>>>Alpha-10 Feedback<<<

[Nick Thomadis]

Hello Admirals,

First of all, we wish you a great time with your family and friends during these festive days. Today we are happy to announce our new update which offers crucial improvements on battle gameplay, especially regarding the formations and evasion system. In this patch we also introduce the ability to use the reverse engines of ships, an action that is very useful for evading torpedoes and maintaining formations. Various other improvements have been worked on, based on your recent feedback.

 

You can read more information in our official blog or below:

==============================

ALPHA-10

==============================

SHIP EVASION IMPROVEMENT

The auto-evasion system has been fully reworked and optimized. Ships under AI control will be much more effective in evading other ships or torpedoes. Especially, the ship-to-ship evasion system is now more advanced and is based on ship size and rank, following the standard military navigation rules of the Royal Navy:

Priority of Passage Rules

1. Ship of higher tonnage has priority

2. Ship with Captain of higher rank has priority

3. For ships of the same rank and size, the ship on the starboard has priority.

The new system makes ships to keep formations with realistic and consistent maneuvers without doing unneeded circles.

SHIP REVERSE MOVEMENT

Ships are now able to use reverse engines. This is done automatically when ships have to auto-navigate for evading or keeping a formation. Additionally, the player can also use the reverse engines at his own will, by pressing the new "Reverse" button. In that manner, the ship can turn harder to avoid, for example, a torpedo or another ship. Moving backwards at will is possible but you will realize it has no tactical benefit in most battle situations, while it can harm your engines.

AI OPTIMIZATION

AI will keep an effective firing distance according to battle situation. Destroyers will approach in more deadly ranges according to their torpedo armament. Lightly protected ships will desire to keep a safer distance. This was especially needed for AI battlecruisers which now they desire to fight inside their immunity zone more often, but not too far away and becoming ineffective.

OTHER

• Auto Design Fixes: Some important bug fixes regarding the auto-design system make AI ships to never have empty barbettes or have very large unoccupied gaps on the deck.

• Partial Penetration Damage Increase: Shells that partially penetrate the armor will now make more damage. Small gun damage will be more significant against Battleships as a consequence, but still not comparable to the impact of big guns.

• Weapon info improvement: The average damage estimation of guns and torpedoes will be closer to actual battle numbers (previously the numbers were just not accurate showing x100 more damage). Additionally, penetration ranges can expand up to 35 km (previously they were limited to 25 km).

• Weight balances for armor, bulkheads, guns: The new balance of weights for integral parts of the ships allows for more realistic constraints. Auto-Design is also affected positively because it makes wiser choices for building more durable and effective ships.

• Tonnage Minimum Step for Design reduced: Minimum step was 50 tons and now it is 25 tons. This change not only helps the player to utilize tonnage more effectively for designing ships but also helps auto-design to use almost all free tonnage (previously it could leave several tonnes unused making AI designs weaker than the player’s on average).

• Minimum Speed for BB, CA and CL slightly increased: For BB and CA now the minimum speed is 16 knots (from 15) and for CL is 17 knots (from 16). This was needed for allowing more realistic designs of those ship types and to help AI to not build impractical, very slow ships.

• Minor penetration balance for 8-inch and 9-inch guns: Those guns have slightly more penetration at their extreme ranges.

• Initial playable missions increased: Initially the unlocked missions are nine (instead of five), to help players progress. (Note: The ironclad missions should be not so tough, due to the partial penetration damage increase).

• Various minor hull fixes.

*Warning:*

The "Mission difficulty" setting is still a work in progress and currently has no effect.

================================================================

Thank you for reading! Please continue to share your feedback in our forums!

 

[Cptbarney]

Very nice, is the rank and captain thing, visible or simply a hidden value until the crew mechanics are fully released?

[Nick Thomadis]

3 minutes ago, Cptbarney said:

Very nice, is the rank and captain thing, visible or simply a hidden value until the crew mechanics are fully released?

Now it works according to ship class or position in the division (division leaders have priority). Later, as a functionality, it will be also related with the rank of ship captains.

[CapnAvont1015]

Like the patch but one thing I would've added is an indicator to show how slow you have to be to activate the reverse engines without damaging them.

[Tankaxe]

It seems destroyers has once again swung in the other direction of absurd durability... again. For some reason HE shells are not detonating against destroyers and instead just reads me a bunch of over-pens.

 

I understand the issue of DDs being too fragile but their ability to activate romulan cloaking devices (smokes) and are only spotted when they are in torpedo range means this fragility was justifiable. 

 

To demonstrate here is the damage log against an enemy destroyer.

 

 

10 HE hits on a destroyer from 6" and 14" gunfire should've left nothing but scraps of metal. I urge the developers to please deal with destroyers to be at an acceptable level in campaign they will be spammed as they were IRL. Preferably to finally give them single shot torpedo tubes and a look at destroyer damage models.

[1MajorKoenig]

Woohoo - new patch!!

 

Gogogo 🙂

 

Will take a look later 

[SonicB]

11 hours ago, Tankaxe said:

I understand the issue of DDs being too fragile but their ability to activate romulan cloaking devices (smokes) and are only spotted when they are in torpedo range means this fragility was justifiable. 

The cloaking device mechanic frankly shouldn't belong in a game of this complexity. It feels pretty arcadey, and as said above, it unbalances the rest of the torpedo mechanic.

If it's to be included at all, I would love it to be done properly, with persistent smoke that can be toggled on and off freely, that gradually degrades from time and wind conditions, that can easily hide other ships, not the screening ship, and that can cause loss of sight as well as decreased accuracy. And for good measure, do the same to a lesser extent for gun and funnel smoke, especially in the coal-fired era.

Ultimately, smoke should be a tactical decision used when it benefits your entire fleet, not a spam-as-soon-as-it-recharges buff from an MMO.

[CapnAvont1015]

32 minutes ago, SonicB said:

The cloaking device mechanic frankly shouldn't belong in a game of this complexity. It feels pretty arcadey, and as said above, it unbalances the rest of the torpedo mechanic.

If it's to be included at all, I would love it to be done properly, with persistent smoke that can be toggled on and off freely, that gradually degrades from time and wind conditions, that can easily hide other ships, not the screening ship, and that can cause loss of sight as well as decreased accuracy. And for good measure, do the same to a lesser extent for gun and funnel smoke, especially in the coal-fired era.

Ultimately, smoke should be a tactical decision used when it benefits your entire fleet, not a spam-as-soon-as-it-recharges buff from an MMO.

Another thing they could do with smoke is make it be equipped on all ship types. If you follow up on your history in the battle against Bismarck, King George V escaped after making smoke when Hood was destroyed and K.G.V was damaged. Now if you equip it on BBs and CAs it will not linger long and will mostly be used for escape reasons.

[Rob Onze]

Hello,
I'm happy to see the developer team reading and understanding feedback offered and applying into patches.

Means this team has good people that will make an amazing final product, ironing out things that are logical to be solved.

If I may,
- smokescreen to be of wider effect (area of effect), and allow other ships to enter in it and gain advantages. For example a DD starts a smokescreen and a nearby BB passes through it
- torps to have a line indicating where they will shoot and a changing color from color grey (inactive) to blue (active) (colors mentioned are just an exemplification you can use any colors coding) when your torps are facing the correct way). For example you have ship with underwater torps (very small angle of firing) Literally, I have rotated a ship in every possible position to get a lock onto an enemy ship and the bloody thing never launched. You are just looking and waiting for something to happen. Nothing tells you when it's ready or preparing or even where it will shoot.
- Regarding the "where it will shoot" you need to create a secondary player controllable FCS. Because as it is, the calculations are very poor. They take into account the present enemy ship direction and speed. They do not take into account that the enemy ship is already engaged in a rotation, so the estimated position will not be where the straight line and speed point out, because the ship is already maneuvring and will never ever reach that place.. Plus take into account ships that turn very fast.
And this is why i say for the player to select how far to send torps, to avoid any complicated calculations that might fail.
Lets say on torps FCS to select tight average and loose. With tight, you send torps in a direction very close to existing position
With the other extreme setting, named loose by me, you will send very far ahead (the current torps launch settings )
Also enemy ships are instantly aware when they are targeted by torps from any ship and will instantly shoot that ship. And all enemy ships are aware of all torps all the time. Which a human player cannot do and a lot of times a human player can find themselves hit b a torp because they failed to see (screen can only show so much)
In this regard, you should leave active the warning signs on torps so that they can be seen all the time, unless the player clicks on them to hide that particular warning sign above a torps wave
- Another torps needed aspect is shooting. If a player has 3 launchers (an example, can have 2, 5 or 10 launchers, etc) to create a system where it launches everything in one large wave or sequentially. This is where the player can shoot from first launcher with a loose setting, the second wave at point blank (meaning shooting at the exact position the enemy ship is now (this is very good especially against very maneuvrable enemies that will turn hard to avoid torps and surprise-surprise will find themselves that they turn in another torpedo wave) and the rest at average distance, so you can cover a lot of places where the enemy ship can go once it spots a torpedo.
A lot of times the current torpedo mechanic sends them faaaaaaar away and only a damaged rudder ship will be hit.
You have programmed in the game very large torps that have a very long range of firing, but they are useless because they calculate an impact point that is so far away that 99% of the times will not hit that ship, Because that ship will have changed course from various other reasons.
Thank you for your attention, hopefully will see such improvements in gameplay in future patches
I share these from my gaming experience playing all sort of games for may years, and as a passion to see good, quality content.

Cheers.
PS: if something is not clear please do ask me for clarifications and I shall try to illustrate in some form or another what i am mean

[WiselessOwl]

On 12/28/2020 at 8:36 PM, Nick Thomadis said:

Auto Design Fixes: Some important bug fixes regarding the auto-design system make AI ships to never have empty barbettes or have very large unoccupied gaps on the deck.

Ehrr... You might want to improve this a bit more...

https://imgur.com/KmbHlP4

 

Edited December 29, 2020 by WiselessOwl
HOW DO I POST PICTURES HERE NOT LINKS OMG

[Cpt.Hissy]

@Rob Onze i'm sorry but this is not World of Warships, please don't give them ill ideas...
 

[shingo3130]

Was it necessary to raise the minimum speed for players? Couldn't that be done for AI only, to make them design faster, more effective ships while letting the player build stupidly slow ones for fun?

[Cdodders]

I would like an expansion to the engines/boilers and armour mechanics. For the engines/boilers mainly more options on where to place them. Things such as Unit machinery as well. The more options would enable G3/N3 like builds where the machinery was concentrated in the aft third of the ship

Armour layouts is also in need of expansion. Take the Belt armour for instance. How thick is it over the magazines/barbettes? Over the machinery spaces? The ends? The belt needs to also reflect the layout of the machinery and MB barbettes/turrets. How deep below the waterline and how high above do you want the belt? Is it inclined? Is it external or internal? Does it have a decapping layer? Deck armour can be similarly complex

https://imgur.com/piWlHFU

The image above shows the issue. The funnel is as far back as it can be placed. The Main Tower is too big as it has space for a funnel, which pushes P turret back. The Secondary towers do not allow for funnel placement and don't do the N3/G3 shape justice. 

I apparently can't post images over 1.1mb so I have to use Imgur which won't embed

Edited December 29, 2020 by Cdodders

[Tankaxe]

Screening AI needs to be revamp along with usage smokes. For now it seems the first instinct of the AIs screening destroyers is to activate cloaking devices  and bum rush the players fleet and run in circles throwing walls and walls of torpedoes. I know their are valid complaints in regards to the anemic torpedo damage to justify reloads once any sort of torpedo protection is mounted. But imagine if the torpedoes had the lethality that we expected and now imagine each and everyone of those accurate torpedo salvos are a kill shot.

 

I honestly recommend that smokes should be removed until a better and realistic solution is developed or the AI forced to only use them when covering their capital units and not in any offensive actions which I find an acceptable stopgap.

[Fishyfish]

Yup. It's a patch. 

Finally beat the first casemate ironclad mission, through endless partial pen chip damage and I survived with 0.4% structure remaining.. 

 

Furthermore I don't know if it's a bug or a feature, but I've always had all the missions unlocked and accessible, which is neato. Don't take it away from me. 

[roachbeef]

12 hours ago, CapnAvont1015 said:

King George V

KGV was held back. Prince of Wales fought Bismarck

[Rob Onze]

20 hours ago, Cpt.Hissy said:

@Rob Onze i'm sorry but this is not World of Warships, please don't give them ill ideas...
 

I have seen some people here are kinda weird, blocked on WoW...they only see wow, and somehow they have like a gastric reflux to mention it when they don't understand some things.
I would appreciate such people to not bring this fallacy in any discussion. Lets discuss with valid arguments. Torps system right now is bad, needs overhaul

The focus of feedback is to make the game better, as it clearly has a lot of aspects to improve. And is good, devs are reading and listening to good ideas. 

As per this image example, the BB in the middle was facing the other way when the torps were launched. The torps wave to the left was shot targeting it. The BB took evasive actions not to be hit by it, knowing they are coming.
The second wave of torps, to the right were launched just right after the first wave (2 launchers to one BB and 2 launchers to the other BB) but targeting the BB in the back
Care to guess what torps landed a hit on the BB in center screen?!?

For example, we have different torps available, which is perfect 
Using the standard ones should keep the current mechanics, where you pray to god for the ship to shoot already those torps, and hope for a miracle the hit it. 
On the other end of the spectrum, the electric torps should come with the most advanced FCS possible to the player, where you pick and choose the things i mentioned above, allowing for an IQ200 attack on an enemy fleet
And the in-between torp types that offer some sort of control where and how you launch. 

Improved smoke screen is a must as well, to allow for other smart players to apply advanced tactics.

Units pathfinding, another aspect, but will see with a10 how the new system was created, maybe it solves the silly dancing around of other ships, when you move one
Ah, regarding this aspect, please change the collision avoidance system, as a check mark on each ship.
For example when the players selects a direction where the ship to go (and not the silly rudder that will make a ship go in circles) you know you want that ship to go exactly there, and you don't want any avoidance system to be forced onto your ship.
Many times I have found losing a ship because the idiot was trying to avoid something going straight, when in fact doing a tight course change is what was the salvation...and 1 second (before your realize the retard mechanic is forcing it straight, not where you made it turn) is sufficient between avoiding an enemy torp, by the skin of your teeth, or receiving it broadside. 

[Nick Thomadis]

14 hours ago, Fishyfish said:

Furthermore I don't know if it's a bug or a feature, but I've always had all the missions unlocked and accessible, which is neato. Don't take it away from me. 

This surely happens to all players that begun playing missions in older patches. We are not going to take that away

23 hours ago, Rob Onze said:

- smokescreen to be of wider effect (area of effect), and allow other ships to enter in it and gain advantages. For example a DD starts a smokescreen and a nearby BB passes through it

We implemented Smoke Screen to work in a radius (it has area of effect). You can check nearby ships that they gain smoke coverage by their shooting stats. Smoke screen is a feature that would need later an improvement, to work directionally and hide ships that are behind but it is of low priority. Making it very much more complex would certainly decrease game performance as a battle in Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts can contain a lot of ships and a very detailed LOS for each ship emitting smoke, would greatly increase game calculations per second.

23 hours ago, Rob Onze said:

- torps to have a line indicating where they will shoot and a changing color from color grey (inactive) to blue (active) (colors mentioned are just an exemplification you can use any colors coding) when your torps are facing the correct way). For example you have ship with underwater torps (very small angle of firing) Literally, I have rotated a ship in every possible position to get a lock onto an enemy ship and the bloody thing never launched. You are just looking and waiting for something to happen. Nothing tells you when it's ready or preparing or even where it will shoot.
- Regarding the "where it will shoot" you need to create a secondary player controllable FCS. Because as it is, the calculations are very poor. They take into account the present enemy ship direction and speed. They do not take into account that the enemy ship is already engaged in a rotation, so the estimated position will not be where the straight line and speed point out, because the ship is already maneuvring and will never ever reach that place.. Plus take into account ships that turn very fast.

Torpedo targeting is already evaluating multiple factors, speed, direction, angular velocity etc. and is already much more accurate, at most situations, than in real life. If we made torpedoes to literally "home" to target due to an unmistakable targeting system, we would make the game less realistic, and probably less satisfying. Torpedoes lock to target until the moment of firing. There is also an inaccuracy random factor which is affected by technologies. Indeed this system can be tricked if you play vs the AI and notice the torpedo reload time, but the player can aim better by holding torpedo fire until the right moment.

17 hours ago, Cdodders said:

Armour layouts is also in need of expansion

This is a pending priority among many other aspects of the game we want to improve. We will announce in a next update when we choose to improve further.

23 hours ago, WiselessOwl said:

Ehrr... You might want to improve this a bit more...

https://imgur.com/KmbHlP4

 

This issue should happen much less often than before. We will fix the remaining very rare problem of an occasional empty barbette in a next update, as we know the reason behind it. It was risky to do on this patch.

On 12/29/2020 at 5:09 PM, SonicB said:

If it's to be included at all, I would love it to be done properly, with persistent smoke that can be toggled on and off freely, that gradually degrades from time and wind conditions, that can easily hide other ships, not the screening ship, and that can cause loss of sight as well as decreased accuracy. And for good measure, do the same to a lesser extent for gun and funnel smoke, especially in the coal-fired era.

I replied above regarding smoke. Smoke, indeed, has room for improvements. But we need to do other things first.

[Cpt.Hissy]

6 minutes ago, Nick Thomadis said:

We implemented Smoke Screen to work in a radius (it has area of effect). You can check nearby ships that they gain smoke coverage by their shooting stats. Smoke screen is a feature that would need later an improvement, to work directionally and hide ships that are behind but it is of low priority. Making it very much more complex would certainly decrease game performance as a battle in Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts can contain a lot of ships and a very detailed LOS for each ship emitting smoke, would greatly increase game calculations per second.

Hello Nick, sorry for poking in, but...
kind of suggestion. If smoke internally was done by just spawning a row of huge *hitboxes*, and checking coverage by just seeing if visibility check (clearly already existing) to target ship intersects those? This way if a ship is behind smoke, it'll be covered, if it's "in" the smoke, it may or may not be covered.
It's crude for sure, but by fiddling the size of hitboxes via the size of smoke visuals, can be done "good enough" for alpha, and it would work much more "realistic" than current mechanic, which is to be honest even more arcade than in actual arcade.
* * *
Instead of timers, ships can have some limited amount of "smoke resource" that slowly regenerates over time, but is spent faster than it can refill.
And to lay smoke screen, would be good to have special command, where you order to lay the smoke from point A to point B, and ship automatically goes to point A, enables smoke and runs to point B, where disables smoke if it didn't ran dry before. Leaving a wall of smoke behind of course.

[HusariuS]

I don't know if this is just not that important because it doesn't make your game unplayable or maybe devs simply forgot about it but since the introduction of "Bismarck" Hull turrets placed on the secondary can't be rotated to face the stern of the ship:

This is basically the case with every german modern hull and tower.

[Cpt.Hissy]

Seems like collision avoidance swing rocked to the other limit, again.
Now allied ships ram each other all the time, even when they have no reasons to be on collision course.
How torpedo avoidance works i don't know yet, so cannot rightfully complain about ships sometimes not seeing torpedoes at all, but sometimes avoiding them (sometimes, by driving into the most dense swarm x)

Another *annoying* thing is ships sent to scout or screen still prefer to be on the opposite side of the battle line than where they should be, aka enemy.

[Cpt.Hissy]

Even more movement logic weirdness uncovers over time.
- Scouts and screens (still?) tend to wander off and get lost somewhere in the seas way too far from action. If this is intentional (something alike was in RTW), then please explain it to us.

- Scouts are spotted occasionally just stopping and staying still for some time, in seemingly random places and times. Leads to them lagging behind.

- Old annoyance of random leader switching now got worse: if a group has something else on Follow with it, the leader that decided to switch will reassign itself to the Following group and then wander off line to join it's tail.

[WiselessOwl]

On a side note - could we please get an expanded secondary tower for German super-battleships? The one that allows placement of a second uber funnel on the rear superstructure, like in H-39/44 projects?

Edited December 31, 2020 by WiselessOwl

[WiselessOwl]

Also it seems that the old problem with target lock has reappeared.
During heavy manuevers, ships often lose their lock on target (which is fine as it is expected to happen IRL). The problem is, they tend to be completely unable to reacquire the lock after finishing manuever and keep probing the distance with one-two turrets forever. The only workaround I found is to switch targets or briefly disable firing at all.
Lighter ships (up to the CA) are most affected by that, while heavy artillery usually is fine

[Tycondero]

Collision avoidance and torpedo avoidance still doesn't seem to work very well. Still observe ships getting in eachother's way all the time, especially destroyers versus other formations when set to screen duty. Also, when giving these general formation orders I noticed that the division's subordinate ships hardly ever try to avoid incoming torpedoes, even when they are spotted early or under full AI control. IMO, it still requires way too much micromanagement to deal with subordinate ships. Shouldn't these ships set to duties, such as follow, screen or scout not behave similar to AI control, albeit a little more restricted depending on their task? I find that when setting divisions directly under AI control that they seem more capable of avoiding incoming torpedoes.

Edited December 31, 2020 by Tycondero