Serious Balance Issues

[The Fundamentalist]

On 3/31/2020 at 10:00 PM, 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.

Yes that's because effectiveness is exponential, as it ought to be. 

I really don't see how anything listed here is a game-breaking problem, especially at an alpha stage. The highest caliber available ought to deliver catastrophic damage, as the shell weight and explosive capacity are exponentially larger with the increase in diameter. Thus, effectiveness is also exponentially better. 

With the advent of crew mechanics, campaign shipbuilding limitations and advanced concepts such as barrel wear and build quality, much of these complaints will naturally balance themselves out. 

 

[GUTB]

9 hours ago, The Fundamentalist said:

Yes that's because effectiveness is exponential, as it ought to be. 

I really don't see how anything listed here is a game-breaking problem, especially at an alpha stage. The highest caliber available ought to deliver catastrophic damage, as the shell weight and explosive capacity are exponentially larger with the increase in diameter. Thus, effectiveness is also exponentially better. 

With the advent of crew mechanics, campaign shipbuilding limitations and advanced concepts such as barrel wear and build quality, much of these complaints will naturally balance themselves out. 

 

I don't know why this is so hard to understand. The game menu says the 18" shell damage is 8x higher than the 12" shell damage. This is the exponential damage increase. It doesn't make sense in reality, but whatever let's go with it. The POINT is the in-game effectiveness of the shell (ie, the ability to sink ships) is MUCH higher than what the damage stat suggests.

[Steeltrap]

19 minutes ago, GUTB said:

The game menu says the 18" shell damage is 8x higher than the 12" shell damage. This is the exponential damage increase. It doesn't make sense in reality, but whatever let's go with it.

Consider Yamato and Alaska, the latter with what surely was one of if not the most powerful 12" guns ever built.

Yamato firing AP is throwing a 1,460kg shell at 780m/s with the shell's bursting charge being 33.85kg.

Alaska is using a 517kg shell at 762m/s with a bursting charge of 7.9kg. Worth noting this gun was viewed as being so good that it equalled or exceeded the performance of the USA's pre-WW2 14" guns on many of their BBs.

In crude terms that's triple the kinetic energy (444MJ v 150) at the barrel end; the gap would get wider with range as the lighter 12" drops velocity slightly more quickly, and velocity is squared for KE calculations. It's also 4 times the explosive element, although I'm not sure what performance differences existed between the two explosive types.

I don't know how the devs have calculated their "damage" values, but the 18" being a LOT larger than a 12" is exactly what it ought to be. Whether 8 times is too much is a fair question. Either way, it clearly has all that extra KE that has to go somewhere (much of it into the matter of armour penetration), and then 4 times the volume of explosives.

Interestingly, with HC/HE rounds there's a considerably bigger gap in KE (faster and heavier for the 18") yet only a fraction under 2 times the bursting charge (61.7kg v 36.0).

 

51 minutes ago, GUTB said:

The POINT is the in-game effectiveness of the shell (ie, the ability to sink ships) is MUCH higher than what the damage stat suggests.

What we don't know is how the internals of the damage model work. We know damage can 'spill' into adjacent compartments, yet we also know a 'destroyed' compartment does NOT lose its ability to soak damage.

Just because a shell does 8 times damage does not mean it ought to be 8 times as destructive. I can imagine systems that could cause damage effectiveness to be linear, but also others that could be multiplicative IF they overcome some sort of threshold of damage v the hit location.

It's all a black box.

As it happens, I had a discussion elsewhere with Nick about a month ago about how the damage model at some point is going to have to be explained because as it is right now it's extremely unintuitive and likely to cause all sorts of ill feeling/confusion in new players, and already bothers a lot of existing ones. In the absence of accurate information, people will make up their own and believe it to be true. Far better to supply accurate info as far as I'm concerned.

In other words, nothing here is new. They know about it of course.

If you're expecting everything to work as though it's a complete, off the public shelf game purchase, you're going to be frustrated. By all means point out potential issues, ask questions, etc, as that's why we're here.

I try to do so in a way that invites discussion and engagement and not so much in an aggressive, argumentative way. Don't always succeed, but the latter will simply lead people to conclude the person is unpleasant and thus to be avoided.

Cheers

[Latur Husky]

Propellants should be changed anyway. Some of them are available way later than they were historically, it is also very confusing mechanics, because many Navies used different propellant to fire shells and different was present in the shells themselves. 

Some of good examples here are:

White powder (Poudre B ) :

•  Historically Developed in 1884, adopted by French Navy around 1890. Was prone to spontaneous early ignition. Modified by adding stabilizer after  Iéna and Liberté sunk due to accidents related to it's early ignition (respectively 1907 and 1911). Used by ?French Navy in modified versions up until WWII.
•  In the game available for French Navy in 1904, generally very good propellant with almost no downsides, it actually reduces the chance of ammo detonation...

Cordite I:

• Historically manufacturing started in 1889 with cordite I being first issues for 3-pdr, 6-pdr, 4,7" and 6" guns in 1893 and for 12" in 1895. Much more powerful than previously used Gunpowder and Brown Powder. Studies shown that use of Cordite I caused increased wear to gun muzzles due to high burn temperature. It lead to Cordite I being modified in 1901 referred as MD propellant, both Cordite I and MD were used during WWI and both were stored in poor conditions with their stability deteriorating over time. in 1917 modified once more to improve stability (MC) and adopted by late 1918.
• In game available in 1906, it is referred as low explosive and it's actually reducing muzzle velocity and penetration, it increases shell damage and shell fire chance though. And is also significantly increasing chance of own magazine detonation which is probably the only historically accurate info about it xD. 

Cordite II:

• Historically developed after studies over German RP (Rohr-Pulver) propellant in 1927 and referred as SC (solventless cordite). Used extensively during WWII. It was weaker than Cordite I but it was also significantly safer though not enough considering what happened to HMS Hood. Later on upgraded with hot burning version referred as HSC. 
• In game, available at 1911, referred as more powerful than C1 but safer.

Lyddite:

• Historically used as a filler of HE Shells by many Navies (under different names tho), and it was in use since 1887 - 1889. Becomes very unstable if reacts with metal shell or fuse.  
• In game available in 1900, referred as ultra powerful as explosive charge but very sensitive.

TNT:

• Historically adopted as a shell filler around 1902 - 1903 by German Navy, much safer than Lyddite. Widely adopted by other Navies between World Wars.
• In game available in 1914, referred to as new standard for AP shell filler. In general it acts as a late tech in the game. 

 

In general we got a mix of fillers and gun propellants all together that all becomes available before 1920's, while many of them should be available earlier they should also be split between Gun and Shell propellants allowing for different combinations of benefits and drawbacks. 

 

 

As for gun effectiveness right now, again as long as we are not able to reproduce exactly same conditions there is not much point to compare different guns and declare them OP because there is too many variables and it's all luck based. There are features that will impact how ships react to gunfire in various circumstances like Citadel armor, or armor type... too many unknown variables to say if gun is OP imo. I personally almost don't use Lyddite at all for example, because for me it has proven to be too unreliable, my personal to go for is, White Powder or TNT at the moment... but that's my personal preferences. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 18, 2020 by Latur Husky

[madham82]

Guys I don't know why this has suddenly turned into a discussion of 18"s vs another caliber, but the issue is clearly 18"s AND Lyditte 2 having an uber pen/damage value. Please see my posts where I replicated the issue. There's no way to rationalize 56 hits doing over 20K damage (with no sinking) versus 17 hits doing 7.5K (ship sunk). This was a structural sinking, not overwhelmed flooding that resulted in a sinking. Lyditte 2 literally blew away huge chunks of the structure percentage. Meanwhile High TNT did damage per shell closely matching Lyditte 2, but with drastically different results. It looks to be a case of High TNT falling into the "damage soak", but Lyditte 2 values blowing right through. 

Also I initially did tests with other gun calibers and Lyditte 2. The effect was not reproducible with any gun other than 18". The damage per shot values were proportional to the reductions in caliber IMO. In my test cases for example, 12"s were quite useless until I closed to point blank range and was able to cause flooding hits (which is how it sunk), even then almost running out of shells before the AI sunk.   

[Cptbarney]

1 hour ago, madham82 said:

Guys I don't know why this has suddenly turned into a discussion of 18"s vs another caliber, but the issue is clearly 18"s AND Lyditte 2 having an uber pen/damage value. Please see my posts where I replicated the issue. There's no way to rationalize 56 hits doing over 20K damage (with no sinking) versus 17 hits doing 7.5K (ship sunk). This was a structural sinking, not overwhelmed flooding that resulted in a sinking. Lyditte 2 literally blew away huge chunks of the structure percentage. Meanwhile High TNT did damage per shell closely matching Lyditte 2, but with drastically different results. It looks to be a case of High TNT falling into the "damage soak", but Lyditte 2 values blowing right through. 

Also I initially did tests with other gun calibers and Lyditte 2. The effect was not reproducible with any gun other than 18". The damage per shot values were proportional to the reductions in caliber IMO. In my test cases for example, 12"s were quite useless until I closed to point blank range and was able to cause flooding hits (which is how it sunk), even then almost running out of shells before the AI sunk.   

So its only 18inch shells with lydditte 2 causing this problem and no other caliber? How odd. Might be a bug or oversight me thinks. Nick did say he would get on to it, if they find the problem in the admist of all the work they are doing atm

[madham82]

14 minutes ago, Cptbarney said:

So its only 18inch shells with lydditte 2 causing this problem and no other caliber? How odd. Might be a bug or oversight me thinks. Nick did say he would get on to it, if they find the problem in the admist of all the work they are doing atm

Exactly. I tested 18"s, 16"s, and the 12"s (mainly because of their great accuracy). Then went back to test 18"s with High TNT (which are the results I posted earlier).

If Nick sees this, I would consider it a low priority issue, more like an exploit. Personally I just want to know if Nick finds an issue. They can fix it whenever is best. 

Edited April 16, 2020 by madham82

[Nick Thomadis]

22 hours ago, madham82 said:

Personally I just want to know if Nick finds an issue. They can fix it whenever is best. 

Deck penetration could become too high over very large ranges, where the 18-inch guns had the maximum penetration power and could cause the issue reported. This will be balanced better in next update, so thank you a lot for all the help in this thread.

[Steeltrap]

On 4/17/2020 at 11:36 PM, Nick Thomadis said:

Deck penetration could become too high over very large ranges, where the 18-inch guns had the maximum penetration power and could cause the issue reported. This will be balanced better in next update, so thank you a lot for all the help in this thread.

This is one reason we like playing and giving feedback.

Might I add, however, I'm still concerned over the whole "HE v AP" when it comes to plunging fire. If an AP round bounces off the deck, NO WAY can an HE shell then devastate it. That MUST be true of ALL calibres, even if there's a particular issue with 18s. Maybe this generally isn't a problem as much as it once was, as I avoid the modern scenarios for various reasons I won't go into here. If it has been addressed, great.

Cheers