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

[Sproge]

On 12/9/2019 at 6:35 PM, Nick Thomadis said:

 

• Improved Combat Penetration Info:  You can use this in reverse by selecting enemy ships and pressing the alt-key while hovering your mouse over your own ships.

Is this not working for everyone else as well? Or is it just me?

[Wowzery]

The one thing I'm noticing in custom combat, is the enemy AI ships retreating the moment they get damaged.  And if they are faster, the combat is essentially over.

[Accipiter]

On 12/9/2019 at 6:35 PM, Nick Thomadis said:

Fixed issue with hull damage that made severely damaged ships and torpedo boats too hard to sink.

has anything been done about that????

after playing this new update for 5+ hours now, i'm really not seeing anyting different at all in that area. ships with lots of red compartiments are still as overly tanky as before, DD and TB can still tank way too many hits in addition of being way too hard to hit, just like before.

so like, what??? is this in the patchnotes by accident and planned for a future update? i'm confused. what have you done? i really DO NOT see any difference from last version regarding this.

Edited December 10, 2019 by Accipiter

[AML]

1 hour ago, Wowzery said:

The one thing I'm noticing in custom combat, is the enemy AI ships retreating the moment they get damaged.  And if they are faster, the combat is essentially over.

Yep, played a couple of 1v1 custom battles today in various classes and eras, every single one turned into a stern chase the moment the AI took a moderate amount of damage.

Even when my own ship had taken as much if not more of a beating and the AI had a decent chance of winning they would still turn away and run. Cue loading HE because AP just ricochets off everything and slowly running them down or just leaving the battle due to lack of speed or patience on my part. 

[ThatZenoGuy]

Can confirm, if you want to win, you must be as fast as, or preferably a lot faster than your enemy.

Just saying, but shouldn't engine repairs/funnel repairs have limits? I seriously doubt that battleship with half its mass in HE/AP shells within its boilers can repair itself.

[KiltedKey]

I'll attach the second picture to my next post, but notice how the Yamato Modern Tower 1 is worse stats, lighter, and yet has more secondary slots as Yamato Modern Tower 2. So as I said earlier, I think their positions have been flipped around.

Edited December 10, 2019 by KiltedKey

[KiltedKey]

And Yamato Modern Tower 2.

[Tankaxe]

2nd tower is superior really because you have alot more space to place secondaries of your choosing.

[captinjoehenry]

On 12/9/2019 at 12:35 PM, Nick Thomadis said:

COMBAT GAMEPLAY

• Improved Secondary Guns' Penetration & Accuracy.

Also this does not seem to be the case that well.  Having 60 6" barrels in 20 tripple 5" turrets as a secondary battery failed to do any real damage to enemy DDs within 7 - 10km.  They scored about 10~ hits doing notable but light damage.  While all 10 of the DDs I tested against were simply sunk by the 18" primary battery

 

[roachbeef]

I feel like the secondaries got nerfed instead. Missing at less than 10% accuracy at 2km with 8" secondaries makes them pretty useless against destroyers.

[Druzki]

Hey, this is a great update with endless replayability. This game is a perfect example of how to execute early access. 

However I thought for alpha 3 we could design every ship in our fleet in custom battle and naval academy, also designing different ship of the same type(for example 2 battlecruisers, one with 3x 3 13'guns and another with 2x4 12'') . Im a bit dissappointed that this hasn't been implemented because this would've massively increased the depth of the game and given much more player control with even more replayability.

[RAMJB]

1 hour ago, captinjoehenry said:

Also this does not seem to be the case that well.  Having 60 6" barrels in 20 tripple 5" turrets as a secondary battery failed to do any real damage to enemy DDs within 7 - 10km.  They scored about 10~ hits doing notable but light damage.  While all 10 of the DDs I tested against were simply sunk by the 18" primary battery

 

Not my experience. Standard scenario 4 1400ton DDs vs 1935 tech BB armed with 9x14'' guns , 6x2 6'' in twin turrets, assortment of 3 inch guns for close range combat.

Hitting them was a nightmare (result of the penalties I spoke about before), but each time any of them got hit by the 6'' guns they duly took notice. Of course it also depends on the placement of the hits, if you're hitting their superstructure the damage is not that much. But damn, they didn't like being hit on the hull. At all.

Of course, every time one of them took a 14'' it was like fireworks - so in order to sink them in short notice nothing like a hit of the main guns. But the 6'' did their job. The job being: keeping them at check and damaging them enough for my main battery to shoot them into the moon. Which is the role of the secondary battery of a main battleship: fend off destroyers. Fending off does not equal disintegrating, means damaging them enough so they stop attacking/stop being a threat. Of course given enough time the 6'' battery would've killed them. But why wait when you have massive guns to make the job faster...

[disc]

This patch is very nice.

The new hulls are fun to play with, I especially like the catapult on Zara. Maybe we will have scouts and spotting planes one day.

Custom battles look great. Once we can save designs there, I think it will be even better.

The new scenarios are good. I think another cool one would be attack/defense on a port, with forts and mines. Definitely a huge piece of naval warfare there.

In terms of things to improve, I think further relaxation of snap points is needed, especially for barbettes. No doubt the auto-generator finds them useful when trying to make rational designs, but for us I'd like few restrictions. If we want to build idiotic monstrosities, let us do so, though with penalties. It may serve as small lesson.

AP is improved, but from what I glean, the penetration values are still too low. The base pen looks to refer to iron plate, which may be our "problem," because it seems fairly reasonable for homogeneous steel. What penetration formula does the game use? Is it proprietary? And why are the Mark 5 "standard" shells about twice the reasonable weight for their caliber? (maybe a lb to kg conversion, or lack thereof?)

Regarding small guns, I think they are still undertuned. Part of the issue stems from the abundance of armor -- without knowing the specifics of the in-game ship layout, it looks that the armor covers too much area. An increase of rate of fire (still somewhat low at high Marks) could help. A better approach may be to give an inverse bonus to gun size: the smaller the gun, the less the penalty it takes from high target speed and small target size. Anti-torpedo guns would fulfill their purpose, while not overwhelming the big guns when fighting battleship to battleship.

[RAMJB]

17 minutes ago, disc said:

 

AP is improved, but from what I glean, the penetration values are still too low. The base pen looks to refer to iron plate, which may be our "problem," because it seems fairly reasonable for homogeneous steel. 

It is not a "problem", and yes, it is measured in iron plate penetration. It is not a problem because the game is going to have to deal with the evolving metallurgy advances that happened during the Dreadnought era. A normalization is needed and the compromise of basing penetration values on the lowest common denominator works perfectly well. I know those who have played RTW are used to something different - but I like this system better. In RTW you didn't actually armor your ship with the thicknesses you wanted, you armored it with an "equivalent value". Meaning, if you put "12" in your belt entry, you'll get the equivalent protection to 12'' of the reference armor (which IIRC, was the best one you could unlock with techs). Gun penetration was also measured vs that value. A much simpler presentation for the user but a far less transparent one and one that induced many people to gross mistakes when trying to replicate historical warships ("I can't design this X historical ship within the historical displacement values using the armor values the historical ships used!!!!" well no kidding because when you're putting "12" on your belt the game is translating it into maybe 15'' of REAL armor that's equivalent to 12'' of the best one in the game. You're putting a lot more armor weight on your ship than the historical one did. So which is the value you'd need to equal your belt armor to that of the historical ship you're trying to replicate?. Well, good luck trying to figure it out. Again, very confusing)

In the battle tool you'll get info about the real penetration of your main guns at any given moment: they factor in angle of fall, angle of hit, richochet chances, etc. It's plain to see that the effective penetration you get is not the one listed on the gun, but exctly what you'd expect if you reduced the gun penetration by the krupp value of the armor, plus added modifiers for the angle of hit, angle of fall of shell, etc.
 I've just finally recorded a video for my channel that I'll edit and probably upload by tomorrow. There I talk a little bit about armoring the ship and how I do it, using the reference values of the armor I'm placing, multiplying it by the krupp % protection bonus and comparing them vs the gun penetration values. Maybe that'll help illustrating things out (for anyone who can put up with my horrid english accent, that is).


I don't think small guns are undertuned. But I do think you're right about armor being too extensive. right now by the look of things whatever you put into your belt thickness covers the whole side of the main area of the warship. This is just not historical, like at all. Belts covered the waterline, some feet avobe and below. Avobe that there'd be an "upper belt" which thickness would be much lower, or almost nonexistant (in AoN designs). Same with the extended belt - the whole ship's ends are covered in whatever thickness you put in the box. again, not historical as that "belt extension" also was quite limited in area, and restricted to the waterline.
 
I'm sure what we have now is a placeholder armor model that in the future will be revamped with more precise armor layouts like main belt, extended belt, upper belt, etc. Right now is what it is though, and yes, that's not historical and yes, that probably contributes to the idea that smaller guns don't do that much.

Edited December 11, 2019 by RAMJB

[RAMJB]

5 hours ago, Wowzery said:

The one thing I'm noticing in custom combat, is the enemy AI ships retreating the moment they get damaged.  And if they are faster, the combat is essentially over.

I'm not saying it's a desirable thing, but makes sense. The AI does that when it considers the ship is so damaged that it's lost most of its battle worth (because of cumulative damage that's pretty much destroying it's chances to hit back and win the engagement)/has been so damaged as to be in serious risk of being lost for no real gain. Of course in a 1v1 the behavior is a pain in the butt, but it makes sense. And for fleet vs fleet engagement, even more.

If they're faster then they've disengaged. Yes, the combat is over. Not every naval engagement ended with one side losing all their ships. And in order to win engagements it wasn't needed either. If that happens, score the game as a win, move to the next one ;).

I'd like the behavior to be somewhat different for 1v1s though. That they just turn tails is not exactly the most realistic way to break contact you'd have in such a scenario, it pretty much kills the chances (with the far less guns being able to fire back) to score some hits that might either persuade the chaser, or get a couple lucky hits to slow him down enough to make the escape good. A less dramatic "I'm out of here" angle would work for that, a 60º angle towards the enemy instead of the current 90º, for instance. As it is right now, the second the enemy turns tails, I just switch to HE - once a proper hit happens on the tail of the runner guy his rudder is gone, probably he'll have some serious flooding on his poop, and that's a chase cut short, while whatever's firing back at me is not enough in volume by far, and is firing with very low chances to hit (because of cumulative damage penalties). Too easy. 

Edited December 11, 2019 by RAMJB

[oread]

Custom battle need ship blueprint save function

[Marder]

1 hour ago, RAMJB said:

The AI does that when it considers the ship is so damaged that it's lost most of its battle worth

Side note: I've seen some badly damaged ships retreat in pretty cool ways. Not sure if it's specifically programmed to or just lucky, but I've observed enemy AI either have DDs or CLs set up smoke screens to cover retreating vessels, or conversely, have retreating vessels attempt to retreat by putting existing smoke screens between them and my own ships. 

Whatever it is, it's pretty cool to see this kind of thing happening. 

[disc]

Interesting proposition concerning the armor modifiers. I think I see what you mean. Once all of the modifiers are applied, do the penetration values approximate, say, DeMarre, or Krupp, or the Thompson universal formula? I'm not familiar with Rule the Waves, unfortunately, so I can't say how this compares.

Regarding a retreat, I think it is often true-to-form, a good thing. Would not a seriously damaged vessel retreat, to save life and the ship itself?

That said, it is a little frustrating, because we then have no real win condition. You definitely don't need to sink the whole opposing side to win in "real life," but that's not present here. Not yet, anyway. We can't deny bases, set blockades, bombard airfields, destroy port facilities, land troops, whatever, that an unopposed force could perform with impunity. So we don't have any "mission accomplished" feeling when the enemy just cuts and runs.

For custom battles, if all forces on one side retreat, the battle simulator should allow the battle to "end" at our discretion. The simulator would show an after-action scene, with losses and damage for each side. Maybe we could also set the AI behavior, to "never retreats," "trying to escape," or something in the middle. That would go part of the way; the rest, I think, would be dependent on campaign.

[Zebgef]

I'm probably repeating a lot of what has already been said here, but this is my feedback after a few hours of playing this update:

-The new hulls are cool

-Improved target info is great

-I like the new missions

-Torpedos seem to pack a better punch now

-Damage decals are a nice touch

-HE shells are still better than AP shells 99% of the time. When firing at a heavily armoured target, an AP shell penetration should be VASTLY more damage than an HE shell, instead it seems to be about the same, except that HE shells will also do plenty of damage when an AP shell would bounce.

-Secondaries are still mostly useless. They don't feel more accurate. Even with modern tech, radar etc I'm seeing < 1% hit chances at ~5km ranges against destroyers using 5" secondaries, which maybe raises into 2-3% after some time of constant firing. Meanwhile the mains will hit in a fraction of the time and generally sink a DD in 1-2 hits.

-Heavily damaged ships not sinking doesn't seem of have significantly changed, it still seems to take 5 mins to get a ship downs to 50%, then about 30 mins to actually sink them.

-The torpedo warnings are a good first step, but I really can't understand why there isn't a constant highlight on then - something like the little arrows that WOWS uses would be perfect - not too distracting, but enough that you won't miss them easily like you currently can.

Overall moving in the right direction.

[TAKTCOM]

7 hours ago, RAMJB said:

I don't think small guns are undertuned. But I do think you're right about armor being too extensive. right now by the look of things whatever you put into your belt thickness covers the whole side of the main area of the warship.

I think the armor model at the moment looks something like this

[Steeltrap]

14 hours ago, Sproge said:

Is this not working for everyone else as well? Or is it just me?

No, I can't get it to work either. Am going to list it as a bug, given the patch notes say it ought to work.

[RAMJB]

1 hour ago, TAKTCOM said:

I think the armor model at the moment looks something like this

More or less like that. But with thinner "deck", and more area taken by the "belts". You can spot the many problems with this implementation. Though I don't know about the underwater areas, they might be somewhat less armored.
 

It's obvious to see that belt is homogeneous all over the hull at least avobe the waterline. The extended belt sharing that property is what causes the infuriating (for most) high rate of ricochets on highly angled ships. This was just not possible in viable battleships once they began being large past a certain size - to armor all the hull like that the ammount of armor weight you'd need would be of such magnitude as to mean the ship wouldn't be a ship but rather an underwater reef if it ever was dared to float.
There was a rather thin (thinner in some designs than others) main belt with max thickness. That would reach 2-5 feet over the waterline at best (it wasn't rare for battleships to be overloaded with refits and extra equipment as to force their main belt completely underwater!). Anything over that was, by force, armored by medium armor in early designs, little more than splinter protection in AON ones. In fact when it came down to the design process of warships of the era there usually was a highly contentious process of deciding the belt thickness and height variables. Going for too thick a belt usually would mean a smaller area covered (otherwise the weight demands were unnaceptable). Opposite, trying to cover too much area would mean a thinner overall belt. There are some extremes of both in ships that actually existed. The Royal Navy sailors had a joke that went that the only thing harder for a shell than to penetrate nelson class main amored belt, for instance, was for the shell to actually hit it in the first place. Obviously that class made too an extreme compromise for thickness to the point that the actual area covered wasn't that much.

Also, the deck placement is completely incorrect. The main armored deck usually was placed at the same level of the top of the armored belt. It was usual to have several armored decks, one or more being given splinter armor thicknesses (some designs more than others). At any rate the main armored deck still was the thickest one, and was placed rather low in the hull. In AoN designs it'd join the upper limit ot the belt. In Turtleback designs the extremes of the deck would be sloped down to join the main belt lower end under the waterline (in both cases forming an internal armored "Box" - the citadel). In most warships of the era if you tried to put any worthwhile thicknesses of armor on the top deck (the weather deck), not only you'd leave the sides of your "armored citadel" protected by large areas of intermediate (or worse) armor, thus leaving it wide open for enemy gunfire, the design also would be so topheavy as to be dangerously unstable.

Ships were armored like that in the very early age of the ironclads. But as soon as technology evolved and sizes increased it was impossible to protect such large areas and the different types of layouts began to happen. Hence - this implementation must be an interim placeholder. There's no way the game can claim to represent correct age of dreadnought naval combat with this kind of modelling ;).

Edited December 11, 2019 by RAMJB

[Illya von Einzbern]

Small boats are really hard to kill now days.
DDs and TPs can eat up quite a few 11"" shells before going down and for some strange reason on the modern cruiser mission enemy CAs can survive up to 15 19"" torps with crippling damage to the engine but for structure 30+% mean while players modern CAs goes from 80% t0 30% from single torpedo hit from their escorts. Even with torpedo protection.
Also another note. Guns sometimes seems to lock to a certain place when maneuvering. It's not like the guns won't keep up. Guns simply stays put until maneuver is done. Same happens when there is a nimble ship with in 1km of said cruisers. The guns simply lock down and won't rotate nor shoot. This problem was not in the previous patch.

2nd. AI cheats. In some missions AI uses more funds on the ships than you could possibly muster.
Taking extra funds to increase armor or speed ect is pointles as the AI seems to put more money than you and maintain better tech  (if you took more funds) With standard funds and more tech the AI still does it better. It uses more money on speed and armor most of the time in guns and gun quality as well on extra protections that pushes the ship way beyond the limitations player has on ship tonage.

Could the AI have similar restrictions as the player when it comes to ship tonage??
Ships gadgets and armor thicknes are trivial as long as the AI ships can't be 20% more heavier and bulkier than players. It may be balance reasons but giving AI heavier ships is not so nice.
AI could have better mark guns and armor quality.

To counter this AI thing you must make ship with the smallest possible tonage with reasonable armor and small guns that can do the job but are not too strong (Coz AI goes two steps ahead in that compartment) with that you can find yourself fighting against yamato with 17"" guns and only 15"" max armor. Can be do able in the "There can only be one" mission.

I do like the Iowa superstructure. It looks mean clean sinking machine.
Iowa hull doesn't feel like Iowas. The nose of the ship feels odd and some other parts too.
Might be me just and lack of sleep

[RAMJB]

Small boats are really hard to kill now days. 

 

They weren't easy to kill at any time. In fact some historical destroyer designs survived absolutely brutal degrees of damage. Take a look at what picket DDs in the US navy received in the way of kamikaze attacks during the last couple years of the war and you'll understand up to which point sinking one of those tincans wasn't easy. And I'm sure the japanese pilots who crashed their planes against those ships only to see them survive (completely trashed, ruined and in such a state as to make them not worth repairing) would've wanted to see a patch to change it had they lived through it ;). Just kidding , but you get the idea :).

They were quite easy to disable though. A good hit on the machinery and a DD was for all practical purposes a mission kill. This happens in there too. A good hit on the hull of a DD generally screws it so much as to make it a sitting duck for the remainder of the battle. A couple good follow up shoots to really screw it over, and you can work on other targets for the remainder of the battle. Now, actually sinking it is a completely different matter. But so it was with real ships.


I think people are getting the whole wrong idea out of the missions. I know they demand you to "Kill x ammount of ships", and that if you don't meet that goal the scenario is a loss. It focuses too much on linking the idea of "success" to the idea of "sinking". Of course sinking the enemy was a success. most of the time rendering it incapable of fighting was more than enough, without the need of actually sinking it.

 I think the objective system for those scenarios should work in very different lines because right now it's plain to see it's giving the wrong idea about what a "naval victory" was at the time. But I don't know up to which point that kind of work is really necessary. Once the campaign is working in the future, the idea of "winning" or "losing" a given engagement will be completely revamped on it's own.


2nd. AI cheats. In some missions AI uses more funds on the ships than you could possibly muster.

I'm not sure the missions explicit at any time that the force you're fighting against is working with the same or less funds than you are. At all. In fact some scenarios are so lopsided numbers wise that's clearcut to see that the AI has more resources. That's not cheating, that's scenario design ,and it's perfectly good scenario design too. Again, think campaign. When you're commanding the french fleet and you find yourself fighting the british (for instance) there will be little room to complain the AI is cheating "because they have more funds". Some navies are bigger than others, and the smaller ones have to make do with less resources to cover for the same basic needs. And even bigger navies are compromised by their needs to keep large numbers at play at a given moment - even if their budgets are much higher, they still aren't limitless, and they'll usually have a need for much large forces to cover for a far larger area. Hence economy of design is an extremely valuable tool in a designer's toolbox for both small and large navies: teaching the player through forcing him to design ships as effective and cost efficient as possible is one of the things I think the scenario system does very well. If you think you're going to jump into the campaign and begin pumping out 90k ton versions of the Yamato left and right...think again. Won't be the case.



Ships gadgets and armor thicknes are trivial as long as the AI ships can't be 20% more heavier and bulkier than players. 

I completely disagree with this. Higher techs enable much more efficient designs - generally in weight, but also in some cases, in overall cost. In fact making the right tech selection in the pre-design screen is the key to win some of those scenarios - and on top of that most of the times the "more funds" option is the LEAST desirable one, showing that more absolute resources doesn't mean a better shot at winning them. Think what the scenario entails, what will you need to win it, and then choose the correct box to make a design adequate for the job at hand. You'll be surprised.
 

Edited December 11, 2019 by RAMJB

[captinjoehenry]

2 hours ago, RAMJB said:

Small boats are really hard to kill now days. 

 

They weren't easy to kill at any time. In fact some historical destroyer designs survived absolutely brutal degrees of damage. Take a look at what picket DDs in the US navy received in the way of kamikaze attacks during the last couple years of the war and you'll understand up to which point sinking one of those tincans wasn't easy. And I'm sure the japanese pilots who crashed their planes against those ships only to see them survive (completely trashed, ruined and in such a state as to make them not worth repairing) would've wanted to see a patch to change it had they lived through it ;). Just kidding , but you get the idea :).

They were quite easy to disable though. A good hit on the machinery and a DD was for all practical purposes a mission kill. This happens in there too. A good hit on the hull of a DD generally screws it so much as to make it a sitting duck for the remainder of the battle. A couple good follow up shoots to really screw it over, and you can work on other targets for the remainder of the battle. Now, actually sinking it is a completely different matter. But so it was with real ships.


I think people are getting the whole wrong idea out of the missions. I know they demand you to "Kill x ammount of ships", and that if you don't meet that goal the scenario is a loss. It focuses too much on linking the idea of "success" to the idea of "sinking". Of course sinking the enemy was a success. most of the time rendering it incapable of fighting was more than enough, without the need of actually sinking it.

 I think the objective system for those scenarios should work in very different lines because right now it's plain to see it's giving the wrong idea about what a "naval victory" was at the time. But I don't know up to which point that kind of work is really necessary. Once the campaign is working in the future, the idea of "winning" or "losing" a given engagement will be completely revamped on it's own. 

Your not wrong.  But most of the time when a DD takes a single heavy cruiser or larger HE shell they are massively messed up which is definitely not the case here in game.  And the same with lower caliber shells.  DDs take a decent amount of damage from them but they are so hard to hit with small guns that the small guns are near worthless making the odd situation of BB main guns being the best if not only practical way to kill DDs instead of the quick firing lower caliber weapons that were actually used for that job in real life.