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>>>Alpha-3 General Feedback v65<<<


Nick Thomadis

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Liking the patch but destroyers have been massively overbuffed. Before you had a 5-10% chance to hit them and that was okay, but playing the new heavy cruiser mission I have two issues. 

One - They took (easily) 100+ hits from 203mm main guns and 102mm secondaries. This is too much, tried AP and HE. 

Two - The hit chance. My God. Three things here. 

- Small target profile, -70%

- Maneuver (in ANY turn, even slight), -80%

- High speed, -90% 

All in all that's a total of -240% to any incoming shell hit chance just because it's a destroyer, this is too much. I had to close in brawl the destroyers to kill them. (As in ramming distance.) And even here my hit chance was never above 5% until I started to damage engines. 

 

My other complaint about the armored cruisers you have to fight is they should not have access to Krupp armor of any kind, +100% armor on a ship with a 200mm belt is not fun to 203mm armed modern CA's. I actually think that all armors need to keep weight reduction and increase cost but barely affect thickness, some of the values we see right now are obscene which in turn makes anything other than the highest size guns kind of pointless. I beat the mission not with Graf Spee type ships or gun focused 203mm armed treaty cruisers but with IJN Style Long Lance Torpedo cruisers that wiped the floor with the armored cruisers purely with long range torps. 

I also find it very unrealistic that every single enemy armored cruiser we ever see has at least 230mm (9 inch) plus guns when historically this was an exception except in very early types with awful reloads. (and the aforementioned Panzerschiff types.) Right now it feels like the AI almost always picks the largest guns available to it, even if they're of a poor Mark. 

Edited by Reaper Jack
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1 hour ago, Reaper Jack said:

I also find it very unrealistic that every single enemy armored cruiser we ever see has at least 230mm (9 inch) plus guns when historically this was an exception except in very early types with awful reloads. (and the aforementioned Panzerschiff types.) Right now it feels like the AI almost always picks the largest guns available to it, even if they're of a poor Mark. 

8" guns were a product of treaty, not a finding of design optimum. (6" guns were encouraged by treaty but are at more of a natural threshold in terms of the complexity of the loading system). Without a treaty to enforce it, the AI's tendency to upgun makes sense.

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1 hour ago, Blothorn said:

8" guns were a product of treaty, not a finding of design optimum. (6" guns were encouraged by treaty but are at more of a natural threshold in terms of the complexity of the loading system). Without a treaty to enforce it, the AI's tendency to upgun makes sense.

Still think that the AI  should not choose to upgun every single time. Smaller sizes have other advantages, lower maintenance, cheaper to build, industries were already in place to make said guns, rate of fire, ship weight, balance, reliability, historically cruiser guns tended to be the most accurate as well,  etc.  There's also the fact that 8-10 inches might not sound like a huge difference, but in naval gunnery it really is, an 8 inch gun is still smaller, with most shells weighing about 200kg/440 lb. To take say the Graf Spee's 11 inch guns, those shells could weigh almost 150kg more, or a 75% increase in weight for about a 42% increase in size, the technical issues this presents to mounting such guns on a smaller cruiser platform is a big one. There's a reason no designs for anything employing larger than 8 inch guns were ever approved for cruisers even after the treaties were done away with. And the Spee and other Deutschlands only got away with it by employing six barrels and lackluster armor to make up for keeping the weight reasonable so the ship didn't capsize in a small squall; any more guns and the instability would have been too much. 

Bigger was not always better. To use the 8 inch guns as an example, shells from the Prinz Eugen penetrated the Prince of Wales in vital areas (and the Hood too, into magazine spaces) during the Battle of  the Denmark Strait, a dud, undetonated shell from the Eugen was in fact found in Prince of Wale's ammunition storage after the battle when she went to dock in the USA for repair. Which speaking of, dud weaponry might be a factor to add at some point. (To reflect a home industries/economy problem maybe? Campaign stuff.) 

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Alright.  First impressions:

Pluses

  • Awesome new ships!
  • Cool new missions!
  • Custom battles show potential!

Minuses

  • I can only control the design of a single group of ships in custom battles.  This is annoying if not surprising but it leads DIRECTLY to the rest of my complaints
  • In custom battles the enemies seem to like to bring out random ships even in the 1940 setting.  This is highly annoying as I like to build massive super Battleships.  The problem is almost all the time the USA just brings out an old and obsolete dreadnought weighing around 55k~ tons while I'm using a 120k ton monster BB that sort of makes the whole fight feel pointless and not even worth fighting
  • This lack of being able to fight a high end fleet leads me to severely miss the unlock tech and ship hulls cheat codes as naval academy missions have constant and fun enemies to fight against with a super BB especially now with the added modern scenarios.  But I can no longer take out a super BB in any of them due to the removal of the cheats. 
    This would not be a problem if I could design at least the ship hulls that the enemies use in custom battles but I can not do that right now. 
    This leads me to being highly annoyed at the removal of the cheats for hulls and tech as I want to bring out a super BB vs a competent and high end enemy fleet and I could do that if the cheats were still in place.  
    The custom battles should solve this problem except for the fact that the enemy AI in custom battle almost never brings out an actual modern BB for me to fight against. 
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Haven't gotten a chance to check too much stuff out yet but I am certainly noticing the improvements.

I definitely appreciate being able to try out the different technology levels in custom battles vs the academy's presets.

 

 

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Okay well I'll probably get some flack for saying this but I have to be honest. I'm not thrilled with the content I've seen thus far. I'm sure the battles are great, I haven't gotten to them yet.

I've spent several hours just building ships in different eras in the custom ship builder and I've several points to pick at. 

I was under the impression with the patch teaser that there would be considerably more freedom in where one could place the super structure, barbettes, and turrets as many players were asking to be able to build ships akin to the Nelson, and it seems we can now do that. On only the super battleship and modern battleship hulls. That's disappointing. 

Further, I'm sorry oh lords of the admiralty, but these limiting snap points for various structures are a heinous warcrime. Some of them are so limiting on some hulls that if I want to try and squish a pair of super firing turrets on the bow of the ship it causes the ships weight to be offset by absurd amounts. I smooshed a super firing pair of twin 14's on the battle cruiser III hull and got it bow offset by over 45%, despite having three twin 14 inch turrets on the midships and stern. They also just get in the way of each other. No you can't put that superstructure there because this barbette can only be placed in one spot on the hull, which means you need to use a smaller super structure because you can't move it back further to accommodate that one locked in place barbette. I can understand, to a point, why some things are limited to the snap point, but why barbettes when turrets can be placed end to end to end down almost the entire center line of the hull until you get to the border.. which brings me to the nest point.

And then there's the dreaded snap point that actually overhang a border. Want to put any sort of guns on those snap points that sit atop the sponsons on some of the armored cruiser/pre-dreadnought hulls? Still can't. The modern secondary tower II, the long flat one with the slot for the super funnel that's clearly japanese in design, if put it on a modern battle cruiser none of the available funnels are small enough to actually fit on it. The Modern battleship hull has 2 snap points way in the stern that if you plop a mega pagoda tower and a small secondary tower also obscure all the snap points to put the funnels on. The German pre-dreadnought battleship III, based off of the Kaiser Friedrich III class has 2 bridge snap points, front tower III can only use one of the 2 points because the bridge overhangs the hull border on the point that snugs it up tight to the hull seamlessly, but the second point leaves a noticeable gap between the bridge and the hull. These just name a few, there are several others I found that I didn't write down. 

 

I hope the naval combat part of the game is better at least. I haven't actually gotten to any of that and that seems to be the main focus on this alpha. Keep up the good work, despite my lamentations I do think you guys are doing a great job. Uh, just maybe dial back all the love you're giving to more modern warships please, I'll be brutally honest and I know many will disagree with me but that modern Italian styled cruiser hull is kinda bland and feels very limited in it's design possibilities (why can't I put medium barbettes on its stern, for example). Give some more love to the older ship designs. 

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I hope everyone enjoys the new update but I feel it only tip toed to the larger issues. I recently experimented in the custom battles of a task force cruiser battle (1926) and unfortunately it was a mess. ships that were set to screen abandoned their charges and sailed bow first into the enemy. Since their were a lot of light forces present they all proceed to get hit by torpedoes and due to how clunky the formation system is their is nothing I could do about it. 

My personally designed heavy cruisers armed with 11" guns were pitiful when it came to engage the enemy. Starting at 12000m apart I've yet to see any of their accuracy percentages grow beyond %12. Destroyers were worse as my 5" armed secondary's struggled to hit and struggled to do damage. Even the main guns of 11" still do pitiful damage when they hit, I've rolled damaging hits that only gave 4.2dmg! Light forces still have major issues that need to be resolved because without torpedo spamming they don't do much

I returned back to capital ship fights and the issues were still the same. Armor piercing, luckily, is much more capable of landing hits but almost never cause serious damage. I might knock out a chunk of health here and there but the process of just repeatedly banging an old ship with 18" gun fire is frustrating. I believe the issue is that since citadels dramatically reduce the chance for an engine or ammo hit its quite difficult to land a ship that can do a lasting blow

The placement system leaves me unimpressed as the only major change I see is that Yamato has hardpoints for folks to try a Nelson style ship but not much else. The ability to move our structures without snaps would be nice. Also the towers we get is restricting on what secondary armament I can mount on a ship.

Despite the doom and gloom I like the new hulls and the more modern turret designs for secondary's look great. I'll gladly follow along and see things improve and wish the devs best of luck

Edited by Tankaxe
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12 minutes ago, RedParadize said:

I would be great if we were able to place Barbette and Tower just like turret. At least until you add snap point to all middle section.

I wonder if these are more for the AI. I could see wanting to limit AI design options

 

I'm enjoying the update, however I've noticed that the Destroyers are still unreasonably hard to kill. I had one today that was down to .1% of health and still taking 10" HE shells (200-500dmg per hit) like a champ. 

 

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40 minutes ago, Bluishdoor76 said:

Anyone else having an issue where the game goes into full screen but the task bar is still displayed and covers the bottom of the game screen?

@admin nvm, it just suddenly went to full screen while in the middle of a battle. I'm honestly kinda lost as to what it caused it but it seems fine now.

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2 hours ago, Tankaxe said:

I hope everyone enjoys the new update but I feel it only tip toed to the larger issues. I recently experimented in the custom battles of a task force cruiser battle (1926) and unfortunately it was a mess. ships that were set to screen abandoned their charges and sailed bow first into the enemy. Since their were a lot of light forces present they all proceed to get hit by torpedoes and due to how clunky the formation system is their is nothing I could do about it. 

My personally designed heavy cruisers armed with 11" guns were pitiful when it came to engage the enemy. Starting at 12000m apart I've yet to see any of their accuracy percentages grow beyond %12. Destroyers were worse as my 5" armed secondary's struggled to hit and struggled to do damage. Even the main guns of 11" still do pitiful damage when they hit, I've rolled damaging hits that only gave 4.2dmg! Light forces still have major issues that need to be resolved because without torpedo spamming they don't do much

I returned back to capital ship fights and the issues were still the same. Armor piercing, luckily, is much more capable of landing hits but almost never cause serious damage. I might knock out a chunk of health here and there but the process of just repeatedly banging an old ship with 18" gun fire is frustrating. I believe the issue is that since citadels dramatically reduce the chance for an engine or ammo hit its quite difficult to land a ship that can do a lasting blow

The placement system leaves me unimpressed as the only major change I see is that Yamato has hardpoints for folks to try a Nelson style ship but not much else. The ability to move our structures without snaps would be nice. Also the towers we get is restricting on what secondary armament I can mount on a ship.

Despite the doom and gloom I like the new hulls and the more modern turret designs for secondary's look great. I'll gladly follow along and see things improve and wish the devs best of luck

This.

 In a test run, enemy CAs 8" done almost the same damage as my BCs 13". Both cases reported "penetration" and done around 15-20hp dmg and started a small fire. My ship at least used 13" AP Mk3. 

The above with the armour still being too OP, lessens the impact of having large guns apart from the latest monsters.

Small guns are even worse, as they cannot hit a barn from point-blank.  

|

Anyhow, I am glad that they included the additional  stuff, especially the custpm battle. 

 

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I have  a problem

 

in red I have this message from console during a custom battle

 

exception assertion failed bad auto whoosh_long suitableloop8_F2_B2

 

on a lot of lignes

 

can you help me

Edited by biondi
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4 hours ago, Mhtsos said:

This.

 In a test run, enemy CAs 8" done almost the same damage as my BCs 13". Both cases reported "penetration" and done around 15-20hp dmg and started a small fire. My ship at least used 13" AP Mk3. 

The above with the armour still being too OP, lessens the impact of having large guns apart from the latest monsters.

Small guns are even worse, as they cannot hit a barn from point-blank.  

|

Anyhow, I am glad that they included the additional  stuff, especially the custpm battle. 

 

Re-tried with modern (1940) US BC, 13"+4"+2". All maxed for accuracy. This time in the same range (2-4km) the 4" had around 50% and the small ones around...90%. 

I say that it should be more consistent because the other BC was tech from 1928, not a huge difference in that range. 

|

Anyhow, I love the new barrel up-down when reloading, the penetration marks, the destroyed turrets and the slick new late-game main towers. Also, it is very positive that at last the almost-dead ships are not having excellent accuracy or even fight back when around 5-10%. 

The damage model for stern/bow to enemy should also improved, it took some dozens 13" and some hundreds 4+2" to sink a 1920/early 30 CA.

 

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13 hours ago, Reaper Jack said:

Liking the patch but destroyers have been massively overbuffed. Before you had a 5-10% chance to hit them and that was okay, but playing the new heavy cruiser mission I have two issues. 

One - They took (easily) 100+ hits from 203mm main guns and 102mm secondaries. This is too much, tried AP and HE. 

Two - The hit chance. My God. Three things here. 

- Small target profile, -70%

- Maneuver (in ANY turn, even slight), -80%

- High speed, -90% 

All in all that's a total of -240% to any incoming shell hit chance just because it's a destroyer, this is too much. I had to close in brawl the destroyers to kill them. (As in ramming distance.) And even here my hit chance was never above 5% until I started to damage engines. 

 

 

I have to agree. Just ran a couple fast custom games to check out destroyers and by god hitting those things was a pray to RNGsus each time the guns fired. I'm of course OK with hit chances against fast small vessels to be low at most ranges...but not when down to point blank, there you're not firing by plot-and-correction, there you're actually firing by direct control and lead and I swear at times it looks like the gunners are actively trying to NOT hit the targetted ship.

I've just got a 1935 scenario of a single BB vs four destroyers, which came down to almost 4km and it was almost benny-hill-esque to watch. Again, those modifiers make sense for a DD sitting maybe 15km away from your big guns, but when they're pretty much on top of you they just don't.


Gotta say however that at least you get the right idea about what it takes to fight a flotilla of small fast craft: sheer volume of secondaries. They won't hit much on a per-shot basis, but if you're firing off a zillion of them something will stick. And a DD doesn't take a 6'' shell lightly. So at least right now the game does one thing right: Teaching you the lesson that if you skimp of secondaries you're asking for trouble. Right now hitting chances against DDs as close as 5km away are ridiculously low, but at medium and long ranges they make sense, and as torpedo technology increases DDs won't need to come *that* close to your ships in order to deliver their surprise packages.

Still wrong is wrong - at point blank ranges those negative hit modifiers are just too much to be believable.

Edited by RAMJB
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Torpedoes still cannot harm late-tier battleships.

I'm all for torpedo defenses being a thing, they were historically after all. But there's no torpedo defense system, excluding duct taping destroyers to the side of your ship, which can stop 20 torpedoes from doing at least immense damage to a ship.

I pumped god knows how many 24 inch max tier torpedoes into the 105 kiloton battleship and it barely scratched her. 

Torpedo defense should NOT, I repeat, NOT scale with belt armor. Belts were not deep enough to impact torpedoes (excluding the few shallow running torps which people tried avoiding), and the sheer concussive force would certainly crack and obliterate the belt anyway.

Another problem is that technically torpedoes don't hit anything but the lowest areas of the ship, meaning that as long as you have antiflooding, you can survive infinite torpedoes, in theory.

I noticed that once enough torpedoes had hit me, more hitting me didn't do anything, and I could pump water out faster than they could put into me.

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- torpedo warning markers are good;

- the new turrets  models are pretty nice;

- Custom Battles  nice addition to the Academy;

- Damage decals not so bad to start;

I like Penetration Estimator. Extra information, but without info overloading. Good work;

Secondary Guns (aka small guns) now can hit TB! At least 4" and 5" can get TB and sink whem. Long-awaited changes.

- new torpedoes and hulls - more options is more fun; 

- HE shells now useless  significantly less usefull;

- the new heavy cruisers obviously lack firepower.  8" are practically worthless and even 11" are barely adequate. Torpedoes are the best choice and even then the enemy’s battleships can take a few hits and refuse to sink. This is due to the armor model.  Because instead

 

shema-indiana-1893.png

we have

depositphotos_126403382-stock-photo-iron

 

 

P.S. Can you add a button "click-to-continue" to the boot screen?I do not always have time to read historical tabs :unsure:

Edited by TAKTCOM
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in the mission, sink the cruiser killer. remove all the other ships both allied and enemy. As I was fighting the BC I would occasionally get reports of a DD sinking, when they were nowhere in sight. They are simply cluttering up the mission at this point if the AI won't bother to keep a formation. 

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One thing I desperately miss is turret barbettes having sizes to fit certain turret wells. Problem is, you need huge barbettes for even twin 15" guns, severely limiting you. So a procedural size increase for barbettes, with types having a range of sizes for different calibres. As forplacements... PLEASE remove the limited points. Instead, mark areas where you can place the parts.

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21 hours ago, RAMJB said:

Finally I set up a BB vs BB battle. 1925. I proudly bring in a 35k tonner, 10x14'' guns and 26 knot top speed, well protected...proud of myself, that's a design I'd definitely go for in a campaign where I'm limited by treaties or funds!!!!...

AI shows up with a 12x16'' monster displacing 56k tons. My buttocks still hurt from the ass whooping that came next XDDDD.

Yep, know that feeling. 😱

Kidding aside, loving the new custom battles.

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Some initial thoughts:

- Still not convinced about how ships fall back into the back of a formation when their speed is reduced. If not babysitted, they just make a long U turn, exposing themselves even more. I  had one instance where a bleeding lady tried to fall back, sailing right into the way of spotted torpedoes. Note that all of this can be avoided with micromanagement.

- HE shells still feel more reliable at mid and long ranges, I might need more games before being absolutely certain. They punch through the soft parts, start fire, flooding, can break guns, ect. I mostly played with high end technologies, but some 1910+ battles gave me the same feeling.

- Still not seeing any use with low caliber secondary guns (other than being pretty). DD's still have issue hitting/damaging things with other things than torpedoes. Am I missing something here?

- Torpedo protection/counterflooding is pretty strong overall. While damages are okayish, flooding seems to be easily fixed on bigger ships, even after multiple hits.

- Torpedo warning is a very nice addition and custom battle are welcome.

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