Missions and Challenges - Community Feedback

[Cptbarney]

Hmm, so we have custom battles (time to go mental ladz) , Admirals College (Historical battles only), Naval Academy (custom scenarios that function as fun learn to plays and as the tut of the games essentially.).

Have some gud ideas here ladz lets keep it up and remember only 3 smoll devs so lets not tire them out too much!

[Capt in pyjamas]

On 10/22/2019 at 4:44 PM, Tankaxe said:

I recommend more cruiser type missions! This is to prepare players for the campaign as most of their time might be spent on cruiser battles. More missions involving cruisers (or Battlecruisers) would be wise and most relevant to the campaign.

Totally. Same for destroyers too. 

 

I would also like to see  Port raids, like the Royal navy raid into Norway during ww2. 

Edited November 16, 2019 by Capt in pyjamas

[Capt in pyjamas]

What about a break the blockade mission. 

 

Also protect a convoy? 

[Steeltrap]

5 hours ago, Capt in pyjamas said:

Also protect a convoy? 

There's already one, isn't there?

[chriske]

I liked most the Pre dreadnought conflict because of the combined fleet vs combined fleet action

I dont like the dreadnough vs fleet  and the timer on most missions ..in many cases you need pure Luck to do enough damage in the given time

Torpedos do too little damage and too little flooding against Battlecruisers and Dreadnoughts ..I had cases with 20+ hits and they where still floating and shooting happily.    

otherwise I enjoy the game so far and see lots of potential for it.

PS. There is a little name-error  Ersatz Monarch is not a name of a ship but of a Project to replace a Ship or a class that is named Monarch... when the ship(s) where launched they would get propper names...

[Teckelmaster]

I may be late for this topic, but i will give it a shot any way:

1. I like all the missions, where i have some liberty on ship types. As i can play my style. Most satisfying is to bring up a strategy and find out if it works. I do like "sink whole fleet", "build a dreadnought" and of course "modern bb" and "numbers dont matter.

2. I dislike missions, like bb vs tb, bc vs bb, where you have to follow a (as i think of it) very narrow path with limited options AND still have to rely a lot on luck. And missions where i have to protect one, usually weak, ship. Defend convoy and BB vs TB (again). BUT i consider those "must be" missions, as it is exactly what happens in any naval conflict. Destroy targets of value and keep your own alive. I still dont like them

The most frustrating thing for me usually is, when i basically would win, but the enemy fleet runs away and quits the fight OR when i have a fleet against me, but am not allowed to kill them all (every time there is a "kill xx% of the enemy" active).

What i would love to see:

Once you have sunk 70% of the enemy (probably rebel scum), given the choice to keep playing until you quit or have sunk them all. A "wanna quit yes/no" button would be awesome. As i said, im quite neurotic and i like to see my enemies squished and reduced to nothing.

In the running away missions, as i find them extremely accurate, take Scharnhorst for example, i have no solution other than becoming better and not give them a chance xD .

Teckelmaster out

 

[Wowzery]

I like the destroy an unarmed convoy and the armed convoy.  It actually took me a while to figure out how to win the unarmed convoy as I let the AI steer the ships and it never closed the distance which is needed.

There is one, think its BC vs. BB where if I place my ships on AI run away, and another one where both sides just run away (think its going to be addressed in the next update) that are frustrating as I'm not that good of a pilot for ships, especially several divisions.

[Deepsix]

On 11/8/2019 at 7:05 AM, Admiral_Alpha said:

This may be a little useless feedback in this topic but I have to say, that I didnt found the naval academy fun enough until I created a cheat table to zero out the weight, cost and set a custom number of ships. With so many maxed out OP ships I completed the naval academy rather quickly, but multiple times and I still want more. I dont expect devs to implement this kind of features in naval academy, but I really hope that this kind of unrestricted construction will be featured in custom battles when they will finally arrive.

Share the wealth please? I've been looking everywhere for a Cheat Table for this.

[TAKTCOM]

• Sink the Raiders: some sort of OK. Except that if you choose not a battleship, the raiders will eat you cruisers  alive. Since they usually have a broadside 10-12 ~8'' guns per ship and you have what? 4 big gun?
• Rise of the Heavy Cruiser:  heavy cruisers have problem with damaging  artillery fire so that this mission shows well.
• There can be only one: Extra boring. And all because, when enemy lost half of the structure he begins to run away. And the player is chasing him for a long and painful time. Even 17 inch guns are not able to penetrate superBB at a distance of 20+ kilometers, so go HE and you can go to dinner.
• Heavy Duty: take cruisers and for win you will need a miracle. Why? That's why

I still have no idea how I managed to win this mission. Because, obviously, my main weapon was a bit more efficient than chewed paper. 

Edited December 10, 2019 by TAKTCOM
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[Buchanie]

I am enjoying a steady plod through the academy - but have come to a halt with "Sink the Raiders" - BB or CAs escorting the two merchantmen with 3 enemy CAs attacking.  For me, this one has stepped up a level - the enemy CAs seem to have a newer hull design with a long raised forecastle, and they are fierce and powerful - their tech seems more advanced than I have access to.  I haven't been able to design a single BB which is accurate enough to destroy all of them before being sunk itself - I can get one of the CAs before they sink me, but have not done better than that.  So I tried building 3 cruisers instead - lots of bulkheads for strength, best balance of armour and guns - and shot to bits in no time!

From reading the forum it sounds like I need to start some fires rather than try for a killer punch all the time - or perhaps move on past this challenge and come back to it later!  I prefer to try to stay with "historical development" ideas, rather than do peculiar things just to overcome "the game".  This scenario has really highlighted the balance characteristics - and perhaps I am giving speed too high a priority, and the BIG gun - the note at the head of the scenario does urge a strong secondary armament (but those enemy cruisers are fast - and they have lots of 8inch and seem able to take a lot of punishment too).  I shall try perhaps 2 cruisers, but better ones if possible, against them next.

I agree with some comments about the closeness of some "wins" - I wonder if my ship, victorious though she was, would have survived the voyage back to port without foundering in a few of the scenarios I've completed.  There is also the nagging doubt, "did I actually win that one through skill and tactics, or was I simply lucky this time?"  I think Admiral Ziggy Sprague summed it up after his fighting retreat at Samar when he ascribed his win to, "the courage of American sailors and the partiality of almighty God."  He didn't sink all or many of the enemy - but they turned and retreated and didn't come back, and the landing fleet he was protecting suffered no harm: that was a remarkable victory.  Jutland was the same - the British were still at sea, despite some bad losses; the Germans returned to port, and stayed there - we can't all do a Nelson/Trafalgar - I guess it depends on the actual mission needed to be delivered.

Timer - some people like speedy battles - I feel it is more about an artificial "gaming" constraint than anything that would have historical relevance.  If it was left to player choice, I would probably not use it.  It does put a pressure on, perhaps encourages me to close for the kill sooner than I otherwise might - and sometimes that isn't wise and I'm the one who gets sunk because the enemy is less disabled than I thought - it does make me get on with it, though.

Controlling a fleet - not easy - even a second ship cannot be micro-managed easily, so a fleet of half a dozen would be a challenge - Coronel used a "battle line" but the light conditions and time of day were maybe the most significant factor (as well as the huge difference in technology between the two fleets), with River Plate offering a rehearsed "set piece" with Exeter on a different diverging course to Ajax and Achilles to try to split Graf Spee's fire.  Oldendorff's gun line at Surigao was classic and made use of the geography (like the Greeks at Salamis), and the odds were very one-sided.  Jutland was a magnificent example of fleet discipline - Jellicoe's masterly port wing deployment, and the incredible 180 turns away accomplished by Hipper and Scheer were unbelievably brilliant.  I could cause total chaos trying to model those in a game!

Dogger Bank would make an interesting historical scenario - try to sink all the KM battlecruisers rather than just poor old outclassed Blucher; and there was an interesting campaign between the Turks and the Russians in the Black Sea where pre-dreadnought Evstafi fought off the BC Goeben - similarly at Moon Sound in the Baltic where Slava held Konig at bay, and maybe what if Troubridge had pressed the engagement with his armoured cruisers when Goeben was running through the Mediterranean?

Just some thoughts.  I shall return to trying to sink the raiders (and probably lose again).  Thanks for this great game.

Buchanie

 

 

[Buchanie]

It has just occurred to me how important a role visibility played in so many historical battles - Coronel; Dogger Bank; Heligoland Bight; Jutland; Evstafi - Goeben; Slava -Konig; North Cape; Samar - perhaps it is significant in virtually all naval engagements?  Certainly it always had to be a consideration in the North Sea - fog banks and rain squalls saved more than a few ships.

Buchanie

[Buchanie]

On the historic ships info that comes up while the scenario loads, just seen Moltke class - info says 6x11inch - should say 10x11inch (or 5 twin turrets) - typo!

Edited December 30, 2019 by Buchanie

[Buchanie]

Really struggling with the Raiders

So I analysed the challenge - 3 advanced CAs = 24 8inch barrels per broadside - no way would 2 cruisers suffice.  So an HMS Swiftsure or Triumph type semi dreadnought - and we won, 3 CAs sunk.  I had to keep the range 5.5-6.5 km or they did huge damage - even at 6km every salvo from the CAs was likely to hit with at least one shell, often 2 or 3 of them; whereas I only hit every second or third salvo, and had to keep swinging back and forth to throw their aim.  A 4th CA would have beaten me.  That felt like a serious engagement!

Point: I would have expected their accuracy and resilience to drop off as they took damage - but their damage control and repairing rates were phenomenal - mine were dire.  Surely the numbers of crewmen required to fight fires and weld patches etc. and the mounting toll of casualties should impact on the ability to fight the guns and perform fire fighting and damage repair all at the same time?  The ability of the Raider CAs to take punishment from my 12inch and maintain amazing accuracy and rate of fire was annoyingly unreal.

I really enjoyed that challenge, despite all - it is nice to win after such a struggle!!!!

Buchanie

[WelshZeCorgi]

On 10/21/2019 at 9:19 PM, Nick Thomadis said:

Hey Admirals, 

Please share the following:

1) Academy Missions you like the most and why? What would you change to make it more interesting for you

It was the two where you had to sink an entire convoy unescorted merchantmen as well as the version with escorted merchant ships. I guess mainly because that mission was just such absolute carnage with such a powerful ship build. I guess I would make it more interesting by making you face off a ton of escorted and armed merchant ships with a slightly less powerful ship/more limited resources to build a smart, fast, low tonnage merchant raider that needs to avoid the big guns of a slow and lumbering battleship escort that you have no hope of taking out, using speed and firepower punch to zoom in, take out a few merchant ships and zoom out, trying to avoid hits while doing as much damage as possible. 

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2) Academy missions you hate the most and why? What is causing frustration?

Anything involving torpedoes, if only because using them is rather limited, difficult to coordinate and frustrating. Setting up a torpedo run requires a lot of micromanaging and a lot of luck, for me at least. Mileage may vary with different people. 

 

I remember once that I had to take out a merchant convoy that had a cruiser escort. Your only option was with destroyers. But what kept happening was that on my way to try and torpedo the cruiser escort, my destroyers would release their torpedo spreads on the merchant ships instead, making me lose because I had no way of attacking for 10 or so minutes while they had to reload, now that my ships had wasted their torpedoes on unarmed merchantmen. 

 

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3) Please propose new missions or challenges (historical or fictional), share your ideas for missions you would enjoy playing, by describing the situations and the difficulties you want to face. Maybe your suggestion can be the next mission you will play in Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts!

I want to see missions that focus on the role armor, number of bulkheads, angling, positioning and survivability techs (double hull, reinforced bulkheads, torpedo belts, aux engine) has. 

 

You can argue that all missions are "survival" missions but I just thought of suggesting missions that solely focuses on those concepts. We have the first few missions that focus on firepower, torpedoes and speed, but it was difficult for me to grasp the idea of how to protect your ships (or if you should even try to,) because that was never its own section to learn in.

I'd imagine a scenario where your ship is not allowed to fire and you're to build a ship that can survive for X amount of minutes from an enemy or enemies that are armed with formidable guns (plunging or direct fire), another mission with formidable torpedoes, another mission with formidable secondaries and so on.    

 

Edited January 6, 2020 by WelshZeCorgi

[Shaftoe]

I am finding "Defeat the semi-dreadnought" scenario really difficult, regardless of bonus choice. Since it's an academy task and it is so close to earlier scenarios, I think it should be much easier. Otherwise, what's the purpose? It's way easier to sink real battleships and even superbattleships (and even entire fleets) in other scenarios, than beat down this old heap of junk and its escorts. Lol.

Also, there is a description error in "Armed Convoy Escort" scenario. Objective states that the convoy that we are supposed to sink is protected by several armored cruisers and a pre-dreadnought, when in fact it's protected by (technically) 2 BBs, only 1 CA and a number of CLs. 

[Skeksis]

Academy Light Cruiser Missions.

What's available...  

Armed Convoy Attack,
Undefended Convoy Attack,
Sink the Raiders,
Destroy a Fleet.

For CLs, would be nice for more missions, more to design, more to test, more to learn from,  like 3 to 6 new and specific CLs missions.

 

PS, had to almost completely reverse this post and updated it to include (state) missions as 'doable', as enlighten by @Evil4Zerggin and his CL design (see below). I guess this highlights the deficiencies of a trial and error tutorial (gotta blame something!).

Edited January 20, 2020 by Skeksis

[Evil4Zerggin]

2 hours ago, Skeksis said:

Armed Convoy Attack

This one at least is quite easy with CL with certain builds. Here's a video:

Destroy a Fleet is pretty bad for cruisers though, for the most part there they have the disadvantages of both BBs and DDs, and the advantages of neither.

Edited January 19, 2020 by Evil4Zerggin

[Thistle_Tea]

I found the pre-dreadnought conflict mission the most fun by far and would love to see more missions along those lines, and, in general, I enjoyed earlier tech a lot more than later tech

The limited abilities of ships really mean that you have to make the most out of every ship in your feel so it's a lot more about planning, positioning and picking the right targets while the later missions really just come down to sniping the enemy from 25km away with laser accurate 18" guns.

[Skeksis]

On 1/19/2020 at 9:45 PM, Evil4Zerggin said:

This one at least is quite easy with CL with certain builds. Here's a video:

Very nice, so I went and design one too, I only had 7 but still those CLs just choped right through that enemy escort fleet, surprise me at how effective they were too.
Updated the post above as well.

Here's my 'copied' design...

 

Edited January 21, 2020 by Skeksis

[Enraged Ewok]

Been working my way through the academy since getting the game last week, and for the most part enjoying it immensely. A few thoughts below on the missions that have stood out most to me so far, both good and bad:

Sink the Raiders

• Definitely the hardest one I've done up until I reached the one last night to build a BB/BC/CA and destroy two modern BBs, a BC, and their escorts.
• Feels just right in terms of difficulty to me, while still being very engaging gameplay-wise and having multiple ways to win.
• Speaking of engagement, my most recent attempt with 2 armored cruisers carrying 12" guns and 5" secondaries had me on the edge of my seat. By the end, with one enemy CA left and closing on the transports, I had only one 12" gun turret still in action between my two ships. Both had around 50% structure, but looked so roughly handled that they might not be worth repairing afterwards. Fortunately the final CA wasn't much better off, and the 5" secondaries did their deadly (and seemingly now too common) work of causing magazine detonations.

Armed Convoy Attack

• I did this once with a BC and just barely failed due to time limit, and twice with CLs and won so hard and fast my head was spinning.
• Especially with CLs, I feel like this mission is far too easy. The first time I was expecting to get reamed by the pre-dreadnought and armored cruiser escorts, so I sent 1 division of 2 CLs at them as a distraction, and the other division of 2 at the convoy to sink it before all my CLs died. Much to my surprise, my CLs' 3" casemates scored multiple ammo detonations on the pre-dreadnoughts and had both sunk within 40 minutes on the clock without any torpedo hits.
• The accuracy of the CLs on the BBs/CAs was often 70-100%, without the gun tech bonuses, within 3km range, which seemed really silly when the pre-dreads had sub 2% accuracy at best at the same range

Search and Destroy

• This one bored me. Build a fast battleship, run down and sink two retreating battleships. It felt like, short of cheesing the game to get stupid high speeds to close the distance, it mainly came down to whether I got a lucky hit on the faster of the two running battleships.
• When I finally did beat it, my destroyers actually caught up to and torpedoed the lead BB after I sank the first with gunfire but couldn't land any hits on the second

Destroy a Fleet (Forgive me if I have the name wrong on this one, it's the one where you build BBs/BCs to fight the 2 modern BBs and their BC/CA/CL/DD escorts.)

• I've only tried a couple times so far on this one. First was with a closer ranged approach, which got my 2 ships chewed up and sunk very quickly. I tried a longer ranged approach afterwards and fared much better, with my main issues now being the screening ships closing and launching a lot of torpedoes.
• My main mechanics problem with this mission is basically the flip side of the Armed Convoy Attack mission. Despite radar and all these nice FCS upgrades, 6", 5", and 3" secondaries are nearly useless against the DDs/CLs in the screen, but the screen gets incredibly high gun accuracy against my ships and cause quite a bit of damage despite their tiny caliber.
• Accuracy and hit rate against the BBs and BCs seems fine for the most part

DDs vs TBs

• I actually liked this one, and at least with regards to accuracy against each other, the DDs and TBs felt ok. Both had very poor accuracy against each other even at close range, and most of the sinkings were caused by torpedoes and in a couple cases lucky main battery hits from the opposing dreadnought. Gunnery did assist in that by occasionally causing flooding/engine damage that slowed them enough for torpedoes to hit.
• I believe I got incredibly lucky managing to win this on my first try. I did lose all 5 of my DDs while the AI had 6 TBs left, but my AI-designed battleship managed to sink the enemy BB and then after a long time my secondaries managed to sink enough of the remaining TBs to win.

[Brandon L]

I would like a mission that is all commerce raiding, with large convoys and single ship convoys that I have to sail around and locate then sink. have some escorted by small craft others entire fleets, that is what I would like the most in the way of a new mission.

[Pizzafighter]

Hello,

I have some ideas for some...well, let's call it additions: I think, it would be great, if you will get some special rewards for doing the Missions. So in the Base game, you have everythingh of the current parts in the games unlocked. But especially in historic missions you can get special parts or ships. For example, if you play the "Iowa vs Yamato" Mission you aren't able to build a ship, you will get the original Iowa BB as it historically had been. If you win, you will get this ship usable for custom battles. The same for the Yamato and any other missions like for example the hunt for the Bismarck, wich could be made in two parts, the fight against the Hood and then the second one after the hit in the rudder. In the first Part, the player will get the "Prinz Eugen" and if he wins the second part he will get the "Bismarck". All special ships will also get a historical camouflage.

I think if this would be added, the game would be way more interesting because it would combine the fascination the original ships bring with them with the feature to build your own ship in one game.

[Evil4Zerggin]

A typical Alpha 4 BB design.

[NRathsmann]

Just one wish - Add merchant ships to custom battles !  For some convoy raiding/protecting   

[Nick Thomadis]

This is already included for next patch.