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Nick Thomadis

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Back to this after a long break! Even though contents of this update aren't what i'd want to see the most.
 

So first impression is, enemy AI became "smarter", and this made battles longer and less predictable, but this also made them easier. I've beaten several missions that were too unfair to me before, due to enemy being far less aggressive, especially destroyers.

Regarding destroyers and new formations in general. AI captains definitely need a lot of training for their ship handling skills.
They are expected to gently adjust their speed and heading to snap into new positions while staying within the fleet. Instead they go for full rudder turns, and spinning in circles until everyone manages to wiggle into position, all while ignoring the rest of the fleet.
Any formation command causes them to go into chaotic dance for a good while, often the battle is over before they sort themselves.
But well, at least now they do sort themselves.

This is what allowed to easily beat missions with destroyers. Enemy destroyers went dancing and were left very far behind the main forces, which allowed my fleets to manoeuvre freely and not die to boomfish soup as they usually did.
Also destroyers no longer dive on enemy with their payload, releasing it from afar instead. This makes it much easier (and even actually possible) to avoid enemy torps, while my destroyers no longer suicide (as it's what actually happened when they tried to act like enemy)

Unnecessary unintended ramming is still there in full extent, everyone just wants to hug everyone.

AI seems to make less incredibly stupid or OP boats, but still sometimes violates the design limits... I've seen cruisers that manage to do an instant 180 turn at full speed within their own length, despite having 600+m turning circle in stats.

Also discovered a few of new graphical glitches, and a big improvement in editor's performance.
Testing continues...

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Good update. I like the new fleet management and of course the quad guns. I also observed that subordinate ships are now much more skillful in avoiding torpedoes!

Still hoping for future armor scheme improvements and the campaign of course.

Regarding mixing different gun turrets. I do feel that guns of the same caliber should be sharing their ammo, independent on the number of guns per turret. Either all turrets should only use their locally shored ammo or they should share ammo providing they use the same shells.

Also, I feel that incoming hits have become very unpredictable in terms of actual damage caused. In a way this is a very good development, however it also opens up a lot of room for chance. Still unsure how to feel about that.

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Scout formations worked very well, I was able to control the whole fleet with one capital ship.

Here the scout divisions fell behind alittle so I turned the lead division back into the scouts...

X8pOppE.png

then turned the lead around to head back out...

3CBR87r.png

In general, the scouting divisions maintain there distance from the enemy while station keeping on the lead, this maneuvering was a pleasure to command and watch, very nice.

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Though there was a capital ship issue...

mmluhPS.png

The screenshot shows the DD as the lead ship, couldn't change it, didn't know how, wasn't consistent.

At the very least the utmost capital ship should be the default lead. Better still if we could slide the ship cards within the division row ourselves then we could set the lead ship, even organize the whole row. FYI the division was formed by dragging  & dropping ship cards.

Suggestion 2. It takes some time to re-organize the fleet into divisions and for those ships to steam to there destinations once the battle has started. Campaign-wise there might not be enough time to re-organize the fleet at the beginning of the battle and thus putting us at a disadvantage.

Pre-organizing the fleet in load screen would be a real helpful battle prep feature...

blEyeLL.png

 

 

Edited by Skeksis
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hi all

here my opinion after the last patch, not to be negative but for constructive criticism

happy ! well ! the new hull and division system ara good ! all we need now is a campain

but, what a pity not to have also made quadruple turrets for secondary armament
Like on dunkerque class... for exemple

and now i think the most importante before campain is to creat save systeme

it is very boring to remake all the time our boat ! the possibility to create all the boat for a battle could be an good idea too

 a system to save during battle  ! some time we have not 3 hour to play ....

 i hope  the campain was dynamic ! our action influence the conflict and war ....

a lineare campaign (suite of mission ) would not be interesting

 

kind regard

and congrat for the job

 

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Quite nice update overall, had fun with new hulls and guns, and the new formation system seems to work a lot better then before.

However, these formations are still being fricked up quite often due to the overreacting auto-evasion logic. I really am convinced that there must appear an option to disable it - generally in settings, or individually for each ship/squadron is up to discussion. Cause in the new italian mission my whole cruiser-destroyer fleet got in one big flustercuck instead of taking their assigned places in order - all because whenever they tried to relocate themselves inside the order, the auto-evasion logic activated and messed all up even when there were enough space for the ship to sneak through. Or, for example, I ordered destroyers to scout, but they could not leave their position in fleet untill I ruddered them manually - because cruiser screen was in their way and the autoevasion freaked out forcing destroyers to sail in a wobbly line along the cruisers in a futile attempt to bypass them.

So, all in all, please make this thing an option, for Chtulhu sake!
Otherwise, the update was fun

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After poking around more.

I like how they maintain speeds within division now, definitely a huge improvement. There are still funny cases, most noticeable one is that following ships tend to wiggle from side to side while fine-tuning their position in order. Sometimes they struggle to settle in, and go in zigzags forever, which from one side makes them nearly immune to enemy fire, but from other, makes it near impossible for them to hit anything.. Because "manoeuvre" buffs. Also looks silly.

I do like new division system. UI may need some polish still. For instance, i'd like to be able to "expand" multiple divisions at once to see all the ship cards, like it was in old system. Also, would be nice to have better indication of individual ship speeds somehow, not sure how to do this though.
Cards themselves could be made smaller, and maybe horizontal, with an option to go in two rows to fit moar boats on screen. But that's not necessary.

Ability to choose the flagship and to disable auto switching would be nice. Sometimes it's desired to keep even damaged leader in lead, also sometimes my leader was switching for no apparent reason, without being hit even once. I'd say, leave auto leader switch to AI controlled divisions.

Old tech ships are worryingly blind now compared to previous version. Often, it's player ships who blind, enemies are less so.

Turrets with different numbers of same gun are still treated separately and such ships can't lock on targets, that's disappointing...

Enemies just running away in straight line is still a thing, but now it seems to be easier to finish them. Or i just got lucky.

intentional ramming is still impossible. Unintentional ramming is still impossible to avoid x)

Quads are kinda OP, i find myself making quad turreted Deutschland's for almost every occasion due to how good these are compared to variants with more, less-gunned turrets, within the cost and weight limits. But well, that's the reason they used quads IRL after all.

Still didn't use super huge guns, was fighting supergunned enemies though <- to answer those who questioned if AI uses the new guns.

Just now realized that wast majority of academy missions are about "1940's superbattleship". The most boring kind... This needs less superdreads and more variety...

 

 

Bring. Freedom. To. Editor.

 

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Downloaded the new alpha, and played with it a bit... I see some improvements coming but I have still some perplexities on formations.

Switching from line ahead to line abreast is still weird. There should be the option to perform simultaneous and sequential turns.  Scout and screen seems better, it would be even nicer if you can set a screen/scout primary direction.

Maneuvers:

option to order a division to make evasive maneuvers automatically

option to order full rudder course changes even in auto plotting.

UI: still not 100% sure of it. Two things I would appreciate...

1) spotted torpedoes are permanently marked. You should have lookouts whose job is just that.

2) an option to lock the info of the target ship.

 

Ship building...

more hulls and superstructure (okay it is still alpha... so I am waiting for it, but right now you cannot design the IJN CA or the US big CLs, I am a fan of the Brooklyns. I miss the flat stern US Cruiser hulls.

Scout planes... they became more and more important and a key element in ship design (either by inclusion or exclusion...) and they are important for... scouting. Even if they are not included as a direct mechanics in battle, they should be a design consideration (as DP secondaries and at times primaries).

 

Looking forward to the campaign and next updates. 

 

 

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Someone said it a few posts above. Less super dreadnoughts. More of the actual realistic ship hulls and components and whatnot. Based on how everything is I'm kinda expecting to have to build 100k ton battleships during the campaign if only because the AI surely will cuz it's stupid. I don't want to do that though. Super dreadnoughts are, or should be, extremely expensive and honestly they're not worth it. In RTW I never go past 50k tons for my dreadnoughts because after that they start to get prohibitively expensive especially since in RTW it's hard to armor against 16/17/18in guns. Of course in this game it's not that hard but hopefully armor will be reworked at some point. But yeah, less superdreadnought stuff more predreadnought stuff. That's honestly kinda where stuff is interesting, trying to squeeze out every last bit of performance on a crappy ship. Pre-dreads, and really all ships of that period, were extremely varied in their designs and it would be nice to let that be reflected

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The fix to formations is really good, the ships seem to be more ridgid in thier pathing, and crossing a ships path does not send it into an apeshit frenzy for 5 minutes anymore so thats cool. 

the hulls, new guns and new turret models are cool but need urgent adjustment, size and placement issues are rampant. 

i dont know what you have planned for the next patch but finally removing fixed placement nodes would be cool, also allow us to choose betwen maintower variants (with or without built in barbette) and make more superstructures avalible for more hulls, and a final thing, is to add main and secondary barbette tabs, and make a barbette model fitting all the guns reparetly since some of them dont fit eachother at all. A good fix would be to remove barbettes completly annd instead just allow us to raise a gun with a custom made barbette apearing under it with a press of a button. this would streamline the procces for the future.

over all i like the update, but it wasn't what we all expected. I hope the new team will make development easier for you, since its not easy to make a realistic naval game, especialy that we are looking at your every step.

Good luck.

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i forget something also very importante

when the ship crash together, they need to have damage !! and  large damage if a little ship is hit by a bigger one on his side at full speed !.. .. .  normally it is finish for him !

Edited by liaxelot
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3 hours ago, Arrigo74 said:

 

1) spotted torpedoes are permanently marked. You should have lookouts whose job is just that.

Not really a good idea.

First of all: There are crew members that have a job of spotting shit around the ship, but in the end it's yours job as a captain and a player to keep an eye on them and make a correct decision.

Second: IIRC this game is supposed to be realistic more or less not some arcade game like World of Warships were you have everything possible information from either the game or "legal" mods to "help" you.

Third: If in the future we will have difficulty level, it wouldn't be that bad idea to add markers like that in lower difficulty levels.

Edited by HusariuS
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8 minutes ago, HusariuS said:

Second: IIRC this game is supposed to be realistic more or less not some arcade game like World of Warships were you have everything possible information from either the game or "legal" mods to "help" you.

 

Even then weegee hides info cus they think majority of players are too dumb to understand it or get 'confused easily'.

Alpha 10 will be a fat patch, makes me wonder if they will go for older ships hulls or just simply give every nation their end game hulls first and turret designs etc and flesh out endgame more and then move down to early-mid game, although i think they should also pay attention to those.

Plus players in that game struggle to look at the minimap nevermind breathing and thinking, also they broke their promise on no tier 10 prems (arp yamato) so another reason not to bother with the bloody company anymore.

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9 hours ago, liaxelot said:

a system to save during battle  ! some time we have not 3 hour to play ....

This is something I’ve started to echo aswell, RTW2 has it. Planning ahead into the campaign and late campaign, battles aren’t going to take few minutes to solve, like you said 'hours', battle saves is a must have.

Edited by Skeksis
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41 minutes ago, HusariuS said:

First of all: There are crew members that have a job of spotting shit around the ship, but in the end it's yours job as a captain and a player to keep an eye on them and make a correct decision.

Not really, we are not commanding a single ship but entire fleets. So as long as they are spotted by a friendly ship, their position should be reported and have some icon display on the map (after all the enemy ships positions are plotted, even icons at the top to jump to their position).

The AI in charge of each of your ships should be the one doing the evasion, not the Admiral or Task Force commander (i.e. the player). This is unnecessary micromanagement otherwise. Only in rare cases like Jutland do you have the commander issuing a direct order to do X because of a torpedo threat, and that was to simply turn the whole fleet away. 

Now I am not saying this shouldn't be part of difficulty levels (which are a great idea for many aspects), or that you shouldn't be able to manually intervene. But AI does is and should be completely capable of avoiding ones detected with sufficient range/time.

The real issue is the whole detection scheme. It's not really balanced yet. 

Edited by madham82
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2 minutes ago, madham82 said:

Not really, we are not commanding a single ship but entire fleets. So as long as they are spotted by a friendly ship, their position should be reported and have some icon display on the map (after all the enemy ships positions are plotted, even icons at the top to jump to their position).

The AI in charge of each of your ships should be the one doing the evasion, not the Admiral or Task Force commander (i.e. the player). This is unnecessary micromanagement otherwise. Only in rare cases like Jutland do you have the commander issuing a direct order to do X because of a torpedo threat, and that was to simply turn the whole fleet away. 

Now I am not saying this shouldn't be part of difficulty levels (which are a great idea for many aspects), or that you shouldn't be able to manually intervene. But AI does is and should be completely capable of avoiding ones detected with sufficient range/time.

The real issue is the whole detection scheme. It's not really balanced yet. 

Dude, I was talking here about markers above the spotted torps not the AI behaviour :) sorry if this sounds like that.

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1 minute ago, HusariuS said:

Dude, I was talking here about markers above the spotted torps not the AI behaviour :) sorry if this sounds like that.

Yea, I probably went on too much about the AI. But the idea of having the warning triangle stay above them (as long as they remain spotted) is valid to me at least at whatever difficulty shows the enemy ship positions. There's not really a justification for showing one but not the other IMO.

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Just now, madham82 said:

Yea, I probably went on too much about the AI. But the idea of having the warning triangle stay above them (as long as they remain spotted) is valid to me at least at whatever difficulty shows the enemy ship positions. There's not really a justification for showing one but not the other IMO.

It would be a good feature especially since they are so hard to spot

 

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I would not like to see WoWS style "hey look torpedoes" constant torpedo alerts or notifications of inbound torpedoes.

I actually find a lot of enjoyment and get a lil rush from having to identify targets with torpedo tubes and having to prioritize them depending on their range. Once a target ship has been 100% IDed you get to see it's individual weapon reload timers anyways, so if you watch the torpedo reload timers you'll know when fish are in the water and know when you have to maneuver accordingly. If you check and see that the tubes are on reload, well, better adjust your course! Besides, a good captain should be maneuvering anyways. 

That said, I think it's pretty exciting having to wonder where enemy fish are and having to juke and swish accordingly, you can find them if you look as most leave a subtle wake, and a surprise torpedo hit punishes a lax commander and punishes harder a cheapskate shipwright. And some times surprise punishment is great, one time [censored] [censored] [censored] and man, my fins hurt for days after but I digress. I finally have some quality time to dive into the new patch and pick it apart so I'm going to go.. do that now. 

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35 minutes ago, Fishyfish said:

I would not like to see WoWS style "hey look torpedoes" constant torpedo alerts or notifications of inbound torpedoes.

I actually find a lot of enjoyment and get a lil rush from having to identify targets with torpedo tubes and having to prioritize them depending on their range. Once a target ship has been 100% IDed you get to see it's individual weapon reload timers anyways, so if you watch the torpedo reload timers you'll know when fish are in the water and know when you have to maneuver accordingly. If you check and see that the tubes are on reload, well, better adjust your course! Besides, a good captain should be maneuvering anyways. 

That said, I think it's pretty exciting having to wonder where enemy fish are and having to juke and swish accordingly, you can find them if you look as most leave a subtle wake, and a surprise torpedo hit punishes a lax commander and punishes harder a cheapskate shipwright. And some times surprise punishment is great, one time [censored] [censored] [censored] and man, my fins hurt for days after but I digress. I finally have some quality time to dive into the new patch and pick it apart so I'm going to go.. do that now. 

Access to enemy reload timers and even the specific dmg they've taken is something I'm not a fan of. This game is most similar to RTW so I compare them a lot. In this case RTW is better, you don't get notifications of torpedoes being launched and you can't tell how much damage a ship has taken besides a guesstimate, light/medium/heavy dmg that is often wrong. You can see the enemy designs as that information is mostly public but sometimes that information is even wrong, armor values and speed at least. It's easy to see if a ship has 16 in guns or 20in or whatever. You definitely don't get access to things like the ballistics and radar tech they're using. I guess this can be connected to difficulty levels as others have said about other things but yeah. I'd like the option to turn all that off even though it is nice seeing it. 

 

There definitely needs to be an AI system for friendly ships evading torpedoes though. A lot of the battles are fairly small but I'm positive it'll be very easy to get large battles in the campaign. Be really annoying if you have to micro every ship evading torpedoes in a large fleet battle

Edited by Jatzi
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Alright so, first impressions. I've played and beat 2 missions. 

First I have to say I've been hitting the space bar this entire time expecting it to pause the game. Too much HoI4. (that would be a great feature) 

I like the new drag and drop division cards I also like the new divisions/battle lines, although I didn't have a problem with the old ones. These both work a lot cleaner so I think they're a good improvement. The new formations work... uh, well? I don't know I still had some considerable AI ship pathing issues. One glaring issue I noticed in my brief play through was that ships spazzed out after being assigned orders, and began to play bumper boats with each other for a considerable amount of 10x FF time. Other than that I do like the new commands and the ease and flexibility of issuing commands.

Over all I find the command and control functions pretty tight.  I wouldn't mind a little extra control over some of the functions, perhaps a "scout over there" feature with a clickable target location, or a "scout north-west" function. I'm pretty pleased with the new commands though, very nice. 

That being said the new shiny gubbinz are kinda a let down. Don't get me wrong, I find the french connection to be the most alluring modern warship parts as of yet added. Though if we're honest it's a very small set of parts and I still don't consider resized parts to be noteworthy enough of denoting a "X amount of new ship classes available" but that's just me. For what it's worth I do like the new towers and funnels, but it the restrictive parts selection does hinder my ability to make the Normandie Class. I'm sure it's doable with enough hoop jumping. 

Huge guns are fine. I don't have anything really to say about them, I'm of the opinion that if you've seen one mega cannon you've seen them all. The new 20 in are just last patches 18 in. I've played one game with the new 20 in guns. I beat the new France vs Germany mission in about 10 minutes battle time... I landed one hit on the H Class, who was sitting broadside to me, and I ammo racked it. I took one 20 in hit in exchange that did about 6% of my health. Cool I guess? 

The battle of Tsushima mission was fun, though the available parts are tired for ship building are tired. And the AI made some questionable decisions in ship building. But other than that it was a good mission to get a hang of the new command and control functions, and to see the new formations in effect. Over all a great mission. 

It took me a while to realize that the morse code was coming from the game, I use a lot of power tools and at first thought it was tinnitus. I had alt tabbed out and was poking around elsewhere online and the morse code continued to play in the background - drove me nuts until I tracked it down. 

 

1 hour ago, Jatzi said:

Access to enemy reload timers and even the specific dmg they've taken is something I'm not a fan of. This game is most similar to RTW so I compare them a lot. In this case RTW is better, you don't get notifications of torpedoes being launched and you can't tell how much damage a ship has taken besides a guesstimate, light/medium/heavy dmg that is often wrong. You can see the enemy designs as that information is mostly public but sometimes that information is even wrong, armor values and speed at least. It's easy to see if a ship has 16 in guns or 20in or whatever. You definitely don't get access to things like the ballistics and radar tech they're using. I guess this can be connected to difficulty levels as others have said about other things but yeah. I'd like the option to turn all that off even though it is nice seeing it. 

 

There definitely needs to be an AI system for friendly ships evading torpedoes though. A lot of the battles are fairly small but I'm positive it'll be very easy to get large battles in the campaign. Be really annoying if you have to micro every ship evading torpedoes in a large fleet battle

I would be okay with more information restrictions akin to RTW, though I would also like the ability to access the current level of information that we have. Maybe the campaign needs something like the custom difficulty settings you see in silent hunter? I don't know if you're familiar with those but essentially you choose a lot of the information you want restricted or available when you start the campaign, and a bunch of other difficulty settings too. 

 

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It happen again, (1) after reorganizing ships by dragging & dropping, the utmost capital ship won't set as the lead ship, this issue is actually more consistent. (2) Also trailing ships won't speed up into formation, see BB in the back, its speed stays at the division speed and won't speed up...
ufSm1rf.pngFrance vs Germany mission. 

Another issue, (3) if you have the division situation above, with the speed lowered for e.g. 16kn, then detach the BB (possibility detaching any ship), the speed of the detached ship won't increase above the previous division set speed, in fact below shows the speed is actually dropping... 

tZEFYaa.pngFrance vs Germany mission. 

(4) If you have two screens and the game is running in the primary, at fullscreen, then if you click or use the secondary screen, UAD automatically minimizes, there's no need for this, could this be fixed too, please.

Edited by Skeksis
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