>>>"Alpha-4 v67+" General Feedback<<<

[Illya von Einzbern]

World of warships and the french DDs would disagree....


BUT yes that is stupendous speed
Did the AI paint the ship red?
I mean red goes faster right?

The smol DDs and the 45+ knots speed

[Pizzafighter]

So, you added the barbettes for the centerlined secondaries for the Yamato, but why didn't you add some new mounts for the huge barbette so that it would be possible to rebuild the Yamato correctly?

[Nick Thomadis]

6 minutes ago, Pizzafighter said:

So, you added the barbettes for the centerlined secondaries for the Yamato, but why didn't you add some new mounts for the huge barbette so that it would be possible to rebuild the Yamato correctly?

Can you please report this issue also with the game button, so we fix asap?

[Teckelmaster]

Actually, i recreated Yamato yesterday and i could easily fit both next to each other.

Maybe it depends if you take the high/medium leveled medium barbette?

I did not take pictures, and unfortunately i habe to care for my sons atm, ad they have a cold, but i will check again asap. And i cannot remember if i rotated the huge barbette, but i think i did not. But top down mine looked fine.

Also it looks, as if your Superstructure is simply too far backwards, there are hardpoints further in the front. Sorry, not criticising, maybe i just do not understand the issue here

And it actually seems one touch too long, as you put displacement too high?! What was her actual battle ready weight?

Top to bottom the barbette was right behind the „bend“ in the outer hull, put the barbette in the rear most hardpoint, reduce weight to 65k tonnes and it should actually look quite „Yamatoish“ (though mine had a weight offset of ~8% to the front).

Secondary barbettes snap to superstructure, not barbette hardpoints, i think.

Edited February 6, 2020 by Teckelmaster

[Cptbarney]

Sigh, i guess imggmi doesnt work for images. Plus the links even though they seemed completely fine on my end havent shown up the images i wanted at all., will need to bring that french image converter up again...

[TAKTCOM]

Independent control the main and secondary guns is long-awaited improvement and more components for shipyard are always welcome.

Flood and AP balance has gone the strange way - the number of floods has fallen significantly, and I’m not sure that it’s good. Fires and floods now rarely decide the fate of the ship, it usually sinks since  health bar empty.

In my opinion, the next important stage is armour model detailing. What I see in the game right now, armour looks something like

Don't get me wrong: this is actually not a worst option. But while in the game use this (or similar) armor model, guns tuning will never end. Because you make the guns too weak or too strong. No golden mean.

5 hours ago, arkhangelsk said:

Maybe this can be Alpha-4's hotfix (they usually have one for each Alpha):

Destroyers are not permitted...

Cruisers may not exceed...

Battleships, Battlecruisers and Dreadnaughts may not exceed...

The Modern Battleship and Super Battleship (clearly oversized ships) are limited...

Hard limits are not fun. If you want to limit the speed, make the engines very expensive, it will make at least some sense.

[admin]

36 minutes ago, Cptbarney said:

Sigh, i guess imggmi doesnt work for images. Plus the links even though they seemed completely fine on my end havent shown up the images i wanted at all., will need to bring that french image converter up again...

use imgur.

 

[Suts]

First of all, very happy and pleased with the new content, finding the new missions in the naval academy quite the challenge if I say so myself.

Capital ships are much tougher nuts to crack in gunnery duels now (which is generally good), but as mentioned in other posts the "soft-kill" features need a rework I feel, as well as a hard limit on the speeds some capital ships can go, 40+ knots is absurd for such warships.

 

One thing however that hasn't been mentioned and I don't rightly know where to put this query but, I had built a Destroyer flotilla for the missions "Hurry up" and the lead vessel...blew itself up with it's own torpedoes. HMS Swan was sailing along, on her way to repel the attackers assailing the merchant convoy and then she spontaneously explodes, to one of her own torpedoes.

Pic related is the build of the destroyer in question, who was currently sailing directly towards her target, i'll try to replicate results and post more findings, as well as my immaculate artist rendition of what I think happened. (I was so genuinely shocked that I looked at my monitor mouth agape, and forgot to pause the battle to take screenies of the ship report detailing that in fact the DD launched and hit itself with it's own torpedoes simultaneously.) 

edit: artist rendition is meant to say "stern" instead of bow.

Edited February 6, 2020 by Suts
typo

[arkhangelsk]

1 hour ago, TAKTCOM said:

Hard limits are not fun. If you want to limit the speed, make the engines very expensive, it will make at least some sense.

Two arguments to that. First, the limits are so high there that I think that it is a fair realistic limit and a hard limit can be set. Second, it is a hotfix. It is a lot easier to just quickly stick some caps on than fiddle with soft limit curves.

OK, some observations from the second pass at Hurry Up. First, I think this is the first time we got crappy weather, and I appreciate seeing how badly the weather is murdering the accuracy of my guns. However, do allow me to make one big gripe:

Really, what is this debuff? Isn't the flag supposed to be on one of the ships of my rescue force? What am I supposed to do with those two little cruisers - send them charging at my rescuing battlecruiser to bring it within this game mechanic limit?

On the positive side, big guns still do do reasonable damage to little ships (note the multi hundred point damage from the 14" gun.

Reviewing the raw gun stats, it seems the Gun Accuracy Reversions have not been completely fixed (taken straight off the cards from an otherwise completed battleship - yours might vary slightly). What do those accuracy bumps represent?

Edited February 6, 2020 by arkhangelsk

[Teckelmaster]

@arkhangelsk: those numbers are quite interesting, the mk 1/2/3 part seems ok, the 12 inch vs all is another thing, could you please add the year, shiptype and gear you used? I will definitely look into this subject, too as i am curious about the overall topic of accuracy, atm.

thanks

 

i think for the beginning (once i find the time) i will compare all mk5 guns of the bb main artillery, to see if this is consistent.

Do you think it could be related to ship size, as bigger guns on smaller ships might be less accurate, due to stability reasons?

Edited February 6, 2020 by Teckelmaster

[arkhangelsk]

It's not a particular year: I took them right off the Hurry Up scenario, Optimize Main Guns.

Here is one more, from Modern Battleship vs Destroyers (all the available guns) - basically again it is the same battleship - this time I didn't have the rangefinders mounted on yet. I would never have guessed that the "hero" gun of medium range in Mark 5 is the 9-inch gun, and the close range champion is the 12-inch gun 🙂

 

 

Edited February 6, 2020 by arkhangelsk
Realized the Conditional Formatting was wrecked by the sorting

[Teckelmaster]

wow, definitely start experimenting on that topic tonight! Cool, thank you Arkhangelsk.

[RAMJB]

3 hours ago, TAKTCOM said:

Hard limits are not fun. If you want to limit the speed, make the engines very expensive, it will make at least some sense.

Nature itself presents those hard limits. Water resistance (drag) increases exponentially with speeds. At speeds of 10 knots or so increasing a knot of speed didn't require a lot of power. At speeds over 30 knots, on a large ship with a huge wetted area, increasing that same knot would require dozens of thosands of extra hp.
 

On the other side there's shaft efficiency. Propellers can only be so big and turn so fast before the external parts of the propeller woud cavitate like mad and produce almost no thrust at all thus wasting a big chunk of their power for no good result (other than accelerating the degradation of the propeller). I'm not sure at which point it was (propeller technology has advanced immensely on that end, and I can't find reliable technical documents about early XX century propeller technology right now), but even with geared turbines there was a top limit of power per shaft at which, if you added extra power and tried to put it on the shaft, the shaft would actually begin producing LESS thrust due to the sharp loss of effectiveness. It'd not only be a case of deminishing returns if adding more power per shaft above a certain limit - is that it was a case of negative returns if you went past a certain treshold.

Mix both together, the limits given by Arkhangelsk may not be realistic in the way they are proposed and implemented, but they are realistic in the way they "work" in effective terms.

There are parts of the engining model of the game that seem to be incomplete at the moment - speeds avobe 32-33 knots simply weren't practical for ships that size anymore because the powerplants needed would've been huge and shaft efficiency would've forced the designs to have more shafts than four (meaning - beamer and "thicker" at the rear end, which in turn usually meant even more drag as a result, needing even more extra power, entering a vicious circle). Until those are worked on, a placeholder system to keep speeds at check and within realistic and credible levels is not a bad idea at all.


And I do agree with you about the armor model, BTW ;).

Edited February 6, 2020 by RAMJB

[ston5883]

Not really sure what is going on with the damage in this patch. Yes I like that large ships can take a beating not but it just feels off to see a 14inch over pen for 17 dmg and then turn around and see an 18 inch full pen for only 27 dmg. Correct me if I'm wrong but a full pen in this is the shell penetrated, fused correctly,  and then exploded inside. If that is the proper way of looking at a full pen then I don't see how that warrants only 10 more dmg unless there is something else I am missing. 

[Dontshoot]

9 hours ago, admin said:

 
Ship designer is not currently a priority, and will not be a priority until the draft campaign is finished and game launches on Steam.
 

 

Could you possible give a super rough estimate of when a version of the campaign will be available? Understandable if this is a tight lipped matter

[Shaftoe]

Man, those English 42.5 knots battlecruisers... I hope these crackpot ships won't be here after the fix arrives. Lol.

Breaks muh immersion!

[arkhangelsk]

The game finally let me complete Hurry Up in a rather humiliating fashion. First, the ship:

Note how I concentrated my thin weight reserves on antitorpedo protection, because the last times my battlecruiser got "eaten" by torpedoes. Needless to say, this time, there will be no torpedoes. Something had to give so note the minimalistic barbette and armor protection (especially the extended protection). Note the Y turret that I was forced to put at the very very back of the ship to balance it out, and the 8" turrets are there as much to balance the ship out as to serve a useful function. Even this was only possible because I found out the "hero" weapon is the 12" inch gun.

The game starts. I try to get Birkenhead, which seems to be the flagship according to its rings, to rendezvous with my battlecruiser in hopes of getting rid of the Far Distance penalty. Inconstant is to expend its life to buy time.

Well, the penetration isn't so bad. The shell is heavier than a 6 pounder and the caliber is a bit narrower. Assuming such a shell exists I guess we could just about see it penetrating 4" of armor steel at 1000m.

Here are some typical damage values of 11 and 14 inch shells smacking at a 10000 ton "light cruiser".

 

Even after doing something totally unrealistic I'm still eating the "Far from Flagship" penalty.

Hurray! We ammo detonate heavy cruiser (with 11 inch guns). Now all we have to do is take the battleship.

We have a significant hit chance advantage. So I think I can grind him d....

It's the quality of hit that counts, not the quantity. I completely blame the hulls we are given for this debacle. If I didn't have to put Y so far back, it might not have had to sit in the "Stern Belt Extended" zone. I really think Naval Ops: Warship Commander had something when it just uses the position of your turrets as the "protected area" (weight of armor is charged accordingly). One might think those Bulkheads would do their job, but no - the fires are throughout the ship. The ship was soon sunk, but it seems that the enemy never saw the transports so I was able to escape with them and time out the scenario. I seriously doubt whatever is on those transports was worth a battlecruiser plus a light cruiser, though

[Cptbarney]

41 minutes ago, Shaftoe said:

Man, those English 42.5 knots battlecruisers... I hope these crackpot ships won't be here after the fix arrives. Lol.

Breaks muh immersion!

I find it amusing, although bloody annoying when you can't hit the sodding things. I mean im british and while i want my ships to be great i don't want to be bonked for balance reasons.

(Nobody touches HMS audacious doe). Found out you can actually detonate the big ships now did so with the USS kansas in the super us battleship mission bought her from 69% structure to zero after penning her stern.

[TAKTCOM]

I have mixed feelings about this situation. Is it just me, or is there really something wrong here? What do you think?

Edited February 6, 2020 by TAKTCOM

[Hussarball_PL]

I have found a bug. When you select an aggressive gun behavior they will fire even if target is beyond range.

[Reaper Jack]

@RAMJB 

So uh...about those maintenance costs we were discussing yesterday...

 

Tried my hand at making a P-class scaled down to be a more realistic successor to the Deutschland Panzerschiff design. Yeah. More expensive to maintain than the BC almost twice it's weight and almost as expensive to build too. (Note that the compnents I used are not quite as modern, but only barely, I used Krupp III armor and anti torp I and citadel III instead of IV, III and IV respectively, otherwise similar components.) 

Just pointing this out so the devs can start to balance the campaign economy, seeing as that is the future feature most of us are after at the end of the day. 

Edited February 6, 2020 by Reaper Jack

[roachbeef]

Should the Bismarck-esque BB be able to tank more than 30 20" torpedoes? Guns seem to only do catastrophic damage with plunging fire so I closed in for torpedoes. Unsurprisingly Murphy hates me so he blew up both my 40 kn, 4.8-km-range-torp DDs after 1 spread and he proceeded to tank >30 torpedoes (out of >60 fired)spread across 6 compartments. He finally sank after the 7th one flooded, but I'm surprised at the overall tankiness this patch. Shells I understand. Torps I'm unsure. We're given too few torpedo-capable ships to reliably sink the enemy while the enemy has tons, and we aren't even allowed to design them ourselves. We need to be able to design our allied ships to have a chance.

Edited February 6, 2020 by roachbeef

[Reaper Jack]

2 minutes ago, roachbeef said:

Should the Bismarck-esque BB be able to tank more than 20" torpedoes? Guns seem to only do catastrophic damage with plunging fire so I closed in for torpedoes. Unsurprisingly Murphy hates me so he blew up both my 40 kn, 4.8-km-range-torp DDs after 1 spread and he proceeded to tank >30 torpedoes spread across 6 compartments. He finally sank after the 7th one flooded, but I'm surprised at the overall tankiness this patch. Shells I understand. Torps I'm unsure. We're given too few torpedo-capable ships to reliably sink the enemy while the enemy has tons, and we aren't even allowed to design them ourselves. We need to be able to design our allied ships to have a chance.

Bismarck took many, many torpedoes when she was sunk/scuttled, but not that many. I forget which of the Yamato class, Musashi or Yamato, took the most, one of them took torpedoes in the double digits before she sank. We shouldn't see even the best anti-torp systems prevent sinking after a dozen or so solid 21 inch torpedo hits (historical standard size for WW2 torpedoes.) Worth noting for future balancing. 

Edited February 6, 2020 by Reaper Jack

[Cptbarney]

1 minute ago, roachbeef said:

Should the Bismarck-esque BB be able to tank more than 30 20" torpedoes? Guns seem to only do catastrophic damage with plunging fire so I closed in for torpedoes. Unsurprisingly Murphy hates me so he blew up both my 40 kn, 4.8-km-range-torp DDs after 1 spread and he proceeded to tank >30 torpedoes (out of >60 fired)spread across 6 compartments. He finally sank after the 7th one flooded, but I'm surprised at the overall tankiness this patch. Shells I understand. Torps I'm unsure. We're given too few torpedo-capable ships to reliably sink the enemy while the enemy has tons, and we aren't even allowed to design them ourselves. We need to be able to design our allied ships to have a chance.

The ships i was using in the super us battleship mission seemed to take on multiple 19inch plus torpedoes at least 10+, seems like torps do less damage or are less effective, before 2-3 would be enough to mess up a bb now...well. I also agree we need to design our own supporting vessels, its very hit and miss with what the AI gives you in terms of effective units.

Plus some of the designs are pretty bad to look at in general (design wise and aesthetics). Think either belt armour is too strong or something happened with belt penetration mechanics, because its werid just seeing 30's or 40's pop up after an actual penetrating hit.

Seems like ships got really tanky, im not sure if the devs are showcasing the extremes of everything before going to the middle ground.

[AML]

I'd say the simplified and incomplete nature of compartments/flooding is the bigger issue rather than torpedo damage. Right now there is just flooding with no danger of capsizing and once that becomes a thing then torpedoes will be much more lethal I hope.