Quality Control in a Future Campaign

[Kommandant Flauschige]

Hey, everyone!

I was just listening to a bit by naval history YouTuber Drachnifel about the Battle of Cape Matapan, and I noticed something that might be good to consider with the (hopefully) upcoming campaign.

So, basically, the battleship Vittorio Venito happens upon a small British force of light cruisers. She opens fire, damaging one within the first few salvoes and causes her to deploy a smoke screen to withdraw.

She switches fire to another of the cruisers, her fire control systems interpret the range perfectly, but for about ten salvoes her shells only bracket the ship, which Drachnifel attributes to poor quality control on the Italian side.

This is further evidenced by the fact that Vittorio Venito's 15in guns suffered around ten jams, and shells coming from the same turret would sometimes land a kilometer apart.

 

This brought into my head a feature (which could be toggleable at the start of a campaign) - quality control in manufacturing.

Basically, you can devote a portion of your budget to a slider known as 'quality control'.

Basically, the higher it is, the longer your ship can stay at sea without needing a refit, your guns are more accurate, your engines produce more power, your ship moves faster (good hull streamlining)...

And obviously if you have poor quality control, which you might go for if you were spamming out a ton of coastal defense ships, then they will be significantly worse than if they had had good quality control.

Now, the cost should be in the medium range - not too high that it's impossible to obtain without sacrificing overall performance anyways, and not too low that it is almost an afterthought.

Whaddya think?

[Aceituna]

Honestly, I would be against it. Simply because I think that the affects that would be caused by poor quality control are already part of other features so there's no really need to add such feature. 

1 hour ago, Kommandant Flauschige said:

the longer your ship can stay at sea without needing a refit

This is already affected by the range of your designed ship.

 

1 hour ago, Kommandant Flauschige said:

your guns are more accurate

And this should be part of the crew mechanic.

So that leaves us only with the engines. Well it might be nice if speed of your ship would deteriorate with it getting older (as it historically was) but I don't think that we need a whole new feature for that.

Edited November 22, 2020 by Aceituna

[Cpt.Hissy]

Looks like good idea overall. Let's think about what more uses it can have, and what cost it will have, in terms of what you can exchange for it?

Example: global QC, fast adoption of new tech. Got a sample of something new, by buying a ship from other country or stealing plans etc? Now:
With normal quality control, you can spend some time and funds to "backwards engineer" the thing and properly adopt it for home built ships.
With high QC, you can spend even more time and funds and get an improved version of said tech, even better than your sample
With low QC, you can basically be an imperial russia and copy the tech using your outdated industry, achieving the new tech quick and cheap, but of lower quality than your sample.

Example: Shipyard QC: higher means building/sustaining the shipyard itself is more expensive, but building ships on it is slightly cheaper, faster, with lower chances of negative events if any.

Example: ship specific QC, build speed vs cost vs quality. So you're building a ship, now:
High QC means it is more expensive, longer to build, but perfect to design and with slight chance of improved stats
Normal QC, it's just more expensive, but perfect to design, with no bonuses
Low QC, it is cheaper, and/or faster to build, but almost guaranteed to get something borked, of lower quality, or get random delays in construction.
(yes i know it basically doubles the shipyard QC, consider it as two different ways to implement the same thing)

[madham82]

I'm with the OP that it would be a nice feature to include. The Vittorio Venito is a great example of poor QC making what was a good design perform poorly. I also think about statements that British and US armor quality was generally higher than other nations due to various factors. 

I like the idea of a separate tech tree or budget slider to devote resources to QC. The other idea could be the more you build X component, hull, gun, etc... your quality increases when building those things. 

Ultimately though, unless it is very easy to implement I'd rather have the devs focus on fixing the issues with the damage model. 

[Kommandant Flauschige]

I think that it wouldn't be as hard to implement QC as improving the damage model, because (with my limited knowledge of coding), to implement this with gun accuracy, you would only have to decrease the 'effectiveness' of, say, a gun by a certain percentage over time. This doesn't seem like that much of a modification, but hey, I'm not a dev, and shouldn't speak for them.