>>> Beta 1.06 Feedback<<< (FINAL UPDATE 6th Release Candidate)

[kjg000]

4 hours ago, Schmitty21 said:

I thought I'd write down some of my thoughts on ways the campaign as it stands could be improved, outside of obvious bug fixes.

Diplomacy: As it stands this seems to be currently set in stone. I'd love to see more opportunity to fight other nations instead of be stuck in WWI alliances. Not sure why tension increases so much for ships moving around the north sea but not when I park a BB off of Pula.

Random Events: I like these so far but there needs to be many more and more variety. Events that effect ships or research progress could be interesting.

Ship Organization: My biggest desires here are:

A.) Permanent task force organization or fleets. This would ideally be its own window. This could also introduce concepts of task force formation planner and pre-grouping of ships. It might also be possible to have the task force spread across nearby ports and then gather together when deployed as happened in reality.

B.) Home port assignment. Let us assign a ship's homeport after its been launched. This way we can reorganize the fleet over time.

Territory Information: Do all the provinces on the map come with income or reserves of recruits? There's no information available on them. Why would I want to capture Corsica over Tunisia? 

Port Strike: Not sure what the effect of this is but right now as a user I feel like it doesn't do much anything when I win except give me a number.

Improving Facilities: Let us improve our ports with our own finances. Right now money is a bit too plentiful, it would be better to give us more ways to have to manage it.

Alliances: Alliances should have a chance to dissolve when they are doing poorly or nations in them surrender individually.

Ship Data: I'd like more data on my fleet. I want to see the combat history of individual ships, how many ships of a type are in my fleet, etc.

Nations: Either don't allow nations to be destroyed or bring them back after a time period. I think it would be best to just have them sue for peace and then impose a period of rebuilding their economy on them. 

Naval Treaties: This would add a lot of gameplay balance and provide a good challenge to the player.

I could go on and on with an endless wish list but I think that suffices what I feel will make the campaign fairly solid. I know we're still in the early stages with bug fixing and still introducing nations but I wanted to have my say.

 

Fully agree! Without knowing the structure of the code its hard to say what is easily implemented and what would take an enormous effort. Having said that Task Force management definitely needs an upgrade – eventually.

I’d love to see individual drydocks with current and absolute capacity limits. Each drydock would be upgraded individually but not beyond its absolute limit. Each would have a limited number of ships it could build at one time. So, for example, “Rosyth” might be a good deep water port with the ability to build up to 2 BB’s or 5 DD’s at one time. Its initial limit might be, say, 15k tons and 2 docks but with an absolute limit of 80K tons and 3 docks.

With this repairs would be treated something like as follows:

Light – over time at sea or 1 turn in any port,

Medium – any port over several turns or in a suitable tonnage drydock more quickly,

Heavy or greater – a suitable tonnage drydock only.

Repairs would only be possible in a vacant dock or, if this detracts from game play, any ship under construction would need to be suspended while repairs are made. The palyer would need to decide which takes precedence. This also raises the possibility of missions to attack drydocks in order to reduce their capacity and/or delay production of ships.

The design screen would need to be modified to show how many docks you have capable of building that design and how many can be expanded to build it, the latter possibly as a rollover.

The build screen would need to be able to allocate builds to docks, including an option for “first available drydock”.

Just a suggestion for future consideration.

[Norbert Sattler]

50 minutes ago, kjg000 said:

In a recent game, starting as British 1890, abandoned late 1917, I had researched up to (something like) Advanced Medium Funnels II under Boilers but still only had Coal as a fuel option. I would have expected to have had at least an early oil fuel by then. I was rated as Very Advanced compared to other nations. Is this a fault, a quirk in the tech tree or have I missed something?

The "very advanced" doesn't seem to be relative to other nations, but to a general timeline of sorts... and tuned to the original research speed and thus vastly outdated. I've had campaigns were all nations had "very advanced" tech.

As for oil-firing it does seem to come rather late, due to how many techs there are to unlock funnels. If you start in 1890 I wouldn't expect it before 1920, even when focussing on boilers over everything else.
It would be nice if some of those funnel techs would be combined, or have their research-time shortened.

Radar on the other hand is the opposite, with my last Austro-Hungarian run having seen Autrian ships sprouting gen 1 radar and tier 5 rangefinders in 1907. Here I wouldn't mind some longer research times or re-shuffling of techs to have a more period appropriate progression.

I mean sure I was having the rangefinder slot under permanent research focus, but that still should not give you radar two years after the battle of tsushima and almost a decade before the first worldwar.

Edited June 14, 2022 by Norbert Sattler

[kjg000]

Would love to see the ability to sell/buy ships from other nations, including the option to build and then re-neg on the contract, which seems to have been a fine tradition over this period. Obviously reneging would have severe diplomatic penalties. So you get a cheap ship – and a war to use it in!

Would also like to see the ability to capture ships in combat and the ability to use the guns from scrapped ships in new builds, giving a discount in time and cost. Possibly allocating the individual ship to be scrapped to the individual new build.

[kjg000]

4 minutes ago, Norbert Sattler said:

The "very advanced" doesn't seem to be relative to other nations, but to a general timeline of sorts... and tuned to the original research speed and thus vastly outdated. I've had campaigns were all nations had "very advanced" tech.

As for oil-firing it does seem to come rather late, due to how many techs there are to unlock funnels. If you start in 1890 I wouldn't expect it before 1920, even when focussing on boilers over everything else.
It would be nice if some of those funnel techs would be combined, or have their research-time shortened.

Radar on the other hand is the opposite, with my last Austro-Hungarian run having seen Autrian ships sprouting gen 1 radar and tier 5 rangefinders in 1907. Here I wouldn't mind some longer research times or re-shuffling of techs to have a more period appropriate progression.

Make techs cheaper if lagging behind the expected timeline or more expensive if too far ahead perhaps.

[kjg000]

Sorry, posted twice.

Edited June 14, 2022 by kjg000
posted twice

[Sandermatt]

I am currently always maxing out research. Do you think it should be more expensive to make how much you invest into it more of a choice?

 

(Or do others already use less than max research?)

Edited June 14, 2022 by Sandermatt

[kjg000]

Are spotter aircraft going to be incorporated? Many superstructures have hangars already and launch catapults would need to be considered.

At its simplest these would give a bonus to locating enemy ships, both on the campaign and battle maps, and would give a slight accuracy bonus for long range fire in fair weather.

I don’t think there would be a need to represent the actual aircraft in flight or to develop air-to-air or air-to-ship rules for this as the likely-hood of being shot down or engaging enemy aircraft in combat is low. These are after all spotter planes.

Latter, if combat aircraft were introduced then this may change but for now I’m mainly interested in a return on all of that hangar space

It could be as simple as giving superstructures with hangars a fair weather spotting and long range accuracy bonus.

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by kjg000
suggest simple solution

[kjg000]

43 minutes ago, Sandermatt said:

I am currently always maxing out research. Do you think it should be more expensive to make how much you invest into it more of a choice?

 

(Or do others already use less than max research?)

Generally I go for maxed research for as long as I can afford it. Recently I have tried starting with no ships and maxing out on research, transport and shipyard size, while keeping an eye on politics to give enough time to build the biggest, most tech advanced (especially accuracy) ships I can.

This is mainly as I find trying to fight with many small ships, on either side, an unrewarding game experience, win or lose.

[Norbert Sattler]

1 hour ago, kjg000 said:

Make techs cheaper if lagging behind the expected timeline or more expensive if too far ahead perhaps.

Something like that is already implemented, but probably not fully fine-tuned yet.

[kjg000]

I'm finding that I'm still getting event messages after a nation has collapsed. Generally these are "French Empire warns their head of Admiralty..." type of message, but one game I had a defunct empire declare war (again the french, but I think that was just a coincidence). Other than being at war nothing else seemed to happen but it is distracting getting these messages.

[Mr Vidicord]

I have requested this before, but now seems like a good time to do so. I would very much enjoy it if the ability to change the designs of turrets was added. At the moment if you build a BB for Britain in 1940 you have access to old looking 16" guns, and this makes making the Lion-class, at least visually, impossible. If you decided to make Vanguard the guns are locked in a state that is too modern. However simply changing the gun visuals would be a bad idea, since then choice would be removed (in the 16" case Nelson would be impossible). The 14" guns are also an issue, since the turrets are too wide for KGV. In my now extensive rant I must also include the 6" (British).

This is also probably an issue for other nations, but I frankly know more about The Royal Navy. My "rant" is also not intended as a complaint, I would just like to aid the development of the game, because I really enjoy playing it.

[Draco]

I'm at a loss.

This ship

with this armor profile

just took a main gun penetration at 26km... from this gun

that has to be a bug... unless you've made the bonus for turret top armour less than the belt and face without telling us (I mean, that would be historically accurate, but then any gun having that much pen against a plate that's angled at 78 degrees is much less historically accurate in the first place, so yeah)

Also, A & B turret can't seem to decide who took the hit. The shell visually landed on A in the game(where the black hole is), but B turret was the one to turn grey afterwards, and yellow up in the tooltip.

There is something wrong with our bloody ships today...

Edited June 14, 2022 by Draco

[o Barão]

@Nick Thomadis I made a test run to see what is possible to get if I set the research tech tree to focus on some specific areas. I was also interesting to know how far could I push the technology in an old hull.

The priority was from the start:

- To get radar, Krupp armor and Induced boilers.

- The moment I got the Krupp armor and Induced boilers, I changed the priority to Big guns, turret mechanism and other techs to save weight.

These are the results:

Radar tech in March 1902. The II version was available in May 1903.

Some images to show the tech progression.

Mark 2 main guns.

Mark3 main guns. Double secondaries. Radar.

Triple main & secondary.

Quad tech. Sadly, the hull didn't allow me to place the second main battery 14 inches 4x turret. But there is room.

The final version. 4 main turrets Mark 5: 3x12 inches and 1x9 inches.

The many refits versions of the same hull.

Two notes to consider from my testing.

- Maybe should be implemented a penalty for researching late tech too soon.

- When going for a refit, I would get a warning that I was moving a tower or a turret too far from the initial position. But, I could just save and do another refit to move again the same component more to the side until I get what I want. So this mechanic is pointless?

 

[IshPR7777]

3 minutes ago, o Barão said:

@Nick Thomadis I made a test run to see what is possible to get if I set the research tech tree to focus on some specific areas. I was also interesting to know how far could I push the technology in an old hull.

The priority was from the start:

- To get radar, Krupp armor and Induced boilers.

- The moment I got the Krupp armor and Induced boilers, I changed the priority to Big guns, turret mechanism and other techs to save weight.

These are the results:

Radar tech in March 1902. The II version was available in May 1903.

Some images to show the tech progression.

Mark 2 main guns.

Mark3 main guns. Double secondaries. Radar.

Triple main & secondary.

Quad tech. Sadly, the hull didn't allow me to place the second main battery 14 inches 4x turret. But there is room.

The final version. 4 main turrets Mark 5: 3x12 inches and 1x9 inches.

The many refits versions of the same hull.

Two notes to consider from my testing.

- Maybe should be implemented a penalty for researching late tech too soon.

- When going for a refit, I would get a warning that I was moving a tower or a turret too far from the initial position. But, I could just save and do another refit to move again the same component more to the side until I get what I want. So this mechanic is pointless?

 

What about it?

[o Barão]

2 minutes ago, IsmaelMolina2021 said:

What about it?

Guess what happens when you already have radar tech and mark5 guns in 1902.

[IshPR7777]

12 minutes ago, o Barão said:

Guess what happens when you already have radar tech and mark5 guns in 1902.

1. It makes sense on your point of view that it would get penalty for researching late tech too early

2. This isn't the case, despite of this as I said earlier from #1, it would give a lot of bonuses on those guns and radar tech in terms of detection and range, giving you an advantage over your enemies. However, getting radar tech and other late techs on Pre-Dreadnought era ships (mostly for battleships and cruisers) is entertaining to watch that is a entertainment purposes only

Edited June 14, 2022 by IsmaelMolina2021

[inub_q8]

5 years into the campaign and I got stuck in this screen that can't be fixed unless I exit to the main menu then enter back. I thought it was a rare bug since no one talked about it so I reported it and started a new one but it happened to me 3 times is the problem with me? or did someone experience it?

[SiWi]

Research balance is going to take a long way and probably will never really "end".

Given the tech "soft locks" like penalties for early research would be an easy way to reduce the problem thou.

[Erukanu Senpai]

The only thing I care right now that the "Stuck in Building Ships" bug gets fixed, I can't concentrate on anything else right now. It literally happens at EVERY TURN!


Building Ships → Updating Relationships → Building Ships (Stuck at this point)

[o Barão]

9 minutes ago, Erukanu Senpai said:

The only thing I care right now that the "Stuck in Building Ships" bug gets fixed,

It was fixed. I never had that issue since the latest update.

[CAR DOOR]

After playing around with the new torpedo mechanics, I feel like they have been nerfed a bit much. All of these are fired at a Transport at only 8km so this is an ideal scenario.

3x3 21" oxygen torpedos 7.5% dud chance for size and -5% dud chance for being oxygen-fueled implying a 2.5% dud chance in total. as you can see barely a km after leaving boat only 8 are left, one of them detonated before I was even ready to screenshot it.

4.5km from launch spot, torpedo 3 counting from the left has changed angle dramatically to the right, while torpedo 5 detonated in open water again leaving only 7 with one going far off-target.

Torpedo 2 and 6 veering off-course too at only 6km, a target further than 12km would probably not have been hit be either of those leaving only 4 left without a failureAt 7km, torpedo 4 made contact with the almost stationary,barely maneuvering dummy ship. And it is a dud. It hit the target, it shows 1 torpedo hit in the top right.

While the chance of each individual failure is rather low on its own, its common to see that out of a wave of 8 - 10 torpedos a good 3-5 will experience a technical issue of some sort, be it some sort of deviation from its course (with even a medium-small change in direction making them ineffective, with huge deviations being seemingly more likely), a premature detonation or just a simple dud on the occasional hit. This results that around only half of the 21" torpedos fired even have a chance to get somewhere close, decreasing odds the larger the torpedo is.

In addition to misfires, the overall increase in accuracy of warships, especially secondaries of capital ships makes getting within torpedo range incredibly dangerous. Especially during the late  1910s and 20s with no access to oxygen torpedos, attacks have to be done from a lot further range, thus giving more time for enemies to maneuver, and also more time for a technical failure to occur within the torpedo itself.

I understand that torpedos were laiden with a variety of issues and were not as reliable as we would like to believe in real life, but they did sink ships in quite large amounts. Perhaps lowering the chance for premature detonation or weighing further into smaller changes in deviation would make them a bit more usable.

[o Barão]

Ok, I managed to get dual quads. It is interesting to see how far we can push the old hulls with modern tech. But at the same time there are many constraints which makes them inferior to other new hulls available. Interesting but balanced. Ok

Another option with better towers, but worse stability issues.

[slightlytreasonous]

13 minutes ago, o Barão said:

Ok, I managed to get dual quads. It is interesting to see how far we can push the old hulls with modern tech. But at the same time there are many constraints which makes them inferior to other new hulls available. Interesting but balanced. Ok

Another option with better towers, but worse stability issues.

"The ship was built in france, and because of that it was incredibly... French."

"The ship was "experimental" and for that very reason it couldn't have been called a failure."

[o Barão]

Campaign bug report:

1- Germany surrendered but is still relevant?

Got some events about Germany after surrendered.

Germany is not in game anymore, but still I got this.

And this.

And 20 years afters Germany surrendered, my parliament want to take action against them? Dumb politicians.

I would like to suggest for nations that already surrendered to return to the game and start building their navies. Maybe 1 year is enough. Is sad to beat Germany one time and never again had the chance to fight them again.

2- Task force special missions

Set to invade and I get...

Role limited, which doesn't exist in the current version.

3- Sneaky AH.

So many ships in the port report, but it is a lie. They only have one TB.

Edited June 14, 2022 by o Barão

[Norbert Sattler]

3 hours ago, Draco said:

I'm at a loss.

This ship

with this armor profile

just took a main gun penetration at 26km... from this gun

that has to be a bug... unless you've made the bonus for turret top armour less than the belt and face without telling us (I mean, that would be historically accurate, but then any gun having that much pen against a plate that's angled at 78 degrees is much less historically accurate in the first place, so yeah)

Also, A & B turret can't seem to decide who took the hit. The shell visually landed on A in the game(where the black hole is), but B turret was the one to turn grey afterwards, and yellow up in the tooltip.

There is something wrong with our bloody ships today...

At that range it should be a plunging shot that hit the turret top. You clearly didn't have the 38.3" of turret top armour necessary to block a shot at 25+ km.