>>>Alpha-11 HotFix v84 Feedback<<< (1/4/2020)

[HEEL_caT666]

17 hours ago, captinjoehenry said:

Partial broadsides have been a long time issue.  Good work on figuring out a consistent pattern for it thought!

Oh this isnt the only issue that I've found so far. I think since this patch theres also an issue where you can get free mass and money from thin air from duplicating hull designs.

You basically duplicate the hull (so far only tested this in Naval Academy Ship Contructor), and it magically gets lighter and cheaper. This seems like some bug when referencing the original design. 

During the bug you get about 25-30% mass and cost reduction for the hull, but at the same time, the bottom UI for selecting guns and towers etc is completely bugged, you cannot select anything apart form the hull selector to reset the hull. However, module selector on the left works perfectly, and you can get things like 44 knot battlecruisers while on maximum bulkheads and Anti-Torp V, and these changes do in fact work in battle.

Another peculiarity with this bug I discovered was when I wanted to try use this dupe bug to swap my guns from 19 to 20 inch in a stubborn mission. Because you cant actually change anything in the duped hull cos of the dead UI, I tried to swap the original hulls guns to 20 inch to then dupe and get free mass - but you cant launch it, says that its overweight! Weird, so I swapped it back to 19 inch on the original hull (without deleting the duplicated hull) and the duplicated hull is now magically launchable.

Software dev friends hinted this could be an issue in communications between prototype object's characteristics, namely tonnage and cost in this case, which is apparently a neat trick to save time on copying the design computationally.

This bug stays persistent each time you click "Rebuild ship" from battle, but fixes itself magically if you exit the constructor while building, or return to contructor after pressing "Retry" if you lost the mission.

Bug report for this has also been submitted.

Edited April 7, 2021 by HEEL_caT666

[HEEL_caT666]

13 hours ago, Marshall99 said:

I always experienced this issue. And I reported this many times. I don't know when will they fix this.

Seems like they maybe either having a hard time reproducing this issue on a large scale or figuring out the cause, or just it's existance being dependant on some old spaghetti monsters, or something that must come out as a later release.

If it was such a long issue (I've only noticed it now), I think the devs are definetly on it, just need to be patient and give them some time.

Edited April 7, 2021 by HEEL_caT666

[Stormnet]

6 hours ago, HEEL_caT666 said:

Oh this isnt the only issue that I've found so far. I think since this patch theres also an issue where you can get free mass and money from thin air from duplicating hull designs.

You basically duplicate the hull (so far only tested this in Naval Academy Ship Contructor), and it magically gets lighter and cheaper. This seems like some bug when referencing the original design. 

During the bug you get about 25-30% mass and cost reduction for the hull, but at the same time, the bottom UI for selecting guns and towers etc is completely bugged, you cannot select anything apart form the hull selector to reset the hull. However, module selector on the left works perfectly, and you can get things like 44 knot battlecruisers while on maximum bulkheads and Anti-Torp V, and these changes do in fact work in battle.

Another peculiarity with this bug I discovered was when I wanted to try use this dupe bug to swap my guns from 19 to 20 inch in a stubborn mission. Because you cant actually change anything in the duped hull cos of the dead UI, I tried to swap the original hulls guns to 20 inch to then dupe and get free mass - but you cant launch it, says that its overweight! Weird, so I swapped it back to 19 inch on the original hull (without deleting the duplicated hull) and the duplicated hull is now magically launchable.

Software dev friends hinted this could be an issue in communications between prototype object's characteristics, namely tonnage and cost in this case, which is apparently a neat trick to save time on copying the design computationally.

This bug stays persistent each time you click "Rebuild ship" from battle, but fixes itself magically if you exit the constructor while building, or return to contructor after pressing "Retry" if you lost the mission.

Bug report for this has also been submitted.

So, just clicking the plus buttom gives you free mass and money?

IMM GOOOONNA MAKE A 50 KNOT 20 INCH QUAD ULTRA BATTLESHIP RIGHT NOW!!!!

[HEEL_caT666]

8 minutes ago, Stormnet said:

So, just clicking the plus buttom gives you free mass and money?

IMM GOOOONNA MAKE A 50 KNOT 20 INCH QUAD ULTRA BATTLESHIP RIGHT NOW!!!!

nah go make a 60 knot dd with 40 kilometer torpedoes instead

[Cpt.Hissy]

Formation movement logic is still very much broken. I mean not AI and not commands.

In multi ship formations, only formation leader always behaves properly, but all subordinate ships can and will randomly derp around at any moment. It feels like they stop receiving data that tells them how to manoeuvre to stay in formation, and continue to do whatever they did last. Like sailing in straight line. 
Affects only movement, gunnery and target swapping still works as normal.

[HEEL_caT666]

10 hours ago, Cpt.Hissy said:

Formation movement logic is still very much broken. I mean not AI and not commands.

In multi ship formations, only formation leader always behaves properly, but all subordinate ships can and will randomly derp around at any moment. It feels like they stop receiving data that tells them how to manoeuvre to stay in formation, and continue to do whatever they did last. Like sailing in straight line. 
Affects only movement, gunnery and target swapping still works as normal.

Please describe derping out, because I'm not sure what youre referring to. For me movement works generally okay, the only problems I have is new ships disregarding orders when a new squad has been formed, but this is due to me not actually giving any new orders to squads, which most frequently happens when I'm controlling destroyers. Otherwise I have experience no issues in how formation movement works, I'm not quite getting what type of random derping you mean.

[Nick Thomadis]

20 hours ago, HEEL_caT666 said:

Oh this isnt the only issue that I've found so far. I think since this patch theres also an issue where you can get free mass and money from thin air from duplicating hull designs.

You basically duplicate the hull (so far only tested this in Naval Academy Ship Contructor), and it magically gets lighter and cheaper. This seems like some bug when referencing the original design. 

During the bug you get about 25-30% mass and cost reduction for the hull, but at the same time, the bottom UI for selecting guns and towers etc is completely bugged, you cannot select anything apart form the hull selector to reset the hull. However, module selector on the left works perfectly, and you can get things like 44 knot battlecruisers while on maximum bulkheads and Anti-Torp V, and these changes do in fact work in battle.

Another peculiarity with this bug I discovered was when I wanted to try use this dupe bug to swap my guns from 19 to 20 inch in a stubborn mission. Because you cant actually change anything in the duped hull cos of the dead UI, I tried to swap the original hulls guns to 20 inch to then dupe and get free mass - but you cant launch it, says that its overweight! Weird, so I swapped it back to 19 inch on the original hull (without deleting the duplicated hull) and the duplicated hull is now magically launchable.

Software dev friends hinted this could be an issue in communications between prototype object's characteristics, namely tonnage and cost in this case, which is apparently a neat trick to save time on copying the design computationally.

This bug stays persistent each time you click "Rebuild ship" from battle, but fixes itself magically if you exit the constructor while building, or return to contructor after pressing "Retry" if you lost the mission.

Bug report for this has also been submitted.

Duplicating hulls is currently causing a serious exception bug and is not advised to use in game as it breaks all sorts of things. Thank you for reporting, we will fix.

[Cpt.Hissy]

1 hour ago, HEEL_caT666 said:

Please describe derping out, because I'm not sure what youre referring to. For me movement works generally okay, the only problems I have is new ships disregarding orders when a new squad has been formed, but this is due to me not actually giving any new orders to squads, which most frequently happens when I'm controlling destroyers. Otherwise I have experience no issues in how formation movement works, I'm not quite getting what type of random derping you mean.

Subordinates can get stuck sailing in a straight line, or unnecessarily slow down to a crawl and never speed up again, or go somewhere out of formation on their own and never come back. In short, they stop actually following their formation leader and behave as if they had no orders. Fixable by kicking them out of this formation, or sometimes by repeated formation change commands.

Happens very often, in fact during one battle this always happens at least once to every formation with subordinates.
Seems like it affects AI controlled groups (both player and enemy) too, but less often. Maybe because AI less often issues new orders to it's formations.

Edited April 8, 2021 by Cpt.Hissy

[Cptbarney]

Seems to effect DD's more than any other class for some reason too.

[disc]

4 hours ago, Cptbarney said:

Seems to effect DD's more than any other class for some reason too.

I think this is due to the "loose" formation, because I have noticed it in light cruisers too. I don't believe I've ever noticed it in "tight" formation. Once again, I sure wish there was a testing mode!

[tvaishar]

On 3/3/2021 at 7:42 PM, Nick Thomadis said:

Increased Partial Penetrations/Overpens damage

Are you sure this is a good idea? I don't put armor on my ship to receive critical damage by partial penetrations. Partial penterations quite often damage engines which kinda defeats any design a tactical considerations. You slap some armor on your ship, engage enemy from a safe distance from which a) you can damage the enemy and b) your armor works. And the armor works, you receive minimum full pens. But the partial ones still damage engines which is a huge penalty to your mobility and your design looks like a failure.

[Cpt.Hissy]

1 hour ago, disc said:

I think this is due to the "loose" formation, because I have noticed it in light cruisers too. I don't believe I've ever noticed it in "tight" formation. Once again, I sure wish there was a testing mode!

Hmm, this leads me to an idea.. What if it's intentional, like simulation of loss of communication? Just yet again undocumented, and maybe poorly balanced.
Devs seem to love sneakily leaving in-progress mechanics in these patcnes.

[admiralsnackbar]

It would be nice for formations to see for a given ship where the ship would 'like' to be, like a green oval in the sea representing the space the ship is attempting to occupy in the formation. 

 

[Cptbarney]

17 hours ago, Cpt.Hissy said:

Hmm, this leads me to an idea.. What if it's intentional, like simulation of loss of communication? Just yet again undocumented, and maybe poorly balanced.
Devs seem to love sneakily leaving in-progress mechanics in these patcnes.

If thats the case i don't mind such a feature. But it would be nice too see it like in RTW where it says signals misunderstood or something similar, so ships end up doing strange things. Although not sure why a DD would just sit in the water however, funny really almost like its lost and doesn't know what to do.

[Cpt.Hissy]

Where this guy is going?
Notice, they're on "Follow". This particular case i know is a bug, was reported.

[Masonator]

On 4/8/2021 at 5:39 PM, tvaishar said:

Are you sure this is a good idea? I don't put armor on my ship to receive critical damage by partial penetrations. Partial penterations quite often damage engines which kinda defeats any design a tactical considerations. You slap some armor on your ship, engage enemy from a safe distance from which a) you can damage the enemy and b) your armor works. And the armor works, you receive minimum full pens. But the partial ones still damage engines which is a huge penalty to your mobility and your design looks like a failure.

Uh, yeah.

That's literally how it works, dude. And how it works historically.

The sheer amount of kinetic energy transferred by a 1.5t 15" armour-piercing shell smashing into your ship, even if it doesn't physically penetrate your armour, is still more than enough to knock off your propellers, cave in your hull plating causing rapid flooding, knock your shafts out of alignment with their turbines, knock your shafts clean off their bearings, jam your turret mechanisms, etc. There's a whole host of things that can go wrong.

Here's a picture of a 13.5" hit on the German battlecruiser Seydlitz at Jutland. While the shell didn't penetrate, it buckled the hull, blew part of her armour belt into the sea, and let in thousands of tons of water.

Here's a 15" hit, also on Seydlitz, though this time it did penetrate. You can see the shell blew clean through over 9.5" of solid steel, and impacted with enough force to shatter the surrounding plating like glass.

No ship, regardless of how well-built or heavily-armoured, can shrug off naval rifles forever.

[HEEL_caT666]

8 hours ago, Masonator said:

Uh, yeah.

That's literally how it works, dude. And how it works historically.

The sheer amount of kinetic energy transferred by a 1.5t 15" armour-piercing shell smashing into your ship, even if it doesn't physically penetrate your armour, is still more than enough to knock off your propellers, cave in your hull plating causing rapid flooding, knock your shafts out of alignment with their turbines, knock your shafts clean off their bearings, jam your turret mechanisms, etc. There's a whole host of things that can go wrong.

Here's a picture of a 13.5" hit on the German battlecruiser Seydlitz at Jutland. While the shell didn't penetrate, it buckled the hull, blew part of her armour belt into the sea, and let in thousands of tons of water.

Here's a 15" hit, also on Seydlitz, though this time it did penetrate. You can see the shell blew clean through over 9.5" of solid steel, and impacted with enough force to shatter the surrounding plating like glass.

No ship, regardless of how well-built or heavily-armoured, can shrug off naval rifles forever.

Wait, did this guy *minimise* his armour to not receive partial pens?

Yikes man

Edit:
oh wait he was complaining about increased partial/overpen damage,

yeah no thats still stupid, partial pens deal lots of damage, this aint World of Warships. Overpens should deal a bit more than partials imo, since they actually clean go through the ship and have more than ample opportunity do to insane damage.

Edited April 11, 2021 by HEEL_caT666

[Nick Thomadis]

2 hours ago, HEEL_caT666 said:

 Overpens should deal a bit more than partials imo, since they actually clean go through the ship and have more than ample opportunity do to insane damage.

Partial penetrations cannot do internal damage. Overpens can cause flooding, destroy engines and rudder, so on average they are more powerful.

[Cpt.Hissy]

2 hours ago, HEEL_caT666 said:

Overpens should deal a bit more than partials imo, since they actually clean go through the ship and have more than ample opportunity do to insane damage.

Overpen leaves a small clean hole, with high chance to go through nothing important at all.
Powerful non-pen acts like smacking the ship with giant sledgehammer, mechanisms don't like being smashed by sledges.
So, i'd argue.

[Cptbarney]

1 hour ago, Cpt.Hissy said:

Overpen leaves a small clean hole, with high chance to go through nothing important at all.
Powerful non-pen acts like smacking the ship with giant sledgehammer, mechanisms don't like being smashed by sledges.
So, i'd argue.

I guess both are right to an extent if the over-pen hits an area where water can freely enter with little effort from the humans on-board. Model deformations, can be done but i reckon the calculations and rendering of displaced geometry can and will cause issues with performance and looks. But if it can be done then, that would be very cool.

Either way, i guess it depends on armour, shell quality, shell type, distance, velocity, shell caliber, victim vessel displacement that should determine, how the shell reacts and what type and amount of damage it inflicts. 

Not sure how much of that they can do in unity and to what degree, but what we have is OK for an alpha.

[Masonator]

A penetrating hit deals most of its damage with the bursting charge after it's made it through the armour. The vast majority of its kinetic energy is spent punching through the armour itself. It's still a huge impact, but centered over a very small area.

You only observe the "sledgehammer effect" as we'll call it from non-penetrating hits, where the full impact force is distributed over a wider area when the armour plate is rung like a bell.

[Cpt.Hissy]

1 hour ago, Masonator said:

A penetrating hit deals most of its damage with the bursting charge after it's made it through the armour. The vast majority of its kinetic energy is spent punching through the armour itself. It's still a huge impact, but centered over a very small area.

You only observe the "sledgehammer effect" as we'll call it from non-penetrating hits, where the full impact force is distributed over a wider area when the armour plate is rung like a bell.

Exactly.
And penetrating shell that didn't go off, or overpen, just makes a hole and potentially spreads officer's panties all over the deck. Though it still can break some super duper important pipe or wire and cause problems with that.

@Cptbarney am sorry, do you know anything about how game entities physics and interactions are processed?

[HEEL_caT666]

6 hours ago, Masonator said:

A penetrating hit deals most of its damage with the bursting charge after it's made it through the armour. The vast majority of its kinetic energy is spent punching through the armour itself. It's still a huge impact, but centered over a very small area.

You only observe the "sledgehammer effect" as we'll call it from non-penetrating hits, where the full impact force is distributed over a wider area when the armour plate is rung like a bell.

I think it's less to do with ditribution of force and more to do with the armour having to deformate to compensate displacement done by the force of the shell at that site.

But yeah I'll agree that overpens only have smaller chance to deal signficinat damage for any one event, but I'd say have much more potential if they strike any internal structures such as engines, hydraulics lines, wires, linkages, w/e, even potentially compromising internal construction of the vessel.

[HEEL_caT666]

5 hours ago, Cpt.Hissy said:

Exactly.
And penetrating shell that didn't go off, or overpen, just makes a hole and potentially spreads officer's panties all over the deck. Though it still can break some super duper important pipe or wire and cause problems with that.

@Cptbarney am sorry, do you know anything about how game entities physics and interactions are processed?

Ehh id imagine in this case its just a really detailed breakdown of the ship into logic units (armour belt, bulkheads, etc) with some trig and rng math plus base game shell properties to govern penetration, potentially modelled force application on the armour with some surface calculus (spread of force along the area of impact), idk, depends on the game, but visually the deformations are definetly not dynamicaly created, just a texture applied over impact site.

Edited April 11, 2021 by HEEL_caT666

[Steeltrap]

15 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Partial penetrations cannot do internal damage. Overpens can cause flooding, destroy engines and rudder, so on average they are more powerful.

The USN Mk8 "super heavy" 16" AP round had the following:

The Mark 21 Base Detonating Fuze (BDF) had a delay of 0.033 seconds. Fuze activation required a resistance equal to 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) of armor at 0 degrees obliquity or 0.375 inches (1 cm) at 65 degrees obliquity.

Source: http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_16-50_mk7.php

HMS Glorious wasn't sunk by a load of "over pen" 11" rounds. From wiki:

Scharnhorst switched her fire to Glorious at 16:32 and scored her first hit six minutes later on her third salvo, at a range of 26,000 yards (24,000 m), when one 28.3-centimetre (11.1 in) hit the forward flight deck and burst in the upper hangar, starting a large fire. This hit destroyed two Swordfish being prepared for flight and the hole in the flight deck prevented any other aircraft from taking off.^[42] Splinters penetrated a boiler casing and caused a temporary drop in steam pressure. At 16:58 a second shell hit the homing beacon above the bridge and killed or wounded the captain and most of the personnel stationed there.

This is despite Glorious having armour of 2–3 in (51–76 mm) on her belt and 0.75–3 in (19–76 mm) at various deck levels.

One of the DDs were supposedly sunk largely by "several secondary hits", and those were 5.9"/150mm rounds. "Over pens"? I think not.

I'd like to know the basis on which loads of these "over pens" are calculated. Given there's data available on the velocity at striking at various ranges, and we know the fuse time, it's not hard to work out how far the shell could travel before going "bang" and doing unpleasant things. If it hits other things that slow it down further? It goes "bang" after travelling a shorter distance.

The vast majority of "over pens" in this game as is are more or less "cow manure", to put it politely.

For a contact fused 5-6" HE shell to "over pen" after striking the belt of a Transport or DD? That's really badly smelling manure.

But you presumably know this given I've written it many, many times.

And, yes, the whole "partial pen" is also largely absurd because it's based on the shell's damage yet partial pens frequently didn't explode at all or did so more or less instantly. THAT is why the RN AP shells at Jutland did relatively little damage for all the hits they scored. Increasing it further just makes it more absurd.

But then I've also given examples of how ridiculous it can be when a partial pen can do ~50% or more of the damage of a FULL pen through the belt armour of a BB when the calibres are IDENTICAL.

It's as though you're more interested in "balancing" things than trying to model them as accurately as possible and THEN considering the implications. Besides which, pro tip: war ISN'T balanced if you're doing it correctly.  Only a moron attacks an enemy in a way that they expect an even/balanced fight.

Not that I expect any of this to make the slightest difference because it hasn't any other time I and others have written about it.

Edited April 12, 2021 by Steeltrap