Update 1.04, The Good, Bad and Ugly/Infuriating

[Bigjku]

I stepped away from the game for several months when there were no updates.  Came back to it in the last few weeks to see what was improved and what was working better.  These are my thoughts.

Good

The ship designer appears to be working somewhat better.  It seems to save ships.  Most importantly you are letting me design all of my ship classes in a custom battle.  This is such a vast improvement that it can't be overstated.  I can actually create a fleet that makes sense together and fight with it so it make obvious the potential of the game.

Advice on some smaller details of the ship designer got updated.  All of the options now make more sense.  So job well done there.

Bad

The AI still builds awful ships.   They just don't get it and there is no logic there.  I have been playing 1927 battles of the USN against the RN.  Often as not they trot out battleships with 13 inch guns, destroyers with one torpedo, heavy cruisers with 8 different calibers of guns on them.  The only way to get the AI to design decent ships is to play very late dates as far as I can tell.  And then you just get monster ships out of them most of the time.  Look, just implement a ship library and be done with it.  Or let me design my opponents ships too.  I takes a while to load a battle so its a big disappointment when the other side brings their clown car.  Plus at times I just want to simulate a battle by designing exactly what I want on both sides.  Please fix this.

The tactical controls are still kind of wonky.  There still desperately needs to be a reverse heading button that reverses the lead ship in the column and changes heading 180 degrees.

Torpedo attacks work a bit better but I still need to be able to set the spread (narrow, normal, wide).  It is improved but not fixed.

The speed controls still don't really work right.  It seems more of a suggestion.  The ability to set a "fleet speed" that all units are at prior to the battle would help.  The ability to order speeds to the whole fleet would be helpful.

Ugly

I hate to say this...but I don't know that I will keep playing the game if fleet deployment and formations aren't fixed.  If I try to work with a reasonably sized fleet of mixed units (6 capital ships, 6 cruisers, 6 destroyers) the game deploys them in a maddening way to start and there is no quick or clean way to get them deployed in a way that makes any sense at all.  Whatever random program you are using to do this needs to be deleted.  Either let me place my units or simply deploy them in a line ahead formation with units of the same type all in the same divisions.  I can make the necessary changes from there.  But when the AI has defaulted to putting 4 of my capital units in line ahead, 2 more following them, 2 cruisers in a screen, 4 destroyers following the first capital ship unit (and colliding with the second division of capital units) and then 2 destroyers in a screen it becomes and almost impossible mess to sort out.  I have figured out how to do it.  But it involves directing individual ships away from each other and reassembling divisions.  I can do this by starting massively far away from the enemy so I have time to do it.  And it still only works about 70% of the time.  But mostly its just something that is unreasonably annoying.  It doesn't need to be like this.  So just stop it.

That brings me to point two.  The collision avoidance and line ahead formations simply don't hold together and work.  Fairly often when simply executing a 30-60 degree turn with no one else in the way ships within the same line will create major issues for one another.  If I am in one places managing my light units I can return to my battle line to find one ship 10,000 yards ahead of the others because ship two and three collided and then turned in useless circles and ships 4, 5, and 6 are following ship 3 around.  The only way to resolve this is to disassemble the damn formation by detaching a ship, turning it away and sending it the the back of the formation.   They aren't under fire.  They aren't avoiding torpedoes.  They just for some reason can't stop colliding with one another.  And I am extremely careful with my maneuvering.  I don't turn formations back in on themselves.  I don't cross different lines of ships (excepting the mess of how the AI puts them on the field in the first place).

These issues make the game feel broken and worse than that they make it INSANELY FRUSTRATING.  I am a huge fan of the studios work.  Love the Civil War game.  I love what this game could be.  But stop working on the campaign and fix the very basic stuff with the battles.  This game has a broken core mechanic.  You can't layer more crap on top of it right now.  I hate saying it but it is 100% true.

 

[Captain Meow]

25 minutes ago, Bigjku said:

Or let me design my opponents ships too. 

You can do it since patch 1.02. There's a button "You" at the top near "Launch", clicking on it you can switch to enemy (and back) to design or choose which already designed ships enemy will have. Next great thing after being able to have your created designs saved in custom battles.  I play only with & against my own designs.

[Bigjku]

Thanks, that is a small button but that solves one issue.