Hello - New Player and Thoughts on Campaign as of v96

[Littorio]

Greetings all,

I have watched this game from afar for a long time now (years?) and have regularly popped in here to observe the development and feedback. Yesterday I finally took the plunge, so I got my hands on v95 right before the switch. Obviously it is a work in progress and as far as early access games go, I credit Nick and the devs for what they have done so far. There is a lot at work here under the hood that I bet many people don't notice and take for granted. That said, there are many areas in which things need to be improved. While my overall view is positive, these are the things I believe that based on my playing and reading your comments, would most efficiently help the game become better quickly (not perfect, just better):

1. Reframing engagements - how they are explained to occur, knowledge of enemy task force composition, fog of war, "smoke sighted,' etc.

2. Fleshing out and explaining more on transports and all their ins-and-outs - how they are destroyed/protected, proper fleet composition and disposition to limit losses, producing them as part of the budget (spend money to make money)?

3. Battle map scene graphics - night/day, fog, storms, swells, etc.

 

I hope a fresh pair of eyes on this is useful to you all. To explain my points further, the first part is necessary to properly have engagements and avoid endless "smoke sighted" encounters. Part of this ties into my third point, but more on that later. Basically, if we can KNOW that this will be a cruiser duel between my CA and their CL...why can't I jump into the actual fight and see the CL immediately. How then did my men know an enemy CL was in the area? How have we identified their forces? Reworking this mechanic just a little would go a long way to having enjoyable engagements that actually make sense. In v96 I actually had an enemy run away sensibly and demonstrate my point. We both engaged, my CA and his CL, starting the battle in visual range of each other. After several nasty 8-inch hits he popped smoke and used his superior top speed to flee the battle. I have no problem at all with this. The issue is jumping into a fight for the AI to cheat and flee the battle before he has even sighted you, let alone engaged. Otherwise, what purpose is there to accepting the engagement on the campaign map???

The second part is vitally important to the campaign itself, but not an immediate issue like point #1. As it stands, I haven't seen much clarity regarding TPs and where they actually come from/are protected/are detected/are intercepted/are destroyed. Each transport lost, at least as far as I can tell whether from the auto-fighting on turn changing or in an actual battle, costs you x-amount of money from your monthly/yearly budget. Now...if this is going to be a mechanic, especially with such an instrumental effect on the campaign, we need clarification and guidance on how it all works. Would more be protected if all ships were set to go to sea? Are light cruisers the best escorts, or generally ships that have more range? What about speed? What exactly determines how many, if any, of your TPs get auto-sunk each turn? What about enemy ones? What is the division between auto-sinking and generating a convoy attack/defense battle for you to play? Even more...why are some transports heavily armed? I have seen some with 7 or 8 guns, ranging from 2"-4". Is there some logic to this? Why are there differences in TP construction but not crew XP levels manning them? Ultimately, I would love to see transport building, even if abstracted at first to just a single slider pumping out one design. This gives us a method of understanding what we have to work with as far as merchant marine shipping. We would have that info as the chief admiral of a nation after all. Make it something like HOI4 - you have "200 convoys" and you use 100 currently. If you lose too many and don't build anymore, you start having trade issues. Something along those lines would help to make the centrality of convoys more meaningful and controllable by us, the "ultimate admirals" lol.

Lastly - tying into the first point (perhaps controversially): graphics are not always an end game thing to worry about. In this case, battle map graphics are a must in order to fully understand the encounters and engagements you will have to fight. What I mean by this is that I see players complain about "World of Warships cloaking" and "invisibility." While I am sympathetic given the engagement parameters usually and the "smoke sighted" chasing, I don't think everyone looks at the weather button. It's deceiving - the sky is always the same midsummer afternoon, partly cloudy but bright. Yet, if you look at the weather button...Gale, Rough Seas, Windy, Night, LOL! No wonder we almost have to run into some ships at times to find them (or endlessly chase "smoke" that we shouldn't even be able to see in a storm...which means we shouldn't even have had a campaign map alert in the first place, but i digress). Often, the weather is horrendous, but that sunny sky fools us and we get angry. It's just one big wrap around picture I believe. I shouldn't be hard to AT LEAST give us a NIGHT backdrop for our battles if the weather thing reads NIGHT. From there, storms, windy conditions, rain, fog, etc can gradually be added with updates. But as it stands, the physical backdrop of the battles is ruining immersion, and making people angry because they can't understand why the enemy is hard to see/hit/follow, etc.

 

Hope all that helps!

Edited December 4, 2021 by Littorio