>>> v1.06-1.08+ Feedback<<<(17/8/2022)

[The PC Collector]

3 hours ago, Grayknight said:

Lifespans of the ship is very short

That's likely due to the era in which you're playing. In the pre-dreadnought era, in real life, tech advanced so fast that there were cases of ships becoming obsolete even before they entered service. That was the case of, for example, most Russian pre-dreadnoughts. Due to the lack of industry, their build times were so long, that their designs usually became obsolete before the left the drydocks. So that is correctly represented on the game.

However, once you progress to the Dreadnought era, you'll notice that you can extend the lifespan of your ships for nearly as long as you want. As of 1921 in my campaign, I'm still using my original 1903 dreadnoughts, albeit seriously revamped through sucessive refits. And they are as effective as the first day (I'd say even more).

I do agree on the part of the easier refits up to a certain degree. Some techs like better shells should be upgradeable without a full refit.

[Rucki]

15 hours ago, ZorinW said:

Germany going strong with 1000+ ships. Playing the campaign is absolutely pointless right now...

I would guess that has something to do with the crazy amounts of naval budget nations get when they are at war.
I would say that the Naval budget shoult not allow nations to have more than 10 of the newest and most costly BBs + 5 BCs and as many screens and TBs as needed + reserve. (Maybe UK and later USA can have more like 15 to 20 BBs, but not all of the newest, costly tech)

In my current campaign as Germany, started in 1890, I have over 200.000.000 thats enough money to build I guess 70 of the current BB Design.

I actually would say that since the campaign got included in the game I did never ever watched out that my ships are not getting too costly, the only limiter for me was always tonnage, never how much the Ship costs. I would like it, if that gets changed.

[The PC Collector]

Also, quick feedback: Triple turrets are still too heavy. The main selling point of the triple turrets was that you could make 9 gun bbs with significantly less weight than 8 barrel ones using twins, or 12 gun barrels with less weight than using the 6x2 the japanese. Whereas in the game, even taking in account the weight of the extra barbette, that doesn't happen.

So, essentially, you're still taking a huge penalty to reload and accuracy in exchange of nothing. There is still no point on using above duals.

[Sonar]

Just an FYI here, don't think too hard on the economy money.  The map should be expanding to the entire world right?  It doesn't matter what the economy balance is like now, it'll have to be rebalanced later.

 

EDIT:  

 

Also: Ottomans when?

Edited July 21, 2022 by Sonar

[Skeksis]

17 minutes ago, Sonar said:

Just an FYI here, don't think too hard on the economy money.  The map should be expanding to the entire world right?  It doesn't matter what the economy balance is like now, it'll have to be rebalanced later.

 

EDIT:  

 

Also: Ottomans when?

You're right on the money! What we have is a stabilized version for the current mapped nations. I think too the final version will be a completely different beast to what we have now. Probably will shock quite a few players.

Edited July 21, 2022 by Skeksis

[The PC Collector]

Well, I'm giving my campaign as finished in 1922, due to the fact that is not fun to wait for several years for the AIs to build forces back, only for the war to be over in three turns due to blobs/doomstacks/call them whatever you want. So, detailed feedback incoming. As is the same campaign I have posted already, I'll jump straight to my conclussions and feedback.

Minor issues/bugs found (need fixing/addressing, but don't significantly affect the game's playability other than being inconvenient)

- Captured ships show their former owner's flag instead of their current owner's

- Sunk/Scrapped ship names don't return to the auto generator name pool.

- Avoid ships and avoid torpedoes still need work, as most of the time they still mess the formations instead of doing what they are intended.

-Related to the previous: A global setting should be added to allow for "avoid ships" and "avoid torpedoes" to be enabled or disabled by defaul. Having to turn on or off those functions manually from every division at the start of each battle is tedious, to say the least.

- The current way of displaying how advanced is a country is not really useful. Replacing that by the average year of each country's top techs would be way more useful.

Major issues/bugs found (While not gamebreaking, they significantly affect gameplay and should be addressed rather sooner than later)

- Captured ships can't be retrofitted, which severely diminish their value and usefulness as war reparations.

- The ability of building refitted versions of ships is badly needed. And clearly there is no coding barrier as I have screenshots which prove that the AI is allowed to do it.

- Sunk ships still count as active, preventing designs to be deleted, cluttering the design tab to the point of being nearly unusable.

- Casemate main calliber guns still aren't allowed on CLs and Armoured cruisers, despite those being common. This not only prevent some historic designs to be repoduced, but also severely limits options on the already very limited design wise early campaign gameplay.

- Same goes for pre-dreadnought hulls. Despite most of them relied on very heavy secondary batteries, comprising usually callibers from 160 to 200 mm, and sometimes even more, only 2 or 3 of them allow even 6" on the casemates in game.

- Tech research speed... needs some tweaking on individual techs. I had Dreadnought hulls by mid 1903 (I suspect this is part due to A-H only having the base pre dreadnought hull), and ended the armour techs by 1920, but yet I didn't get BC hulls until 1916, and wasn't able to build semi-oil until late 1919, or triple turrets until 1917. Just to set a few examples.

- Triple turrets are still too heavy. One of the main reason they were used, was because with them you could build a 12 gun battleship with a significantly lower weight than using twins, or you couls have a 9 gun battleship with a significantly lower weight than an 8 gun BB using twins, so the inconvenients and loss of performance was worth. Despite the tweaking, that still don't happen in game, so by taking triples you're essentially taking a significant penalty in exchange for nothing. The only reason to use triples in game is if your ship is physically too small to take the required amount of twins, and yet, if you make it with twins, you'll get much better results because the loss of accuracy is simply too big.

- Guns above 305 mm need a significant base accuracy buff. Right now there is no point on using them, as you will always get much better results with the 305's, as due to the better accuracy an reload times, even if they do less damage per shot, you'll overall get much more damage than with higer calibers simply because you'll land 3 or 4 times more shots.

- Same goes with 178 and 203 mm guns compared to 152.

- Some historical callibers, like the german 150 mm or 380 mm, are still not allowed by the system.

- Signing peace still fails like half of the times. You simply get a "The war continues" message.

- War reparations still work erratically, as in the sense as you don't get what you asked for most of the times. While this might be realistic, it should be a negotiaion, not simply the AI outright giving you whatever they want with no consequences.

- The fleet management screen is not suitable for large fleets manahement. At the very least, options to filter by port and by ship type should be added. Also, the option to reactivate ships from the "move ships" screen would greatly improve usability.

- Ships used in randomly generated missions (the ones generated for ships not in a taskforce) still return to random ports to repair/regroup after battle, instead of returning to the port they came from.

Critical issues/bugs found (seriously compromise the playability of the game and need to be adressed ASAP)

- Blobs/doomstacks not only kill some computers, also mean that there is no way to have a meaninful war as the AI runs out of ships in a few battles. Is not fun to have to wait for 3-4 (or even more) years for the countries to rearm, only for the war to be over in the first battle (as my last war against france) because they pooled most of their ships on a single taskforce. Taskforces BADLY NEED a hard cap in the number of ships or the tonnage you can put in them. If you want to give the AI and edge through numeric superiority, then make the AI limit be higer than the player limit. But the limit is badly needed.

- The max crew pool and the base amount of recruits you get need to be significantly increased, at the very least to two or three times the current values. It is not normal that the very moment you lose a few ships, your crew pool tooks YEARS to recover. In my last (and only) war against italy from early 1915 to mid 1916, they lost 350 ships. Even at a rate of 700+ crew per turn, by mid 1922 when I decided to abandon the campaign, their crew pool hadn't started to build up yet. For france, which had been wiped by me regularly, their last defeat took them more than 3 years until they started recovering crew. Even me, who only lost around 30 ships in my war against italy, it took me more than a year after the war until I started building again.

- Related to the previous one: Besides the global, static increase, these amounts need to escalate as the campaign progresses, to compensate ships demanding more and more crew as time passes. Same as it was done with ports to compensate for the bigger ships.

Miscellaneous feedback and sugestions to improve the game/campaign

- The option to create permanent taskforces would be very desirable, as it would greatly ease fleet management. While in war, I currently spend like 80% of my time recreating and reorganising my taskforces, and this is tedious.

- While ships are in a task force, we need the option that only damaged ships go back to port.

- An option to sell/buy ships to/from other countries would be interesting.

Edited July 21, 2022 by The PC Collector

[Skeksis]

v1.08.2......a ?  Hotfix.

• Fixed repairing taskforces at sea, only heavily damaged ships return to port now.

 

No notes though, that one went in under the radar.

Sorry scratch that, it only works sometimes! Well for 2 battles anyway. 

Edited July 21, 2022 by Skeksis

[Skeksis]

29 minutes ago, The PC Collector said:

doomstacks

Have you tried different campaign tactical options, such as deploying decoy taskforces. These will breakup enemy regional numbers into more manageable groups. Then you only fight battles which have your main battleships.

[The PC Collector]

29 minutes ago, Skeksis said:

Have you tried different campaign tactical options, such as deploying decoy taskforces. These will breakup enemy regional numbers into more manageable groups. Then you only fight battles which have your main battleships.

The problem isn't that I can't fight the doomstacks. Is that they make the AI run out of ships stupidly fast. The fact that there are ways to counter it, doesn't invalidate that they are a problem the devs should address ASAP

 

[Drenzul]

17 hours ago, The PC Collector said:

Also, quick feedback: Triple turrets are still too heavy. The main selling point of the triple turrets was that you could make 9 gun bbs with significantly less weight than 8 barrel ones using twins, or 12 gun barrels with less weight than using the 6x2 the japanese. Whereas in the game, even taking in account the weight of the extra barbette, that doesn't happen.

So, essentially, you're still taking a huge penalty to reload and accuracy in exchange of nothing. There is still no point on using above duals.

Not sure what the problem is here, they are already significantly lighter?

[Skeksis]

12 hours ago, The PC Collector said:

The problem isn't that I can't fight the doomstacks. Is that they make the AI run out of ships stupidly fast. The fact that there are ways to counter it, doesn't invalidate that they are a problem the devs should address ASAP

 

The final end goal is to overwhelm the whole world with naval superiority against different warring nations, to which that should last a full 50 years. That inherently means forcing nations to “stupidly” runout of ships and not to keep those nations furnished with ships for the full 50 years. Otherwise it'll be an endless war of 50 years against the same nation.

What we have now is a stabilized timeframe of, lets say about 10-15 years against one or two nations.

Expand the map worldwide and stack those timeframes end for end and what we will get is wars against different nations for the full 50 year cycle. I.e. the end goal.

So yeah, IMO doomstacks (up to 30-50 ships per side) isn't a problem if we get the odd one throughout the whole 50 year campaign cycle.

Edited July 21, 2022 by Skeksis

[Nick Thomadis]

 

Dear Admirals,

We offer another important update which addresses several of your recent requests. More importantly, we have repaired a major portion of the old memory leaks issues, which became more apparent when the campaign became expanded with more features and nations. You should notice a significant improvement in fps performance and much better game stability. There are many other fixes, balances and enhancements which you can read below.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1069660/view/3390665221822194463

[Urst]

So... When will the casemates on towers be fixed?

[Skeksis]

40 minutes ago, Nick Thomadis said:

 

Dear Admirals,

We offer another important update which addresses several of your recent requests. More importantly, we have repaired a major portion of the old memory leaks issues, which became more apparent when the campaign became expanded with more features and nations. You should notice a significant improvement in fps performance and much better game stability. There are many other fixes, balances and enhancements which you can read below.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1069660/view/3390665221822194463

Hmm, no save reset, honor and glory to you.

[The PC Collector]

4 hours ago, Skeksis said:

The final end goal is to overwhelm the whole world with naval superiority against different warring nations, to which that should last a full 50 years. That inherently means forcing nations to “stupidly” runout of ships and not to keep those nations furnished with ships for the full 50 years.

While that is true, this is ultimately a game, and the objetive of a game is to be fun. And, for most people, wating 20-30-50 turns to have war, just for it to end in 3 turns, is not fun, even if it is strategicaly ideal. If you think otherwise, I have no other solution than to politely agree to disagree and consider this conversation ended.

However, I do agree that fighting an moderate sized, jutland like blob every now and then is fun. But it should be something which happened once or twice on the whole campaign, not the norm.

[SodaBit]

So there's now a limit on the amount of armor you can put on a turret. Kinda makes sense, the amount of space you have in a turret is quite limited, but I feel the values on the armor limits are a bit too restrictive. Given how much armor long barrel capital ship guns can penetrate, the amount of armor you need on a ship to see it through a battle with its opposite number has gone up by a fair margin. I can only speak for myself, but around ~635mm of armor is the minimum amount I'd put on a 1940's BB turret. That is no longer possible, as most calibers cannot support 600mm of turret armor, with 18" guns only capable of supporting up to ~595mm of armor. This is a pretty bad change imo, especially since it's being made in the name of realism. IRL, the main limitations on how thick a turret's armor was going to be was a country's manufacturing capabilities and how much they wanted to spend on a single ship. If a nation is capable of forging a meter thick armored plate for a turret face, and is willing to pay for it because they honestly thought they needed a meter of Krupp steel to protect their ships, we would have seen ships with a meter of armored plate on their turret faces. As far as I'm aware, the thickest plate ever manufactured was the 650mm frontal plate for the Yamato class BB's.

Given that the Yamato's were explicitly designed to kill Standard Class BB's, the frontal plate was designed to be completely impervious to the largest caliber of those types of ships, the 406mm guns on the Colorado's. 

And it would seem that this would have been true in practice, not just on paper. 
But with the recent changes, this sort of design philosophy is no longer possible in game... to an extent. The maximum thickness for an 18" gun is ~595mm on the sides, ~310mm on top, and ~2000mm for the barbette.
If we're going with the whole realism thing I feel like shaving a solid 4 meters off of the internal width of the barbette might be more unrealistic than shaving a few feet of the internal width of the turret.

Honestly, I think this change should be undone in its entirety. If you still want to limit the amount of armor people can have on their ships, a better approach would be to add some sort of armor forging technology into the tech tree, where researching new levels of it allows you to manufacture heavier and heavier armor plates. I feel this would be more realistic, as the manufacturing capabilities of a nation played more of a part in armor thickness than space concerns, as early in the age of steam and steel, a lot of people were running around with only 4 inches of armor plate on their capital ships, not because they thought it would be sufficient to stop enemy gunfire, but because that was the thickest plate anyone could make at the time. This sort of armor forging tech solution would also add a bit more to the extended campaign, as there would be another avenue for nations to compete with each other with regards to technological advancements.

[Fangoriously]

3 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

 

Dear Admirals,

We offer another important update which addresses several of your recent requests. More importantly, we have repaired a major portion of the old memory leaks issues, which became more apparent when the campaign became expanded with more features and nations. You should notice a significant improvement in fps performance and much better game stability. There are many other fixes, balances and enhancements which you can read below.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1069660/view/3390665221822194463

like what Im hearing from this. 👍

[Dave P.]

I know that you just added some AI pathing improvements for formations, but one oversight seems to be the "follow" command. When I directed some TBs (max speed 32kn) away from my CA division (max speed 18kn) and then told them to "follow" the CA division, the following happened:

1. TB division sets division speed to 18kn.
2. Individual TBs exceed this speed in order to find their positions within the TB formation. (Line ahead / Close)
3. The TB division as a whole does not exceed 18kn and does not close with the CA division.

I don't know if this is a "bug" in the sense of undesired or unintended behavior, but it seems wrong to me somehow. IMHO, the TBs should fall in w/ the CA division, and generally act like they're part of the same division, in line-ahead / close with the CAs. Maybe I'm thinking of "Follow" incorrectly though. I'm no naval tactics nerd.

[Dave P.]

Playing as AH. Apparently 10,000 ton CA research unlocks... 9500 ton CAs?

Nitpicky, I know, but yeah.

 

[SodaBit]

Alright, I've got some quick UI feedback here, though it might be rather low priority for a fix.
The absolute state of the damage feed is uh

A bit misleading. I know the AI can come up with some crazy designs, but I've yet to see it mount 112 main guns, let alone 200 "main" towers. It should be noted that, even though I've destroyed an entire navy's worth of guns, two of the five main gun turrets on the enemy ship are still firing. 

[SpardaSon21]

To go with what SodaDave just said, you can't even historically armor smaller calibers any more.  A 6" gun tops out at 4.5" of barbette armor, when the US Cleveland-class cruisers had 6" of barbette protection.  It is also impossible to put vertical protection on 4" guns for whatever reason, but 4.1"/105mm guns can have protection, even if they top out at 1.6", below the 50mm/2" thickness the German CL's had for their gun shields.  All guns, even 2" and smaller, should be able to carry at least .5"/13mm of vertical protection that would be equivalent to a splinter shield, especially since even the 2" Mark 1 guns are modeled with such a gun shield.

EDIT: You still can't put armor on a 5" gun's barbette despite me reporting that as a bug several times.  Either fix the tooltip to refer to 5.2" or larger or allow barbette armor on 5.1" and 5" guns.

Edited July 22, 2022 by SpardaSon21

[The PC Collector]

2 hours ago, SpardaSon21 said:

To go with what SodaDave just said, you can't even historically armor smaller calibers any more.

Get a comfy chair. I have been asking for casemate main guns for CLs and Armoured cruisers since the Steam release... and yet nothing.

[Rucki]

10 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

 

Dear Admirals,

We offer another important update which addresses several of your recent requests. More importantly, we have repaired a major portion of the old memory leaks issues, which became more apparent when the campaign became expanded with more features and nations. You should notice a significant improvement in fps performance and much better game stability. There are many other fixes, balances and enhancements which you can read below.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1069660/view/3390665221822194463

In the patch files there is the point: Improved the penetration mechanics further, so that the shell’s angle of fall affects in a more realistic manner the side hits. Statistical data will show the effective armor that was penetrated including the angle calculations.\ "

Where is that statistical data ? I couldnt find anything new in penetration display or somewhere else.
 

Also if we are already at it, on the left bottom there is that "hit overview", I think it would be cool to see how much armor got penetrated and at which angle If we hover over the hits.

[The PC Collector]

Random question: How can I move my saved campaign from one machine to another? So I can continue it when I come back home in a couple days.

[o Barão]

26 minutes ago, The PC Collector said:

Random question: How can I move my saved campaign from one machine to another? So I can continue it when I come back home in a couple days.

I guess Steam should sync your saved games between machines.

 

If not, you can always go to: C:\Users\xxxx\AppData\LocalLow\Game Labs\Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts

Copy and send the save files to your other machine. Place them in the right location and should work fine.