Campaign feedback

[llib]

Hi.

Haven't noticed originally the campaign was released until couple days back, but have played a bit of campaign.

1) Launcher suggestion: Although I have only played for about three days, after two of them update was triggered, and this either deleted or made unavailable my old campaign. Please consider adding the option to select whether automatically update game or not into the launcher(should be just a tick selection). I actually thought there was such option but don't see it now.

2) Question about ship design - when I copy existing design, I can't add more modern system. For example, after researching new version of 2-in gun, I could not replace it in existing design. That's not good for convenience of updating existing design slightly, also should there be a feature to upgrade/retrofit ships(and there definitely should be one) that would make that feature almost useless.

3) Is there currently ship upgrade feature? Haven't really searched for and had not much opportunity to look around.

4) On the campaign menu, the box with information needs to be scrollable.

5) Fleet menu needs to become better and allow more organization, ideally to form units into squadrons and fleets.

6) In situation where one side has more ships and the other has better ships, the "fair" 1:1 battles can be annoying. This should probably work together with 5 in that units can be organized and operate together in predictable manner. Though I do realize this is going to be a bit difficult to balance.

7)To be perfectly honest, I expected game campaign to be real-time with control over fleet operations, reconnaissance, actions and reactions, rather than turn-based and random chance encounters based on ships in areas. And with turn-based campaign and chance encounters I guess it's never going to be quite what I hoped for, which does not mean it will be bad game just not as great as I thought it would be. If this is what you are currently implementing (i.e. this isn't just placeholder) probably switching to RT would be too big effort, so maybe leave that to version 1.5 or 2.

8 ) Ship design wise, I let the AI design ships first round, and they weren't bad, though Germany got better BBs first time, their CA's had torpedoes (mine did not), CL's on both sides got torpedoes. For the second campaign I designed my ships, and I went for fewer but better, as a result I outclass the enemy one on one in all classes. Weirdly enough, for the non-torpedo boats, Germany only has side launchers on their battleships and no launchers on their cruisers.

9 ) Torpedoes... early on, they are very effective. And perhaps a bit too much so. I don't think the issue is that they do so much damage, that's probably accurate and typically with enough bulkheads ships can survive hits, however perhaps the issue is that they work a  bit too reliably in terms of not malfunctioning(no duds), going in perfect straight lines (although I don't really know much about early era torpedoes, I know later torpedoes had many issues and I would expect early ones to have them too).

10) Damage persistence - it looks like there is now no way to persistently disable engines in the battle. That's a problem. This leads to weird cases like torpedo boat getting hit over and over into engines (including hits with torpedoes), but if it stays alive long enough that damage is always repaired and ship sails on like nothing happened. I think this should change. I don't mind ships sometimes surviving huge amount of damage, but there should at least be possibility for them to be disabled for the battle. This can currently happen to guns, but seems not engines.

 

EDIT:

11) Probably more than one campaign in progress should be allowed 😉

12) In the ship designer, when trying to set target speed, the popup blocks the speed view. This makes it impossible to see currently selected speed and is very frustrating/annoying. Please do something about that, two possible improvements:

-In addition to mouse dragging, allow mouse selection of the edit field but keyboard finetuning, so that the popup window can be someplace else when changing speed. This is probably good idea to do anyway, because even with unblocked window finer selection of particular target speed is tricky and mouse selection would be better.

-change the way popup is triggered or how long it stays

EDIT2:

Wanted to add, also had lot of fun with the game already. So developers, thank you so far and keep coding 🙂

 

Edited December 4, 2021 by llib

[llib]

I'll be adding more feedback as a separate post to not confuse what was added in edit.
-In one prolonged battle, the gun/torpedo circles as well as targeting lines (the red ones) kind of seemed disappear under water for the most part in the later part of battle. I tried to check I had the "gun ranges" feature enabled (by turning it off and on couple times) but this did not help. The captions of the circles(what is it for and the distance - for example Torp 0.9km - still were visible.

-In the same battle(where above behavior was observed), I was torpedoing few ships that were already dead in the water (heavily damaged). However, the torpedoes went under them (or just through them). This was not one torpedo, but at least three(I think four), with three different ships being targeted (one was torpedo boat, but two were heavy cruisers). Eariler torpedo hits were fine.

Dunno if something happened with the sea level plane, or if maybe the engine calculated hit position in the wrong direction (partially flooded ships would have deeper part in water, meaning hit zone would be elsewhere, I don't know if game is trying to calculate that, but if it is, one possibility is it's having substraction/addition switched in some place.

I need to emphasize I only saw this in one battle which was rather long stern chase.

One other possibility comes to mind, whether the ships firing torpedoes may have been deeper in the water (I mean flooded). While this could in theory be the case, I don't think it was the case of all of them, and in any case torpedo should float fixed distance from surface, not fixed distance from launcher that fired it.

[akd]

6 hours ago, llib said:

9 ) Torpedoes... early on, they are very effective. And perhaps a bit too much so. I don't think the issue is that they do so much damage, that's probably accurate and typically with enough bulkheads ships can survive hits, however perhaps the issue is that they work a  bit too reliably in terms of not malfunctioning(no duds), going in perfect straight lines (although I don't really know much about early era torpedoes, I know later torpedoes had many issues and I would expect early ones to have them too).

Early torpedoes did not run straight at all (nor were they necessarily very good at holding the right depth), and did not reliably detonate at low impact angles.  I agree that the damage from early torpedoes is about right, but they are far to reliable.

Quote

10) Damage persistence - it looks like there is now no way to persistently disable engines in the battle. That's a problem. This leads to weird cases like torpedo boat getting hit over and over into engines (including hits with torpedoes), but if it stays alive long enough that damage is always repaired and ship sails on like nothing happened. I think this should change. I don't mind ships sometimes surviving huge amount of damage, but there should at least be possibility for them to be disabled for the battle. This can currently happen to guns, but seems not engines.

If the "box" that is associated with the engine machinery is destroyed (red), the engine damage is permanent.  The problem with torpedo boats is that shells of all calibers (small to large) and types (AP and HE) always over penetrate, so it is really hard to deliver the necessary damage to destroy a "box" and its associated components unless you hit them with very, very big calibers (such that even the over pen damage can still destroy).  Even AP shells should not over pen if they are passing down the length of the ship or at lower angles in general, but currently all shells always over pen no matter type, caliber or angle.  It's like the only over pen calculation is whether or not the shell's initial contact is with a no / low armor location, nothing else is considered.

Edited December 4, 2021 by akd