Clown Car Thread

[SonicB]

3 hours ago, Stormnet said:

Because when you are a Light-Cruiser in the 1905s with 7 7 inches, you need to show your fat round turrets to everybody.

I love this ship. It's like a teenager fitting 20" rims and a paint tin exhaust mod from Wish to their first car.

It's okay, kid, you'll be a County class when you grow up.

[Stormnet]

47 minutes ago, Cpt.Hissy said:

It's made out of thin foil, it is a light cruiser. Just with big guns. Because maybe it works, can't know without trying.
That AI  is able to experiment is a good thing, if it also able to understand when experiment has failed and avoid doing stupid in the future.
these missions don't have future tho

This was before the overpen changes. I remenber these things taking a punch simply because shots were constantly overpenning. 

At the time, it did work though.

Edited April 24, 2021 by Stormnet

[Intrepid_Arty]

It isn't *excessively* clown car levels, but the torpedo placement on this (generated earlier today) seems somewhat wonky to me.

[Masonator]

I don't even want to know anymore.

It was fighting this abomination, too.

[Shneemaster]

I've been waiting for something for something truly awful to post here, and here it is:Okay, where to start:

- 6x 12" guns as the main battery for a 57,000 ton battleship.

- Another example of horrible aft weight offset, complete with massive barbette

- 4 different calibres of secondary guns

-Chaotic mess of secondary turret placement

- Deck torpedo tubes on a battleship

- Weird funnel placement

- Reduced ammo count, resulting in them running out of 12 shells before doing serious damage to my fleet

At least they were well protected, with maximum bulkheads (side note: maximum bulkheads are way to powerful, the current "few" and "many" settings should be the minimum and maximum) and good armour, I emptied 5600 13" shells, and a good number of 8", into these things at close range and only sunk one of them.

Edited June 7, 2021 by Shneemaster

[ThatZenoGuy]

Where do I even begin?...

[Stormnet]

38 minutes ago, ThatZenoGuy said:

Where do I even begin?...

Theres a secondary on a tall barbette, that blocks a superfiring main from firing front, defeating the while point of superfiring those turrets. They put the mains on barbettes so they could fire throught the secondaries gore in the deck.

Its a secondary calliber collector ship.

Who knows about that weight balance.

Chogei, what a name.

 

In the plus side, it sure packs quite a punch with those 9 20" for a ship that size

Edited June 27, 2021 by Stormnet

[neph]

In general, AI seems far, far, too secondary-happy. These are dreadnoughts, yeah? Pick two calibers & stick with it (plus a few AA calibers for flair, I guess)

[Stormnet]

14 hours ago, neph said:

In general, AI seems far, far, too secondary-happy. These are dreadnoughts, yeah? Pick two calibers & stick with it (plus a few AA calibers for flair, I guess)

The AI is a secondary UAD calliber collector.

[ThatZenoGuy]

This one isn't quite as bad, but I like how during the creation of this ship the designers were like...

"Ahh finally its complete!"

"What on earth are you talking about? We have an entire single 7 inch tertiary battery to install, not to mention the two 4 inch ...Quadtiaries? And finally the meaningless 3 inch Quinttiaries!"

[neph]

 What in the sam hell is that  

[Speglord]

3 hours ago, neph said:

 What in the sam hell is that  

Is that a secondary on top of a main? When did they ever add this? I've wanted to recreate some of those early American pre-dreadnoughts.

[Skeksis]

...

 

Edited November 9, 2021 by Skeksis

[neph]

 On an Armored Cruiser note... is this new???  

[neph]

Another travesty. The AI just does not know what a dreadnought is supposed to be.

[Skeksis]

...

Edited November 9, 2021 by Skeksis

[neph]

33 minutes ago, Skeksis said:

I disagree. Apart from the 2 secondary turrets aft of the rear tower, this design is not bad at all. This is what a player might design and charge into battle with.

This ship is not generic at all, it shows a competent design equipped to provocative the player, i.e. to do some damage to the player. Plus some port and starboard redundancy, 6 mains forwards, 6 aft and 8 broadside. Not unlike HMS Dreadnought itself.  

With so few posting now, it translating into a much improved AI. I say well done, it's really coming along nicely.

Ignoring the obvious easy shots (those MASSIVE double barbettes for 2" turrets towards the stern...) this is a horrible example of dreadnought-style design. It has much more in common with the semi-dreads (late pre-dreads that started to experiment with a more big gun design) insofar as it has a heavy mixed battery of 11", 10", and 8" cannon. I won't mention the triangular forward/aft layout--although it's quite awful in-game due to the roll penalty, it's very similar to some early studies for HMS Dreadnought herself. What I have an awful problem with is the mixed main battery.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but when you introduce the player to "Meet the Dreadnought she's Scary and has All Big Guns" (which, for the record, the "meet the dread" mission's design was even worse--just look at this, she's a predreadnought with extra steps https://i.imgur.com/4fz4jVG.jpg) and then give them this mixed battery monstrosity, it completely defeats the purpose. Killing that ship was effortless with a decent 3x2 12" BC--why? She had no armor, spending her entire displacement budget on a zillion heavy wing turrets. Replace all those stupid mixed turrets with a sensible 4x2 12" battery--they don't even need to superfire! and you've got a much much more lethal design that will scare the player as advertised. That was the whole point of dreadnoughts & why they were scary. They stripped away all the nonessential stuff and used that displacement to install only the heaviest of guns, in such as way as to bring as many turrets to broadside as possible. (plus a few very light secondaries to deal with torpedo ships, increasingly becoming heavier as TBs were replaced with DDs)

That thing's not a dreadnought. It's just not. The definition is a unified, large main battery.

Edited September 20, 2021 by neph

[Skeksis]

...

Edited November 9, 2021 by Skeksis

[o Barão]

11 minutes ago, Skeksis said:

Regarding to the layout only, that's all you presented. If the game wanted historical ships or it must only look like a dreadnought, then there'll be no Shipyard, every design would be specific as you so claim it should be, Shipyard would only allow specific options, AI would only produce specific ships.

But game is not riveted to history, it's non-mandatory, diverse, and so should the AI be.   

Exactly. Well said. IMO the AI design was improved a lot in recent patch. I still notice some issues but are few at this point. Secondary spam sometimes limiting the maing gun battery arcs and some strange barbettes places in dubious locations.

[neph]

1 hour ago, Skeksis said:

Regarding to the layout only, that's all you presented. If the game wanted historical ships or it must only look like a dreadnought, then there'll be no Shipyard, every design would be specific as you so claim it should be, Shipyard would only allow specific options, AI would only produce specific ships.

But game is not riveted to history, it's non-mandatory, diverse, and so should the AI be.   

I'm not sure you understand... I don't have a problem with the layout. I have a problem with the caliber selection. The mission literally says "this is a dreadnought, it's got a unified main battery" and then gives you this to fight. It'd be like saying "here, go fight a heavy cruiser" and then it's a light cruiser. You'd be left scratching your head at what's exactly going on. One is much more lethal than the other.

For comparison, here's a good dreadnought by the AI (8" gun aside)

This would be much scarier to fight than that other thing.

In general, the AI wastes its displacement on silly things that are neither bulkheads nor the largest caliber gun on the ship. A smattering of intermediate caliber turrets isn't going to help you do your job as a battleship--punch holes in heavy armor from as far away as you can manage.

 

EDIT: Another wonderful AI dreadnought (BC) design https://i.imgur.com/2IYnQW3.png

Edited September 20, 2021 by neph

[brucesim2003]

They really should limit the number of calibers the AI can put on 1 ship. Say 2-3, and then teach it to add enough guns in each battery to matter.

Also - another bugbear - unify batteries of the same caliber. Wing guns generally did not have separate fire control from centreline guns. Number of guns in a mount also should not create separate batteries.

Edited September 20, 2021 by brucesim2003

[SonicB]

Found this in (iirc) Power of Dreadnoughts mission last night. Sins include a woefully small main battery, tiny turret on enormous barbette, and approximately one (1) trillion useless 3" turrets of varying types.

Such dreadnought. So power. Wow.

[Stormnet]

On 9/20/2021 at 8:30 AM, Skeksis said:

If the game wanted historical ships or it must only look like a dreadnought, then there'll be no Shipyard, every design would be specific as you so claim it should be, Shipyard would only allow specific options, AI would only produce specific ships.

But game is not riveted to history, it's non-mandator

The AI still hasnt mastered barbettes. 

 

[SonicB]

4 minutes ago, Stormnet said:

The AI still hasnt mastered barbettes. 

 

Yet more reason to take total placement control away from the AI and let it use preset templates for each hull - as has been suggested quite recently in another thread.

[Stormnet]

Remember this half-retarded meme list I made of all the AI fails I knew about 5 months ago? Well, many of these flaws are apparently still in, and I think I can even expand it even more.



1 - Anorexia barbettes.

2 - Thicc barbettes (also known as Caps Lock + Shift).

3 - Secs are feeling lonely here.

4 - Collect all the secondary callibers in UAD!

5 - Aft Weight Offset club. With representatives from all classes.

6 - ITS HMS NELSON TIME!

7 - You get a barbette! And you get a barbette! Everybody gets a barbette!

8 - Pick 'n' mix single, double, and triple turrets. - deprecated?

9 - Mix 'n' match funnels.

10 - WE WANT PLANES, AND WE WANT THEM NOW! 

11 - Vision and field of view is for pussies.

12 - With enought funnels, you can smoke screen all the time. Idea by Malboro. - deprecated?

13 - Broadside frigates' club. - deprecated?

14 - Barbettes dont always need a gun on them. - deprecated

15 - Pre-dreadnoughts embody the best of naval design and should be built in modern times.

16 - Big turrets are afraid of piranha secs roaming the decks, so they hide on top of barbettes.

17 - Im not gonna be Yamato'ed or Bismark'ed if I have enought AA secs.

18 - ♫ Going up the waves! Going down the waves! Shaking left and shaking right, vomit all over the place! ♫

19 - Where armor

20 - Tug boats are underrated warships. Change my mind. - deprecated?

21 - I farm turrets, and ships do that so well.

22 - Underwater turrets just work. - deprecated

23 - Tall barbettes show your dominant position to the enemy.

24 - "Deja vu, I've been in this place before" top speed.
    
25 - Remember to have your turrets huddle together for warmth. - deprecated?

26 

- Sir, the 3x4 17-inch guns are too heavy! We can't fit them on!
- Remove the superstructure and make the funnel as small as possible, that'll save weight.

27 - Destroyers aren't a thing. Don't need secondary batteries.

28 - Monitors rule the seas. - deprecated?

29 - Don't put guns on warships if the budget doesn't allow for them. - deprecated

30 - Big turrets are like big balls. Everybody looks at them and understand YOU are the alpha.

NEW

31 -
♫ Top turret, top turret, 
Top turret, top turret.
Its a turret, YEAH!
A secondary turret!
A secondary turret,
On top of a primary turret. ♫