My thoughts on Core Update 0.5

[Noobito]

How should I put this...
Firstly I'm quite impressed with some of the new stuff, crew/crew losses, the more in-depth depiction of ship range is nice but I still feel boxed in since I cant select a more specific range, secondary weapons seem to hit more often then before, being able to pick powder charges and projectile explosive type. The issue is that's literally it. Every other change I'm quite disappointing with.

SHIP BUILDER
When it comes to ship design, I feel more restricted to what I can put on my ship. Just about all ship designs I had before that I felt were limited are now completely impossible to make now. I usually determine this through how much armor I can no longer put on the ship with the same components and its quite troubling, even freed up quite a bit of tonnage by changing the main guns but it seems to ultimately not make much of a difference.
This has always been my primary issue with Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, but now it seems the devs have gone in the wrong direction to solve this major issue.

CREW
The only thing that I'm confused about crew is when crew are "lost" in combat. Does this mean casualties or fatalities? I'm quite confused on this. I need to know how much are dead or are just injured.

RELOAD SPEED
What is with the reload speed of guns? They shoot so incredibly slow in the later parts of the game compared to realistic numbers! Over 50 seconds for a 16 inch gun with semi-auto? Pretty wack if you ask me, I understand the tech is somewhat generic and has the same values across the board but even then I still feel that the higher the caliber a gun is, the further away accuracy or semi-accuracy of reload times become.

FLEET FORMATIONS
Fleet formations are still pretty bad with no signs of improvement, auto-evade to prevent your vessels from ramming ally ships is still somewhat unreliable when it comes to fast vessels.
Auto-evade causes turning to be impossible for no apparent reason, this usually happens with fast cruisers and destroyers.
We need a screen that allows us to pick specific ship formations or create our own ship formations from either a before battle screen and or during battle in the UI.

VISUALS
The game still has bland and washed out colors, the skybox still looks pretty terrible and it seems the "New Horizons" mod gives the game better visuals.
The UI on the "Win" and "Lose" after battle screen looks pretty terrible, we need an after action report of how many ships got sunk, ship damage, crew killed or injured, shells fired and projected refit and repair costs.
Ships across the board still bounce around way too much in water almost like toys. Ships that take flooding damage to one side of the ship sometimes don't sink in that direction but instead has one of several generic sinking animations which need to be added upon.

AI Goofs
Recently did a battle with 2 Ally Battlecruiser's vs 2 CA, 6 CL and 8 DD's protecting 25 transports. There was multiple times where the enemy fleet ended up hitting their own ships with torpedoes, this caused several enemy ships to be damaged plus a light cruiser and destroyer to be sunk! Guess the AI doesn't seem to care if any ally ships are in the way huh?

DEV FEEDBACK
From what I can see, dev choices for game changes seem to be highly selective. Seems the only stuff that get added are stuff the devs think work or things that people who purchased the game who use the report bug function in order to give feedback. Now this is fine and all, but me and a number of people disagreed with the 10% belt armor weight increase which further limited ship building. This is semi-typical of them, going in the wrong direction of realism/sandbox game balancing.

Edited November 5, 2021 by Noobito

[Commander Reed]

Defnitely agree with this. As for the after-battle screen, they could do something similar as to what is in Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail, showing you which ships were sunk, which officers were lost, ect.

[brothermunro]

Interesting points, just my from my own experience:

Ship Builder - I like the tightening up of the designer. You really do have to make a decision between the balance of firepower, protection, and speed. The earlier versions allowed you to make pretty crazy ships which had lots of everything. Adding difficult choices and trade offs I think makes the game more fun, especially long term.

Reload Speed - I’ll let those more qualified make historical comparisons but I genuinely don’t find reload times to be excessively long, they feel pretty appropriate to the era and I rarely feel the need to use autoloaders.

Fleet Formations - the formations are better than they used to be. The ‘anti avoidance’ system I wish I could just turn off. Ships sometimes get stuck or wander off doing the strangest thing. Any major changes to your fleet composition tend to resemble a cloud of angry bees more than a polished naval unit. I’d love to see a pre battle deployment option where you can set your ships up. As well the UI & behaviour of the unit cards is still pretty wonky, it’s easy to mess up divisions by accidentally merging them for instance.

Visuals - An after action report would be a godsend! I think the game looks pretty good though. Doubly so when you consider the size of the team. Graphical polish is something that can be done later as far as I’m concerned. Oh except the brown UI elements and typefaces that came in CP0.5 - not a fan.

AI Goofs - the AI loves to leave transports it is defending to their fate. Some of the AI designs are pretty out there as well (though that has a certain charm).

Dev Feedback - I think the devs wanted to make ship design more difficult - so your complaint (as you put it) made it more likely for them to put it in. The devs are pretty… quiet. Whilst I’d love to hear more from them if it’s a choice between that or them getting some more stuff done I’ll choose the stuff. 

[Noobito]

2 hours ago, brothermunro said:

Interesting points, just my from my own experience:

Ship Builder - I like the tightening up of the designer. You really do have to make a decision between the balance of firepower, protection, and speed. The earlier versions allowed you to make pretty crazy ships which had lots of everything. Adding difficult choices and trade offs I think makes the game more fun, especially long term.

Reload Speed - I’ll let those more qualified make historical comparisons but I genuinely don’t find reload times to be excessively long, they feel pretty appropriate to the era and I rarely feel the need to use autoloaders.

Fleet Formations - the formations are better than they used to be. The ‘anti avoidance’ system I wish I could just turn off. Ships sometimes get stuck or wander off doing the strangest thing. Any major changes to your fleet composition tend to resemble a cloud of angry bees more than a polished naval unit. I’d love to see a pre battle deployment option where you can set your ships up. As well the UI & behaviour of the unit cards is still pretty wonky, it’s easy to mess up divisions by accidentally merging them for instance.

Visuals - An after action report would be a godsend! I think the game looks pretty good though. Doubly so when you consider the size of the team. Graphical polish is something that can be done later as far as I’m concerned. Oh except the brown UI elements and typefaces that came in CP0.5 - not a fan.

AI Goofs - the AI loves to leave transports it is defending to their fate. Some of the AI designs are pretty out there as well (though that has a certain charm).

Dev Feedback - I think the devs wanted to make ship design more difficult - so your complaint (as you put it) made it more likely for them to put it in. The devs are pretty… quiet. Whilst I’d love to hear more from them if it’s a choice between that or them getting some more stuff done I’ll choose the stuff. 

Indeed all fair points. Love your channel btw
The designer before did indeed allow for some pretty insane designs that I felt were a bit much, and some ships mostly cruisers still feel kinda out there with what I can do to them. But when it comes to general balancing, I feel cruisers ultimately get the best out of tonnage limits and restrictions while destroyers and battleships get screwed sometimes.

So reload speed, did some testing and the fastest I can get a 1940 16 inch triple super heavy's to fire is just over 38 seconds, but this requires auto loaders and a 100 veteran crew to occur. Not really entirely possible to get 5 second reload time on a 8 inch for that Des Moine's spam.

But the AI has made some even stranger ship designs because of this new update. Recently tested out my ships against the new Italian ships, the AI created a 75k ton Battlecruiser armed with 6 quad 14 inch auto-loaders firing standard shells. Safe to say this ship was a spam boat with dozens of smaller secondary guns spread out everywhere, I'm honestly amazed the ship didn't explode.