Player Suggestions - January/February

[Nick Thomadis]

Hello Admirals and happy new year!

This topic will help to prioritize feedback and get it all in one place
Please post your suggestions on improving the game in this thread.

Rules:
- 1x suggestion per post (or a clear numbered list of suggestions)
- Repeats of other player suggestions are allowed

We will collect suggestions and feedback and tell you which we will add to the development list for next stages at the end of the month.

The suggestions for December where in this thread:

List of developed additions based on the previous feedback post:
- Design the ships of the AI opponent in Custom Battles
- Make friendly ships to auto-evade torpedoes
- Make friendly fire check for ships
- Ability to name all ships in the campaign
- Accuracy improvement close range / early tech
- Ships turning too fast to dodge torps or to stay in formation (Bug fixed in 1.03/1.04)
- Secondary guns more effective (1.03/1.04)
- AI can switch to HE evaluating not only penetration but also the angle of target (1.03/1.04)
- Some important fixes for evasion/division controls (In process 1.03/1.04)
- Ships sink more gradually (1.03/1.04)
- Flash Fires/Ammo detonations should affect ammo storage. (1.03/1.04)
- Improved Battle AI
- Improved Auto-Design 

Confirmed new features for the next patches:
- Ship refit in campaign (Planned for v1.05)
- Task forces/Campaign movement  (Planned for v1.05)
- More sea roles (Planned for v1.05)
- More events and peace time mechanics (Planned for forthcoming patches)
- Further improved AI (Planned for v1.05)
- Further auto-Design improvement (Planned for v1.05)
- More Shell Options (Choose AP/HE Ratio for Main/Sec Guns, Choose Ammo for Main/Sec  Guns during Battle, Different AP/HE Shells such as SAP, Common HE,  etc. 
- Button for disabling auto-avoid of ships. (Planned for v1.05)
- Make Torpedo Boats more vulnerable (done via flooding mechanics). (Planned for v1.05)
- Customized Beam/Draught for ships (Planned for v1.05)
- Fix remaining issues of division formations  (Planned for v1.05)
- More to come

 

[Nick Thomadis]

Hello all, here is a list of chosen features that were made so far based on your recent suggestions:
- Design the ships of the AI opponent in Custom Battles
- Make friendly ships to auto-evade torpedoes
- Make friendly fire check for ships
- Ability to name all ships in the campaign
- Accuracy improvement close range / early tech

Confirmed new features for the next patch:
- Ship refit in campaign

We will soon let you know for more important features that will be developed.

The thread is open for new suggestions.

[T_the_ferret]

I'll just repost most of my suggestions from last month and a new one set in bold:

1: More early ships (1890-1910) as well as modules and options for that time period. Currently these ships offer the least amount of build possibility and creativity while also being a focus of the campaign as it starts then.

2: Gunships or more torpedo boats introduced to allow small-scale battle to still be interesting and dynamic while also offering another threat against DD and CL than just torpedoes .

3: Important research in campaign. Currently everything in campaign takes way too much time to research and thus priority or focus of research offers absolutely no benefit. What is only 3-4 months away from being researched is the only thing you'll unlock.

4: Clarify tooltips, currently many tooltips display erroneous information such as "accuracy increase" or are not clear enough such as what resistance offers. The right panel when designing is also nothing but a mess of numbers and confusing words for new players not acquainted with naval terms or the game itself.

5: Improve naval academy, currently those missions not only make for a poor introduction overall to the game, they do not explain much either and some outright use erroneous information and battle parameters, such as tooltips describing battle against outdated ships but those ships sporting 1920-1930 technology.

6: Change nation AI and AI overall to not prioritize "wall of torpedoes" so much, as it feels they are heavily weighted to use torpedoes.

7: Vastly improve light shells and propellant modules, currently light shell and some propellant module benefits are pitiful which makes almost no one use them. A sliding scale of accuracy vs range and RoF would be much better.

8: Improve small gun accuracy and damage. Currently small caliber guns (under 127) feel outright useless unless at high Mark tiers, such as Mark 4, because of the huge accuracy change between calibers. 51mm guns cannot hit the broadside of a barn while 203mm guns can (relatively) easily hit enemies at 5km. This makes small caliber guns useless and massively influences small-scale battles into slap fights at knife fight range, or torpedo spams. Smoothing accuracy from low to high caliber would help enormously.

9: Very secondary but i would love to see more options for Ironclad/Monitor battles and other such things.

10: Please please please please PLEASE  I AM BEGGING YOU  hire a community manager or someone able to dedicate time to the community. I cannot with any amount of words overstate how much it would improve its health and attitude as well as promote constructive discussion and help the game.

11: Stats such as resistance, flodability and stability desperately need a rework. Early ship suffer from very low points in those stats while late ship have immense amount of them to the point it is very easy to see destroyers get ridiculously high hull form for 70%+ bonus to acceleration and 100%+ bonus to turning rate or even -40% gun damage, which on destroyers are even more ridiculous. This is not going into such stats on battleships, battlecruisers and heavy cruisers where it can reach -70% gun damage, -40% torpedo damage, +120% ricochet chances and -50% flooding chances. This makes early battle way too short and by virtue of low accuracy and high damage while late battles are frustrating on virtues of torpedoes and guns doing little to no damage at all even when otherwise devastating hits are scored. 

Battleships can take multiple 500mm shell penetration with no internal damage, heavy cruisers can take 24 inch torpedo salvoes sometime with no flooding nor crippling damage, and even destroyers can just shrug off the very few shells that manage to hit them 

Edit: 12: Very minor but it'd be nice to be able to design transports and they would influence how cheap/costly they are to maintain and how much are needed to maintain your supply lines, as well as their defenses and guns

Edited January 10, 2022 by T_the_ferret

[SiWi]

1. Option to chose different types of ammo for the 2nddaries then the main guns.

2 Options to let the "not engage" side of a ship chose a different target, to make side guns more relevant.

3 the let the torpedo launcher track enemy ships even when in "off" firemode.

[DieHard_BR]

1 For the battle generator in the campaign the player has the ability for some battles to select part of the fleet that will engage the enemy.

2 For the campaign the AI ships should have minumum requirements such as belt, bulkheads, deck, guns by class. Tired to see BB in 1930 or 1940 with 20 knots speed and 9 belt.

Edited January 8, 2022 by DieHard_BR

[Schirüno]

The situation currently is all of my or the enemies ships will target the lead ship of the largest class(really weird tbh) and will NOT switch to any other ship unless said target ship is sunk or not in range, guns that haven't come into range will target the closest ship in their proximity.

Each ship should have their own target, if multiple ships fire at one target there will be an accuracy penalty.

P.S. in older versions the enemy ships could switch targets without the conditions stated above but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Schirüno

[Kreisauer]

Being able to Import/Export Shipdesigns would be awesome. Just let it spit out the code, i'm sure there is one

[SiWi]

53 minutes ago, Kreisauer said:

Being able to Import/Export Shipdesigns would be awesome. Just let it spit out the code, i'm sure there is one

I think that there could be an issue with different tech leading to different ship possible, but then again we should then be able to tweak the designs to fit the technology viable.

[The PC Collector]

1- Priority tech needs to be fixed. A 50% bonus bonus at the cost of a 50% penalty in everything else is not operative and unreallistic. Given the amount of tech fields, diverting the resources to increase one by 50% would reallistically have a negligible impact on the rest. And, even if not, the way it is designed simpy makes the system worthless. No sane person would take a 50% penalty in EVERYTHING to get a measly 50% bonus on the priority tech. Penalties should be around 5% for each one at most. Maybe, make them increase for each tech. Like, 5% for the first, 12% for two, and 20% for three, for a total of 20% penalty if all three priorities are used. And penalties for other techs prioritised when using more than one should be removed.

2- QoL improvement for the Ship Design window: Add a second tab on it for obsolete/decomissioned designs, and add a "mark as obsolete/Decomission design" button on the main tab. This way you can keep at hand only the designs you are going to use. That is already a problem in the current, short campaigns, in the long ones this will be a must.

Then, in the Obsolete/Decommisioned designs, you should have an option to make the design active again, or to delete it definitively (useful for failed designs)

3- QoL improvement for the battle overview: Add the class of the participating ships, at least for your own ships. Useful when you have more than a class of the same kind of ship.

4- QoL improvement for the ship designer: Add a "generate name" button in the design tool, to choose another name of the list, instead of the one chosen automatically.

5- Add Ironclad battleships/cruisers/frigates to the campaign. Since all metal ships were introduced in the mid/late 1880s, reallistically by 1890 a significant part of the fleets, if not most, would still be Ironclad era ships. Also, this would give more variety to the 1890 start. Right now, the only reason to not use auto generated fleet on the 1890 start is how shitty the algorythm for auto creation is, because you have absolutely no options.

6- A lot of calibers widely used like are missing. Making the gun sizes scale by half inches rather than full inches would solve most of this.

7- Early destroyer/large torpedo boat hull for Spain in 1890 start.

8- Spain needs a early battleship similar to the french ones, as their early battleships, which were among the first proper all metal battleships, were based off french ironclad battleship desings, and thus would look similar.

9- French Ironclad hulls need to be fixed, as they allow rear superfiring turrets much earlier than it should.

10- Implement some sort of primitive peace mechanism that allows the campaign to continue in the case of peace/revolution. Simply keep the turns running, but without battles, and make the war start again after a certain number of turns (a random between 20 and 40, for example)

11- Ships need to be able to be assigned to more specific roles. That would give low caliber gunboat cruisers and other kind of specifically designed ships a place in the game.

Edited January 8, 2022 by The PC Collector
Fixed typos

[akd]

29 minutes ago, The PC Collector said:

7- Early destroyer/large torpedo boat hull for Spain in 1890 start.

Spain had no such ship in 1890.  What she had was a torpedo gunboat (albeit a fast one at 23kn, but probably not trialed to the same standards as RN ships, so this is likely somewhat exaggerated for comparison purposes with other torpedo gunboats of similar design achieving 19-20kn).

Spain's first large torpedo boat / destroyer (of roughly the hull form in the game) was laid down in 1896, in line with many other nations and behind some.

Edited January 8, 2022 by akd

[The PC Collector]

34 minutes ago, akd said:

Spain had no such ship in 1890.  What she had was a torpedo gunboat (albeit a fast one at 23kn, but probably not trialed to the same standards as RN ships, so this is likely somewhat exaggerated for comparison purposes with other torpedo gunboats of similar design achieving 19-20kn).

Spain's first large torpedo boat / destroyer (of roughly the hull form in the game) was laid down in 1896, in line with many other nations and behind some.

If you want that we have this dicussion in every thread fine by me. Most sources you can check consider Destructor to be the first ship that can be considered a destroyer. And even if not, her displacement is twice as the TBs in that era, so it is still a disticntive hull (hence why I said "large torpedo boat" as an option)

Edited January 8, 2022 by The PC Collector

[Werwaz]

1. expand campaign with more countries, and add proper diplomacy so it isn't always war

2. get rid of semi-oil diesel engines and gas turbines since coal doesn't work in combustion engines

3. steam workshop based import/export ship designs

4. improve AI designer- most AI ships are pushovers when put against a player-built ship of similar displacement. That being said, the AI is actually quite competent at commanding player built ships.

5. officer corps in campaign- one would assign a captain to a given ship, and they would increase the effectiveness of said ship based on their area of expertise. the number of new captains one would receive each year and their quality would be tied to crew costs. 

EDIT:

6. in custom battles, I often see battle going in one of three ways:

1. it devolves into an all out brawl at super close range (these are quite fun)
2. the enemy AI concentrates on my BB, allowing for any gun based BC or CA to close the distance and deliver devastating point-blank fire whist they are still fixated on the BB
3. the battle is attritional, and the fleets expend most of their ammo at super long range until someone sinks due to the sheer number of deck pens

7. partial pen damage should be nerfed to about half of what it is currently.

EDIT 2:

8. Resistance should be reworked so that super high resistance is a diminishing return rather than a must have. a BB with 120 base resistance is far less competitive than a similar build with 160 base resistance. in the above example, the 120 resistance ship would have about 60 percent damage reduction, whilst the 160 resistance ship would have about a 90 percent damage reduction. That would mean that a ship with 120 resistance would take FOUR TIMES THE DAMAGE compared to the 160 resistance. In short, the resistance bonus is applied in a linear fashion when the effects are exponential, and the easiest solution if to make the application exponential, i.e. one would have to use four times as much resistance to go from 40 percent to 10 percent, rather than 40 more points.

9. some Tillman battleships would be a welcome addition since they are well within the tonnage range of this game (most of them were around 65-80k tons in displacement)

 

 

Edited January 30, 2022 by Werwaz

[Skeksis]

I) Improve night-time aesthetics, for battles. Maybe large sun, moon phase icons or night shadow casing across the skybox.

II) General bad weather aesthetics. Rain, dark clouds, sea spray of white caps (at close camera views). Howling wind sounds etc (at close ship viewing too). Lighting off in the distance, including sounds (at least at the start of battle, to give the player an 'heads up' of weather conditions).

III) Port finance/cargo information. I'm assuming capturing ports or controlling sea areas will increase finance/cargo capacity in some way, for nations to expand economically. So then we might need a breakdown of such information, more information than just tonnage. To have some way of knowing which ports to claim, to know which nations to aggravate or even to defend against. I.e. build up the economic/cargo gameplay abit.

Actually it's not that easy to come up with new improvements (not already listed previously) because the game, as is, is very polished. 

I guess the next stages coming up this year, along with map expansion's, and what's not in game yet, is: 

• Submarine & Anti Submarine Warfare. 
• Mine & Anti Mine Warfare.
• Alliances and Treaties.
• Spying & Intelligence gathering - and the risk of.

Again it's also not easy to give good feedback on these since we really don't know the exact framework. Just saying I'm looking forwards to this year's development and the build up to a fully completed campaign.  

Edited January 10, 2022 by Skeksis

[akd]

36 minutes ago, The PC Collector said:

If you want that we have this dicussion in every thread fine by me. Most sources you can check consider Destructor to be the first ship that can be considered a destroyer. And even if not, her displacement is twice as the TBs in that era, so it is still a disticntive hull (hence why I said "large torpedo boat" as an option)

I already pointed out why you were wrong on this, so I'll repeat facts when you repeat fiction.  It's not the "large torpedo boat / destroyer" as it is in game (high speed, low freeboard, short range hull form, i.e. scaled up torpedo boat), and it is not the first conceptualization of the "destroyer" role in a broader sense.  That is making way too much of the actual name of the ship, when the naming for the concept was still in flux (e.g. RN was pursuing same concept earlier, but under with names like "catcher" not "destroyer"; regardless, use of "torpedo boat destroyer" in RN documents precedes Spanish Destructor, so it was not even the origin of the name, much less the broader concept).  Destructor was a torpedo gunboat.  It is a unique form that we need in game.  Suggest something that is based in fact, not fiction.

https://navypedia.org/ships/uk/brit_dd_grasshopper.htm

https://navypedia.org/ships/uk/brit_dd_rattlesnake.htm

https://navypedia.org/ships/france/fr_dd_bombe.htm

https://navypedia.org/ships/austrohungary/ah_dd_blitz.htm

https://navypedia.org/ships/spain/sp_dd_destructor.htm

 

Edited January 8, 2022 by akd

[The PC Collector]

16 minutes ago, akd said:

I already pointed out why you were wrong on this, so I'll repeat facts when you repeat fiction.  It's not the "large torpedo boat / destroyer" as it is in game (high speed, low freeboard, short range hull form), and it is not the first conceptualization of the "destroyer" role in a broader sense.  That is making way too much of the actual name of the ship, when the naming for the concept was still in flux (e.g. RN was pursuing same concept earlier, but under with names like "catcher" not "destroyer"; regardless, use of "torpedo boat destroyer" in RN documents precedes Spanish Destructor, so it was not even the origin of the name, much less the broader concept).  Destructor was a torpedo gunboat.  It is a unique form that we need in game.  Suggest something that is based in fact, not fiction.

https://navypedia.org/ships/uk/brit_dd_grasshopper.htm

https://navypedia.org/ships/uk/brit_dd_rattlesnake.htm

https://navypedia.org/ships/spain/sp_dd_destructor.htm

 

At least we agree that it is something needed in the game. That "torpedo gunboat" concept has a completely different name in Spanish (and to be fair I didn't knew how to translate it), but is good to know it for future submissions. However, about the origin of the name... the only thing we are going to agree is that we disagree, so I'll politely suggest that we drop that topic.

[halofanjames]

1. have a turret design as a base with caliber being edited afterwards as well as barrel number (ie the ability to have the TbtsK C/36 5.9 inch and the SK C/28 as well in the single mount)

2. following the first suggestion. give each turret type it's own stats in terms of reload, travers, cost and the likes with the barrel amount and caliber affecting each of those (such as a 4 inch gun being just a tad bit too pricy for ones liking for it's benefits but a 3.5 inch is a tad bit cheaper and lighter with a higher fire rate)

3. for the campaign when you select historical AI priorities the AI should be given tailored templates to that nation based on historical ships and not the same flavour of paste for every nation (ie fighting against a russian fleet should feel and look different to that of fighting japan or france) and when it get's a new tech if it doesn't deviate far from the base design it can add it as a retrofit (when that happens) or it can save new designs to align with a human made template and the other mode of AI difficulty can be whatever the AI thinks is good

4. wouldn't mind a more concrete roadmap with a rough estimate till things drop

[Wowzery]

So far, my biggest peeve is in the campaign, the fleet screen.  When you scroll around on the ships there is that pop up displaying all that ships info.  Get rid of it, all it does is block the view of the list of ships in the fleet.  Gets really annoying when I'm trying to set the ships to either in being or at sea and the pop up is hiding what port I'm trying to look at.

[akd]

32 minutes ago, The PC Collector said:

At least we agree that it is something needed in the game. That "torpedo gunboat" concept has a completely different name in Spanish (and to be fair I didn't knew how to translate it), but is good to know it for future submissions. However, about the origin of the name... the only thing we are going to agree is that we disagree, so I'll politely suggest that we drop that topic.

I'm not asking you to agree with my opinion, I'm asking you to look at the documented history.  J.A. Fisher used "torpedo boat destroyer" in his official report and conclusions on the 1885 fleet maneuvers:

British Cruisers of the Victorian Era, Norman Friedman

Destructor was laid down in 1886. It is without a doubt a central part of the story of the development of these types of vessels, but it didn't exist in isolation and it didn't take the form that later entered service more widely and in multiple navies as the "torpedo boat destroyer."

Agree entirely that there a huge, gaping holes in the types of ships available for a campaign start in 1890.  It is almost comical building a fleet almost entirely from stubby forms of later hulls.

Edited January 8, 2022 by akd

[Toby]

ive said it once ill say it a million more time

the main feature we need right now and to help test future additions to the campaign is more countries and diplomacy. the campaign being tow countries a\nd lasting only a short period of time makes testing long term features like economy and ship rebuilding actually viabkle rather then the current situation where the campaign is too shrot for any of that to matter

 

[ColonelHenry]

10 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

We will soon let you know for more important features that will be developed.

I really really hope that further development of crews or crew morale is being considered to help mitigate 1% floating ships angling away while stationary and still shooting.

[vyprestrike]

https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/39431-massive-hulltowermodule-suggestion-that-was-too-big-to-fit-into-the-player-suggestions-thread/

I made a huge post earlier last year during the December round of feedback which I still stand by but I now think I probably should have condensed, so here's the condensed version.

1. Have a menu to assign any base hull, tower, funnels, and guns to any country when using unlock on.

2. Length/Width/Height scaling for hulls. We already have length scaling, let us scale the other two dimensions.

3. Size scaling for towers and funnels and barbettes. Many towers and funnels are resized versions of each other, let us resize the modules ourselves and use a formula to calculate stats based on scale.

4. Use community made designs for AI ships. The game's designer is too complex for the AI to work with but not complex enough to satisfy most human players. Let the community design ships for each other like just about every other build and battle game which uses community and dev made designs. This would increase the quality of designs we fight while also allowing for more complexity in ship design.

[The PC Collector]

Something I noticed in custom battles, and is not exactly a suggestion, but feedback. But since I don't know where else to post it, I'll leave it here.

This is the right flag for Spain in most of the era the game happens in:



The one currently featured in the game wasn't a thing until 1981. The flag is actually displayed right in the country selection, but the ships show the modern one, which won't be accurate for ships in that era.

As it can be seen, the flag displayed in the ships is not the right one.

Edited January 9, 2022 by The PC Collector

[Schirüno]

1 hour ago, The PC Collector said:

Something I noticed in custom battles, and is not exactly a suggestion, but feedback. But since I don't know where else to post it, I'll leave it here.

This is the right flag for Spain in most of the era the game happens in:



The one currently featured in the game wasn't a thing until 1981. The flag is actually displayed right in the country selection, but the ships show the modern one, which won't be accurate for ships in that era.

As it can be seen, the flag displayed in the ships is not the right one.

The US flag is also not correct, in game it's the 49 star flag for some reason. 

Some nations should change flags according to the period(the US for example).

[The PC Collector]

11 minutes ago, Schirüno said:

The US flag is also not correct, in game it's the 49 star flag for some reason. 

Some nations should change flags according to the period(the US for example).

Better have the changing flags as an option. To be honest, I'd rather have the incorrect flag than either the II republic one (which would be correct from 1931 to 1936) ot the one representing the francoist dictatorship from 1939 onwards. Also, since the nation is labeled as "Spanish Empire, the pre 1931 is the most correct one.

[Andvarus]

Hello Game Labs, 

I've been playing and watching the game for a while now. While I quiet enjoy the game there are some bits and pieces that are either missing or a bit wacky. I hope you can adress any of the following suggestions in the future.

1. After a turret explosion the deck only has a really wacky texture which really looks odd. Is it possible to rework some of the damage Models of battle damage 

2. Rework the flooding. Having a ship heel by 35% to port with half off the stern beneath the waves and still having 1% buoyancy is pretty unrealistic

3. Sinking: The way ships sink in this game are 'Interesting' at the least. For example a ship got hit by 3 torpedos at port, heels to port at 40% angle and then just sinks on an even keel after two more compartments flood at the stern. I would love to see ships blow up in to 2 pieces after a Ammo detonation, have ammo detonatinons after flash fires and see ships capazise after they have been listing substantially to one side. 

4. We need a way to intercept moving fleets in the campaign. At the moment any big engagement are totally random while in the past battles like Jutland only happened cause the British decided to intercept the german fleet. 

5. Superstructure. When designing ships the Superstructure alway gives me a headache. Most of the primary and secondary towers just feel of and dont fit the ships of the nation. Also the placement of barbettes is not very satisfying.

6. Campaign length: The campaign are way to short at the moment. Sofar I've managed to get one done in 5 turns. I mean common I dont only want to use on generation of ships in the campaign. 

7. AI Ship Designs: They are bad! I mean 0.5 inch amour and 18knt on a light cruiser in 1900??? Were did the tonnage go?

8. Catapult Aircraft? I would love to see scout planes beeing launched from Battle Ships to mabey increase accuracy and make the spotting of ships easier. 

9. Intel before Campaign fights. Currently I always know what I'm going to face when I have random encounters on the campaign map. I would love to see a more vague approach, cause in reality you didn't knew what you were going to face when smoke on the horizon appeared.

For example: Atm a random encounter in campaign would look like this: 1 CA vs 1 CA. As soon as I go into battle the game still wants me to identfly what that ship is I'm going to fight allthough I allready know it is going to be a CA. To get rid of that you could either mix up numbers: 1 CA (You) vs 1-2 CA (AI) or  You could instead give some more vague information on which ship type you are going to face: 1 CA (You) vs 1 BC? (AI). This would increase the risk for picking fights with the enemy in my opinion.

And if you don't want to pick a big risk and always want to know what you are going to fight you could equip Ships with radar or (^)Scout aircraft to increase spotting power or have spys working for you. 

10. Officer Core: Just like the one from Age of Sails. I would love to have Commanders which increase the base stats of the Ships. This would make every lost ship an even harder blow cause you would lose a trained Captain, a Ship and the Crew aswel. 

As I allready mentioned, I really enjoy the game and I hope you keep on giving us cool new updates. 

Keep it up 😉

Edited January 9, 2022 by Andvarus