Please let us edit enemy ships

[Kreisauer]

If you are not adding PvP,  please let us at least edit the enemy ship(s)

I want to let my viewers builds fight each other in AI-Mode to supplement for PvP for now.

 

[arkhangelsk]

They should just let us edit all the ships in Custom Battle and be done with it. I must admit I cannot see what the difficulty is.

And let us save designs. As for the problem of equipment availability by year, here's my proposed solution - Let Us. If we want 1 or 2 1940 ships in what is otherwise a 1925 battle, we should just be allowed to do so. Let us be responsible for such things.

[ThatOneBounced]

11 hours ago, arkhangelsk said:

They should just let us edit all the ships in Custom Battle and be done with it. I must admit I cannot see what the difficulty is.

And let us save designs. As for the problem of equipment availability by year, here's my proposed solution - Let Us. If we want 1 or 2 1940 ships in what is otherwise a 1925 battle, we should just be allowed to do so. Let us be responsible for such things.

so far my most recent crashes have been me creating large battles and then the AI cant build the ships before tearing the game apart and crashing the PC. So if the AI only has to design half the ships it would definitely cause a bit more stability. So i agree that i dont see why we dont just save designs 

Edited March 31, 2020 by ThatOneBounced

[Dan Dare]

yeah, please let us do that and also more that one ship/type on either side...pleassseeee

[ThatOneBounced]

1 hour ago, Dan Dare said:

yeah, please let us do that and also more that one ship/type on either side...pleassseeee

Now what I dont understand is why is designing enemy ships such a popular request. It kinda defeats the purpose of creating ships that have to be ready for any kind action. Don't quite see the fun in knowing what your up against. My ship designs usually are built around the fact that I will have no idea what the enemy battle line is. I could be in a conflict in a dual vs heavily armored, massive gunned battleships that lack gun quality and/or accuracy, but can cause a sizable headache for my fleet once they have the range. The other extreme is I could be up against fast, accurate, but lightly armored and gunned battleships meaning the balance is heavily in my favor (I tend to build ships with the highest tech guns with some serious armor and rangefinding). But if i can create an enemy ship, i feel too tempted to just make them inferior where I would just create a glaring weak spot that I would just exploit with my own ships. At that point its not really fun anymore its just poor ship design. i mean battle recreations are also popular, but the ship designer doesn't really facilitate that as most modern ship displacements make the ship too short to fit towers. Honestly all I ask for is creating our own fleets and moving resources to much more critical matters after the fact

[arkhangelsk]

2 hours ago, ThatOneBounced said:

i feel too tempted to just make them inferior where I would just create a glaring weak spot that I would just exploit with my own ships.

That's you. For the rest of us I can see several reasons. First, if you "max out" your design against an opponent of equal tech, your ship will almost certainly be better than the AI ship, so making it yourself can be a greater challenge. That's recognized and that's a reason why so many Naval Academy scenarios give the AI a substantial tech advantage.

Second, if you play to win, AI ships restrict your choices. Sometimes you want to build a smaller ship say to practise being economical. Unfortunately, the AI doesn't read the air and builds a 100,000 ton super battleship, and you don't even know about it until you play. So you are forced to make the biggest ship you can just in case (and money is no object, either). Now of course the enemy just so happens to build a small ship and you kill it extremely easily...

Third, from a realism standpoint, it is not that often that people design their ships with so little information (none beyond tech year) as to what their opponent is building. Usually you'll have an inkling of what's on the enemy plate even if you don't know the details.

Fourth is of course historical battles. We can at least try to get close in terms of capabilities if perhaps not the listed displacement.

[Skeksis]

On 3/31/2020 at 2:01 AM, Kreisauer said:

If you are not adding PvP,  please let us at least edit the enemy ship(s)

I want to let my viewers builds fight each other in AI-Mode to supplement for PvP for now.

Custom Battles is a community driven introduction and not Dev's first choice, also Admin has said that the first draft of the "campaign is the priority" and after that is when designer tool will get improvements.

With these two points in mind, work on designing & saving all ships in customs battles will be on the backburner for quite some time.

Edited March 31, 2020 by Skeksis

[Wowzery]

4 hours ago, ThatOneBounced said:

Now what I dont understand is why is designing enemy ships such a popular request.

I know with some of my videos, the viewers would love to see a Yamato vs. Iowa battle.

[Zak MacKay]

Quote

Now what I dont understand is why is designing enemy ships such a popular request.

You could create 2 balanced ships and see how they do against each other. Or get a proper challenge like a another 18" armed super battleship. Not a 15" armed ship. You would also have a better idea how powerful your ships are if you compare it against your own.

It would also let you have a kind of multiplayer. Where it could be my ship vs your ship.

[arkhangelsk]

7 hours ago, Skeksis said:

Custom Battles is a community driven introduction and not Dev's first choice, also Admin has said that the first draft of the "campaign is the priority" and after that is when designer tool will get improvements.

With these two points in mind, work on designing & saving all ships in customs battles will be on the backburner for quite some time.

I have a record of being a wet blanket when it comes to "new feature proposals" in proportion to my perception of how time consuming that "small, necessary" proposal is, because I agree the campaign is priority.

However, in this case, it seems that no new components have to be made, more just hooking a few existing components up and removing some blockages. It just doesn't seem like that much of a diversion.

Of course, I could be wrong.

[Cptbarney]

12 hours ago, Skeksis said:

Custom Battles is a community driven introduction and not Dev's first choice, also Admin has said that the first draft of the "campaign is the priority" and after that is when designer tool will get improvements.

With these two points in mind, work on designing & saving all ships in customs battles will be on the backburner for quite some time.

I seriously doubt, simply adding a few new already existing features into an already existing feature will take that much time ingeneral. If you think the campaign will come out in the next patch then i would think again since they will obviously want to get some features nailed down and also added in before committing to it.

We can already design ships in custom battles, saving ships won't exactly take 5months to implement and also the ability to design multiple ships should come before the campaign since you know thats what you will be doing in the first place.

It makes no sense to test the features out in the campaign first when you can simply put them into pre-existing templates and improve them before the big show. Considering the devs made far bigger changes before with little issues in time.

[Skeksis]

21 hours ago, Cptbarney said:

We can already design ships in custom battles

You mean one ship only!

For all "ships" there need a fleet tab for both you and the enemy and that takes a programmer.

Saving fleet of designs will take a game save of sorts and a programmer.

As soon as Custom Battles was enable (that was a long time ago) the next step of designing and saving all was quested but not action because there only one programmer... and he/she is buzzy.

Custom Battles won't take much to finish (and I don't like things unfinished either) but it is not priority, even though historical recreation via custom battles is a priority to us, Dev's have layout there plan for there lone programmer and custom battles is not planned for the interim.

Remember...

 

It's like watching a snail move around the garden, it will get to where it's going...... but not anytime soon! 🙂

Edited April 2, 2020 by Skeksis

[lordcmdr]

I agree. This is my most wanted feature to be able to make my own custom enemies to fight.

[arkhangelsk]

You don't need a "fleet tab". Here is the present flow after selecting how many battleships, cruisers ... etc you want for each side, the year, and the starting distance:
1) Load design screen.
2) User either uses auto-design or designs his ship.
3) User ends design phase, saving his design for the battle.
4) Computer pushes auto-design, end design itself without your intervention for all the other categories.
5) At the end of the battle, the computer throws his design away.

Here's the new flow:
1) Load design screen
2) User either uses auto-design or designs his ship.
3) User ends design phase, saving the design.
4) Computer loops back to 1 until all categories are done.

There is no step 5, because we don't want to lose the designs. We actually have fewer steps in the new flow. How much work can it possibly take...

[Skeksis]

There has to be a capacity to have multiple designs for each class e.g. different types of battleships, for battle re-creations (and/or for any large project).

Edited April 2, 2020 by Skeksis

[arkhangelsk]

1 hour ago, Skeksis said:

There has to be a capacity to have multiple designs for each class e.g. different types of battleships, for battle re-creations (and/or for any large project).

Fine. Change the mechanization of the loop. Make the loop for each ship instead of each category. If you want 3 ships of the same type, just load the same design 3 times. We can have SoL improvements like automating the application of one design to a class later.

[Druzki]

On 3/31/2020 at 4:56 PM, ThatOneBounced said:

Now what I dont understand is why is designing enemy ships such a popular request. It kinda defeats the purpose of creating ships that have to be ready for any kind action. Don't quite see the fun in knowing what your up against. My ship designs usually are built around the fact that I will have no idea what the enemy battle line is. I could be in a conflict in a dual vs heavily armored, massive gunned battleships that lack gun quality and/or accuracy, but can cause a sizable headache for my fleet once they have the range. The other extreme is I could be up against fast, accurate, but lightly armored and gunned battleships meaning the balance is heavily in my favor (I tend to build ships with the highest tech guns with some serious armor and rangefinding). But if i can create an enemy ship, i feel too tempted to just make them inferior where I would just create a glaring weak spot that I would just exploit with my own ships. At that point its not really fun anymore its just poor ship design. i mean battle recreations are also popular, but the ship designer doesn't really facilitate that as most modern ship displacements make the ship too short to fit towers. Honestly all I ask for is creating our own fleets and moving resources to much more critical matters after the fact

This is about player freedom, which is very important in a sandbox game. If we're given the ability to design enemy ships, it doesnt mean that the option to fight AI designed ships won't exist.

[The Maned Wolf]

On 4/3/2020 at 6:21 AM, Druzki said:

This is about player freedom, which is very important in a sandbox game. If we're given the ability to design enemy ships, it doesnt mean that the option to fight AI designed ships won't exist.

Exacxtly. Part of why I like these sort of games is being able to set up custom scenarios and see how they play out, not everyone is in it 100% for the challenge. I want to set up some custom ship designs and have mock fleet battles, is that such a bad thing?

[fsp]

This is urgently needed.

I applaud the general design of this game and the state it is in right now, I think that the bigger issues in combat are most likely going to be fixed.

 

I mention this because I also absolutely cannot understand why custom battle comes with such poor features after several updates. It should at the very minimum allow you to design all your own ships. It should also allow you to design all enemy ships.

When I think of custom battles, I immediately think of SSI's Steel Panthers. It had all those options (and even allowed you to deploy enemy troops if you wished to do so, although I rarely used that option) - and that was designed in 1995!

[IronKaputt]

On 4/1/2020 at 4:00 AM, Zak MacKay said:

You could create 2 balanced ships and see how they do against each other. Or get a proper challenge like a another 18" armed super battleship. Not a 15" armed ship. You would also have a better idea how powerful your ships are if you compare it against your own.

Speaking of testing, Sink Exercise should definetly be an option for ship disposal in the campaign.

On the other side of the spectrum, converting significant ones into museums (receiving some morale(?) bonuses, perhaps) would also be a nice touch.

[monbvol]

I guess I see things a little differently.

Improving the designer for Custom Battle would be effort you could just copy/paste into the campaign for allowing us players to custom design ships during the campaign.

Especially the ability to save designs so there is the ability to populate the campaign with static ships so that we can engage say the SMS Seydlitz in one fight and if it survives to fight again the next fight we can engage the SMS Seydlitz and it'll have the same stats and even damage.