Nick Thomadis Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 Hello admirals, The next major update is still at work but is close to finish. We will provide the first beta on next week. Here is what it includes so far. ==v1.05 Update== CAMPAIGN Map Expansion: Expanded the map to include the Mediterranean Sea and a larger portion of Europe. New Nations: Italy, France and Austria-Hungary are added to the major nations. The nations form two rival alliances and fight with each other for total victory (this is temporary functionality until we offer the prolonged campaign system). Task Forces: Previously you were able to move ships only between ports. You can now also form Task Forces, by grouping ships and sending them to any sea point on the map. In this way you block strategic passages and generate missions according to the ships in the vicinity. Refit Mode: Now you can refit your ships, from changing a few components to radically replacing weapons, funnels, towers with modern variations. This new and essential feature will allow you to utilize all the latest technology advancements for your current ships without the need to scrap them and build new ones. New Sea Roles: New sea roles added to the previous “In Being” and “Sea Control”, special for the Task Forces, offer more options for controlling strategically your ships. Interface improvements: There is a new tab “Politics” where you will later manage some diplomacy aspects. Now you are able to overview the relations and power of all nations. Additionally we added an “ Economy Growth” to the GDP which will be dependent later from various conditions. You will be warned when you want to end the turn with danger of going bankrupt. When you hover at a sea region a tooltip shows statistical information for the included fleets. Many other minor changes to support the new functionalities. Balances: Maintenance cost is balanced so that it is not so high now that ships will spend more time at sea with all the various and expensive sea roles. Tech research is balanced to be overall faster and tech priorities will give a more distinctive advantage when chosen. Various other balances were made to support the new campaign expansion. NEW HULLS Many New Hulls (To be announced) MAJOR NEW FEATURES Customization of Beam / Draught: You can now adjust the width and height of the hull in the design options. These adjustments will greatly affect the hull characteristics and the performance of your designed ships. New Components for AP/HE rounds ratio: Choose the distribution of AP and HE rounds between different settings for your main and secondary guns. You will no longer have indefinitely any type of AP or HE round but both will have their separate limit. New Components for AP/HE shell types: The type of the HE or AP shell can be now customized depending on technology. The different HE shells span between the options: HEI - High Explosive Incendiary Shell HCHE - High Capacity High Explosive Shell CNF - Nose Fuze Shell CP - Base Fuze Shell CPC - Common Pointed Capped CPBC - Common Pointed Ballistic Capped The varying AP shells are: SAP - Semi Armor Piercing Shell SAPBC - Semi Armor Piercing Ballistic Cap Shell AP - Armor Piercing Shell APC - Armor Piercing Capped Shell APBC - Armor Piercing Ballistic Capped Shell Improved APBC - Armor Piercing Ballistic Capped Shell New Battle Control Option “Avoid Ship”: By default it is enabled and allows the ships to automatically avoid other ships to prevent collision. You can now override this behavior individually for any of your ships, either for improving your swift maneuvers or for ramming the enemy… New Battle Control Option “Ammo for Secondary Guns": You can now choose what type of ammo is used for your Secondary Guns, Auto, AP or HE. Improved Shell Ballistics and Gun Aiming Mechanics: Following the various new options for AP and HE shells the shell ballistics now follow a much more characteristic trajectory depending on all their different physics variables. Additionally, the guns aim in a more realistic manner, firing salvoes depending on the target’s speed and angular velocity. For example, previously you would see shell salvoes to be mostly random in relation to the center of the target, but now salvoes are en mass fired forward, aft, in front or behind the target until the range is found and hits start to be achieved. This automatic procedure affects the base accuracy and now makes the firing more natural and expected depending on target distance. Improved Ship Motion at Sea: Ship buoyancy mechanics are enriched to support the new Beam/Draught options. The interaction of ships with waves is now more characteristic depending on the weight offset, pitch/roll, beam/draught options chosen for their design. Exponential speed limit for hulls: As ships reach a maximum speed barrier depending on the hull technology, then the engine weight needed to achieve a higher speed increases exponentially. Thus it will be much harder to design unrealistically fast ships with old hulls, something that a lot of players abused to make much faster ships than the AI to overwhelm it. OTHER IMPROVEMENTS Over penetration mechanics improvement: Overpenetration will now happen with more accurate conditions. Previously the unarmored ships would mostly overpenetrate, or the heavily armored almost never became overpenetrated. Flooding mechanics improvement: Flooding from direct hits will now spread not only to adjacent sections but further beyond, depending on the height of water inside the flooded sections. This new feature addresses the previous unnatural survivability for smaller ships (especially the torpedo boats) which would become unsinkable until more sections were flooded from a direct hit. With this new feature, the torpedo and flooding protection schemes in the design options will be more than essential. AP/HE different stats: When you hover on guns to see their info tooltip you will now see detailed and different statistics for AP/HE shell weights, damage, range, muzzle velocity, penetration and accuracy tables. Crew scales with hull size and displacement: As you change displacement, beam/ draught the hull crew number will change accordingly. Previously the “Control Station” crew was not scaling. Added instability/beam/draught values in battle UI: These are important design aspects, useful to know for any ship that participates in a battle. Save file system improved: When a new game version requires it, obsolete save files will be discarded and new will be generated automatically. This will stop the confusion of players when the game would become broken due to incompatible saves (invalid designs, exceptions, floating guns etc.) Ship weight/cost balances: Balanced the weight and cost for various parts and components, as it was needed for all the latest new features. Other balances: The “Dunnite” explosive charge is available in late tech years, new Radar Rangefinder III is now available and other minor improvements or balances for the ship design options. Minor Visual Effects Improvement: You will notice a little better visual effects overall. NEW MISSIONS One new mission (To be announced). BATTLE AI The Battle AI is further improved to make decisions more promptly and effectively by using more algorithms. The result is an AI that will know better when to attack and defend and at which distance, always depending on the nation's personality. Auto Targeting is influenced by the new AI algorithms and is more effective. Some older issues should become resolved, for example the over-prioritization of Transports. Improved the AI decision making on switching shell type. You will notice that the ships will more successfully switch ammo depending on the armor and angle of the target. AI auto-design algorithms enriched to support all the new features for Beam/Draught, new components. The ships created will be balanced in protection and firepower and thus more potent adversaries. BUG FIXES Several division movement bugs were fixed: Ships will not confuse so much as before in dense formations. Further fixes will come after feedback. Fixed issue that caused the division ship leader to instantly switch position when receiving little damage, causing confusion to the formation. Fixed bug that would cause ships of screen formation to immediately try to switch position at the start of battle, creating big confusion in the formation. Fixed bugs that would cause the showing of inaccurate statistical data after battle. Fixed some issues with barbettes that were not available in mount positions, while they should. This bug would cause issues in the auto-design which made it very difficult to find a proper barbette to place a gun. Fixed old issue of inconsistent reverse engine damage. Minor text fixes. *==============================* As you might have realized the changelog includes not only planned features but many things you requested the past two months. The changelog is not final as we will add new content until we finalize the update. Please note that all the new features of this patch will make all previous saves not working. The new game file system will make sure to not have any bugs when you update. Unfortunately, it will be impossible to keep your previous saves on campaign, battles and saved designs. Thank you for reading, The Game-Labs Team 28 12 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BilgeRat22 Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 This sounds awesome. Can't wait for the beta! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Speglord Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 Exciting to hear! Looking forward to what you guys have in store. Keep up the great work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candle_86 Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 looking forward to the beta next week Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The PC Collector Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 Meh. ETA for the long campaign? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toby Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 while its cool to see many of the new features the extended campaign is still deprerately needed if only to allow proper testing of the variouis features being added Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grayknight Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 @Nick Thomadis This is really great news. I must admit i am impressed. It feels that you guys were able to do really allot in last month Cannot wait to test all of those! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
akd Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 (edited) 7 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said: The different HE shells span between the options: HEI - High Explosive Incendiary Shell HCHE - High Capacity High Explosive ShellCNF - Nose Fuze Shell CP - Base Fuze Shell CPC - Common Pointed Capped CPBC - Common Pointed Ballistic Capped Maybe I misunderstand, but the bolded do not make sense as separate types of “HE” shell. You would, for example, have nose-fused HCHE (generally for bombardment, not ship-to-ship combat), or base-fused CPC, etc. All in all, sounds like a great set of changes and look forward to the Beta. Particularly happy to hear of the switch to more natural “accuracy” system that as described would seem to allow for both “accuracy” (errors in predicting future position of target or in where own shells will land) and “precision” (dispersion of shells within a salvo due to ballistic factors). Edited February 13, 2022 by akd 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Meow Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 (edited) @Nick Thomadis Something simple as any ship's current speed being visible at first glance somewhere in the info window & an indicator which underwater torpedo launcher is on reload or has no torpedoes - hopefully it's already in the upcoming update or at least is noted & in the works. Other than that, it's nice to know that many of the frequently requested features & discussed issues were heard! Edited February 12, 2022 by Captain Meow 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candle_86 Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 You know one postive of this is now we can build slow cheap cruiser's who's job is to escort convoy's and assign them to that task, while making faster crusiers to hunt convoys, or make destroyer escorts vs destroyers in later eras, or 2nd class battleships ect. Oh I'm excited Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UnleashtheKraken Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 That all looks excellent. Props to the team. @Nick Thomadis I posted a bug report for which I have not seen any feedback from the dev team. Several players in the thread have seen the same problem. It appears that firing accuracy can become bugged when a non-targeted ship intersects the trajectory of a shell between the firing ship and the actual target. It's most visible in nearly flat-arc trajectories such as the 1-2 km range engagements of the 1890's. If this has been seen by the devs, or is fixed by the new way that gun accuracy/salvo precision happens, please just a 'we know' or 'thank you, we'll look into it' so I can stop fretting whether the issue is known. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DieHard_BR Posted February 12, 2022 Share Posted February 12, 2022 Very good news Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Danvanthevacuumman Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 Im impressed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The PC Collector Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 (edited) 15 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said: Exponential speed limit for hulls: As ships reach a maximum speed barrier depending on the hull technology, then the engine weight needed to achieve a higher speed increases exponentially. Thus it will be much harder to design unrealistically fast ships with old hulls, something that a lot of players abused to make much faster ships than the AI to overwhelm it. I hope that the optimal maximum speed is indicated somehow. Otherwise, trying to optimise speed can become an excruciating chore. Edited February 13, 2022 by The PC Collector 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wowzery Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 19 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said: As ships reach a maximum speed barrier depending on the hull technology, then the engine weight needed to achieve a higher speed increases exponentially. Thus it will be much harder to design unrealistically fast ships with old hulls, something that a lot of players abused to make much faster ships than the AI to overwhelm it. You are also making it so the AI doesn't run away right from the start of the battle. The only way to make it so you can have a good engagement now is if you're ship is faster than the AI ships. Everything with the AI seems to be maximum range, many times out of visual sight as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King_Tiger_II Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 18 hours ago, akd said: Maybe I misunderstand, but the bolded do not make sense as separate types of “HE” shell. You would, for example, have nose-fused HCHE (generally for bombardment, not ship-to-ship combat), or base-fused CPC, etc. All in all, sounds like a great set of changes and look forward to the Beta. Particularly happy to hear of the switch to more natural “accuracy” system that as described would seem to allow for both “accuracy” (errors in predicting future position of target or in where own shells will land) and “precision” (dispersion of shells within a salvo due to ballistic factors). HCHE has in very few cases been used against Destroyers in emergency. Though finding examples is going to be tough as I am working off something I heard as a kid from a old WW2 Navy Vet who passed away years ago. Who did mention the ammo was shocking great to use against Destroyers as it could penetrate and detonate inside many of them, if it did not impact and blow a large hole first. Destroyers were pretty squishy with all things considered. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
German CL mk II guns Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 yay! sounds great! cant wait to see all these changes when you finish the extended version of the campaign Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Himbeereule Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 Quite the impressive list of new features, but I am a bit disappointed the delay wasn't announced until the last possible moment - and the frequent mentions of features still being worked on makes me fear we might not actually see 1.05 "next week" either. I think it would've been better to get half of these features this week, or at the very least tomorrow, and all the nice extra stuff sometime within the next two weeks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werwaz Posted February 13, 2022 Share Posted February 13, 2022 On 2/12/2022 at 1:23 PM, Nick Thomadis said: Hello admirals, The next major update is still at work but is close to finish. We will provide the first beta on next week. Here is what it includes so far. ==v1.05 Update== CAMPAIGN Map Expansion: Expanded the map to include the Mediterranean Sea and a larger portion of Europe. New Nations: Italy, France and Austria-Hungary are added to the major nations. The nations form two rival alliances and fight with each other for total victory (this is temporary functionality until we offer the prolonged campaign system). Task Forces: Previously you were able to move ships only between ports. You can now also form Task Forces, by grouping ships and sending them to any sea point on the map. In this way you block strategic passages and generate missions according to the ships in the vicinity. Refit Mode: Now you can refit your ships, from changing a few components to radically replacing weapons, funnels, towers with modern variations. This new and essential feature will allow you to utilize all the latest technology advancements for your current ships without the need to scrap them and build new ones. New Sea Roles: New sea roles added to the previous “In Being” and “Sea Control”, special for the Task Forces, offer more options for controlling strategically your ships. Interface improvements: There is a new tab “Politics” where you will later manage some diplomacy aspects. Now you are able to overview the relations and power of all nations. Additionally we added an “ Economy Growth” to the GDP which will be dependent later from various conditions. You will be warned when you want to end the turn with danger of going bankrupt. When you hover at a sea region a tooltip shows statistical information for the included fleets. Many other minor changes to support the new functionalities. Balances: Maintenance cost is balanced so that it is not so high now that ships will spend more time at sea with all the various and expensive sea roles. Tech research is balanced to be overall faster and tech priorities will give a more distinctive advantage when chosen. Various other balances were made to support the new campaign expansion. NEW HULLS Many New Hulls (To be announced) MAJOR NEW FEATURES Customization of Beam / Draught: You can now adjust the width and height of the hull in the design options. These adjustments will greatly affect the hull characteristics and the performance of your designed ships. New Components for AP/HE rounds ratio: Choose the distribution of AP and HE rounds between different settings for your main and secondary guns. You will no longer have indefinitely any type of AP or HE round but both will have their separate limit. New Components for AP/HE shell types: The type of the HE or AP shell can be now customized depending on technology. The different HE shells span between the options: HEI - High Explosive Incendiary Shell HCHE - High Capacity High Explosive Shell CNF - Nose Fuze Shell CP - Base Fuze Shell CPC - Common Pointed Capped CPBC - Common Pointed Ballistic Capped The varying AP shells are: SAP - Semi Armor Piercing Shell SAPBC - Semi Armor Piercing Ballistic Cap Shell AP - Armor Piercing Shell APC - Armor Piercing Capped Shell APBC - Armor Piercing Ballistic Capped Shell Improved APBC - Armor Piercing Ballistic Capped Shell New Battle Control Option “Avoid Ship”: By default it is enabled and allows the ships to automatically avoid other ships to prevent collision. You can now override this behavior individually for any of your ships, either for improving your swift maneuvers or for ramming the enemy… New Battle Control Option “Ammo for Secondary Guns": You can now choose what type of ammo is used for your Secondary Guns, Auto, AP or HE. Improved Shell Ballistics and Gun Aiming Mechanics: Following the various new options for AP and HE shells the shell ballistics now follow a much more characteristic trajectory depending on all their different physics variables. Additionally, the guns aim in a more realistic manner, firing salvoes depending on the target’s speed and angular velocity. For example, previously you would see shell salvoes to be mostly random in relation to the center of the target, but now salvoes are en mass fired forward, aft, in front or behind the target until the range is found and hits start to be achieved. This automatic procedure affects the base accuracy and now makes the firing more natural and expected depending on target distance. Improved Ship Motion at Sea: Ship buoyancy mechanics are enriched to support the new Beam/Draught options. The interaction of ships with waves is now more characteristic depending on the weight offset, pitch/roll, beam/draught options chosen for their design. Exponential speed limit for hulls: As ships reach a maximum speed barrier depending on the hull technology, then the engine weight needed to achieve a higher speed increases exponentially. Thus it will be much harder to design unrealistically fast ships with old hulls, something that a lot of players abused to make much faster ships than the AI to overwhelm it. OTHER IMPROVEMENTS Over penetration mechanics improvement: Overpenetration will now happen with more accurate conditions. Previously the unarmored ships would mostly overpenetrate, or the heavily armored almost never became overpenetrated. Flooding mechanics improvement: Flooding from direct hits will now spread not only to adjacent sections but further beyond, depending on the height of water inside the flooded sections. This new feature addresses the previous unnatural survivability for smaller ships (especially the torpedo boats) which would become unsinkable until more sections were flooded from a direct hit. With this new feature, the torpedo and flooding protection schemes in the design options will be more than essential. AP/HE different stats: When you hover on guns to see their info tooltip you will now see detailed and different statistics for AP/HE shell weights, damage, range, muzzle velocity, penetration and accuracy tables. Crew scales with hull size and displacement: As you change displacement, beam/ draught the hull crew number will change accordingly. Previously the “Control Station” crew was not scaling. Added instability/beam/draught values in battle UI: These are important design aspects, useful to know for any ship that participates in a battle. Save file system improved: When a new game version requires it, obsolete save files will be discarded and new will be generated automatically. This will stop the confusion of players when the game would become broken due to incompatible saves (invalid designs, exceptions, floating guns etc.) Ship weight/cost balances: Balanced the weight and cost for various parts and components, as it was needed for all the latest new features. Other balances: The “Dunnite” explosive charge is available in late tech years, new Radar Rangefinder III is now available and other minor improvements or balances for the ship design options. NEW MISSIONS One new mission (To be announced). BATTLE AI The Battle AI is further improved to make decisions more promptly and effectively by using more algorithms. The result is an AI that will know better when to attack and defend and at which distance, always depending on the nation's personality. Auto Targeting is influenced by the new AI algorithms and is more effective. Some older issues should become resolved, for example the over-prioritization of Transports. Improved the AI decision making on switching shell type. You will notice that the ships will more successfully switch ammo depending on the armor and angle of the target. AI auto-design algorithms enriched to support all the new features for Beam/Draught, new components. The ships created will be balanced in protection and firepower and thus more potent adversaries. BUG FIXES Several division movement bugs were fixed: Ships will not confuse so much as before in dense formations. Further fixes will come after feedback. Fixed issue that caused the division ship leader to instantly switch position when receiving little damage, causing confusion to the formation. Fixed bug that would cause ships of screen formation to immediately try to switch position at the start of battle, creating big confusion in the formation. Fixed bugs that would cause the showing of inaccurate statistical data after battle. Fixed some issues with barbettes that were not available in mount positions, while they should. This bug would cause issues in the auto-design which made it very difficult to find a proper barbette to place a gun. Minor text fixes. *==============================* As you might have realized the changelog includes not only planned features but many things you requested the past two months. The changelog is not final as we will add new content until we finalize the update. Please note that all the new features of this patch will make all previous saves not working. The new game file system will make sure to not have any bugs when you update. Unfortunately, it will be impossible to keep your previous saves on campaign, battles and saved designs. Thank you for reading, The Game-Labs Team A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one I do have a few questions about the upcoming patch though 1. how will draught/beam affect the ship? (more/less displacement, hull form, etc...) 2. are the speed limits based on the individual hull or the year? 3. will stats like resistance be reworked as part of the weight/cost balances? (right now the resistance stat in particular is quite lacking for late era USA and UK battleships) 4. what will the alliances be in campaign, or will they be random each time? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The PC Collector Posted February 14, 2022 Share Posted February 14, 2022 @Nick Thomadis an idea I jut had, and that could help to better try the new functions: Why don't you include an "eternal war" option? A setting which disables the AI asking for peace or having revolutions, making the campaign endless? That would be an easy and fast to code stopgap way to offer a better campaign experience. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candle_86 Posted February 14, 2022 Share Posted February 14, 2022 11 minutes ago, The PC Collector said: @Nick Thomadis an idea I jut had, and that could help to better try the new functions: Why don't you include an "eternal war" option? A setting which disables the AI asking for peace or having revolutions, making the campaign endless? That would be an easy and fast to code stopgap way to offer a better campaign experience. would be nice, right now I go into the save_0 file and change the enemy factions reputation to 0.0 and peace treaty month check from 3-5 to 9000, aka 750 years, this works, but the reputation has to be fixed every year almost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SpardaSon21 Posted February 14, 2022 Share Posted February 14, 2022 On 2/13/2022 at 6:31 AM, King_Tiger_II said: HCHE has in very few cases been used against Destroyers in emergency. Though finding examples is going to be tough as I am working off something I heard as a kid from a old WW2 Navy Vet who passed away years ago. Who did mention the ammo was shocking great to use against Destroyers as it could penetrate and detonate inside many of them, if it did not impact and blow a large hole first. Destroyers were pretty squishy with all things considered. To complicate matters a bit, especially for the devs, typical US naval HE shells were designed to allow the base plug to be swapped out with a base fuse, and the nose fuse with a plug, allowing for one general shell that could be tailored to any target. And yes, that includes impact, MT, and VT fuses, all of which could be added to any caliber HE shell. There's ballistics charts out there for the 16"/50 on potential AA use using VT shells. Also, given the quality of US steel at the time compared to our contemporaries, all of our HE shells had surprisingly good penetration against mild steel and thin armor, especially with the base fuse installed. SP Common would have been just the icing on the cake, the expected 4" of pen on the 8"/55 able to punch through the relatively thin belts on most other cruisers, even heavy cruisers, with ease. Kinda puts the 5+ inches of armor on our CL's into perspective, doesn't it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AurumCorvus Posted February 14, 2022 Share Posted February 14, 2022 1 hour ago, Candle_86 said: would be nice, right now I go into the save_0 file and change the enemy factions reputation to 0.0 and peace treaty month check from 3-5 to 9000, aka 750 years, this works, but the reputation has to be fixed every year almost. Set reputation and respect to "NaN" (including quotes). That sets it to infinite. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candle_86 Posted February 14, 2022 Share Posted February 14, 2022 6 minutes ago, AurumCorvus said: Set reputation and respect to "NaN" (including quotes). That sets it to infinite. Why thank you, now i can have a never ending war 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Panzergraf Posted February 15, 2022 Share Posted February 15, 2022 9 hours ago, AurumCorvus said: Set reputation and respect to "NaN" (including quotes). That sets it to infinite. Awesome! And I assume you can also edit the file give the enemy some money now and then so you actually get ships to fight against? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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