Planning of next updates

[Mindfield]

Some not already mentioned points:

1. UI Option to disable all floating numbers.

2. Fog of War Options maybe as part of difficulty settings :

- No exact Information about what is damaged (non visible)

- No Information about gun reload status and torpedo reload status (incl. launch sound) 

- No exact ship model before certain %

[Wowzery]

17 hours ago, WelshZeCorgi said:

I want to say that kind of looks like the bismarck, but I'm no ship expert. 

Could something be done about the draw distance? At extreme ranges, enemy ships don't appear on screen and you have to scroll in the direction your turrets are facing before they pop up and are clickable. 

If you look at the top of the screen you'll see enemy ships which are spotted.  Double clock on one of them and bam, no need scroll taken right to the ship in question.

I had the same problem until I realized the easier path.

[Bontainer]

Nice Hood... 

My wishes are purely cosmetic. Please, please, please, do something about the AI funnel construction. Nearly no seagoing nation used different funnel sizes, and if (british BCs) they at least had the same height. Also some ships have oversized turrets, especially CAs and CLs which would make them top heavy in reality, and last, some main gun turrets are so placed so far to the rear of the ship that there would be no space for ammunition magazines or hoists because of the screws and rudder machinery.  

 

[TAKTCOM]

1. Can you make the sea different? It is always the same. This is a little boring. I don’t know, add some ice and make the sea darker, or vice versa, brighter and cleaner. Like the north sea and the south sea. A bit of land would be nice. Night battles? Maybe rain, great excitement, a storm?

2. More unique hulls for fractions. Like a Hood, yes. I would like to see more hulls of light, armored and protected cruisers, since most of the presented in the game, in fact, one hull, just in different sizes.

3. Fix known flaws. Like this.

4. Fleet pathfinding is still bad.

5. Armor patterns are still not obvious. This 

and this

6. Secondary guns shoot at secondary targets while the main guns fire at the main target.

7.Optimization is always welcome.

[Cptbarney]

17 hours ago, HusariuS said:

Ahhhh nice, it's time for magazine explosions

Yayyy miss pudding is teh game!!!!! (or will be soon)

For stuff more important the campaign, the ability to move pieces on the ship hull in whatever way we would like would be good, plus different variations in ship hulls and also types (so more light cruiser hulls, BB's, BC's etc). Maybe better sound design on some of the guns or just alternate sounds as well, crew would be nice as well but will probs make the game pretty complex but could add very unique ways of playing and even ending ships.

Oh and more freedom with guns and the ability to resize barbettes as well and placement options. Maybe ships with radar and radio have somekind of idle chatter or chatter going on when certain events oocur (ships spotting each other, firing at each other, damage reports etc) when you zoom in close enough.

More formations, plus shells types and also better AI in general. Also new shell fuzes and propellants too. Camos and decals would be cool (like putting the ship name on the ship itself or a symbol on the side or deck or something).

Maybe islands with installations and defenses plus missions that take place around land (so bombardment missions, stealing prototype ships etc).

Otherwise thanks for teh game!

[AdmiralJon]

The ability to save designs in custom missions would be huge. Parts (towers, turrets & hulls) specific to each nation would also be huge. 

[liaxelot]

hello and happy new year
great game, glad that the developers listen to the players!
my grievances

1 - a dynamic campaign influenced by our actions
2 - new cruiser hulls, liners and other ships
3 - new turrets like French and English quadruple
4 - possibility of directing the shots more finely, separation of shooting groups and targeting several adversaries (turret A firing on one enemy and turret B on another for example) greater independence of each cannon and turret with a penalty representing the difficulty to target several targets at the same time! that will bring more tactics! as an example the battle of the rio de la plata
the graf spee having only two turrets concentrated these shots on the exeter and made only equal games with these adversaries much weaker than him. whereas by also targeting the ajax and the achilles these shells would have been right of them quickly and thus the battle could have been turned otherwise. this is an example of the tactical level of having multiple targets and choice of target with each cannon ...
5 - a little more life on the boats, a little crew ... even if it is true that for this shrapnel protection the sailors stay inside ... but at least on the pieces in the open air the cannons lightweight
6 - possibility to name these boats, so they will have more soul more life
good job great success
 friendly

[ston5883]

Mine will mirror some points others have brought up.

1. Freedom in placement of barbetts and height adjustment of said barbetts.

2. Freedom in placement of towers and funnels.

3. Ability to choose targets for our secondary guns while our main guns engage a different target.

4. An armor viewing mode that highlights the section of the ship we are adjusting armor thickness on.

The last one I think is quite important to help most players. I know what the tooltip describes the extended armor as but I noticed in combat that a ship I made only took hits to the extended armor sections. Looking at the damage on the ship the parts that showed a different graphic was a good 2/3 of the ship with only the center 1/3 remaining with the fresh hull graphic. I could be wrong but I concluded from this the extended armor is just as equally important to make as thick as the main hull because of what part of the ship model the game considers extended. 

[akd]

I think from a UI standpoint, simpler way to switch between setting gun and torpedo fire control for individual ships or for all ships in a group would be most appreciated.  I guess I got used to clicking through and changing it for individual ships, but this is actually very annoying. However, a per ship option is needed in some circumstances.

 

[Suztown]

I personally agree with many suggestions in this thread and my personal request is that the ship designer allows much more freedom in placing just about every object as it would allow for much more creative designs, sure it may introduce a lot of ahistoric designs but there is already mechanics like "weight offset" designed to nudge designs in a more historical direction.

A secondary request would be to allow us to change dimensions without increasing tonnage directly, if I could increase length and width but also make the keel shallower I think that could introduce an interesting design path.

[Skeksis]

The game is so good there's nothing really that critical other than the campaign itself but for general stuff and wishes...

1) After battle results screen, per ship, a list of damage done and damage received and maybe some general battle statistics.

2) Barbettes for main 'side' guns.

3) Barbettes for secondaries and torpedo launchers.

4) And to echo previous posts, more Barbettes centreline placements (letting us have this would be the 'YEAH BABY' moment!).

5) For Custom Battles to have the ability to design (and save) every ship in the fleet, including enemy fleets. This should keep custom battle content alive until a campaign 'teaser'. 

6) Deck superstructures, to elevate centreline components e.g.

7) A new KM CL hull shape, 1914 5000-10000 tons...

Edited January 7, 2020 by Skeksis

[Cptbarney]

Well it's good to know its only the smaller stuff that needs doing, so maybe my prediction that the campaign will come in alpha 4-5 will be right (think i said alpha 4 originally).

Im guessing it will be the campaign with a few nations first to test out the campaign mechanics ingeneral, so that they are fleshed out for release.

[Skeksis]

On 1/8/2020 at 7:19 AM, Cptbarney said:

so maybe my prediction that the campaign will come in alpha 4-5

My guess is they've just plan out the year [for developing the campaign] and well... it's going to be awhile!

Edited January 11, 2020 by Skeksis
I needed to inserted 'my' definition of 'the plan'

[Cptbarney]

2 minutes ago, Skeksis said:

My guess is they've just plan out the year and well... it's going to be awhile!

Im, not sure myself if they are doing it in steps (so release parts of the campaign) or fling the entire thing at once into our faces lol.

But eh predictions are rarely right. I need to play more will probs play like 3-4hrs tommorrow.

[James Cornelius]

19 hours ago, Hellstrike said:

My biggest gripe with right now is that almost always, there is some "best design" and building anything else would be suboptimal. There should be at least two or three possible variations with the same or similar stats so that you actually have a some variety when building a ship. A positive example would be "Design a Dreadnought", where you can build good ships which looks differently and allows several strong builds. And if not in hulls, at least superstructures should offer some visual choices so that it does not feel as if you are building the same ship again and again.

Light Cruisers need some love as well. There was a lot of diversity in their designs, ranging from very small ships like the HMS Arethusa (1934) up to beasts like the USS Fargo and Mogami classes (as built). The early ones are pretty good, but once we get to the 1910s, things start to look bleak. It is not possible to build an effective with a centerline armament, not even a C- or D-Class, nevermind something with double or triple turrets.

I agree with all this as well. Plus, there were historic examples where for whatever reason, the "optimum design" wasn't practical, so there should be allowances for that too.

[Hussarball_PL]

AI still need fixes. I mean look at this Hyuga only 4 17' inch guns

And this thing down below

My point is I would never create such a monsters, mine all guns forward looks much nicer (no i'm not bragging).

+Please look at this battleship bow got hit by only one shell and it looks now like he went to hell and he came back, I would like to see damage model upgrade.

+Crossdeck fire suffers, I mean when you create one it suffers 100% starboard offset making is useless.

+I would love to see more cruiser hulls (Prinz Eugen, Cleveland, Furutaka)?

+I would love to see new destroyer models and towers.

[Squatter]

Excellent news

By far the most important gameplay/tactical priority should be INDEPENDENT TARGETTING FOR SECONDARIES/MAIN/TORPS

Most important in shipbuilding is more hand-holding with numbers and values: when a number, say 125, is given for visibility, what does this mean? 125 what? Can be seen at 125 miles distance (clearly not)? It needs more context, along with all other non-defined numbers in the shipbuilding process. Everyone understands what a 14 inch gun in (because we all know inches), or what a percentage is, but when you have values with no context, they are baffling and meaningless to the uninitiated. 

Many of the other suggestions on here are great, but lots of them are basically for the dreadheads. I believe that while the realistic 'feel' of the game is really important, and the dreadheads are contributing much great info on various aspects of historical veracity, that you need to remember to give less hardcore players some more handholding - not in any ways that reduce realism, but in ways that increase the intuitiveness, and GUI. 

Great work so far, gonna be an awesome game. 

Edited January 7, 2020 by Squatter
typo

[Fishyfish]

I'll be honest I don't play this game much these days. This is mostly because I'm patiently waiting for the campaign to come but also largely because I'm bored of how "samey" everything is. Above everything else I'd love to see more variety in ship design as well as some small variation in available battlefields. I can live with the rest, the UI, the HE tweaks, all that. 

I could go on and on ad nauseam about ship design but I'll restrain myself. As I've stated in other threads I'd like to see a lot less copy-paste resizes and more unique hull designs. It frustrates me when I want to play, say the naval academy mission pre-dreadnought conflict for example and if I choose to build an armored cruiser with the hull available it's the same hull as the AI's battleships. Ideally I'd love to see no copy-paste hulls but I get that's relatively unrealistic. 

More unique historical hulls and superstructures for both predreadnought and dreadnought era. Seeing the HMS Hood is wonderful, how about a hull based off the HMS Hood from 1891? The ability to have feasible en echlon turrets and some way to figure out how to balance hulls in doing so. Different turret designs or the ability to choose between turret style, even something like armored barbette hoods for lightly armored main battery turrets. Delineation between armored cruisers/heavy cruisers and protected cruisers/light cruisers. Monitors or just the ability to place one main battery turret. I'd really like to see mod tools and some light instructions on how we could make and import our own hulls and parts. My biggest pipedream? 1880s warship designs and hulls, a naval commander could reasonably expect to see these ships still in service in the 1890s and 1900s, and for poorer nations even longer. 

I'd like to see some variation in battlefield. The ability to choose when setting up a custom battle between open ocean, port attack, coastal battle of fighting among an atol or islands. Even if it's a little variation that would be more interesting that the vast empty Atlantic or Pacific. Allowing players to choose weather and time of day would also help with this. 

Lastly reel in the AI's ability to make pants on head stupid designs. I want more design freedom for the players, echoing the calls for freedom of placement on barbettes and the like as others have said but restrict that for the AI. Some times the enemy comes to the battle with ship designs so asspulled that I just quit. 

[toggelhase]

A few things I would like to see:

Editor:

• More freedom in placing parts as mentioned several times here
• No fixed assignemts of funnels & towers to hulls. Give more freedom that you can used them on nay hull.
• A "real" save function, so that you can build a ship, save the design, play it and maybe modifiy it the next day. Especially in the custom battle mode, so you can test something and improve your designs based on the battle result.

Battle:

• Some kind of "mini-map"
• Pathfinding/manouvering of ships. Its better now than in the previous alpha, but still a bit strange sometimes.
• An option to "pin" a target ship. Select a target ship with the mouse and keep its stats open. right now, its only shown when hovering it with the mouse, for distant ships its almost impossible to keet it focused
• After battle report
• The event log (left side of screen) should show the names of your own ships when they hit something. Right now it says something like "BB hits BC Whatever with 305mm gun..."
• Weather/time of day settings that have a real effect visually (and for gameplay of course)
• Graphically, ships seem to be flodded with water too often as if they are too deep in the water.
• Assignment od a secondary target that can be used for secondary guns.

Realism:

• Right now, a ship has lets say 500 rounds of shells for a gun type. There is no difference about HE/AP rounds or fwd/bwd ammo storage.
• Ramming a ship (well, this mostly happens with friendly units during manouvering) has no effect right now
• Maybe this is already implemented, but i have not seen it so far - fires can cause detonations.
• When oyur own ship is hit, fires and floddgin going on, some kind of info about the countermeasures that your crew is doing.

Those are my thougs regarding improvemnts.

But not to forget - a big thanks about what has been made so far. Playing naval computer games for over 30 years now (and made my own small ones a long time ago), i really appreciated what has been  done so far.

[WelshZeCorgi]

@SquatterAgreed, I think it would be helpful if you can select targets for your primary, secondaries and torpedoes. Especially torpedoes, who sometimes target unarmed cargo ships when you wanted them to fire on the cruiser escort instead.

[RAMJB]

3 hours ago, Hussarball_PL said:

+Crossdeck fire suffers, I mean when you create one it suffers 100% starboard offset making is useless.

Not really. While it requires a lot of careful placement, viable cross-deck firing wing turrets is perfectly doable:
 

 

[SiWi]

I think we need to have a good extra amount of control over the behavior of our fire power.

 

Specific how ships behave when one side is engage and the other isn't.

I would suggest that each gun size gets a priority target you can set it to. So you can tell your 5 inches in the 2nd to fire mainly at Cruiser while you inches would fire at TB. And they would do that if they can't engage the prime target of the ship.

If one would do a ship which is design to break into an enemy line, it would be right now pretty useless, because at least the 2ndaries on one side would stay silent, and I hope that something like i suggested would solve that.

 

 

Damage saturated compartments of a ship should be ignored, when shoots can fly through them and hit an not saturated part since I believe that would solve a lot of issues with the Damage model

 

 

Also I would like to have a retreat point or points so that ships can actually disengage battles. 

Edited January 8, 2020 by SiWi

[Wowzery]

Is there going to be more variety for light cruiser hulls soon?

I went to create the light cruiser Ajax for my YT channel only to discover that for in Custom, British, 1940, light cruiser, the hull doesn't allow you to have superimposed turrets.  So you will have a hard time creating many post WW1 light cruisers.

Had to switch gears, ended up doing the mission Meet the US Battleships and designed a Chinese battleship.  Not sure how that happened, or I clicked on the wrong mission but it was fun.  🤔

[Steeltrap]

6 hours ago, Squatter said:

Most important in shipbuilding is more hand-holding with numbers and values: when a number, say 125, is given for visibility, what does this mean? 125 what? Can be seen at 125 miles distance (clearly not)? It needs more context, along with all other non-defined numbers in the shipbuilding process. Everyone understands what a 14 inch gun in (because we all know inches), or what a percentage is, but when you have values with no context, they are baffling and meaningless to the uninitiated. 

Many of the other suggestions on here are great, but lots of them are basically for the dreadheads. I believe that while the realistic 'feel' of the game is really important, and the dreadheads are contributing much great info on various aspects of historical veracity, that you need to remember to give less hardcore players some more handholding - not in any ways that reduce realism, but in ways that increase the intuitiveness, and GUI. 

WARNING: Incoming wall of text

If you scroll to the 'Ship Details' tab of the stats in the shipyard (it's the first one under the summary), you get a section called 'Detection' that tells you the range at which your ship can be spotted ('Visibility Range').

Just FYI, from what I can see you need to go to the tab 'Stats' to understand how that number was arrived at.

In the case of one of my ships, its 'Visibility Range' under 'Detection' in the 'Ship Details' is 9,060m. So it can be spotted potentially from that distance PLUS any applicable 'Tower Spotting' bonus.

Under the 'Stats' tab and 'Detection', I can see the 'Surface Visibility' is 6,000m (6km) as a base (it's a 21,500t Battlecruiser I hull). If I look at 'Target Signature' in the same section, it's 102. I believe that's the sort of number you're commenting on. If I mouse over it, I see two numbers.

The first is "Ship Detectability", the second is "Ship Visibility Modifier". The second one is +51%. If we take the base 'Surface Visibility' of 6km and apply the 'Ship Visibility Modifier' I get 6000 x 1.51 = 9060m. Bingo! So that tells me if I want to change my 'Visibility Range' I need to change 2 things: Surface Visibility and Target Signature. I'm not sure how much I can change the first one, as it's tied to the hull; there is a figure for techs, but am not sure if that is available as yet because I imagine it's referring to things like camo schemes and the like. Target Signature, however, is changed by EVERYTHING you put ON the base hull. Towers, funnels, guns, everything. So you can definitely change it. Whether you want to do so by using smaller/fewer guns, however, is not so obvious.

The other number under Target Signature' is 'Ship Detectability'. I suspect this is what drives the 'Target Ship Size' modifier when shooting at it. In my ship's case it's +179%, so I hope I'm not giving a +79% modifier for 'Target Ship Size' for things shooting at me, but I could well be (that one's not well explained, frankly).

Also in 'Stats' and 'Detection' there's 'Tower Spotting'. That's the bonus to spotting given by the tower/s (duh, lol) and if your ship has main and rear (really ought to be called 'aft') towers, it defaults to whichever gives the greater bonus (usually the main). That's useful to know because I believe the base numbers can be modified by damage, and of course if destroyed don't apply at all. In my ship's case the number is +3800m for the main tower (the aft is +2500). Go back to the first tab, 'Ship Details', we can see that value listed under 'Detection' 'Spotting Bonus'. What does it do? Well, that number gets ADDED to an enemy ship's 

To summarise, then, my ship can be spotted from a base value of 9060m. I believe any ship with a 'Spotting Bonus' (which is anything with an operational tower) can potentially see me from 9060 + bonus. If the enemy were an exact copy of my ship, we'd see each other from 9060 + 3800 = 12,860m/12.86km away. If their main tower were destroyed, they'd get their rear tower bonus, so it would be 9060 + 2500 = 11,560m/11.56km. With no towers, obviously it's 9060m/9.06km.

A DD is going to see me easily before I see it, as it'll spot me from 9.06km + its tower bonus. The advantage of having a whopping tower of course is that I get to add 3.8km to the base detection of that DD, so I would probably spot that DD before my own DD might see it. The smaller a target's 'Visibility Range' the more important a large 'Tower Spotting' number becomes.

As to what specifically the 'Ship Detectability' is doing, it's not clear. As I said, I expect it involves the 'Target Ship Size' gunnery modifier, but I'd also expect it's going to affect 'non-visual' detection, namely radar, too. Makes sense as a larger ship will give a detectable radar return from a greater distance.

On top of that, weather may well play a part or at least doubtless will if they haven't already included it.

Easy, right? LOL. Joking aside, it's a good point.

In this instance it's not helped by the terms being somewhat confusing. Just within the Stats tab under Detection we have:

Surface Visibility, Tower Spotting, Target Signature and within that Ship Detectability and Ship Visibility Modifier. Yikes!

I'll assume I qualify as a 'dreadhead' (because I'm old enough to have read about military history for 35+ years), yet I'm sure there's plenty about the mechanics I've not worked out or, worse, think I have but am incorrect (in fact I rewrote this post because I realised I'd misunderstood something; perfect example, really). Not everyone wants to dig around at those levels. I use these things as I uncover them to inform my ship designs, for example, so making them more obvious and clearer to everyone IN the shipyard would be great.

I might start a thread to invite people to consider how we could rename some of these to make things easier for people to understand (including ourselves, lol).

As an aside, it would be really sad if the game didn't do as well as it might in part due to important mechanics and concepts being poorly explained.

To give credit where it's due, however, they already do a very good job of making info available for the players. They did add the penetration info popup, which was a VERY good addition and also showed they're very much on board with the idea of trying to help players understand how things work.

I've little doubt they've got a LONG list of stuff they'd love to include, and we know they take note of what goes on in the forum. [As an aside, that's a great thing and not necessarily common. I was in the Alpha for that other game we don't mention and the interaction there was zero; writing in the forum was like speaking into a void, which was pretty frustrating when some of the problems that became obvious after release were things some of us had discussed all the way from Alpha through to release]. They're constrained by time to release (time = money and they need to sell the game before they run out, to be blunt) so they need to address the long list of "must haves" no matter how much they may also want to work on "would be great to have as well".

I responded to something @arkhangelsk posted in the Combat Feedback thread (link to post below) where we commented on explaining mechanics, even to the point of using missions in the Naval Academy to do so. By pure coincidence the mechanic I used as an illustration was "Target Signature" which affects range at which you can be spotted and the modifier applied to hitting you ("target ship size"). You might like the idea and want to add to it. Evidence suggests the devs read almost everything, even if skimming, so you never know what they might take note of and add to the "like to have" list.

Cheers

 

Edited January 8, 2020 by Steeltrap

[Skoggatt]

I've seen some others point out that there need to be more light cruiser hulls, particularly later ones, and I agree. However, I think destroyers need the most love. From what I can tell, all of the destroyer hulls are pretty much the same, the only thing that changes is the maximum displacement and some of the stats. The 1930's destroyer hulls still look like 1910 destroyer hulls even if they are larger. I think we should have more variety such as the US flush deckers.