To check game weight limits, I tried to build real ships (like Yamato etc) All way too heavy.

[Ernst Preuss]

I'm trying to build real ships but one thing makes them beyond impossible; how much things weigh.  The Yamato as an example, the 'game' Yamato is 90,000 tons when fitted to the 73,000 tons real world load out. The game hull limit was 80,000T hence unbuildable unless armour was reduced to half real world values. 

Can you please fix this as it's frustrating unable to build (and then tweak) the classics, especially WW2 Light and heavy cruisers. Perhaps a simple fix is to reduce the base weight of the empty hull when you start.

Please consider this....  Please..

 

If possible, another option I'd like to see is perhaps a "Fun Mode" in ship building where building limits are greatly relaxed.

Thanks for your time

Ernst

 

Edited February 10, 2021 by Ernst Preuss

[SPANISH_AVENGER]

Agree to both your points on this post. +1 from me!

[Commander Reed]

+1

[Adm. Tom]

^THIS!^

+1

It's pretty obvious that the weights in the game are not anywhere close to reality. Watching some YouTube creators trying to do 'historically correct' designs by displacement numbers is sometimes quite hilarious when the resulting Iowa, Bismarck or Yamato looks like a disproportioned shrunk child toy version.

And after the core patch changes, which also wiped your entire mission progress, it seems now to be near impossible to build some types of cruisers for these 'Naval Academy' missions. I'm currently struggling with something as simple as the 'Speed Basics 2' mission where you are supposed to design an early WW I era light cruiser to catch and sink an enemy destroyer trying to run away at 26 knots. With just a 30 minute time limit you have to get at least close to 30 knots design speed to catch up, which for a pre-1914 CL is pretty laughable by itself.

But wait until you open the ship designer: you get the small (~3,500t max.) Light Cruiser I hull and a measly 3,125k budget. Even if you max out the displacement and take the machinery to 30 knots performance level (Oil 1, Forced Boilers, Turbines) your displacement is already at 92% and you've blown your budget at 111% - "Can't build ship!" Even if you had a higher budget there would be no way to build a somewhat decently balanced 30 knots ship in terms of armament, armor, protection and ancillary equipment that resembles a 'realistic' CL design from before 1914. The only way to win this mission is probably a small 'speed dart' with forward main guns only and no protection and armor at all.

I don't fully remember that it was this difficult before the core patch, but I think it wasn't. Actually most early light cruiser hulls suffer from that basic obesity. They are all at almost maximum displacement or already overweight(!) when the hull is selected in 'Custom Battle'. And depending on the chosen design year there`s no way to fix this because you are stuck with coal and heavy steam engines. Is this just oversight on the devs' side? However, something here is seriously broken and it needs to be fixed.

Just my 2C

Thomas

 

 

 

 

[Kane]

I think part of the problem here is that certain systems are way, way too heavy due to the way they scale.

Example, radio equipment, does not have a set weight, and instead modifies the weight of your towers.  This is leading to numbers that are way, way too big.  I get that a battleship will have more radios on it than a destroyer, since the battleship may be a flagship and thus will need the radios necessary to handle the quantity of radio traffic.  But thousands of tons of radio equipment?  What, am I building the HMS Radioshack?  Same with Sonar equipment, same with Radar, etc.  Scaling the weights based on things like tower weight isn't a huge issue, but the amounts are way too high.  And yes, I get that a sonar with the same performance could weigh more on a battleship since you may end up with more length of cable connecting systems, etc.  But still, the weight gain for many of these systems just seems ridiculous.

The same applies to gun-loading equipment, and many more systems.  It seems all of the systems that scale as a % of a major ship component are in need of a serious tuning-pass.

Edited October 22, 2021 by Kane
Said "hundreds" meant "thousands"

[HistoricalAccuracyMan]

Yeah, even though the unrealistic displacement values don't bother me too much as I'm more of somebody who goes for the aesthetics and looks of a ship over irl values of weight, length, beam etc....it is kind of ridiculous that I have to raise a dreadnought IV hull to 60.000 tons just so the hull will be long enough to fit the middle turret on a USS Texas build.

[Kane]

I think armor weight/protection is also a big issue here.

Taking the example of Yamato.  She had a maximum deck armor of 9", which which was part of her zone of immunity against her own guns from 21000-32000 meters.  By comparison, in game it takes a Krupp-IV thickness of 15.6 inches on the deck for you to maintain your zone of immunity against 18" guns at those ranges.  And you're by no means immune.  Anything of 14" or larger will consistently get partial pens rather than blocks.  I'm not sure exactly what the dev's design philosophy is in pertaining to this.  But as it stands you need ridiculous amounts of armor to give the kind of protection a historic ship would have.  Especially since as armor mechanics go, the armor seems to only be "skin", with a pass/fail/partial in terms of penetration, block, or partial pen.

So if you're going for a historic build.  If you try putting the historical amounts of armor on there (if you can), you end up with much weaker protection than the real thing had.  If you put armor on it until you have equivalent protection, good luck not running out of tonnage.

Either way when combined with things like a battleship's radios literally weighing more than a destroyer, its not a surprise that historic builds are pretty much impossible.

Or hell, let's compare turrets.
Yamato's 18" turrets had a mass of 2730 tons each, with side armor of 9.8 inches, face armor of 25.6 inches, and turret tops of 10.6 inches.
Now the game doesn't let us adjust turret face armor, but if we set the side armor at 9.8 and the top at 10.6, we end up with a weight of 3,214 tons.
Equip autoloaders like Yamato had, the weight increases to 3,703 tons.  Equip electro-hydro turrets, weight increases to 3,773 tons.

Now, I know the game is also including the mass of the ammunition for the guns.
Yammy Shell: 3,218lbs
In-game 18" shell: 3328lbs (I'm going to assume the listed weight for shells is included powder bags)
3328*90: 135.8 metric tons.

3214-135.8=3078.2


So the default three-gun 18" turret, even when accounting for the weight of ammo for all three guns is still 350 tons heavier than Yamato's turrets were by themselves.  And again that's without autoladers, without proper hydraulics, etc, all that Yamato's turrets had.

Issues like this are why historic builds simply aren't possible.  Everything is too heavy.

Edited December 3, 2021 by Kane
Added more.

[SpardaSon21]

On 10/29/2021 at 10:01 AM, HistoricalAccuracyMan said:

Yeah, even though the unrealistic displacement values don't bother me too much as I'm more of somebody who goes for the aesthetics and looks of a ship over irl values of weight, length, beam etc....it is kind of ridiculous that I have to raise a dreadnought IV hull to 60.000 tons just so the hull will be long enough to fit the middle turret on a USS Texas build.

Don't forget you can't cram on the secondaries Texas had, getting towers to fit properly is a pain, especially when superstructure is concerned, and I'm sure there's a lot more that needs to be brought up.

[akd]

I don't think they can ever correspond to reality because the armor design (where in the ship the armor actually is distributed and which areas go without armor) does not correspond to reality.

[Kane]

23 hours ago, akd said:

I don't think they can ever correspond to reality because the armor design (where in the ship the armor actually is distributed and which areas go without armor) does not correspond to reality.

They may not ever be able to get it exact.  And truthfully trying to get it exact could very well strain the limits both of the computing system, and the patience of the player.  The game already has a lot to keep track of, and we see how well the formation system (doesn't) work.  That said they could still get a lot closer than what they are, and addressing some of the ridiculous weights would go a long way in doing that.  The problems meanwhile become more glaring in later areas as the size of the ships scales up.

1)  Battleship turrets weighing more by themselves than did the real turrets with all relevant equipment installed.
2)  Things like radios for larger ships weighing more than complete destroyers.
3)  Armor being far less effective per inch of thickness than era-appropriate equivalents.

Extreme examples are often useful for identifying issues in non-extremes, since it reveals issues that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.  On the extreme end with the late era large ships, we see these problems drawing to their full extent.  And I haven't wanted to pitch too much of a *&%)( about this since A)  I know the devs are focused on the campaign ATM, and B) don't know if they even bother reading this part of the forum.  But a lot of these issues that are making something resembling historic builds impossible could be addressed by either doing a tuning pass on the existing system, or changing some of the equipment to have set starting weights rather than scaling as a result of the weight of the system they're connected to.  The example I keep using being the issue of radios being a functional percent of the tower mass.  Giving a set rate to the radio equipment based on the size category of the ship (destroyers & cruisers vs. battleships) would solve one issue there. 

It doesn't bother me that if I want to build my H-44 I have to go all-or-nothing, to have any chance at resisting plunging fire despite the apparent German preference for an incremental armor scheme.  But it does bother me that if I try to build my H-44, the ridiculous weights and inefficiency of some systems make it impossible for me to build the ship with the systems it would be considered mandatory to have.  Similarly it bothers me that if I try to make an Iowa-class, I can't make anything that had Iowa's capabilities without going grossly overweight vs an actual Iowa.  And yes I get that the game is based around building my own ships, but it takes something away from the designs I come up with if its impossible for me to create something approximating real designs in the same universe, so to speak.

Many of these issues as I said could be resolved with either a tuning pass, or set weights for certain equipment.

It would also be nice if the devs shared a bit of their design philosophy on these issues.  Since many things are going to end up being an abstraction / approximation, it would be nice to know what they're leaving to the abstract by design, and what they are not.

[catloverjerrygarcia]

I was noticing this too, struggling to build what I feel are reasonably protected ships and having no tonnage to do anything but make an armored target or skimping on armor and having room for guns and ammo.

[catloverjerrygarcia]

I'd like to see engine/speed control be determined by the number of boilers or at the very least how many horsepower the ships engines are rated for.  If you base it on horsepower you can more sufficiently control the tonnage of the engine systems.

Edited December 12, 2021 by catloverjerrygarcia

[Littorio]

4 hours ago, catloverjerrygarcia said:

I'd like to see engine/speed control be determined by the number of boilers or at the very least how many horsepower the ships engines are rated for.  If you base it on horsepower you can more sufficiently control the tonnage of the engine systems.

Right now I think boilers and engines are mostly abstracted. I have seen ships have up to "three engines" damaged but I have no idea what actually goes on under the hood as far as the mechanics behind propulsion.

[catloverjerrygarcia]

15 minutes ago, Littorio said:

Right now I think boilers and engines are mostly abstracted. I have seen ships have up to "three engines" damaged but I have no idea what actually goes on under the hood as far as the mechanics behind propulsion.

I know, the lack of information about how so much of this works is really hard for me to do anything more then throw darts at designing and shrug my shoulders to see how it does.

[Littorio]

16 minutes ago, catloverjerrygarcia said:

I know, the lack of information about how so much of this works is really hard for me to do anything more then throw darts at designing and shrug my shoulders to see how it does.

More concrete information from the devs would be very nice. Even if it isn't finished, at least some idea of the existing mechanics would be helpful.

[catloverjerrygarcia]

7 hours ago, Littorio said:

More concrete information from the devs would be very nice. Even if it isn't finished, at least some idea of the existing mechanics would be helpful.

Exactly, it gives me something to work from to make decisions with.

[coalminer]

they really dont care at this point. those threads created for "feedback"? its just going to run along for 50 over pages and get ignored just like how everyone has been for the past couple of years.

Everything is unexplained modifiers and "stealth hullz wit 90% damagez reductionz" cause we can. what are the basis for those reductions? it sure as hell isnt GA or armour layouts because the player cant control any of those.

If the really wanted feedback, start answering questions and suggestions given over the many many pages in the past not lead us all on another merry go round. in all possibility those threads are created to bait the new players flooding over from steam.

[Admiral Unterhosen]

On 12/12/2021 at 5:47 PM, catloverjerrygarcia said:

I'd like to see engine/speed control be determined by the number of boilers or at the very least how many horsepower the ships engines are rated for.  If you base it on horsepower you can more sufficiently control the tonnage of the engine systems.

 

[catloverjerrygarcia]

1 minute ago, Admiral Unterhosen said:

 

Okay and this is important why?  You're not controlling your speed via the horsepower as I'm suggesting simply saying I want to go this fast.  If you have a boiler of a certain size/HP generated and have to place multiple boilers you can control the power to weight ratio.  But as it stands right now you just say "I wanna go this fast" and have no more control.