Off to School

[Hardlec]

Academy missions should have a setting:  hard, balanced, easy.  Tough missions to test you.  Balanced missions for practice, easy missions for fun.  As it is now, the Academy is just resources wasted on unplayable missions.  I've played 50.  I've won 2.  If I'm experienced enough to have played 45 missions, I should be getting some  more  successes. If the academy missions are just Kobayashi Maru tests, stop making more.

I don't count the missions where the computer scored a super-critical hit from over the horizon and blasts me to davy jones locker in the first 30 game seconds.  (The computer scores the first hit in 98% of my missions.)  the academy is now ++unfun.

[BobRoss0902]

No offense intended. But this is a classic case of git gud.

Don't always just slap the biggest baddest guns you can find on your ship, check for accuracy.

Look over your stats. This game is closer to RTW than it is WoWs.

[Norbert Sattler]

Yeah, git gud doesn't work for all missions. There are some where RnG can make it literally impossible to win, no matter how well designed your ship is and how well you command it and you'll have to re-roll the dice until it becomes possible.

For example "Hurry Up" where you have to defend a convoy and if you're unlucky the enemy starts on top of your convoy and takes it apart before you can reach them with a 40+ kn ship.

Or the one where you have to defend your Italian battleship with a cruiser and it's entirely possible your BB is one-shot by the enemy (unless they fixed the bug that any enemy shell that hits you in the first 30 seconds ignore armour).

[Cptbarney]

Just now, Norbert Sattler said:

Yeah, git gud doesn't work for all missions. There are some where RnG can make it literally impossible to win, no matter how well designed your ship is and how well you command it and you'll have to re-roll the dice until it becomes possible.

For example "Hurry Up" where you have to defend a convoy and if you're unlucky the enemy starts on top of your convoy and takes it apart before you can reach them with a 40+ kn ship.

Or the one where you have to defend your Italian battleship with a cruiser and it's entirely possible your BB is one-shot by the enemy (unless they fixed the bug that any enemy shell that hits you in the first 30 seconds ignore armour).

True, but then these missions are not the mainstray of the game just supplemental content, i think they should be reorganised in terms of difficulty however to make it clear what is difficult and what isn't.

I've never had the italian BB get one-shotted (yet but one time did get killed in 4 hits and to complete that mission you just focus your cruisers on torpedoes and speed only (which makes sense since you are trying to kill it with lighter and weaker ships).

[Shaftoe]

Sadly, many Naval Academy missions are very poorly balanced, most often not giving the player enough time, or allowing enemy fleet to escape barely having enough surviving units to deny victory. So in NA scenarious luck is too much of a factor. In fact, sometimes it is the most important decisive factor.

And these issues remain unaddressed, now for a very long time...

Edited May 17, 2020 by Shaftoe

[Cptbarney]

Just now, Shaftoe said:

Sadly, many Naval Academy missions are very poorly balanced, most often not giving the player enough time, or allowing enemy fleet to escape barely having enough surviving units to deny victory. And these issued remain unaddressed, now for a very long time...

This seems to be a prevalent problem in later missions, objectives seem to be a hard yes or no when it comes to completing objectives in-general, meaning even if you do large amounts of damage or almost wipe out an enemy fleet you still lose, kinda wish they spent another patch working on missions balance too be honest to test a more softer boolean operation than the current one.

Im hoping the armour rework arrives after the campaign too be honest if this sort of thing isn't solved by the end of closed beta, beginning of open i will be quite concerned.

But then they are a small team so, there is that, i'd rather they take their time to polish things. Unless they are doing what i think they are doing and thats simply putting out the content first then fixing it before the end of closed alpha then polishing it around the end of Closed alpha and the beginning of the closed beta/early access thing.

Reminds me of the forest in some ways.

[Norbert Sattler]

My problem is that some missions can be very easy or outright impossible on account of RnG.

For example there's the mission "Hurry Up" where you have to defend a convoy against a fleet with your battlecruiser and two random CLs.
If you are unlucky you can have the enemy spawn right on top of your convoy and start blasting away at them from second 1 of the misison, making it literally impossible to win.

Or the mission where you have to defend your Italian battleship against a Super Battleship, where it's entirely possible that if the AI rolls a good BB and you a bad one, your BB can get one-shot or downed in a few salvoes before you have a chance to even get into firing range with your cruiser or BC.

That's not just poor balance, but poor game design. Thankfully such horribly mis-designed misisons are the exception rather than the norm, but they need to be adressed at some point.

[Dirlinger]

1 hour ago, Norbert Sattler said:

My problem is that some missions can be very easy or outright impossible on account of RnG.

 

This. If the RNG favors you, you'll get very easy mission (enemy design is sacrificing survivability) which are over in 5 minutes or you may be faced with HMS Unsinkable. "Git lucky" is more useful advice than "get gud" in this case.

This does not apply to all missions of course but generally any mission design which assumes that you need to game the system to win is not good.