Serious Balance Issues

[Kasuga]

My only true complain about game now is how in academy missions where you need destroy enemy after loose a few ships simple leave battlefield and this combined with the incredible hard way to send a BB to bottom.... i refer if you charge lights made you holes with torpedos and secondary weapons are very random, i see battles where under 10km hits nothing and battles where they destroy targets even over their attack range using agresive posture.

I prefer see secondary weapons be more consistent with their own ammo selection (even use star shells like in Fighting Steel) and an option to made heavy damage BBs count as destroyed when they are under 20% of structural of flotation damage... for example.

Other point to improve is made secondaries ammo selecction be independent of main weapons, i want use HE with light guns over BB... not the AP used in big guns.

 

PD: to test guns why not an academy mission where you are free to design what you want to test it VS a target designed by yourself???

 

 

[Zak MacKay]

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Secondaries are useless below 8 inches.

My most recent ships with 6-7" secondaries have preformed reasonably. While their not as destructive I have found they can force back destroyers which combined with evasive maneuvers stops torpedo attacks. Which is their goal stop torpedo attacks so just because the enemy is not dead does not mean their doing a bad job.

I found myself placing way too many secondaries before but have since reduced how many I put down. Lets say you have 2 dual 8" turrets per side you could in my custom battle test have 11 dual 5" or 4 dual 6".

Secondaries tend to be on the otter edges of the ship where they can cause extreme roll. The roll and weight makes them best used in the center line.
 

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Game puts way too much power emphasis on larger guns.

Navies put a ton of emphasis on larger guns. They just kept growing and growing until treaties forced them to stop.

I have found myself frequently not using the biggest guns but often a smaller higher tier weapon. But only to a point. If you want to spam 12" 3

I think one of the things with this and secondaries is aiming time. It may be reworked in the future so you need a specific amount to be effective and cannot just use a single triple 8" and expect it to work at 15km. So at a given tonnage you cannot effectively use 18" and have to use 16" instead.

Maybe campaign would solve that more with a tech system and in general. Naval academy missions right now are kind of based around building 1 ship. In the campaign it may not be viable to build just one super ship
 

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Balance between hulls vastly favors higher weight classes over lower weight classes. For example, a heavy cruiser can barely scratch a battleship unless torpedoes are used.

The only solution I can think of this is disabling systems like radar when shot. So they can disable parts of ships but cannot destroy the entire thing. That is just how things where. Theirs a reason dreadnought capital ships where so important back in the day. They where naval power.

 

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Lower tech designs can't hit the broadside of a barn and need to be at virtual point bank range before accuracy becomes respectable, but higher tech designs have great accuracy at over 20km away.

Technology! During  the 20th century technology advanced at a extreamly high rate. On Wikipedia their is a naval artillery ranges to give a estimate. What is close range to a 1940's ship a early dreadnought cannot physically hit. Even though their only a few decades apart. Ships where not just outdated but obsoletted at a rapid pace.

 

Edited March 20, 2020 by Zak MacKay
Cat typing removed

[Wowzery]

I'm curious what balance is?  In real life there wasn't such a thing as balance.

[Ruan]

3 hours ago, Wowzery said:

I'm curious what balance is?  In real life there wasn't such a thing as balance.

Balance in this context is ensuring that nothing is significantly superior to something else in all areas. That doesn't mean, however, that say 18" guns cant be vastly superior in damage than the runner up, 17" guns. But the 18" should have something to offset that superiority. Like costs, weight, RoF, etc.

Then there is balanced-inbalance. That's the idea that your not always going to be matched up evenly. Your enemy might have a ship that just happens to counter you rather well or has better tech in some areas. The trick here is you can still win or lose, even though the odds are against  or with you.

We won't be able to have a pure RL reality. There are just to many variables to track. Everything from how skilled the wielder was to how loose a bolt was or the number of ideas one guy had, can influence events in RL and place one group ahead of the others. it's  just impossible to model that in a game.

[arkhangelsk]

4 hours ago, Ruan said:

Balance in this context is ensuring that nothing is significantly superior to something else in all areas. That doesn't mean, however, that say 18" guns cant be vastly superior in damage than the runner up, 17" guns. But the 18" should have something to offset that superiority. Like costs, weight, RoF, etc.

Why should it necessarily have it? Realism has its own balance, though it would mean not every weapon is equally useful (and of course they aren't, that's why certain options are gravitated towards). It's true we can't track every variable, but certainly the variables we can determine should be matched as far as possible, and the results accepted rather than warped for a subjective feeling of "balanz".

[Hangar18]

On 3/20/2020 at 6:12 PM, Zak MacKay said:

Navies put a ton of emphasis on larger guns. They just kept growing and growing until treaties forced them to stop.

cost and building limitations stopped it.

[GUTB]

Another area of unbalance: BCs vs DDs vs BBs. A lot us know that the game isn't balanced against torpedos. If you send a high speed BC armed with nothing but torps against a BB the BB stands no chance. If you try to do the same thing with a DD, you'd think a DD would do as well given its much smaller size; if a BB has so much trouble hitting a BC, you'd think a DD going a few kts slower would be just as hard or harder to hit...but nope. You'll find secondaries have a decent chance to hit DDs no mater what. 

[Bluishdoor76]

2 hours ago, GUTB said:

Another area of unbalance: BCs vs DDs vs BBs. A lot us know that the game isn't balanced against torpedos. If you send a high speed BC armed with nothing but torps against a BB the BB stands no chance. If you try to do the same thing with a DD, you'd think a DD would do as well given its much smaller size; if a BB has so much trouble hitting a BC, you'd think a DD going a few kts slower would be just as hard or harder to hit...but nope. You'll find secondaries have a decent chance to hit DDs no mater what. 

well yeah a Destroyer is much easier to sink with secondaries then a Battlecruiser, its not the amount of times the BB's secondaries miss is more the amount of times needed to hit a DD to sink it. Obviously the DD will die quicker then a BC.

Edited March 25, 2020 by Bluishdoor76

[GUTB]

Just ran a test of 12 inch vs 18 inch effectiveness of sinking a battleship.

12" = 264 penetrating hits to sink

18" = 7 penetrating hits to sink.

According the game the 18" shells have over 8x the damage compared to 12" shells. However, the 18" shells had 38x the effectiveness. It's very clear the model heavily skews upward as gun caliber goes up.

[baatsman]

Torpedo power balance. (Yes they currently seem to be somewhat overpowered, but they where stupidly underpowered)

-It is an ALPHA, creeping towards full game status.

-Game mechanics now needs testing, the balancing of ordnance and protection is an easy thing to adjust later, even they just now seems under/over powered.

-Torpedoes do explode under water, and the detonation pressure actually finds it easier to go through the hull rather than surfacing, that is why a torpedo impact-detonation, is seemingly overpowered, as it can be devastating for any sized vessel. 

-Early torpedoes where instant detonated contact/magnetic fused. Some of the later era submarine versions where magnetic delay-fused for passing closely under the hull before detonation below the centerline of the target, it then would keelbreak almost anything regardless of size. Not sure what is modeled in current alpha version 

-Surface vs Surface torpedoes mostly where straight running hull hitters, and not keel breakers.

 

[arkhangelsk]

1 hour ago, GUTB said:

Just ran a test of 12 inch vs 18 inch effectiveness of sinking a battleship.

12" = 264 penetrating hits to sink

18" = 7 penetrating hits to sink.

According the game the 18" shells have over 8x the damage compared to 12" shells. However, the 18" shells had 38x the effectiveness. It's very clear the model heavily skews upward as gun caliber goes up.

It has 8 times the base damage, but because of its larger damage the ability of the ship to absorb it is less, so the 18 inch shells get a fair advantage. Why do you think people cram the biggest guns on the ship they can.

Besides, how did you get the exact same battleship to shoot at both times?

[madham82]

6 hours ago, arkhangelsk said:

It has 8 times the base damage, but because of its larger damage the ability of the ship to absorb it is less, so the 18 inch shells get a fair advantage. Why do you think people cram the biggest guns on the ship they can.

Besides, how did you get the exact same battleship to shoot at both times?

I used the mission where you build an Iowa to face a Yamato. The AI always tries to run after I score a few flooding hits. Then I switch to HE. I have used 18"-12" guns on my design, but what I noticed is the damage from HE seemed to scale quite linearly. I had no real trouble sinking the fleeing BB with HE with any of the guns, but 12" took hundreds of rounds (of course it pumps them out fast too). So while the 18"s sunk in the fewest hits, the 12"s didn't really take that much longer in time. 

It seems with the latest update once the deck has turned red from damage, HE shells hitting the same area will explode in the lower decks. Making HE shells much more effective in sinking a ship. The main issue there, is my HE was what was damaging the deck armor which shouldn't happen based on the way armored decks were designed. 

[Cptbarney]

17 minutes ago, madham82 said:

I used the mission where you build an Iowa to face a Yamato. The AI always tries to run after I score a few flooding hits. Then I switch to HE. I have used 18"-12" guns on my design, but what I noticed is the damage from HE seemed to scale quite linearly. I had no real trouble sinking the fleeing BB with HE with any of the guns, but 12" took hundreds of rounds (of course it pumps them out fast too). So while the 18"s sunk in the fewest hits, the 12"s didn't really take that much longer in time. 

It seems with the latest update once the deck has turned red from damage, HE shells hitting the same area will explode in the lower decks. Making HE shells much more effective in sinking a ship. The main issue there, is my HE was what was damaging the deck armor which shouldn't happen based on the way armored decks were designed. 

They could use the latter part of your post for AP, as parts of the ship get more and more damage it should not only get easier to pen it but also pen stuff behind that block as well. We could defo use internal models to represent the ships innards that should also help with the damage model.

For HE it could cause more 'equipment damage' and directly affect the crews morale from the loud bangs and tremors the shells would cause (assuming they are big shells, im sure most would be enough to make anyone go mad).

[GUTB]

If you want to see how messed up the damage model is, try building a BB with 18" super heavy lyditte II guns for a custom engagement at 30km. Use HE. You can literally one-shot stuff doing this. One penetrating hit can completely gut an enemy BB. The huge bonus to deck penetrating hits at that range seems to allows HE shells to penetrate the typically thin deck armor the AI puts out.

[madham82]

1 hour ago, Cptbarney said:

They could use the latter part of your post for AP, as parts of the ship get more and more damage it should not only get easier to pen it but also pen stuff behind that block as well. We could defo use internal models to represent the ships innards that should also help with the damage model.

For HE it could cause more 'equipment damage' and directly affect the crews morale from the loud bangs and tremors the shells would cause (assuming they are big shells, im sure most would be enough to make anyone go mad).

Agreed.

1 hour ago, GUTB said:

If you want to see how messed up the damage model is, try building a BB with 18" super heavy lyditte II guns for a custom engagement at 30km. Use HE. You can literally one-shot stuff doing this. One penetrating hit can completely gut an enemy BB. The huge bonus to deck penetrating hits at that range seems to allows HE shells to penetrate the typically thin deck armor the AI puts out.

Lyditte 2 might be the factor. I've been testing with High TNT. I'll try that tonight and see if I can repeat your results. I also wondered if the AI was designing think deck armor, but until they add the tool tip to show armor placement we are just guessing. 

[madham82]

So I tested the 18"s and Lyditte 2. While I didn't see damage numbers out of proportion to my High TNT tests, I did sink the AI Yamato at 30+km range in 17 hits doing 7500K damage (see 1st screen, sorry it is dark as I grabbed it during fade out). I grabbed a screen of the typical damage I saw which each hit (2nd screen). It sank so fast I didn't even get to ID it.

I then replayed the mission with High TNT with drastically different results. I gave up due after having done 20K+ damage with pens alone as the ship seemed to become a damage sponge at the 30km range. The results may be inconclusive if the armor scheme on the 2nd test with High TNT was different. I'd like to do 3 more tests in a row of Lyditte 2 to see if sinking the AI at that range is consistent. If it is, there is definitely a bug as High TNT damage is only like 5K less than Lyditte 2  (think it was 37K vs 42K). There is no way that would account for the unsinkable AI in my second test.

Also of note, AP at the same ranges was doing half or 1/3 the damage of HE which doesn't seem right to me either. 

[madham82]

So I confirmed there is something unique about the 18"s and Lyddite 2. I tried 16"s with it but did not get the same results. While the damage was proportional, I ran out of shells before sinking the AI. Makes me wonder if there is something going on with the penetration mechanics on 18"s which is giving them much greater pen values than other guns. Will probably try the 17"s just to be thorough. 

[Steeltrap]

Many of us have been commenting on how the damage model is especially deficient at present with respect to the difference between HE and AP plunging fire.

The simple fact is plunging HE fire is vastly, utterly unjustifiably, too effective.

It's been that way since I started playing last year. Given little has changed with the damage model in terms of application of damage, at least AFAIK, it's not surprising this hasn't altered.

One part of the problem is HE is given a pen of 1/3 of the AP (at least that's what the data mine thread on the damage model showed) BUT we don't know WHICH AP BASE pen it is using.

Does it scale that 1/3 directly against the AP pen (horizontal/vertical) for the range in question? Or does it retain a certain pen regardless of range?

We also don't know the penetration mechanic. Nor how or if fusing is modelled, which is HUGELY important for HE shells. Let alone various forms of ballistic caps and the like. ALL of those are relevant.

In short, there are so many things missing that explain real life performances that it's hardly the basic system with arbitrary values and incomplete mechanics that are all part of an Alpha build are producing results that clearly are not anywhere close to realistic.

[madham82]

5 hours ago, Steeltrap said:

Many of us have been commenting on how the damage model is especially deficient at present with respect to the difference between HE and AP plunging fire.

The simple fact is plunging HE fire is vastly, utterly unjustifiably, too effective.

It's been that way since I started playing last year. Given little has changed with the damage model in terms of application of damage, at least AFAIK, it's not surprising this hasn't altered.

One part of the problem is HE is given a pen of 1/3 of the AP (at least that's what the data mine thread on the damage model showed) BUT we don't know WHICH AP BASE pen it is using.

Does it scale that 1/3 directly against the AP pen (horizontal/vertical) for the range in question? Or does it retain a certain pen regardless of range?

We also don't know the penetration mechanic. Nor how or if fusing is modelled, which is HUGELY important for HE shells. Let alone various forms of ballistic caps and the like. ALL of those are relevant.

In short, there are so many things missing that explain real life performances that it's hardly the basic system with arbitrary values and incomplete mechanics that are all part of an Alpha build are producing results that clearly are not anywhere close to realistic.

I definitely agree, but @GUTB has definitely stumbled upon something extra. I wonder if the pen table for the MK5 (think that is what I used) 18"s is off at ranges of 30KMs or more when using Lyditte 2. We can't see it in the game at those ranges (think it cuts off at 25KM). It is definitely is destroying the ship in large chunks vs the 16"s which basically stopped doing damage after awhile at the same ranges. 

Edited April 14, 2020 by madham82
had already tested that

[GUTB]

There's something definitely wrong with 18" Lyditte 2. Just try it. Super heavy, 30km range. Switch to HE, and watch as ships get gutted on single deck pens. There's some kind of internal multiplier which is blowing them out of proportion. 

[Cptbarney]

This might be a bug but i have no clue at all. @Nick Thomadis Sorry to bother you, But is the above true for 18inch mark 5 lyditte 2 shells when switching to HE with super heavy shells that they can inflict such damage at such ranges compared to AP?

EDIT: HE to AP.

Edited April 14, 2020 by Cptbarney

[Nick Thomadis]

6 hours ago, GUTB said:

There's something definitely wrong with 18" Lyditte 2. Just try it. Super heavy, 30km range. Switch to HE, and watch as ships get gutted on single deck pens. There's some kind of internal multiplier which is blowing them out of proportion. 

6 hours ago, Cptbarney said:

This might be a bug but i have no clue at all. @Nick Thomadis Sorry to bother you, But is the above true for 18inch mark 5 lyditte 2 shells when switching to HE with super heavy shells that they can inflict such damage at such ranges compared to AP?

EDIT: HE to AP.

We will check and fix if necessary, thank you!

[Latur Husky]

On 4/1/2020 at 6:00 AM, GUTB said:

Just ran a test of 12 inch vs 18 inch effectiveness of sinking a battleship.

12" = 264 penetrating hits to sink

18" = 7 penetrating hits to sink.

According the game the 18" shells have over 8x the damage compared to 12" shells. However, the 18" shells had 38x the effectiveness. It's very clear the model heavily skews upward as gun caliber goes up.

Unfortunately your test data is quite inconsistent, you can't decide about effectiveness of a weapon after a single test with so many variables lol...  Also until we see actual campaign economy and how effective guns are compared to all variables like cost, weight, crew, tech level etc. 

Finally I would expect 18" to do far better than 12" in any scenario anyway.... the gap is just too large to even try to compare.

[Cptbarney]

5 hours ago, Latur Husky said:

Unfortunately your test data is quite inconsistent, you can't decide about effectiveness of a weapon after a single test with so many variables lol...  Also until we see actual campaign economy and how effective guns are compared to all variables like cost, weight, crew, tech level etc. 

Finally I would expect 18" to do far better than 12" in any scenario anyway.... the gap is just too large to even try to compare.

I agree with this however, if the HE shells are doing far more damage and pen better than the AP shells then there is something wrong (same caliber). As far as i know HE wasn't that effective against warships in general (not sure about big caliber HE against smaller targets i guess they were still devestating regardless).

But yeah not enough data, plus the AI also designs ships at a random and sometimes inconsistent basis, having the ability to make our own designs for the AI to use in custom battles would also help with testing as well.

[madham82]

13 hours ago, Latur Husky said:

Unfortunately your test data is quite inconsistent, you can't decide about effectiveness of a weapon after a single test with so many variables lol...  Also until we see actual campaign economy and how effective guns are compared to all variables like cost, weight, crew, tech level etc. 

Finally I would expect 18" to do far better than 12" in any scenario anyway.... the gap is just too large to even try to compare.

Take a look at my post earlier where I repeated his experience. Only switching from High TNT to Lyditte :

High TNT: 56 hits doing 20.9K damage before I gave up (ship would not sink)

Lyddite 2: 17 hits doing 7.5K damage (sunk)

Same guns, same ship (my build), same scenario (so AI used similar design)