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


Nick Thomadis

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I think having a middle ground between alpha 3 and alpha 4 should work. Or just tweaking stats rather than increasing them dramatically, also wouldn’t mind seeing the reasons behind changes and also what they changed (so parameters) as this gives us a far better idea of how we can test stuff and then suggest, posdible problems fixes etc.

i would post screenies of the visual bugs but sky decides that isnt a good thing and ill have to wait till tuesday wednesday before my connection goes back to normal.

i love the new hulls and missions, but yeah armour needs lowering and ap made more devastating, kinda werid seeing a superstructure take multiple 17-18inch shells and either be green or yellow after multiple hits.

also i think limiting the tech the ai can use would be great so that the ai doesnt just slap on diesel engines with krupp 4 armour but has too choose between various limitations like players do (so give the same or opposite limitations).

im not sure if the bigger guns with all of that tech are usually that inaccurate if so thats fine, if not then yeah.

still ill play anyways since every update makes me want to play more, campaign should be pretty good.

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Maybe someone can gave me a little insight here since I feel like something is way off. Just for testing I threw together a custom battle. 1940s tech on both of us 1 vs 1 battleships. I built a pure tanky ship. It is a very simple design with four turrets of triple 18s, has 20 inch (508mm) armor all over it with a +118% modifier. Now the enemy ship shows up with 14s they are mark 4 and TNT for the propellant. At 20km it says he can pen 18.3 / 16.4 and has an accuracy of 1.5%. Thing is the ship is easily penning me and hitting quite often. What gives? This was supposed to be just to test propellants but I noticed this situation arising so it created more questions for me. In this last patch did they place a decimal point in the wrong place or something? 

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11 minutes ago, ston5883 said:

Maybe someone can gave me a little insight here since I feel like something is way off. Just for testing I threw together a custom battle. 1940s tech on both of us 1 vs 1 battleships. I built a pure tanky ship. It is a very simple design with four turrets of triple 18s, has 20 inch (508mm) armor all over it with a +118% modifier. Now the enemy ship shows up with 14s they are mark 4 and TNT for the propellant. At 20km it says he can pen 18.3 / 16.4 and has an accuracy of 1.5%. Thing is the ship is easily penning me and hitting quite often. What gives? This was supposed to be just to test propellants but I noticed this situation arising so it created more questions for me. In this last patch did they place a decimal point in the wrong place or something? 

The visuals might be bugged, i haven't done custom battles but im assuming ill have this problem too. Not sure if a hotfix is needed too be honest, but trying to complete most missions is quite difficult and you need to either come up with some extremely werid designs or pure luck.

Not sure if this was intended or they made an error and released the patch without further testing.

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@Evil4Zerggin

When I did my gimmicky torpedo CA/BC/BB I did encounter a group of super battleship that would not sink regardless of the amount of torpedo that hit them. Just like seen on your image at the end all their underwater compartment were red. They had maximum bulkhead and I suspect they had the best pump and torpedo defense. So they were pumping out water out of the single big hole that used to be their hull. At the end they had more in common with hovercraft than ship!

About the gimmicky torpedo CA/BC/BB. It turn out that it doesn't need to be a quick ship. A heavy armored slow BB with strong resistance can do it too. Same for CA, but you most likely gonna need to maintain some distance as going above 20" of hull armor is difficult. A cheap 15kt CA can reliably destroy a 3 BB, exept when they have the very best torpedo protection, this doesn't sound right.

Now that I have played allot of match I will post a detailed feedback with some suggestion.

Edited by RedParadize
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@Nick Thomadis I noticed that you seem to read our feedback on a regular basis. I am grateful for that, I tagged you anyway because I want this to stand out of the usual debate we often have here.

Anyways here is my feedback of alpha 4:

Guns & Accuracy:
Leveling base accuracy across the board had interesting effect, In Alpha 3 we were restricted to go for the biggest gun for accuracy, now its more a question of penetration. Going for smaller gun is much less punishing in Alpha 4 and I like it. I however feel that big gun should have a slight advantage in base accuracy, specially at top range. Now I noticed that Smaller caliber are often more accurate despite being at the limit of their range, if I look at the base accuracy they should not. If it is some kind of buff due to them being easier to aim at moving target then I am for it. It give us a reasonable justification to add secondary battery. However it should be visible somewhere in the stats, ideally both in designer and in combat.

I also want to stress that the shell per gun error must be fixed asap. A 15" have 100 shell in single mount, a double have 400 and triple 900!

Armor & Resilience:
In alpha 3 armor almost didn't matter, alpha 4 is a big improvement on that aspect. There is a problem trough, armor is now better than guns. We now have to get pretty close to target to have a reasonable chance of sinking target before running out of ammo. In fact, armor now more or less defeat guns. Torpedo plus extreme armor are now a much better option pound for pound. I would say that balance probably reside somewhere between Alpha 3 and Alpha 4. However, addressing shell count and how torpedo works might do it too.

Torpedoes:
At the moment torpedo are both strong and weak. They are strong because they bypass armor and cost/mass is very low. They are weak because you need a unreasonable amount of them and with good pumping a ship can stay afloat after being hit by hundreds of torpedo. It should not be possible to deliver massive torpedo wave at point blank range without being punished for it. In alpha 3 you could do that with destroyer, not anymore (more on that later). But you can do it even better with larger heavily armored ship.

A possible solution would be to make deck torpedo more damage sensitive and have catastrophic result when destroyed. If exploding torpedo launcher would damage surrounding object and hull,  it would make deck torpedo hazardous and large stack of them truly dangerous. Torpedo could also have a wider spread, it would increase hit chance at range and make multiple hit less likely. These two measure would limit the amount of torpedo that hit, thus allow a significant buff to their damage. Ideally a single torpedo should be able to sink a poorly protected ship and significantly impair its fighting capacity of better protected one. Multiple hit should be able to sink anything.

Target Signature:
It is unclear how hull size and target signature affect hit chance, but it does. I am all for the concept but it seem poorly balanced and definitively under explained. What is for sure is that casemate guns, deck and underwater torpedoes should not have any impact on target signature, if possible, sides and tower mounted secondary too.

Speed as armor:
This will hurt me, I really like super fast Battlecruiser. But the level of protection speed offer is a bit over the top, specially for large ship. It should be reduced a bit.

The case of destroyer:
In alpha 3 a destroyer could get unreasonably close to a heavily armed ship. In alpha 4 they became so easy to target that even AI focus and kill them at extreme range. I do not like "artificial" nerf, but I am not dogmatic about it. In this case I think it is a over-correction and unnecessary. With the current level of accuracy I think that making the deck torpedo more damage sensitive should be enough to prevent destroyer from getting too close. AI should take this consideration too and launch torpedo from a greater distance.

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On 2/7/2020 at 6:56 PM, Hangar18 said:

Bismarck has a more effective TDS. Yamato took more torps, but they were lower payload. The ones yamato ate were aerial dropped.

The better TDS available make torps almost a non factor, you just eat it, and move on with little consequence.

She literally took some of the most powerful torpedoes of their day, more powerful than she was designed to deal with, without suffering fatal damage until she was pounded with more than any other ship.

Even proportionally the torpedo defense system outclassed anything else.

The 'weakness' only worked when hit near it, with torpedoes way more powerful than she was designed to deal with in the first place.

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@ThatZenoGuy @Hangar18 TDS, for the most part, is a damage mitigation mechanism. It does not negate the damage, it only make it less likely to be serious.

If everything work as it should, and history show us that it is often not the case, torpedo hit will breach some already flooded compartment (fuel or water) or coal depot for older ship. Structure is damaged and water leak in several compartment, but pump outpace the leak and allow crew seal some compartment out. For big and large ship there is a good chance water wont leak in the burner/boiler room or other water sensitive place.

That is more or less the best scenario. Now, it might not be life threatening on the short term. But now the ship is significantly slower, have a strong tendency to turn on one side and is off balance. In combat that can turn out to be deadly. Out of combat and on the long term, ship will need substantial repair in a drydock. That is a single torpedo hit, not two, not three. Each hit have this effect and compound the problem, until it can't be mitigated anymore.

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4 hours ago, RedParadize said:

@ThatZenoGuy @Hangar18 TDS, for the most part, is a damage mitigation mechanism. It does not negate the damage, it only make it less likely to be serious.

If everything work as it should, and history show us that it is often not the case, torpedo hit will breach some already flooded compartment (fuel or water) or coal depot for older ship. Structure is damaged and water leak in several compartment, but pump outpace the leak and allow crew seal some compartment out. For big and large ship there is a good chance water wont leak in the burner/boiler room or other water sensitive place.

That is more or less the best scenario. Now, it might not be life threatening on the short term. But now the ship is significantly slower, have a strong tendency to turn on one side and is off balance. In combat that can turn out to be deadly. Out of combat and on the long term, ship will need substantial repair in a drydock. That is a single torpedo hit, not two, not three. Each hit have this effect and compound the problem, until it can't be mitigated anymore.

And?...Yamato mitigated so much damage that she withstood 10-20 times more explosive mass than some other battleships, and at least 5+ times more explosive mass than her peers.

That only happens when the TDS WORKS.

And considering she was up against torpedoes which were out of her TDS's context, that's pretty damned impressive.

Yamato's TDS was flawed, but strong. Anything else is utter lies.

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41 minutes ago, ThatZenoGuy said:

And?...Yamato mitigated so much damage that she withstood 10-20 times more explosive mass than some other battleships, and at least 5+ times more explosive mass than her peers.

Argue it all you want and from whichever angle you want, won't change the fact that the TDS was significantly flawed. You can try and argue from the standpoint that "she didn't sink until she took X torpedoes", X being a ridiculously overkill number. The fact is that those torpedoes were 18in air-dropped ones, not the 21in torpedoes (MUCH more powerful) that submarines and destroyers carried. 
On top of that, the americans didn't take chances on her, they kept on bombing and torpedoing her until she sank. From both sides too (Which delayed a capsizing). It's certain that a good number of those aerial torpedo hits happened when Yamato was already doomed anyway, which means that the TOTAL number of hits she took is irrrelevant - what matters is how many of them were enough to doom her, which doesn't include those that were achieved when the ship was already going down, which, in turn, means that the total torpedo hits Yamato took in her last battle is irrelevant at the time of discussing her TDS.

All of it is academical anyway: Yamato was designed to stay and prevail in a naval fight against superior naval enemy forces. Her TDS was designed to hold the kind of torpedoes she may take on a surface action, meaning 21in torpedoes. Yet a single 21in torpedo got her flooded with more than 3000 tons of water due to a fatal flaw in the TDS, even while that torpedo was running far too shallow, meaning it did less damage that would be expected out of hits like those.

With a proper deep running torpedo the damage would've been that much catastrophic. That's an atrocious performance from whatever standpoint want to use to look at it.

Let's put it in perspective: Yamato was the biggest battleship ever designed, the Japanese designed it with a TDS to take whatever torpedo it would hit her. They failed, and in quite the spectacular fashion. It's clear that by 1945 torpedoes were in general more powerful than what they were when the system was designed. It's no less clear that the TDS was flawed and that had it not been, it'd been able to take hits like the one she took from USS Skate with far less flooding.

Which is the point of the TDS: keep the torpedo explosion effects away from the internal bulkheads to limit flooding into the vital spaces as much as possible. Instead Yamato had a system that made her terribly vulnerable to exactly the kind of shear forces inflicted by underwater detonations. That system is not "good". It's not even "mediocre". It's a flawed system, and a tremendous achilles heel for a warship that size.


And the japanese knew it, as it's proven by the multitude of proposals to rebuild her to alleviate or somehow mitigate the critical flaw of the system. The most radical one would've added 5000 tons of displacement. It was THAT bad. None of them were done, as it was unfeasible to drydock them for months if not years for the needed rebuild in the middle of a full scale war that was entering it's most critical stage. But that the Japanese actually entertained the notion of doing it proves up to which point the TDS flaw was a critical vulnerability, and how worried the japanese were about it once it was exposed by Skate's torpedo.
 

Edited by RAMJB
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4 minutes ago, ThatZenoGuy said:

What a hello kittying reddit tier NPC.

Gotta love the forum's filter. Makes your obnoxious posts really a hoot to read, I'm actually having a good laugh at your hello kittys XDDDDDDD.

In the meantime...well, yeah. By this stage is clear that you do not care about historical facts but about your own one-of-a-kind ultimate "knowledge". You are right and no matter how all the available historical information says otherwise, you are STILL right. And woe anyone who dares tell you otherwise, or you'll hello kitty him to kingdom come XDDD

Also, what's all that reddit hate all of a sudden?. New-era insult to be freely lobbed in the internetz?. Not that I care a lot as my only involvement with it has been putting links to videos in my channel in the relevant subreddits, but still... I find it hillarious too xD.

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About TDS

v3jz2WQ.jpg

In few words.  WW1: 1 torpedo hit = damaged/crippled ship, 2+  torpedo hit  = sunken ship.

                          WW2: 1-2 torpedo hit = damaged ship, 2-6 crippled/immobillized ship, 7+  torpedo hit  = sunken ship. 

 And these in the best case. Usually, 2-4 torpedoes were enough to disable any ship. 

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The only problem with that list is that it doesn't differentiate between air-dropped torpedoes vs submarine/destroyer dropped ones. And there was quite a big difference, as air-dropped ones weren't anywhere close as hard-hitting as the bigger torpedoes dropped by submarines and destroyers :).

Other than that, it's a great summary ;). 

Edited by RAMJB
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13 minutes ago, TAKTCOM said:

About TDS

v3jz2WQ.jpg

In few words.  WW1: 1 torpedo hit = damaged/crippled ship, 2+  torpedo hit  = sunken ship.

                          WW2: 1-2 torpedo hit = damaged ship, 2-6 crippled/immobillized ship, 7+  torpedo hit  = sunken ship. 

 And these in the best case. Usually, 2-4 torpedoes were enough to disable any ship. 

Biscuits and Yamashiro took a lot too be honest and scharnhorst, bloody musashi doe 20 torps.

Frankly this is what the damage system for surface torpedoes should be like, mostly 1 hit cripples or outright sinking after 2 torpedoes. Atm some ships can survive 20+ 23inch torpedoes lol, from multiple DD's which is just bloody bonkers.

I hope the devs do hotfix this or at least address this in alpha 5.

 

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5 minutes ago, Cptbarney said:

bloody musashi doe 20 torps.


Another case of gross overkill. US Airmen kept on pounding her until she was no more - again from both sides (preventing a fast capsize) and even past the point when she was a loss anyway. That Musashi (or Yamato) took that many torpedoes only proves the kind of overwhelming air power they were sailing under.

Same deal with, say, Oklahoma or WV. Those ships took a lot of torpedoes when they went down - doesn't mean they wouldn't have gone down with less torpedoes (as USS California proved - being a ship with very similar TDS as the other two, with "only" two impacts, she foundered on the port).

Frankly this is what the damage system for surface torpedoes should be like, mostly 1 hit cripples or outright sinking after 2 torpedoes. 



Disagree. Most of the ships on that list were "old" ones. Only "Modern" ones were PoW, the Yamatos, Bismarck, and Littorio. All of them proved that one or two couple torpedo hits wouldn't either sink or cripple them (unless the hit happened at a critical place such as propulsion/Steering).

WT, and specially, Post-WT battleships were VERY large ships. Whereas a representative WWI-vintage battleship would be in the 25-30k ton ballpark, WWII ones went from 35k-70k tons. Big ships have a lot of  extra reserve buoyancy vs smaller ships. That fact alone (and generally better TDS technology) meant they were a lot more resilient to torpedo hits.

a battleship of the WW2 era was expected to be perfectly able to keep on going and fighting after taking a couple torpedo hits, as long as they didn't hit where they did on PoW or Bismarck.

Also remember that capsizing mechanics aren't in game at the moment, and capsizing was, by far, the largest reason why torpedoed battleships went down.  It's hard to extrapolate real life numbers into the game when the mechanic through which most of those went down isn't represented here yet...

Meaning, torpedo/flooding sinking mechanics should wait to be finalized after the moment where listing/capsizing is represented in game, or we'll be seeing some really absurd sinkings (as absurd it is battleships taking 20 torpedoes at the moment). Edited by RAMJB
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On 2/7/2020 at 12:43 PM, Reaper Jack said:

- As others have said, AP post penetration damage is pitiful.

Just finished dumping 4x large 15" gun mags into cruisers... didnt sink a single one.

same scenario, with 3x large 12" mags, few hurt, none killed.

this is with super heavy shells and either ballistite, or tube powder. Ships are just eating shell after shell after shell. The only thing that actually seems to die when you hit it are the DDs.

Especially battle ships. which casually shrug off 18" shells. If you run a good TDS then torps are basically a non factor as long as you hit them on the belt.

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1 hour ago, RAMJB said:

The only problem with that list is that it doesn't differentiate between air-dropped torpedoes vs submarine/destroyer dropped ones. And there was quite a big difference, as air-dropped ones weren't anywhere close as hard-hitting as the bigger torpedoes dropped by submarines and destroyers :).

Other than that, it's a great summary ;). 

Did the list change?

Otherwise I don't see the problem. Submarines are submarine launched, surface are launched from any surface ship, and aerial is obvious.

Edited by Steeltrap
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28 minutes ago, Hangar18 said:

Just a reminder her sister took 4 and flipped.

This is a good reminder that Torpedo defense is not uniform. The context matter more than the number of hits. Can we really say that the Bismark faith would have been the same if the torpedoes had hit around the same area mid ship? All on the rear? all on the front? All on the same side? No we can't. If there would have been twelve Bismark torpedoed to death we would have twelve different story to tell.

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11 minutes ago, TAKTCOM said:

What is wrong with a designation like "Submarine torpedo hits", "Surface torpedo hits" and "Aerial torpedo hits"?

Oh, there's nothing wrong with it, just that it's a presentation that kind of "equalizes" the hits. Or at least induces the reader to analize them as equal. Which they weren't.

You see the number on the tables, but the ones on the air dropped list can't be judged on the same value than the ones of the sub/surface tabs. Which can lead to somewhat of a confusion because while "1" means something in two of the lists, it means a different thing on the third. All in all something I'm not particularily fond of.

It's just a matter of me being a bit anal about how information is presented, nothing else :). Other than that, as I mentioned, it's a splendid gathering of data.

Edited by RAMJB
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1 hour ago, TAKTCOM said:

What is wrong with a designation like "Submarine torpedo hits", "Surface torpedo hits" and "Aerial torpedo hits"?

Different sizes.  Submarines in WW2 carried 21 inchers usually, aerial torps are smaller 18 inchers by necessity, and then surface torps include things like the 24 inch long lances.  Differences do not sound like much, but the payloads of those sizes are orders of magnitude different from one another. 

As for the Yamato's weakness in her TDS, the Shinano, which in theory should have had a similar TDS, did indeed go down in relatively short order to a pair of torpedoes hitting that same weak spot on a deeper run, with additional damage of two more torpedoes further back along the hull. This was all on one side of the ship, and despite deliberate counter flooding, she capsized just as Musashi did. Yamato herself was the exception, not the rule, when it came to that particular hull type's TDS. 

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