Some Thoughts On Realism in the Current Game

[Mycophobia]

Currently, I feel the combat section of the game still have many very jarring issues with realism. However, while I prefer the game's main aim to be delivering realistic combat simulation with a robust designer and campaign, I understand that for the sake of gameplay some compromise has to be made. But in the end, while it is totally fair to make some simplification and abstractions, the game should still "feel" realistic at the end.

Thus I thought it would be good to point out some issue with realism I've encountered playing the game, and propose some solution that I believe will attempt to achieve a degree of balance and realism and gameplay. 

1. Damage Model - Bulkheads

I want to discuss this first and foremost because I believe it is a significant contributor of many other issues I will note below. Currently, a hit on a destroyed bulkhead does nothing. As a result, a ship becomes harder to damaged the more damaged it gets. This of course, makes very little sense. I understand that the team is considering using the crew mechanism to represent the damage control being overwhelmed, but it still require those damage being at the correct location first and foremost. 

I suggest that hit to a already destroyed section of the ship automatically radiate that damage to adjacent bulkheads, and if they are also destroyed, further down the ship, with some diminishing return. There should be a limit to this, or alternatively interacts with armor schemes (I.E AON scheme makes it so that damage outside of citadel area will not radiate into a undamaged citadel area), but still makes it much easier to destroy a damaged ship since you don't have to hope RNG to hit that particular undamaged bulkhead you wish. This effect is meant to represent that shell hitting an already structurally weak area can still rupture adjacent bulkhead or weaken structure, causing damage in a larger area.

Some on the forums have also proposed that if sufficient bulkheads in midship region is damaged, the ship breaks due to the damage done to the keel/structural integrity of the ship, which I also believe to be a great idea to remedy the need to "hunt down" those few undamaged bulkheads.

Ship size should also be crucial in determining the effectiveness of bulkheads in isolating damage, Currently smaller ships, with maximum bulkheads are extremely resilient to small-med caliber guns partly due to the fact that they have way more bulkhead than realistically feasible. HP aside, maximum bulkhead on a 350ton TD should not give the same degree of compartmentalization as a 30000 ton dread. 

2. Damage Model - Armor Schemes

This is to slightly expand on the idea of bulkheads, but bulkhead arrangement can be impacted by choices of armor schemes such as "turtle back" vs. "AON", which impact the overall weight of non-citadel area bulkheads for the purpose of sinking a ship. BE armor maybe very important for a non-AON ship since it can be sunk without its main belt ever penetrated, while AON ship can mostly disregard BE armor or only keep some minimal plating as historically done. 

3. Accuracy 

Currently, most large caliber guns are too accurate over most ranges, this I don't actually mind. Since UAD operates at real time, having a realistic 3-5% hit rate for main battery in reasonable engagement range will drag battle on forever, so this is an area that we can go with what "feels right". However, currently, the base accuracy for secondary guns are still too low, making them less effective weapon in general even against the smaller craft they are supposed to defend against, while the main battery guns seems very good at obliterating destroyers by themselves. 

If we look at the reason that secondary guns are being used to defend against smaller crafts, their main benefit is traverse rate and fire rate. As far as accuracy goes, it is fine for their accuracy to fall off sharply at longer ranges especially before secondary directors, but they should improve to much more reasonable level as the enemy closes. Further, I think the traverse rate of the gun can be used as a factor when determining the penalty a gun receives against vessel that are small/fast, while this is an abstraction, it should capture the relative advantage of secondary guns against smaller vessals.

4. Secondary Gun Damage

Beyond accuracy and rate of fire, secondary guns currently inflict completely negligible damage against all kinds of targets. While occasional lucky hit allow the higher end of secondary guns to cause some damage, for the most part they do almost nothing. If we look at damages received by US DDs for samar for example, 6" shells are able to inflict significant damage (destroying Johnston's bridge and cause rapid flooding). While location, of course, still have a role to play in the end, secondary guns should be very capable of sinking destroyers and inflict significant damage to cruiser sized foes they can penetrate. 

Their role as a nuisance weapon against large ships can probably be better represented if fire is made more deadly/crew mechanic is added, but for now they require a serious improvement in their effectiveness against softer targets. While larger shells should be exponentially more powerful, it is important to recognize that smaller shells are still deadly to smaller foes. Even if they do not kill outright, they should be effective in inflicting deliberating damage on most smaller vessel in a few good hits.

5. Torpedo and Torpedo Reloads

Torpedo are still feeling too weak even in their current iteration. This could partly due to the bulkhead does too good a job in isolating flooding from spreading, but the initial damage could also use some upward tweak. Torpedo remain deadly weapon even against ships with intensive torpedo defence system. Further, the area flooded by torpedo hit remain a risk as subsequent hit, high speed, or poor quality of build could all cause subsequent flooding that risk the ship. A torpedo hit damage can have lasting effect on the ship, and can take extensive damage control to safely contain. 

Currently, once the initial flooding is complete, a torpedo hit pose no further risk, coupled with already flooded chamber are not further flooded, we can see ships sometime eat 5-10 torpedo in rapid succession but remains afloat, sometime not even too heavily damage. 

Furthermore, most ships in game carry a unrealistically amount of torpedo reloads, and reloads way too quickly. While again, I understand that for the pace of the game, reload can be speed up a fair amount, I don't believe torpedo ammunition should be as plentiful as they do now. I don't know any destroyer except Japanese WW II ones that carry any reload, and even the Japanese ones only carry one reload. I feel the relative weakness of the torpedo might be a result of the fact that we have about 4 shot per tube in game.

I think torpedo should be adjusted to have a more realistic amount of damage balanced against the realistic limitation on ammunition. They are extremely deadly weapons but also very limited in ammunition, and that is something the game should strive to capture.

6. Armor Scaling 

Edit: I would also like to again point out the discrepancy between in game penetration and armor values. Since the last patch, fights between pre-dread era ships feels a lot more enjoyable and that's because penetration of guns have been improved so as to be relevant. However, the scaling of later period armor remains extremely high, and not in line with their realistic performance against gun's of their period. I wont reiterate the whole point here, but I think the OP and my post in this thread should be pretty clear in explaining the issue.

 

Edited November 1, 2019 by Mycophobia

[FinnishJager]

Some good ideas here!

An additional idea for "Damage Model - Bulkheads" is fires spreading to (or ones already in) areas of the ship where you have ammunition storage can/will cause an ammunition detonation which will sink the ship. The turret lifts and hoists for the ammo that extend several decks below the main guns should be shown in the bulkhead viewer as well as the ammunition storage areas. Fires aboard ships, especially in these areas, are the biggest danger at sea. There are countless examples of crews flooding the magazines just so a fire doesn't cook off the entire ammo supply and obliterate the vessel. More or less bulkheads should have some effect on the spread of fires (if it doesn't already).

TL;DR - Fires should be more dangerous to ships and explode ammo magazines.

Edited November 1, 2019 by FinnishJager

[Mycophobia]

13 minutes ago, FinnishJager said:

Some good ideas here!

An additional idea for "Damage Model - Bulkheads" is fires spreading to (or ones already in) areas of the ship where you have ammunition storage can/will cause an ammunition detonation which will sink the ship. The turret lifts and hoists for the ammo that extend several decks below the main guns should be shown in the bulkhead viewer as well as the ammunition storage areas. Fires aboard ships, especially in these areas, are the biggest danger at sea. There are countless examples of crews flooding the magazines just so a fire doesn't cook off the entire ammo supply and obliterate the vessel. More or less bulkheads should have some effect on the spread of fires (if it doesn't already).

TL;DR - Fires should be more dangerous to ships and explode ammo magazines.

 

 

To add to this, the current issue with turret farming can be partially addressed if each turret will have its own barbette and magazine(several adjacent turret can share a magazine) below deck. I am not very sure if # of turret currently affect ammo detonation chance from magazine hits, but this would be a great way to implement the system. 

Fire into magazine area should almost immediately result in either detonation, or flooding of the magazine and thus loss of its ammo, though seeing bulkheads are slightly more abstract, having a constant "ticking danger" of either happening for as long as the fire is burning is a good idea too.(Or even give a manual override for player to flood magazines if they really want to preserve a particular ship)

[Lobokai]

I agree that secondaries are too weak against smaller craft and bulkheads need some tweaking... 

However, secondary damage threshold is fine.  I've made many 8" BC builds and they are mowing through BBs and CRs of similar tech, also the amount of damage and distraction that fires are causing seems fine and I'm perplexed at why everyone wants every penetrating shot to cook off the whole ship or torpedoes to do more than the considerable damage that they do?  I've seen this in other places amd I'm curious what is giving people these impressions?  Have we all seen too many HMS Hood specials or the like?  If looking at a battle like Jutland or Dogger Bank or Coronel or Falklands the damage we currently have is pretty close.  Too much SubHunter or WofWarships? We currently have roughly hour long engagements if keeping real time in 4 v 4 ish ship actions.  That is exactly what we should have.

As far as engagement range, I  like the closer in (seems like halfing of distances)... lets us see the ships that are fighting, which is smart (why have CGI models if you never really see them) and as long as that is all in proportion, sure.  Increasing close inaccuraccies to balance this out has apparently worked too since most of these fights are timing out as they should.

[Mycophobia]

3 minutes ago, Lobokai said:

I agree that secondaries are too weak against smaller craft and bulkheads need some tweaking... 

However, secondary damage threshold is fine.  I've made many 8" BC builds and they are mowing through BBs and CRs of similar tech, also the amount of damage and distraction that fires are causing seems fine and I'm perplexed at why everyone wants every penetrating shot to cook off the whole ship or torpedoes to do more than the considerable damage that they do?  I've seen this in other places amd I'm curious what is giving people these impressions?  Have we all seen too many HMS Hood specials or the like?  If looking at a battle like Jutland or Dogger Bank or Coronel or Falklands the damage we currently have is pretty close.  Too much SubHunter or WofWarships? We currently have roughly hour long engagements if keeping real time in 4 v 4 ish ship actions.  That is exactly what we should have.

As far as engagement range, I  like the closer in (seems like halfing of distances)... lets us see the ships that are fighting, which is smart (why have CGI models if you never really see them) and as long as that is all in proportion, sure.  Increasing close inaccuraccies to balance this out has apparently worked too since most of these fights are timing out as they should.

I've tried to use 8" secondaried BC against the Cargo ships in the "Sink Undefended Convoy" mission, and it took maybe 20+ hit to reduce them to roughly 50% flotation and 50% structure. I think secondary perform fine against larger ships in that they cant really do much against them besides occasional lucky BE pen, some structural damage and fires. 

Im also curious how your 8" BC was able to sink a BB? Was it through extensive fire? I haven't experimented in using large amount of secondary guns against BBs so cant attest to its effectiveness in game, but standard 14-16 5/6" gun in casemate does nothing to pretty much anything I've came across except the occasionally lucky ammo hit on CL or DD.

Also to clarify, I do not want to penetrating hits to start 1-shotting ships, in fact, their damage could even be reduced somewhat against mid-sized vessels like Cls and CA, who often gets destroyed in 2-3 shots even without any detonation happening. What I have an issue for is that due to the way bulkhead works, sometime a critically damaged ship became extremely difficult to sink because all the hit on already destroyed bulkheads seems to do nothing. 

As for torpedo, I've seen later BB and BC taking 10+ torpedo, and go on with maybe 60-70 flotation. Pre-dreads can also easily take 2-3 torp at least, if not more. In reality we see pre-dreads in the russo Japanese war and WWI lost to a single mine（Granted, naval mine are probably more powerful than contemporary torpedo). Ships like Yamato and Musashi was sunk with 10 and 20 torps respectively, Barham sunk with 3, POW and Repulse with 4. Furthermore, torpedo hit that did not immediately sink the ship can still become extremely problematic down the line, if the ship is to receive further damage or have very bad damage control. (Like the loss of Taiho or Shinano)

I am okay with most dreadnought era BB and BC surviving a few torps, but currently the ingame torpedo damage does not capture the ongoing risk they impose on the ship. Torpedo flood a few area+cause some structure damage and fire, because the way bulkhead works, there is pretty much no further risk to the ship if the ship does not sink from the torp hit. Bulkhead also meant multiple torp hit in rapid succession may end up just adding water to a already destroyed bulkhead and nothing else. This is what I see need changing. 

[Pedroig]

Quote

Currently, a hit on a destroyed bulkhead does nothing. As a result, a ship becomes harder to damaged the more damaged it gets.

This is not true, the devs have stated numerous times that if a destroyed location is hit, damage is spread to adjoining areas.

[Mycophobia]

9 minutes ago, Pedroig said:

This is not true, the devs have stated numerous times that if a destroyed location is hit, damage is spread to adjoining areas.

If that is indeed the case, then the extent of the spread clearly needs to be improved. Because in practice it is very common to see ships that is near death becoming extremely hard to kill. The cargo ship mission again, is the best way to see for yourself, try to do that mission with light cruiser grade weaponry is simply frustrating. (To be fair, sinking cargo vessel with gunfire may take awhile, which is why German convoy raiders all carried torpedo's, but seeing a merchant ship eat volley after volley of point blank 8" is too much.)

Likewise I've seen torpedo hits in rapid sucession only cause flooding to a few bulkhead and no more(granted, they speed up flooding in the affected area and overwhelm pumping).

 

[FinnishJager]

A couple other thought's I've had reading these comments.

1. Merchants should have poor flotation because of the large cargo holds. 1, maybe 2 torpedoes max should sink a merchant. Shots at the waterline that cause flooding should be very damaging to merchants. It's kinda understandable that shots to areas above water don't easily sink ships because they don't effect buoyancy, but yes it can be frustrating to keep pumping rounds into a ship and not seeing it sink. In Rule the Waves, crews of Merchant ships would abandon ship. That might be a good option for the game (ie campaign) as shots to the superstructure causes the crew to leave the ship, then the merchant has some severe penalties and sinks due to damage a lot quicker, or something like the crew scuttling the merchant.

2. This is a hot take, but what if the health bars were invisible to players. Players could still see the bulkhead views of your own ships and that of the enemy, so you can see the fires, the flooding, the damage, but won't have the percentage health number to look at.

[Hangar18]

I have to support this whole post. Sometimes realism IS balanced, and good for gameplay. We shouldn't have to compromise when we have such good options available.

[Pedroig]

One thing that would help:  Bulkheads should be determined by size and type of ship as baseline relatives.  So a cargo ship/tanker would have between 0-9 bulkheads, TB's 3 max, DD's 6 max, cruisers 9-16, capital ships 16-36.  Just throwing out some relative numbers to demonstrate the differences in both effort in putting in bulkheads to begin with, as well as the effectiveness and amount of compartilization..

[Steeltrap]

6 hours ago, Pedroig said:

One thing that would help:  Bulkheads should be determined by size and type of ship as baseline relatives.  So a cargo ship/tanker would have between 0-9 bulkheads, TB's 3 max, DD's 6 max, cruisers 9-16, capital ships 16-36.  Just throwing out some relative numbers to demonstrate the differences in both effort in putting in bulkheads to begin with, as well as the effectiveness and amount of compartilization..

This issue of compartmentalisation by class came up elsewhere, probably in the Combat Feedback thread, where many of us are discussing fires and effects of shells etc. You're probably involved in it, lol.

In fact most merchant marine vessels up to and including in WW2 had pretty poor watertight compartmentalisation. Many of them were old, and besides that weren't expecting to have to absorb explosions. They really needed to guard against storm damage, mainly.

Most merchants sank with a single torpedo hit, and sometimes disturbingly rapidly. What's more, they could be sunk by 88mm gunfire, something the U-boats did in WW2 before ASW measures were more effectively organised. In WW1 a very great number of merchant kills by U-boats were achieved with gunfire. Merchant ships simply weren't very durable against weapons, unsurprisingly.

88mm is ~3.5". And that's one of them, mounted on a submarine. Any sort of capital ship with the sorts of casemate/secondary guns we're discussing would slaughter merchant ships without using their main guns so as to conserve ammo and because it would be ridiculous overkill.

The exception tended to be oil tankers that experienced one of three results; if they were carrying something extremely volatile like avgas they exploded and that was that, their cargo caught fire and that usually caused the crew to abandon ship if for no other reason the concern they'd eat another torp, or their inherent additional durability due to tanks that were watertight compartments filled with something less dense than water allowed them to absorb considerable punishment. Most well known example of the last result is probably USS Ohio and its journey to resupply Malta.

Edited November 2, 2019 by Steeltrap
minor additions/amendments

[Lobokai]

@Mycophobia I agree with you on the "hunting the right hit box" frustrations... but as far as 8" BCs... I made 2 for the Armored Convoy scenario... put as many super firing 8"s and secondaries as I could (used 9s for my minimum mains) , then at 22 knots, in one pass, I was able to sink every ship except the 2 BBs and 1 TR that I intentionally left to keep the mission going.  I then looped around and put all fire into 1 BB and was able to structure it on a single 20 knot pass and severely hurt the other, which I turned to cross its stern T and then gunned down it... last TR bit it... end of mission...

Here's my build

[Mycophobia]

So I have tried the above build of multiple 8" 9" on a BC(I've fitted a bit more guns, but otherwise followed the above build, including using heavy shells and white powder) and tested it against cargo vessels in the undefended convoy mission again. In 146 hits(based on the damage tracker), all of which are being shot at 2 enemy merchant (I'd like to focus on one, but the secondary on the other side will target ships on the otherside).

Both ships were reduced to about half structure after 70 shots or so, flooding was low to begin with, but begin to follow up after another volley or two. However, the effectiveness of my shots dropped significantly as the ship approached <10% strcture and flooding. It took a entire volley of at least 7-8 hit to bring the strcture from 10 to 6, another volley (shown in the pic, with over 10 hits and a ammo explosion) brought the ship down to 3%. The floatiation, while at 1%, did not kill the ship until he next volley brought it under.

Near the end of scenario, I ran out of time, have scored about 400-450 pens+overpens(also, HE overpen makes no sense unless my shell have faulty fuse. Yet they are by far the majorty of my hits), and sunk 3 Cargo ship, heavily damaging 3 more. I could've probably sunk more if I spread my fire a bit and left the sinking ones to sink on their own, but again, I cannot rely upon any flooding to kill a ship unless I got lucky and have leak going on in sufficient bulkheads. To make sure I initiate the flooding in all bulkheads, I just had to keep shooting and hope my shell cause the flooding in enough bulkheads. Even then, the merchant ships can sometime bring the flooding undercontrol, thus requiring me to put yet more shells, hoping to damage an unflooded bulkhead.

This imo, is ridiculous. Cargo ships are not made of paper, 8/9" shells are not quite comparable to those seen on the battleships, but taking at least 50+ shells to sink a merchant ship is ridiculous. This is not the issue of mission balancing alone, I've beaten the armed convoy mission with a pair of big gun BCs for example, and big guns are generally far more reliable since they have a much easier time damaging several components. But this need to hunt for a bulkhead is seriously hurting not only the realism, but gameplay value for me as well. 

 

 

Edited November 2, 2019 by Mycophobia

[Cptbarney]

Think depending on the design, weight, armour, quality, type and damage the ship is and has obtained should mean that even at 10% structure or less it should be inoperable or abandonded by the crew.

At least something to stop miss so and so, as a merchant ship who can tank moar rounds than biscuits and still survive lol.

[Steeltrap]

I just did the attack the convoy mission again, and used a single BC with 7" secondary guns and only two 11" main gun turrets, plus a mass of 2" guns on the towers.

I, too, ran into the "immortal transport" vessel.

It got stuck at 2% structure and 21% flooding. It had dipped to 19%, but then rather remarkably recovered to 21% again.

AFTER it got to 2% structure and 21% flooding, I know for a fact it absorbed more than 50 x 7" rounds. It also took at least 6 x 11" HE. It absorbed enough 2" (50mm) to equip a 1941 German Panzer division, too. All 3 gun types showed 100% hit chance.

Whatever is supposed to be happening clearly has the possibility of somehow going wrong, as there's simply no way that ought to be possible if damage is meant to ignore destroyed compartments and travel to a compartment that has some ability to take damage.

@Mycophobia has given us a pretty clear picture, too. I bet that was a bit wtf to watch, lol.

It's not all the time, either, from what I've seen, which is somewhat the worst case when it comes to trying to resolve it.

Oh well, all that can be done is raise it and see how subsequent patches address it.

Edited November 2, 2019 by Steeltrap

[Lobokai]

Well here’s my 25 minute run where everything died horribly and I was able to kill all in a slash, loop, and single pass. Am I running the wrong version? Are you? If anything I feel like secondaries are OP right now

 

[Lobokai]

What shells, what explosives, what turrets, what reloading techs are you using? I’ve noticed radical differences with changes in those.

[Mycophobia]

7 hours ago, Lobokai said:

What shells, what explosives, what turrets, what reloading techs are you using? I’ve noticed radical differences with changes in those.

I am using heavy shell, white powder and mk 4 turret. The mark 4 turret in particular seems to suggest that this is a very advanced gun, and I feel something more appropriate to the period would perform much worse, but given the nature of naval academy I would not worry about that for now.

I've tried my best to duplicate the ship you posted above and have an attempt at the Armed Convoy attack mission, incase there is some tech difference between this and the unarmed convoy attack mission.

 

The result was quite different from your experience. The AP shells were able to sink both CA and the CL on the way in, all due to ammo explosions. The CL took over 30 hits to sink, but was close to sinking anyways when the ammo explosion happened. The two CAs were sunk rather quickly, after perhaps 10-15 hits before an ammo explosion destroyed the ship. 

I've then shifted my fire to one of the pre-dreads, and after perhaps 50 hits was able to bring it to half strcture, minimal flooding, before one shell detonated one of my BC. At this point I've decided I might as well just go test how well my shells will perform against the cargo vessels. (Aplogies but due to forum pic size limit I will have to make a separate post to show the screen shot for that)

 

[Mycophobia]

The TR is bought to this current state after about three volley, I checked to note that its actually recovering its flotation points slowly before the next volley hits. 

Next volley, 9 hits total, structure reduced to 17%. 

Next volley, 9 more hit(seen from hit tracker). Strcture was only reduced by 3% despite 9 hits. Note the ship log saying most of the hits are midship/bow, location that has been previously destroyed. This, I suspect again, its why that the structural damage is so minimal. Flooding progressed a bit further, but I cant be too sure whether the ship would've sunk as my BC was detonated by a shot from the enemy B.

I hope this demonstrates the problem with the bulkhead damage model. I think the damage model is a bigger issue causing the ineffectiveness of secondary guns. The CA and CL were sunk after a fairly reasonable number of secondary fire, but that is because their ammunation were set off. I could be lucky here, but I feel ammo explosion happen slightly too often in the current game. Inadequately armored CA and CL can be dealt punishing blows by secondary guns, but it should mainly be a fair amount of flotation and machinery damage rather than lucky magazine hits for the most part. 

I have no doubt that with a bit of luck and perhaps more cautiously keeping my distance, I might be able to pull off a victory with this build, but I certainly don't get the feeling that secondary is OP since I've had more success in my earlier attempts with 11" armed ships.

The problem I see here is that even if the final result (winning the battle) may be the same, the way that it is done feels very unrealistic, and could be very problematic in different scenarios. While 8/9" guns, with autoloading and heavy shells can get fairly lucky with ammo detonation, 5-6" guns that serves as the more common secondary guns will struggle to do so. Soft target like merchants are incredibly resilient even to 8-9", 5-6" light cruisers will usually end up having an extreme hard time sinking them at all. (I've tried this)

Granted, In naval warfare, chance plays a huge role, and It could be the case that either you or I are just consistently unlucky, but I've observed this difficulty to finish off dying ships across most missions. The weakness of secondary guns, especially in the 5-6" range, is also something I've noted across the my time with this game. Perhaps I've given 8-9" guns too little credit against more warships, but the fact that they are more effective against warships than cargo vessels is a problem in of itself in my opinion.

To see why the current in game damage model is problematic, lets consider a different scenario from sinking transports. 

Using the sinking of the armored cruiser Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Blucher as an example. These armored cruisers all took a fairly reasonable time and many hits from pursuing battlecruisers to sink, none suffered catastrophic ammo detonation. These ships generally suffered gradual damage that piled up and eventually overwhelmed the ship near the end.

In the game we see the exact opposite, high caliber hits can very quickly inflict severe damage on a ship (A little too much even), but then struggle to finish off the dying ship.Secondary fire generally do not contribute to the gradually worsening damage except getting lucky with ammo explosion, or when the ship in question is extremely poorly armored.

As a result, while it may take the same amount of total time to sink a ship, the progress a ship receiving damage is completely the opposite from reality. Since structural damage and flooding are tied to ship's performance, its very normal to see ship quickly reduced to burning wrecks but then lingering on for quite awhile.

 

 

Edited November 3, 2019 by Mycophobia

[Lobokai]

I’ve done a total of 4 runs now. 1 went similar to the one you described, other 3 were close approximations of the one I posted. It’s basically when and who finally “rolls a crit”. Annoying as all get out in these small academy engagements, but in larger fights (like a posted somewhere else... threads are running together now) it won’t be so bad and is appropriate to the setting. If you’re up for doing it, try a few more runs?

In my experience, tacking a little as you approach a foe in these BCs lets you put a ton of shots down range, but I only do it after a BB main gun volley... you want to be head on when those come at you. Other than that, a lazy loop does the trick 

[Lobokai]

Ninja’d. But I agree with damage model concerns on TRs and TBs... needs some tweaking. Just trying to illustrate that the secondaries are fine in hits and damage when looking at the 8”s  

 

edit: I’ll test smaller secondary mounts (and yes, more historical ones) next

Edited November 3, 2019 by Lobokai

[Mycophobia]

21 minutes ago, Lobokai said:

Ninja’d. But I agree with damage model concerns on TRs and TBs... needs some tweaking. Just trying to illustrate that the secondaries are fine in hits and damage when looking at the 8”s  

 

edit: I’ll test smaller secondary mounts (and yes, more historical ones) next

I've given the scenario another shot, and it went more like what you've experienced, though it took me quite a bit longer (about 40-45 min total) because some TR simply refused to sink...

The CAs again fell prey to ammo detonation, while both Bs were sunk after extensive HE fire that sunk them through "extensive fire". Interesting two of the TR were likewise sunk by extensive fire, which never happened in my 4 tries before in unarmed convoy battle, where I only had one BC. I suppose the volume of fire here made the difference. All in all I think at least in this scenario 8" are fairly viable damaging, but I might try to take them to other scenarios and see how things work out.

In this particular case, you are using highly advanced 8" against whats basically a pre-dread era fleet. (Which is honestly why I hope we get the campaign soon, to make it much easier to compare things that are contemporary to each other)

[Steeltrap]

I, too, tend to use white powder and heavy shells.

Secondaries are indeed more potent than I first considered them, although I would add you have to be reasonably close and the effectiveness of them on small targets/transports in particular can be a crap shoot.

Even so, I think we're all in agreement there's at least something potentially off with the damage model.

On the one hand we don't want a total spreadsheet sort of calculated predictability, reality does contain lots of RNG. On the other, we don't want particularly crazy outliers to occur more often than, well, outliers ought to.

I even saw a TR get hit by a torp, said it was flooding, yet the flooding counter didn't shift at all; I think it hit somewhere already flooded. Indeed torpedoes can be strangely underwhelming given I'm pretty certain they were demonstrably the worst thing by which to be hit regardless of what ship you were in. Hit a TR with a torp, or a DD, or a CL for that matter, and the TR ought to sink, the DD more than likely ought to, and the CL very likely ought to. The latter two at the very least ought to be crippled.

If I had to guess I'd say there are still issues with the way the devs intend damage transfers to occur and what is in fact occurring in certain circumstances.

p.s. I completed that run using 2 x CA with 11" bow and stern main turret and a bunch of 5" casemates, 2 hull mounted torp tubes per side, and healthy slabs of armour. I found the HE was also oddly inconsistent firing at enemy BBs. Sometimes it didn't achieve much, other times pretty massive damage including secondary ammo explosions. The AP hadn't done much at all, which was fine due to target's armour levels and angles. Still have to wonder if HE isn't still a little too good, though, but plenty of time for the devs to play around with it.