>>>Core Patch 0.5 Feedback Hotfix v90<<<

[HailCOBRALA]

Moved to support thread. 

Edited September 24, 2021 by HailCOBRALA

[Skeksis]

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Edited November 9, 2021 by Skeksis

[ColonelHenry]

34 minutes ago, Skeksis said:

I'm not seeing the same thing. These enemies that I've battled with recently with my 1936 Italy fleet are not screwed up...

all ships of the enemy fleet are shown. just a sample of ai designs in general. no one actually posts good ai designs!

IMO it's working. I think AI-designs are over the 90% mark, not 100% yet but they're getting there, most are halfway decent, not the other way around. If players spot what they think is a bad design they should be posting them to help the team improve AI-designs as much as possible. 

Are you playing core patch 0.5? Haven't you notice all the improvements? It's becoming a great game.

I say Nick and the team are doing a great job on 'AI-Auto-Designs Development' and they will keep on improving it too.

Are there improvements? Absolutely! Went from "not even worth my time" to "eh, gamey, workable, whatever". And again, it's not improvement in a VACUUM. It's improvement but with the detrimental to players' ship designer being as braindead as the AI. There I said it.

First enemy ship: giant quadruple turrets are literally not protected by the main belt because of 1. AI fails 2. the ship designer sucks 3. I HECKIN' LOVE FIGHTING SUPER BATTLESHIP BatChest

Second enemy ship: again, failure to protect turrets, that aft turret is just disgusting on many level. Again, AI giving their ship way too many guns, that would explode spectacularly (sure maybe yours armor it enough against your shell idk but if it's 3-4/10 it's still terrible and for what? shitty ship designer?)

Third enemy ship: I swear to god, this is one of the most annoying things I see in game. Destroyers packing double, triple turrets design 8/10. LIKE WHY? I play interwar and my god, triple 4 inch guns, or dual double 4 - 3 inch guns at the front. I mean... did those turrets exist? Yes. But most destroyers have single barrel 5 or 4 inch guns. And if it's double turret design then there sure as shit weren't 5 double turret waiting to screw me over every time I like to design something reasonable. Thus I either have to make CLs to deal with them, or design my destroyers as atrocious looking as the AI. Then why should I bother? I might as well do something else.

 

[Skeksis]

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Edited November 9, 2021 by Skeksis

[Draco]

12 hours ago, DougToss said:

To build on the line of thinking I was going down earlier, 

It's clear that @Nick Thomadis has put a lot of research into making the ship hulls. The new Italian ships, for example are beautiful. The historical forms were also intelligently scaled up or down to have the choice of different displacements. Would it not be possible, then, to just fully fit out those hulls for the AI? Italian AI builds Italian ships etc? 

I don't mean what they do now, which is cram 20 inch guns onto every hull form, I mean, why not just have the Littorio class pre-configured, so when the Italian AI needs a battleship, it builds Littorios of various displacements and gun calibre?  That could be as simple it has everything the Littorio had - 9 guns in the primary battery, 12 in the secondary, or it could mean that it distributes that same share of gunpower between 4 turrets, or uses quadruple mounts, losing a gun in the process. The point being, whatever the combination - the AI knows what to put on that hull! 

That would solve the problems of bizarre superstructures and funnels, strange armour and armament choices, and of course bulkheads/fire control etc. It would simply be a matter of including all of the stuff they must have documented in designing the in-game hulls in the first place, and then omitted for the editor. So, just as we have Italian Large Cruiser II, available from 1929 between 32 500 and 42 500 tonnes, the AI does too, but it also outfits it along the lines of - I dunno, the Trento Class. 

There could of course be several kind of variation of this - look at how many possible turret layouts were considered for Dreadnought and Invincible! The point to me is not if there is a super firing pair, wings, wings en echelon, whatever - the point is that consciously or not, in selecting hulls the Devs already did a great deal of research and have an idea of what that ship should be, or at least, the real ship each hull represents. This would simply be a matter of "pre-assembling" a set of combinations of superstructure, funnel, armours, propulsions and gun layouts. Yes - it means manually creating a database, and then building in a way for it to scale with displacement and technology, plus randomization between templates, but that seems far easier than giving the AI a set of building blocks and then having to code the AI so it's able to make a great ship out of it. 

Actually, regarding the problem of creating a database for the AI to choose from...

We have so many people here who do just that! It could be as simple as asking for volunteers to design a set of ships of a certain class for the AI of a particular nation, say 2-4 designs per decade, per 5000t displacement. So far as I can see the AI just picks the largest possible displacement for a given hull size, so this would also add variety, as well as authenticity and believability to AI designs. 

Tl;dr

Rather than asking the AI to design Italian destroyers, why not do it for them?

It's got to be easier to code AI to pick and modify than to start from scratch, yeah?

Agreed, and again we'd be happy to provide the hours to do this for free (or technically, more a case of us paying you guys, the devs, for the opportunity to do this work for you) and then all you have to do is assess our contributions and discard the ones you don't agree with.

It would potentially solve all the design issues in the course of a single patch, allowing you to focus all that time and energy on the campaign, new hulls (which we would also gladly run through the same process once they become available) and the last realism tweaks before release.

Seems like a win-win to me

[ZorinW]

Did the devs say anything anout the ability to mount the funnels on destroyers right behind the main tower yet? 

[ChryssyH117]

The AI did it again no Rangefinders or Radar when its available to them

[kineuhansen]

any campaign news yet ?

[Commander Reed]

3 hours ago, kineuhansen said:

any campaign news yet ?

No. If there were anything it'd be here or another pinned thread.
Probably a few weeks to a month minimum before we get the campaign. 
 

Yeah, most of the features are here in 0.5, but you know how this dev team is...

[ColonelHenry]

14 hours ago, Skeksis said:

You need to capture these, it's the only way to register it with the Dev's and for them to consider.

But triples are in game? I have 5x3s on this DD, and yes 3 of them up front. It's what makes this game so great. 

This is such an effective fighting machine, especially chasing down those trying to run!

Thank you for proving my 3rd point.

[1MajorKoenig]

Howdy!

I played around a bit for the first time after the patch and I have to say it was pretty fun!

 

- I like the new crew mechanics!

- the Italian BB hulls look pretty good!

- designing all your ships is great!

- it feels more like a trade off now as I could not simply max out all attributes, was there some rebalancing weights? Either way it is good that the design is a trade off between the desired attributes and not all at once!

 

 

I think what we still definitely need are:

- early German Dreadnought modules such as the Kaiser or Konig Bridge module (these are much smaller than the ones we have now / with the current ones en-echelon ships are hardly viable)

- German Battlecruisers Parts / Derfflinger, Mackensen, Ersatz Yorck Style Parts 

[Speglord]

3 minutes ago, 1MajorKoenig said:

Howdy!

I played around a bit for the first time after the patch and I have to say it was pretty fun!

 

- I like the new crew mechanics!

- the Italian BB hulls look pretty good!

- designing all your ships is great!

- it feels more like a trade off now as I could not simply max out all attributes, was there some rebalancing weights? Either way it is good that the design is a trade off between the desired attributes and not all at once!

 

 

I think what we still definitely need are:

- early German Dreadnought modules such as the Kaiser or Konig Bridge module (these are much smaller than the ones we have now / with the current ones en-echelon ships are hardly viable)

- German Battlecruisers Parts / Derfflinger, Mackensen, Ersatz Yorck Style Parts 

German hulls, towers, and turrets from ~1900 through 1918 are very sorely needed, yeah. A few more US and British hulls from this period would also be welcome. And of course pre-dreadnoughts, but that's been asked for for over a year now, and would just be beating a dead horse.

[Skeksis]

...

Edited November 9, 2021 by Skeksis

[DougToss]

On 9/23/2021 at 11:53 PM, Skeksis said:

I'm not seeing the same thing. These enemies that I've battled with recently with my 1936 Italy fleet are not screwed up...

all ships of the enemy fleet are shown. just a sample of ai designs in general. no one actually posts good ai designs!

IMO it's working. I think AI-designs are over the 90% mark, not 100% yet but they're getting there, most are halfway decent, not the other way around. If players spot what they think is a bad design they should be posting them to help the team improve AI-designs as much as possible. 

Are you playing core patch 0.5? Haven't you notice all the improvements? It's becoming a great game.

I say Nick and the team are doing a great job on 'AI-Auto-Designs Development' and they will keep on improving it too.

Those are all wildly over-gunned and under protected. 

If the designer is going to have authenticity and believability  it has to move beyond meme ships. 

On 9/24/2021 at 1:34 AM, Skeksis said:

This is such an effective fighting machine, especially chasing down those trying to run!

And yet nothing like it was ever built, which is exactly the point @ColonelHenry @akd @Steeltrap, others, and I have repeatedly made. 

If 9 guns on a destroyer was so effective, why was it never done? Because the tradeoffs to seakeeping, top weight, stability, etc. etc. made it ridiculous. Not even the Tribals were gunned like that. Hell, most light cruisers weren't.

I can roll my eyes at players designing meme ships. Not everybody understands naval history and architecture, whatever, but the AI designing them is a major problem. 

On 9/24/2021 at 5:03 PM, Skeksis said:

I see no shame commanding supers, any of the game's content, vice versa for the AI to build them.

I draw the line here. It's a huge problem, because the game is not "build super meme anime warships" , it's supposed to be grounded in realism. Players having the freedom to build ships like that, again, I'm apathetic, but the AI building ships like that either forces the player to, or breaks the game. Instead of offering the freedom to build fantasy warships, it removes the freedom not to. 

 

Edited September 25, 2021 by DougToss

[Commander Reed]

1 hour ago, DougToss said:

Those are all wildly over-gunned and under protected. 

If the designer is going to have authenticity and believability  it has to move beyond meme ships. 

And yet nothing like it was ever built, which is exactly the point @ColonelHenry @akd @Steeltrap, I and others have repeatedly made. 

If 9 guns on a destroyer was so effective, why was it never done? Because the tradeoffs to seakeeping, top weight, stability, etc. etc. made it ridiculous. Not even the Tribals were gunned like that. Hell, most light cruisers weren't.

I can roll my eyes at players designing meme ships. Not everybody understands naval history and architecture, whatever, but the AI designing them is a major problem. 

I draw the line here. It's a huge problem, because the game is not "build super meme anime warships" , it's supposed to be grounded in realism. Players having the freedom to build ships like that, again, I'm apathetic, but the AI building ships like that either forces to player to, or breaks the game. 

 

Hah! Unrelated, but love star trek. Great reference.

[Skeksis]

...

Edited November 9, 2021 by Skeksis

[SonicB]

 

2 hours ago, DougToss said:

I draw the line here. It's a huge problem, because the game is not "build super meme anime warships" , it's supposed to be grounded in realism. Players having the freedom to build ships like that, again, I'm apathetic, but the AI building ships like that either forces to player to, or breaks the game. 

+1 to everything @DougToss said. Overgunned cartoon superyamatos are not the way.
 

 

[ColonelHenry]

@DougToss @SonicB At least there are still people who do not want this game to turn into a clown fiesta. Maybe there's hope that the end of the project if devs listen to the right people.

What I want from the game is this: a robust ship designer where you can build anything you want. You want meme ships? Go for it. You want to recreate ships that served during 1880s to 1945? Sure. You want to create your own naval doctrine and reflect that through your design? Mahan, get tf outta the way.

In order to have this game, the devs need to stop adding more 50-60k ton hulls. In fact, this current system of adding Hulls that are barely visually different other than a resize is not sustainable. Why can't I select an Iowa hull and resize it to whatever size I please? Why do I have to increase tonnage to an arbitrary number and suddenly my ship is 100-200ft longer? It doesn't make any sense. We need more control on our design. Better armor layout. Better guns placement mechanic. A double-barrel turret should be SMALLER than a triple-barrel turret. Real, adjustable barbette armor.

It's been a year and we get none of that. Instead we only get more content for things that barely matters (BIG SHIPS BatChest, BIG GUNS THAT WERE NEVER USED BatChest, WOOWWWZERS my 4 20inch guns killed a destroyer 20km away SOOO COOL BatChest)

Enough about the designer, the AI... again @Skeksis... I really don't understand how you could see the AI building ships from scratch as good. They will never be able to compete with humans on their own because they will always have some glaring issues that would be exploited instantly. And if you want the AI to always build massive ships, max tonnage, max gun, max armor, then I might as well stop the conversation here. What we should push for is to retain the AI ship building but that AI must have some parameters that guide it... aka a ship design bank. There will still be variety but real and authentic variety not throw darts blindfolded variety. How is that bad?

Edited September 26, 2021 by ColonelHenry

[Werwaz]

On 9/23/2021 at 11:53 PM, Skeksis said:

I'm not seeing the same thing. These enemies that I've battled with recently with my 1936 Italy fleet are not screwed up...

all ships of the enemy fleet are shown. just a sample of ai designs in general. no one actually posts good ai designs!

IMO it's working. I think AI-designs are over the 90% mark, not 100% yet but they're getting there, most are halfway decent, not the other way around. If players spot what they think is a bad design they should be posting them to help the team improve AI-designs as much as possible. 

Are you playing core patch 0.5? Haven't you notice all the improvements? It's becoming a great game.

I say Nick and the team are doing a great job on 'AI-Auto-Designs Development' and they will keep on improving it too.

I do notice that my most recent AI opponents actually posed a bit of a challenge compared to the usual clown cars it made in the past. However, they still do have an unfortunate tendency to explode when hit. 

[arkhangelsk]

8 hours ago, DougToss said:

Those are all wildly over-gunned and under protected. 

My question would be Are they effective in-game? Maybe in the game, all those guns get them kills fast enough to make up for their weaker protection.

8 hours ago, DougToss said:

If 9 guns on a destroyer was so effective, why was it never done? Because the tradeoffs to seakeeping, top weight, stability, etc. etc. made it ridiculous. Not even the Tribals were gunned like that. Hell, most light cruisers weren't.

As a matter of fact, I can't remember a 9-gun destroyer off-hand. But I can remember an eight-gun destroyer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akizuki-class_destroyer_(1942)

The weight of those turrets are a little heavier than their 5" counterparts. And triple turrets are a way to save weight. From that perspective, it isn't out of the margin to have a Three-Triple turret five-inch gun destroyer.

Of course, there's also the Tribal-class destroyer, and at 2500 tons full, she's very far from being the biggest you can make a Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts destroyer.

8 hours ago, DougToss said:

I draw the line here. It's a huge problem, because the game is not "build super meme anime warships" , it's supposed to be grounded in realism. Players having the freedom to build ships like that, again, I'm apathetic, but the AI building ships like that either forces the player to, or breaks the game. Instead of offering the freedom to build fantasy warships, it removes the freedom not to. 

Since you are speaking in terms of "forcing" the player to ... I'll assume those AI built "meme-ships" are tactically effective in game. If meme-ships don't work, they won't force the player to do anything. In other words, they correspond to the reality and rules of their world. And who knows, maybe they would actually even have worked in real life and our designers were just too wussy.

And just as the AI does something tactically effective, they are to be hard-coded away from doing so? While the human player can build whatever he wants? How long do you think the realistic human player can "remain honorable"? 

[killjoy1941]

@Nick Thomadis

I think I've gotten a solid enough grasp of the crew mechanics to render a verdict.

Generally, it feels well situated within the game, and seems to emulate the concept quite well. I don't build garbage lighters so it's a bit difficult to judge losses, but the secondary crews are pretty exposed on nearly all designs and give a good indication of what we can expect. I think it's pretty damn good for what seems to be the direction this game is headed. Losses aren't excessive, but they can really pile up and have a significant effect on performance if one isn't careful.

 

Some thoughts below:

 

1. Crew experience is king. I'm okay with this, especially as it seems to drop off as tech increases. Experience is far, far more important at lower tech levels than it is in the 1935-1940 era. This is fitting as earlier designs don't have access to things like fire direction systems and late-era mechanical computers. The comparative value of experience without sophisticated directors v. with said directors is... excellent.

2. Radar is unaffected by crew experience. I think this is an oversight. Given the historical difficulty with using radar as a fire direction assistant and general force multiplier (see the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay), I'd like to suggest the following: Radar's initial accuracy bonus is set to 0 at 0 crew experience and reaches its maximum at 100 experience. (i.e.: Radar adds 0 accuracy at 0 crew experience, but adds 100% of its current accuracy at 100 crew experience.)

3. Hydro/Sonar are the out-of-place tech. There's no reason not to use it, and once the appropriate research becomes available, no reason not to invest in it. It's a no-lose, no downside feature. Let me repeat - there is no reason not to take max hydro/Sonar. Ever.

I'd suggest the following now that I've seen the crew experience feature: Hydro/Sonar has no torpedo detection at all.

In addition, crew experience should intrinsically increase torpedo detection on its own in conjunction with tower spotting. It makes much more sense for experience to add to torpedo detection than it does a tech that, during the era covered by the game, would require a warship to make itself a target by slowing to less than, say, 5knts to perform the function it does in the game. Making oneself a prime torpedo target to detect torpedoes is absurd.

4. Make Hydro/Sonar a strategic layer system. Also, add depth charges, K-guns, and hedgehogs to the game. This is a corollary to #3. Hydro/Sonar has no place in the battlescape now that crew experience exists. Better for both systems as well as full ASW suites exist as a counter to subs. If the above systems were to be added, players would have logical choices - make zippy, armed-to-the-teeth DDs to combat fleet assets, make more balanced DDs to cover more missions, make compromise designs as most navies did, or make separate lines of each.

 

I know the crew experience system was a huge portion of this update, and hopefully my admittedly subjective observations help you out. Thanks for allowing us as players to put it to the test. 🙂

[ColonelHenry]

2 hours ago, arkhangelsk said:

My question would be Are they effective in-game? Maybe in the game, all those guns get them kills fast enough to make up for their weaker protection.

As a matter of fact, I can't remember a 9-gun destroyer off-hand. But I can remember an eight-gun destroyer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akizuki-class_destroyer_(1942)

The weight of those turrets are a little heavier than their 5" counterparts. And triple turrets are a way to save weight. From that perspective, it isn't out of the margin to have a Three-Triple turret five-inch gun destroyer.

Of course, there's also the Tribal-class destroyer, and at 2500 tons full, she's very far from being the biggest you can make a Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts destroyer.

Since you are speaking in terms of "forcing" the player to ... I'll assume those AI built "meme-ships" are tactically effective in game. If meme-ships don't work, they won't force the player to do anything. In other words, they correspond to the reality and rules of their world. And who knows, maybe they would actually even have worked in real life and our designers were just too wussy.

And just as the AI does something tactically effective, they are to be hard-coded away from doing so? While the human player can build whatever he wants? How long do you think the realistic human player can "remain honorable"? 

"rules of their world"... folks, this is why when you make a "realistic" game set in a HISTORICAL settings, you listen to people who are really interested in the "historical" part not Ronald McDonald in McDonaldland. Else, might as well make a WoWS: But You Can Build.

How long can human player remain honorable? Excuse me? I guess zoomers brain are built different but when I play a singleplayer game, I don't intentionally break the AI so I can see "YOU WIN" as long as the game is well made and fair.

[arkhangelsk]

Deliberately nerfing the AI from making designs that work in game is not my idea of "fair". And considering that big hulls and triple turrets are emblazoned on the screen as options, I don't think it is "deliberately" breaking the game to use them. They are not exactly tiny bugs hidden deep in the system.

The fact is, ships that haven't been tried before in real life work in this game. There are two possible conclusions. First, this game's penalty rules are not matched with reality. Second, this game's penalty rules are reasonably consistent with reality, and it is our shipbuilders who from conservatism passed up on building those ships (or maybe all the funds went to investigating battleship triples rather than destroyer triples).

If the problem is mostly the first, this problem should be corrected by changing the penalty rules so that "realistic ships" are automatically a good idea, not by forcing the AI to make ships that don't line up to the game rules just to please the human player. If the second is true, then there is no reason why either humans or AI should be barred from building such things.

It is known that fast ships are too easy to build, and efforts that being made to change the penalty rules so it is harder to do so. What about the guns? Can you categorically say the penalty rules are badly mismatched, other than "no one has done it in real life".

I'll also point out that other than the campaign, which would introduce the concept of cost, at present we don't have "weather" in this game. We always seem to be fighting in reasonably flat seas. And if you can always guarantee flat seas for your ships or you accept that yes OK they'll rollover in a typhoon ... you know what? All of a sudden you can arm the ships more.

[ColonelHenry]

 

4 minutes ago, arkhangelsk said:

Deliberately nerfing the AI from making designs that work in game is not my idea of "fair". And considering that big hulls and triple turrets are emblazoned on the screen as options, I don't think it is "deliberately" breaking the game to use them. They are not exactly tiny bugs hidden deep in the system.

The fact is, ships that haven't been tried before in real life work in this game. There are two possible conclusions. First, this game's penalty rules are not matched with reality. Second, this game's penalty rules are reasonably consistent with reality, and it is our shipbuilders who from conservatism passed up on building those ships (or maybe all the funds went to investigating battleship triples rather than destroyer triples).

If the problem is mostly the first, this problem should be corrected by changing the penalty rules so that "realistic ships" are automatically a good idea, not by forcing the AI to make ships that don't line up to the game rules just to please the human player. If the second is true, then there is no reason why either humans or AI should be barred from building such things.

It is known that fast ships are too easy to build, and efforts that being made to change the penalty rules so it is harder to do so. What about the guns? Can you categorically say the penalty rules are badly mismatched, other than "no one has done it in real life".

I'll also point out that other than the campaign, which would introduce the concept of cost, at present we don't have "weather" in this game. We always seem to be fighting in reasonably flat seas. And if you can always guarantee flat seas for your ships or you accept that yes OK they'll rollover in a typhoon ... you know what? All of a sudden you can arm the ships more.

YES. Exactly, the penalty of adding more guns onto your ship does not make a big impact. Many of these "super" designs people post would probably roll over the moment they hit the wave like Vasa but 1940.
Worst still, the "penalty" that is exploding into chunks of steel still does not deter the AI from building these kind of ships. So yes, please make the AI build better ships. Thanks for helping me to write these.

Why navies didn't build quadruple 5 inch turrets and put them on destroyers or 100 20 inch guns on battleship can... you know what, I'm not going to say anything further because everything that had been said. It's up to the devs. Really. You get the point.

[Cptbarney]

Hull weight modifiers need major changes, as they seem to make armour gain a lot of weight very quickly it seems, also turrets should be split into for example 'Three gun' Turrets or 'Triple' Turrets (example) so that if they are the former the guns raise all at once and if the latter the animation remains the same, but also allow for independent tracking.

Plus salvoes need to be fixed as well, as its weird seeing ships fire in a weird dis-jointed way so we need the ability to set firing types like Full salvo, Half and Half, one-by-one, stagger etc.

Also animations for rangefinders and radar too and if you add certain components to ships it should make some cosmetic changes to them (like radar for example).