First Thoughts

[DarkMaid]

First off I have to say I'm very impressed with the product -- it's very playable in its current state and it's only going to get better as it's refined. Been waiting for something like this for 20 years -- or longer tbh. In my teens I used to make sketches of dream battleships and I'm in my 50's now so it's been a long time coming. So on to my first impressions now that I've had a chance to get about a third of the way through the Academy missions.

Visual and especially the sound effects are awesome! The ship constructor is very good with heaps of options to tinker with. The combat portion is based on probability without the players having anything to do with aiming -- which is what I want in a naval simulation (for that reason I never even bothered with WoW).

So a few things that did bug me and a few ideas:

1) The graphic in the top right corner showing ship damage in elevation and plan views is too busy especially with those animated flames and loud cross hatched damage coloration. I would much prefer a more static, less loud version that shows immediately at a glance which guns are knocked out (for the plan view) and for the elevation an estimated "time to pump out" for flooded compartments. Compartments that are permanently flooded can be colored dark blue and compartments that can be shored up and pumped out shown in light blue with the time indicator showing up after being shored up and pumps started.

For the plan view I'd like to see the gun turrets that are operational very clearly shown in, say, solid white (on a medium grey deck background perhaps). Damaged (not on fire) and under repair in solid yellow; damaged and burning in solid red; permanently knocked out in solid black. It's not that that info is currently missing but having to squint through all the dancing flame and crosshatching to find my guns and what state they are in should be much easier. Clarity should be the order of the day for that particular graphic. 

The elevation is mostly fine (aside from adding "time to pump out" for shored-up flooded compartments). It's mainly the plan view that needs simplification. If I want damage animation and what not I can get that cool factor by zooming in on the ship model as it's steaming through the water. The damage graphic needs to show at a glance without dancing flames, etc. exactly what the status of my guns, etc. are.

2) Current speed of ships should be shown somewhere at all times without having to click on the rudder control and hovering over the telegraph. It should also appear on the damage graphic I just finished discussing, maybe even over top of each ship model on the water. Unless I'm missing something it seems too hard to keep track of your (and enemy) ships' speed.

3) Use of red. I'm red-green color blind which means it's very hard to pick out dark red on a dark background or distinguish red from dark greens and dark browns. The dashed red line that shows which enemy ships are being targeted (when you left-click your ship) is very difficult to see (for me) without actually zooming in or even pausing the game to take a closer look. Similarly the use of various red shades on the damage graphic adds to the difficulty in immediately getting information. It's not a game-breaker but it would be great to be able to customize some of the colors used. Bright, lighter reds are better than darker, duller reds. If you use greens and reds as indicators than make sure that one is bright and the other darker. Like a bright red and a dark green is better than both being bright or both being dark.

Some possible features for the future:

1) A way to move the actual machinery around to help with weight offset. Boiler weight should be tied to funnels so moving a funnel should also move the boilers (more-or-less). That would be a big aid in balancing. Engines are aft of the boilers so moving the boilers would also move the engines (but at some point the engines would run afoul of a main gun turret installation (not the turret itself but the barbette that extends below deck housing the shell ring, hoists, etc. as well as nearby shell rooms and powder magazines)).

2) A button available to export battle logs for all ships to a text file.

3) Splinter damage from large caliber shells (near misses). Speaking of near misses, the shell splashes seem to be a bit small (but then again I haven't messed with anything larger than 13").

Anyway, that's enough for now; I've been reading threads discussing the damage of HE vs AP, accuracy factors and similar details but I'll leave my thoughts regarding those things to others with more experience with the game. I did note that as opposing ships get close it seems to me there should be a more dramatic increase in hits and pens to the point that opposing ships both with working guns should never get within several ship lengths of the enemy -- one or the other would've been obliterated way before ramming would be a consideration. It also seems that it takes a lot of shells before guns get knocked out though I'd have to experiment with my gun armor values before saying for sure.

Looking forward to many great battles to come

Edited April 10, 2020 by DarkMaid

[Cptbarney]

I don't think anyones mentioned disability support (im guilty of that myself sadly). Either way that should be put into a patch at some point, nick should be able to forward that himself.

Yeah i agree with ship speeds, maybe putting them above or below the ship name or at the sides (could be customizable). Moving machinery around i think has been suggested alot, not sure when that will happen doe.

Think we should have different animations/objects for ricocheting/bounced/shattered shells to help identify (and also eye sweeties) what happened to the shell as well. I've noticed some ships get their turrets knocked out early or never it depends on the frontal and top armour (plus distance due to shell arcs or lack of) wish we could have an option to allow players to hover their mouse over a part of the ship and see how well armoured that section is and only that section.

Also we could do with an armour viewer inside the dock itself. also like the different colours for flooded areas, could go further had havent that applied to damage componenets as well (so from light green to dark red which basically means its gone completely). I actually prefer the fire inside of the model since it helps me understand what part of the ship is damaged and on fire plus how well damaged, but i guess we could have that as another feature regardless.

Makes me wonder how many peeps are around my age of 24 atm.

also cant wait for alpha 6 ladz 'w'

[roachbeef]

Thank you for bringing up aiding with disabilities. I tend to get nauseous quickly whenever there are sub-60 frame rates (I had to watch Into the Spiderverse in 10-minute chunks because of that) or low-FOV. Motion blur and DOF is almost as bad, because I can't see anything.

[madham82]

16 hours ago, DarkMaid said:

2) Current speed of ships should be shown somewhere at all times without having to click on the rudder control and hovering over the telegraph. It should also appear on the damage graphic I just finished discussing, maybe even over top of each ship model on the water. Unless I'm missing something it seems too hard to keep track of your (and enemy) ships' speed.

Take a look at this screen. Look at the ship icons on the bottom. The current speed is displayed in top right of the icon. Also I have noticed it seems to be color coded based on cruise speed bonus. When it turns grey, the highest bonus is present. It might just be color coded speed period. Maybe someone else can confirm. 

Enemy ship speed definitely isn't easy.

Edited April 10, 2020 by madham82

[DarkMaid]

^^ Ah, ok. Thanks for pointing that out. Kinda figured I was missing something as useful as a speed readout somewhere. It would be handy if they also added the speed in that empty spot to the right of Struct and Float on the elevation of the damage graphic, too. It would be a way to get the enemy speed as well.

[Cptbarney]

15 hours ago, madham82 said:

Take a look at this screen. Look at the ship icons on the bottom. The current speed is displayed in top right of the icon. Also I have noticed it seems to be color coded based on cruise speed bonus. When it turns grey, the highest bonus is present. It might just be color coded speed period. Maybe someone else can confirm. 

Enemy ship speed definitely isn't easy.

I think that if your speed counter is yellow then it means your ship has suffered damage (minor or not) and therefore could be subjected to having a slower top speed after taking structural damage.

That can be as a small as 0.1knots or as big as 5knots+.

I haven't seen the colour change mean anything else, but thats my take on it anyways.

 

[madham82]

3 hours ago, Cptbarney said:

I think that if your speed counter is yellow then it means your ship has suffered damage (minor or not) and therefore could be subjected to having a slower top speed after taking structural damage.

That can be as a small as 0.1knots or as big as 5knots+.

I haven't seen the colour change mean anything else, but thats my take on it anyways.

 

Possibly, I know it does change to grey at slow speeds, even if damaged. Will have to play around it and see.

[madham82]

So you correct @Cptbarney it does turn yellow on any damage impacting top speed. Still not sure why if you slow down after being damaged it changes to grey again. Maybe @Nick Thomadis can tell us. 

[nimbalo500]

From what i have seen grey is able to reach top speed,  yellow is unable to reach top speed due to funnel inefficiency and red is due to engines being knocked out,

[madham82]

20 minutes ago, nimbalo500 said:

From what i have seen grey is able to reach top speed,  yellow is unable to reach top speed due to funnel inefficiency and red is due to engines being knocked out,

That make sense. So it is grey because I am able to reach the set speed (when I slow down from fastest available.

[nimbalo500]

9 hours ago, madham82 said:

That make sense. So it is grey because I am able to reach the set speed (when I slow down from fastest available.

Yes, if you can reach the speed you set it to it will go grey , thinking about it i also think if you turn too sharply it will also show red, i had that happen in the CSS Virginia mission

[DarkMaid]

Since we're discussing speed readouts, I found the enemy speed display. If you expand the arrow beside the icons of the enemy fleet ("a" in my graphic) and then hover over the larger thumbnail (my mouse pointer wasn't captured but it was hovering over the Irresistible's icon) you'll get some info on the enemy ship. It looks like you have to expand for each division or class of vessel and only one group can be expanded at any one time.

While I'm here I'll mention something about the ship logs. Elapsed time is given for events ("b" in my graphic) but the little clock up in the top left ("c") shows time remaining. So you have to remember how much you had at the start and do some math if you want to know how long ago an event occurred. The actual elapsed time should be shown instead of remaining time (or show both). Also, 26:60 should be 27:00. Just little things I'm sure will be smoothed over eventually (hopefully)

Edited April 14, 2020 by DarkMaid