and end all of ALL damage mitigation and then allow the AI to build large warships with minimal bulkheads (such as pre-dreadnought BBs in the Armed Convoy mission for example which you can sink with HE from your secondaries at 6km now).

[Steeltrap]

On 12/29/2019 at 12:17 AM, RedParadize said:

The end result is overkill, that's for sure. The question is why?

To make it clear, I said that at the very beginning of alpha 3. This patch may have overshot. I am still uncertain of how much accuracy contribute to this. I suspect the moving target penalty, armor model, lack of citadel and the high armor bypass ratio to be the dominant factor at play here. Regardless of what accuracy end up becoming I think these factor need to be corrected. Then and only then will we be able to judge if a given target die to quick or not.

I would suggest, and indeed have said as much, that it's because they chose to make changes in ALL 3 of the major aspects of the gunnery resolution system rather than start only with accuracy. Don't know if you bothered to read the rest of my post about the processes and design etc, but if you have then the reason for this hotfix having such drastic effects ought to be clear, just as is why I think they were ill-advised to change so many aspects at once if for no other reason than it makes it a nightmare to try to assess whether what was changed was for the better, worse or a mix.

[RedParadize]

@Steeltrap I did end up reading your text. I "mostly" agree with it. The core of the argument was right, but only "mostly" because it doesn't cover some aspect that I think are important. No blame there, can't say it all in one go and that was a pretty long text already.

About changing many things at once. It is true that it can make diagnostic and troubleshooting more difficult (which is basically my job btw). You can't proceed by elimination while doing this. However, what you can do is doing is half-splitting. Generally speaking half-splitting is a more efficient methodology, as long as you ask the right question. I am not gonna elaborate on this here as it it not much relevant I think. We only see the surface of it, they do internal testing on their side before release. I have no reason to question their methodology.

They are most likely currently working on other than what we see in update, like campaign. Update are one month apart and very few content is added. Balancing must be pretty low priority atm as not all game mechanics are present. On the big picture it is not a very productive time investment as it will all have to be redone later on. I suspect that they are doing balance update just to keep us satisfied with the intermediate product. That's the burden of open beta.
 

Edited December 30, 2019 by RedParadize

[Hangar18]

On 12/29/2019 at 4:31 AM, RAMJB said:

You have to account for many a thing here.

First - magazine count. You load your ships with X ammount of shells. T being the number of turrets on yout ship, your ammo will have a X/T ammount of shells in each turret magazine. Out of any specific loadout you pick and choose for your ships, HE will be a Z % of your loadout so you'll end with X/T*Z/100 number of HE rounds in each of your magazines.

Once those are spent from a given turret, that associated turret is done firing HE. In real terms, anyway - in game we have a "general" magazine which contents we dynamically pick each battle by choosing the ammo we fire.


This has several branching results: First one is that  we begin a fight, with say, 900 rounds for our 9 main guns. That doesn't mean each magazine holds 300, as it should be; the 900 is an overall number. You can't deplete a single turret magazines - all guns keep on firing until the "global" magazine round count is 0. This makes tactical decision making on when to fire and when to hold fire, and from which angles and from which turrets, negligible.

But more importantly, we also have "dynamic" shells. Each one is dual purpose, and what it's good for is decided by the time is fired, depending on your ammo choice for the moment. If each magazine had a, say, 15% shells of HE, 25% of SAP and 60% of AP (a perfectly believable loadout) that translates into a reality where you're running out of HE by your 15th salvo - not to mention, each turret has it's own loadout and you can run out of a specific ammo for that turret alone. Which can't happen in the game right now.

It's a convoluted way to say that the usage of ammo type right now in the game is quite skewed and far from what it should be. And the effects of this particular issue is branched out on fights against other capital ships.


Because, simply stated, loading HE is "easy", yes. Specially on the AoN era there are quite wide stretches of the ship with little more than plating armor. An exploding volkswagen with highly volatile burst explosive is going to make a number on those areas. It's a way to say "you're going to deal damage with most of your hits" vs "you're going to deal damage with your penetrating hits only". HE seems attractive - but only so on the surface.

Because under the hood, it's not that attractive of an idea. First because unless you go for completely bonkers loadouts (once those are implemented), you'll run out of HE very soon. And woe you then when you really need HE shells and you have none. It's less optimal than AP too, at least against ships with noticeable armor protection, because those shells won't reach any internals. The enemy can rearrange your superstructures with HE all day long if he wants to, but if you're putting shell after shell in his machinery areas and potentially, magazines, guess who's going to be the winner at the end.

And once more, this is without accounting the realistic loadouts we should have in the game instead of the abstracted "global", "dinamic-pick-a-shell" system we have now. Once those are in, the "window" timeframe you'll have to just stay put and fire HE rounds will be severely restricted...unless you go for insane loadouts with maxed HE, and no AP - which then will mean your ability to truly hurt enemy capital ships is tremendously limited.


This is a long winded way to say that HE looks far more attractive than what it really is right now, and it'll be far less attractive once believable magazine loadouts are implemented. Which should be, at some point in the future.
 

I don't think you understand. What's in the mag doesn't matter. I would load the entire mag with nothing but HE.

[Steeltrap]

On 12/30/2019 at 10:47 PM, RedParadize said:

@Steeltrap I did end up reading your text. I "mostly" agree with it. The core of the argument was right, but only "mostly" because it doesn't cover some aspect that I think are important. No blame there, can't say it all in one go and that was a pretty long text already.

About changing many things at once. It is true that it can make diagnostic and troubleshooting more difficult (which is basically my job btw). You can't proceed by elimination while doing this. However, what you can do is doing is half-splitting. Generally speaking half-splitting is a more efficient methodology, as long as you ask the right question. I am not gonna elaborate on this here as it it not much relevant I think. We only see the surface of it, they do internal testing on their side before release. I have no reason to question their methodology.

They are most likely currently working on other than what we see in update, like campaign. Update are one month apart and very few content is added. Balancing must be pretty low priority atm as not all game mechanics are present. On the big picture it is not a very productive time investment as it will all have to be redone later on. I suspect that they are doing balance update just to keep us satisfied with the intermediate product. That's the burden of open beta.
 

Saying you don't agree with something on the basis of things that aren't included strikes me as somewhat peculiar. I'd have thought either you agree with what's written or not, and if not you could specify what and why. Having questions is not the same as disagreeing. 

Also be interested to know what aspects you feel are important, given my post was a discussion of the combat model viewed from a process design perspective and why that was worth understanding.

Lastly, I'm a bit confused as to why there would be questions about why the hotfix had such drastic effects if you agreed with what I'd written (or perhaps you still have those questions on the basis of whatever you feel is relevant but haven't mentioned).

As that post made clear, they changed significant aspects of ALL the major processes within the combat model, and did so in ways that REINFORCED the changes as opposed to some countering others. Thus not only did they changer things people weren't clamouring over, they addressed the issues people had raised in a way that would have the broadest application possible i.e. NOT restricted to addressing specific problems of secondaries v small ships, especially in later tech eras (although frankly I think a lot of the noise around that issue is based on what people think ought to be correct vs a baseline that is reasonable with available evidence from applicable sources).

Just for lulz I designed a BC for the Armed Convoy mission taking into account what I now know about the hotfix. I gave it one 10" gun fore and aft (you have to have 2 main gun mounts), but an effective broadside of 5 x (2x8") secondaries and some 2x4" for the hell of it.

Operating largely between 4 to 7km it demolished everything. Why? Because the accuracy is now high enough that the RoF of secondaries AND the changes to the penetration of guns AND the damage model making things more fragile mean the secondaries are entirely capable of slaughtering nearly anything. Ironically it highlights why we really need to be able to direct the main and secondary batteries independently; no point wasting the main guns at targets at 5km when many secondaries will now do the job better.

It also reinforced the degree to which bulkheads are not differentiated between different ships. A transport with maximum bulkheads is massively more difficult to kill than a pre-dreadnought with few or minimum, and I view that as falling squarely within the list of "MUST NOT occur" requirements.

Here we have a transport (with maximum bulkheads) having taken 1x10" and 12x6" hits in rapid succession. Note the flooding spilling into EVERY SINGLE COMPARTMENT.

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Here's that same ship some 3:30 later. Remarkable, isn't it?

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In the same battle, however, we had 2 pre-dreadnoughts. One of them took two 10" penetrations that started flooding, some 30 seconds apart. With a timestamp of 32:31 remaining, it was at 89% structure and 38% float (not much different from the TR Tama, above).

23 seconds later, with 32:08 remaining, it sank with 89% structure remaining. Water was shown in 5 of the 7 damage model cells.

One pre-dreadnought BB sunk within a minute or so by flooding from 2 holing 10" shells.

One Transport holed by a 10" and multiple 6" falling to floatation of less than 40% and with water in EVERY damage model cell (and multiple fires). 3+ minutes later it's happily sailing along at 78% floatation.

A placeholder damage model that was changed to make things more fragile, thus making bulkheads even more important, but an AI that builds BBs with minimum bulkheads. It's coupled with alterations to penetration and accuracy values of relatively rapidly firing guns that mean those guns WILL hit often (in fact a lot more often that the main guns under ranges of about 7km for earlier tech battles) AND go through armour, and a 4" gun apparently can cause flooding or detonate a magazine through the belt/deck just as effectively as a 12".

😶

I suspect there ought to be ZERO mystery as to why the hotfix had such marked effects.

Cheers

 

 

 

Edited January 14, 2020 by Steeltrap