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

[Kebla]

@Nick Tommaso Is there  a roadmap or a plan for the future updates? 

[Vinrellren]

2 hours ago, o Barão said:

 It seems normal to me for the devs to want to see what exploits the players are using to implement the changes to balance the game.

 I suggest implementing another change to fix another exploit by the players. It seems the devs are aware of this, but until now there were no changes.

Of course, it's normal, I acknowledge and praise the devs' effort in actively trying to fix exploits but right now the AI silly design is soo bad that every ship the player made looks like an exploit 

Even the 12'' inch and HE meta have been reported for months and until now there is no change to these exploits.

This game is about players designing and build their own ships against AI, of course the player will use every advantange they can get which also sometimes means using these exploits.

My (now famous 20 super BBs ) is only because I use all of these exploits to show how broken the game with 12'' Mk 5 and 8'' Mk 5 secondary with SONAR I and RADAR III, every single AI ships no matter the most heavily armored or the fastest will be a piece of cake.

Last few updates have alleviate the AI design problem a lot (although still see silly AI only design) but the exploits are still there, ruining every change the devs made to improve the AI. 

 

[jtjohn1]

For those of you who are comparing the various gun sizes please make sure you are using the later marks of the bigger guns.  I would take any of my 16" battleships in against any of your 12" gun battleships as long as my 16" are fully up to date as is my fire control.  The 16" and bigger really don't even start hitting their stride until at least the MK4 version and it takes FOREVER to get to that point.  Starting from 1890 on the German side, leaving the slider full for the entire time.  It took me until the mid 1930s close to 1940 to get to the Mk 4 16".  

What has been bothering me is a repair bug I am running into.  I don't care how many times I take a damaged ship to a port it never repairs.  I have had ships sitting in port for years and the next time they fight they are sub 70% damage for some reason (Taken in the last battle the fought) If you look at the ships on the map they say they aren't damaged.

[Phelidai]

Oh goodness, AI... What have you done? 

[o Barão]

12 minutes ago, Phelidai said:

Oh goodness, AI... What have you done? 

Good ship and very fast. Apart from that single triple 5.4 inch that I would switch for another dual 6.1 and that secondary in the stern is not a bad layout. A CL design in a CA hull, interesting.🤔

[Phelidai]

Well, it's alright... unless it gets hit by anything. Blew up after taking a few secondary hits. Met 2 of the same class in a different battle, same result with both. Also some of it's forward turrets can't turn at all.

[o Barão]

1 hour ago, Phelidai said:

Well, it's alright... unless it gets hit by anything. Blew up after taking a few secondary hits. Met 2 of the same class in a different battle, same result with both. Also some of it's forward turrets can't turn at all.

Well I liked a lot the concept of designing a CL in a CA hull. So I designed this.

I use the minimum displacement and lowered the beam and draught, to lower the costs.

The big advantage is to be possible to add much more armor now.

UPDATE:

Something strange. I tried to do a similar design in a CL hull to see the differences.

- 50% less firepower

- Smaller secondaries

- Less armor.

- The cost is higher????

Cost comparison between the two designs.

 

Edited August 20, 2022 by o Barão

[ZorinW]

18 minutes ago, o Barão said:

Well I liked a lot the concept of designing a CL in a CA hull. So I designed this.

I use the minimum displacement and lowered the beam and draught, to lower the costs.

The big advantage is to be possible to add much more armor now.

Can you build a similar ship on a CL hull and compare construction cost and maintanence?

[o Barão]

7 minutes ago, ZorinW said:

Can you build a similar ship on a CL hull and compare construction cost and maintanence?

I updated the post. I made a similar one with 50% less firepower, smaller secondaries, less armor ( CL hull ), less displacement, and the cost is higher. 🤪

At first glance, is the engine cost the issue. Is half the cost in the CA hull and still more powerful than the CL design. It seems the small difference  into the beam slider is causing the BIG difference.

Edited August 20, 2022 by o Barão

[ZorinW]

12 minutes ago, o Barão said:

I updated the post. I made a similar one with 50% less firepower, smaller secondaries, less armor ( CL hull ), less displacement, and the cost is higher. 🤪

At first glance, is the engine cost the issue. Is half the cost in the CA hull and still more powerful than the CL design. It seems the small difference  into the beam slider is causing the BIG difference.

Thought so, the devs still got a lot of balancing on their hands 😅

[kineuhansen]

any news on 1.09

[Nick Thomadis]

1 hour ago, ZorinW said:

Thought so, the devs still got a lot of balancing on their hands 😅

Players need to spend more time learning the game, instead.

The extra cost was because of the effort to overspeed a hull, exceeding its optimal speed limit. We will add an extra UI indication for the hull to show what is this limit, although it can be "felt" in the speed slider.

[kineuhansen]

one thing they need to balance is the shells and explosive i just feel like there is no point of research those

[ZorinW]

6 minutes ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Players need to spend more time learning the game, instead.

The extra cost was because of the effort to overspeed a hull, exceeding its optimal speed limit. We will add an extra UI indication for the hull to show what is this limit, although it can be "felt" in the speed slider.

Excuse me?!

Someone needs to check their attitude, ASAP.

 

If a bigger and better armed CA is cheaper to build and maintain than a CL something is clearly WRONG.

[Dave P.]

2 hours ago, ZorinW said:

Excuse me?!

Someone needs to check their attitude, ASAP.

 

If a bigger and better armed CA is cheaper to build and maintain than a CL something is clearly WRONG.

Nothing is wrong. Each hull has a specific "natural" top speed inherent in the design. (I think it's based on the "Hull Form" attribute?) This reflects the hydrodynamics of IRL ships.

Exceeding that speed IRL requires truly YIKES growth of engine power/tonnage (e.g., the USN Iowa class needed ~75% more horsepower vs. the South Dakotas to go 5kn faster.) When exceeding the "speed limit", UA:D also increases the engine cost per ton a lot to further discourage 30kn pre-dreadnought refits and such.

This is one of the most frequently asked questions about the ship designer.

Dropping both of your cruiser designs down to somewhere between 32-34kn will likely result in the CA being more expensive. (Depending on the specific limits of the hull.)

Edited August 21, 2022 by Dave P.

[ZorinW]

25 minutes ago, Dave P. said:

Nothing is wrong. Each hull has a specific "natural" top speed inherent in the design. (I think it's based on the "Hull Form" attribute?) This reflects the hydrodynamics of IRL ships.

Exceeding that speed IRL requires truly YIKES growth of engine power/tonnage (e.g., the USN Iowa class needed ~75% more horsepower vs. the South Dakotas to go 5kn faster.) When exceeding the "speed limit", UA:D also increases the engine cost per ton a lot to further discourage 30kn pre-dreadnought refits and such.

This is one of the most frequently asked questions about the ship designer.

Dropping both of your cruiser designs down to somewhere between 32-34kn will likely result in the CA being more expensive. (Depending on the specific limits of the hull.)

I know, but did you not check the stats?

The lighter, narrower CL requires 1000t of engine/boilers and the heavier and wider CA only 500t of engine/boilers.

What kind of black magic hydro dynamic you suggest is going on with that CA hull?

Historically the Condottieri-class (CL) reached 37 knots with the same 95.000 hp double turbines that accelerated the Zara class (CA) to only 32 knots.

Edited August 21, 2022 by ZorinW

[lagabu]

7 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Players need to spend more time learning the game, instead.

The extra cost was because of the effort to overspeed a hull, exceeding its optimal speed limit. We will add an extra UI indication for the hull to show what is this limit, although it can be "felt" in the speed slider.

I have to say this is too arrogant.Although I have always felt this way, I am still shocked when I heard this.

I'm not talking about this example.But the overall development of recent versions.

We know games can't completely simulate reality.But it's not a good idea to push all the problems to the players.

Most players are military enthusiast.We have some consensus in what should the game be like.

At least,the game settings should not go against our common sense,and ask us to learn yours instead.

We have learned many things which against common sense since the begining:

    We set heavy armor on the funnels and towers to avoid huge structural damage.

    We place some useless smallest guns at the end of the ship to balance the weight offset.

    ......

We have also a lot of experience in campaign.On how to avoid:

    A strange economic collapse.

    Doom stack.

    Tension system dose not work.

    ......

But most importantly,It seems that hard-working players can not solve many problems.

Before a problem is submitted, we usually have already tried to adapt.

 

Edited August 21, 2022 by lagabu

[The PC Collector]

7 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

We will add an extra UI indication for the hull to show what is this limit, although it can be "felt" in the speed slider.

About time. I said this was needed the same moment the speed limit for hulls was announced. Currently detecting it requires going by 0.1 Kn speed jumps to detect it. If you make an adjustement of more than a couple Kn, it is too easy to simply not notice it.

[Fangoriously]

7 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Players need to spend more time learning the game, instead.

The extra cost was because of the effort to overspeed a hull, exceeding its optimal speed limit. We will add an extra UI indication for the hull to show what is this limit, although it can be "felt" in the speed slider.

here's a basic L2P guild from my 810 hours of experience

One of the first things you should do when designing a ship is to edge up the speed until you see a DRAMATIC cost increase, back it .1 knot behind what takes it over the threshold, and build the rest of the ship around that. Unless that speed is way more than you want or need. No design with speed over that threshold will be good/worth the cost.

Next, and in the campaign especially where you actually have a budget, you should find the exact ton that increases the physical length of you ship, and build the ship on the shortest hull form. Do this before you adjust beam or draft, these sliders don't quite play well with each other, especially if you change them and try to manually enter a weight number, you just have to adjust these things in the right order. These shorter ships will cost less, be more maneuverable, and almost always more stable so the accuracy stat will be better.

the larger your heavy citadel is, the more stable the ship will be. Having a very short citadel can save you a ton of weight, and allow you to mount huge guns, for example, but huge guns are god awful right now, and that short citadel has bigger down sides than the light weight can make up for. For one, the pitch will be terrible, in the 30s probably, and is a big subtracter to accuracy and like 8 other maneuverability stats. The area outside the citadel will most likely be lightly armored or unarmored if you are an all or nothing purist. These large 'extended' sections will eat a ton of damaging main gun overpens, high damage full pen secondary hits, flood your ship like crazy, now a HUGE problem with listing making your guns unable to fire, and all these hits will simply drain your health bar like crazy, allowing a few cruisers to win gun battles with your battleship.

Consider a -5 or even a -10 on barrel length, depending on the gun. For a minor reduction in range that you were never going to fight much at anyway, and often tiny accuracy penalties, you can shave ~10 seconds off of a main gun reload time, and a lot of weight and cost. Those super accurate 8.9 in guns? I always have them at least at -10 length, the accuracy is barely effected, and the range and reload time becomes that of a ~5in gun. Especially with HE spam and setting fires, your secondary battery DPS can be greatly increased with chopped barrels.

 

[kjg000]

8 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Players need to spend more time learning the game, instead.

The extra cost was because of the effort to overspeed a hull, exceeding its optimal speed limit. We will add an extra UI indication for the hull to show what is this limit, although it can be "felt" in the speed slider.

1.08.who-can-keep-track (9 Live)

 

Ok, so I’ve left the game for six or so weeks but decided to have a look at the current state of play. To be honest not much has really changed, lots of stirring the pot but little to mark six weeks of progress. Possibly much of the change has been in the mechanics behind the scene.

Of what progress there has been much of it seems to be arbitrary kludges to compensate for other seemingly arbitrary decisions. i.e. many players rush to get RADAR to compensate for the mystical spotting system, the response to which has been to make RADAR more expensive, not to fix spotting.

The trend seems to be towards limiting players to re-inventing historical designs rather than exploring alternatives.

That reminds me, many people on the steam page have noted that the original promo video is now misleading and deceptive, so why not just remove it? There are other videos already there, why allow one out dated video to remain and cause problems?

 

The list below is by no means complete and I would not have expected many of these points to have been addressed in just six weeks, but I would have expected some progress, especially on the easier points. If the code has been reasonably written some would be simply adding a link or less than an hours work.

 

• 8” and 12” guns still overpowered (fantasy guns)

• HE incendiary still overpowered (fantasy HE)

• Still using magicians to hide ships (fantasy spotting rules)

• Still able to place torpedoes in centre line main gun positions on BB (fantasy Torps)

• Still getting 200+ enemy ships in 1 fleet (fantasy fleets)

  • (Yes, but not as often – still turns the game into a slideshow even though the hardware is not stressed out)

• Still can’t build from ‘Refit’ designs. Yes, I know there is a clumsy kludge for a work around.

• Transports still get a free pass once escorts are sunk. (fantasy free-pass)

• UI still has a ‘one war’ policy, displaying wars as if there is only one possible alliance/conflict (fantasy alliance)

• Still have to hunt for the last entry in Tech lists to see what is currently being researched

  • No slide bars and/or putting the current tech at top of the list

• Still Have to hunt for the players nation in the ‘Politics’ screen. Player is not always top of the list and still moves about within the list

• Still little or no strategic game

  • Positioning is irrelevant within zones

  • Green zones around ships seem meaningless

  • Can’t blockade, dominate or strike an individual port at the players discretion by positioning ships or selecting the port to attack it

  • Can’t use choke-points to advantage by positioning ships

  • Ship placement in ports seems to have little or no value other than economics

  • Ships still teleport to seemingly random ports after ANY player run encounter with the enemy, even if no shots fired or even no enemy sighted.

• Still no road-map to help the free labour gamers give meaningful feedback

• Taskforce management virtually non-existent

• Fleet management screen lacking … just lacking!

  • Add Crew function not working

  • Add Crew button resets to off on loading a game

  • No TF allocation indication and can’t list by TF

  • Can’t refit a design directly from ‘Fleet’ screen

  • State of repair not always correctly indicated

• Design screen still has problems

  • Pitch, Roll, Engine efficiency etc. centre top of the screen should display relevant roll-over values, just as their ‘Ship Details’ counterparts do

  • ‘Overview’ list values likewise, particularly for Armaments and Engine.

  • Speed penalties jump excessively at a certain, seemingly arbitrary, point. Surely this should be based on a relatively simple formula i.e. involving the square of the speed divided by some value based on Hull Form factor and other relevant factors, and should form a smooth, but increasing curve.

 

Given the number of fantasy elements on the list I am disappointed that the Dev’s seem to be accusing any player that doesn't design ships or play to their liking as cheats. Of course players will adapt to the environment provided. I don’t see the Dev’s complaining about people exploiting the 8” and 12” fantasy guns, but react to people mothballing ships by making mothballing as expensive as building.

As I have mentioned before, the Dev’s have taken on a herculean task in this game and kudos to them for doing so, but perhaps they should be less inclined to shoot the messenger and more willing to take on well intended, meaningful feedback.

 

BTW the free labour above is meant as humour.

 

[Vinrellren]

Oh yeah, the misleading promo video on the steam page... If someone doesn't know (or even hear) the game and only saw the promo video they would immediately think a crazy amount of design variation is allowed in the game but in reality, the hull is premade and cannot be built per section like the video shows. 

Even designing using all the premade hulls and made a super BB, can force the devs to tell me to not design such a thing cause it broke the game.

[The PC Collector]

2 hours ago, kjg000 said:

Given the number of fantasy elements on the list I am disappointed that the Dev’s seem to be accusing any player that doesn't design ships or play to their liking as cheats. Of course players will adapt to the environment provided. I don’t see the Dev’s complaining about people exploiting the 8” and 12” fantasy guns, but react to people mothballing ships by making mothballing as expensive as building.

As I have mentioned before, the Dev’s have taken on a herculean task in this game and kudos to them for doing so, but perhaps they should be less inclined to shoot the messenger and more willing to take on well intended, meaningful feedback.

Exactly this. Considering we are paying for something we should be paid for, the least the devs could do is not going all defensive and start blaming us for everything the second we give a feedback which doesn't align with what/how they think it should be.

Also, I don't think that they can blame anybody for not noticing something like the speed soft cap in an interfacy which is, at the very best, unintuitive and barely functional at all.

[o Barão]

9 hours ago, Dave P. said:

 

Dropping both of your cruiser designs down to somewhere between 32-34kn will likely result in the CA being more expensive. (Depending on the specific limits of the hull.)

 

Well, let's see the results.

48.4 M

43 M

Conclusion

For a 10% cost difference (+/-) I got a CL design in a CA hull with:

- 50% more main battery firepower

- Much better armor values

- A superior hull base stats

- More powerful secondaries

- Better and cheaper Main tower

- The CA have better features like torpedo protection (not possible to have those in a CL)

About the main tower...

3.3 M

3 M

*These are the base stats in a naked ship.

Add all the equipment and now the CL main tower will cost 13.2 M and the CA main tower will cost 10.1 M. And we could argue the CA main tower to be the best one of the two.

So is this a penalty cost to have a compact, advanced tower version in a small hull? Maybe, but this does not help in any way the CL look.

Also, about the hull displacement...

The CA have a total 11k tons against a CL design with almost half the weight.

 

So one ship is vastly superior to the other, have almost the double in tonnage displacement and only cost 10% more?

Edited August 21, 2022 by o Barão

[o Barão]

@Nick Thomadis

The spotting range is depended from the height of the hull...

• Spotting range 21020 m
• Minimum draught

Let's increase the hull height by changing the draught slider.

The detectability goes up, but no changes to the spotting range? Some feature missing here? With many players complaining about spotting seems this feature would make ships with a positive draught more interesting in the design process. Usually is always about getting the minimum to get the best base accuracy.

 

A nice trade off that is missing here to balance the slider, IMO.

Edited August 21, 2022 by o Barão

[The PC Collector]

23 minutes ago, o Barão said:

So one ship is vastly superior to the other, have almost the double in tonnage displacement and only cost 10% more?

Wait, I can give you an even better one:

This is the cheapest 280 mm/11" "pocked battlecruiser" CA I have managed to design



Meanwhile, this is my budget, main fleet actual battlecruiser.



They use the same techs, yet the BC is only a 10% more expensive than the pocket battlecruiser CA. Why would anybody bother building a 280 mm armed pocket battlecruiser when you can have an actual battlecruiser for a 10% more?

So, I'm formally changing my "CLs are too expensive" feedback to "Cruisers are too expensive"

Edited August 21, 2022 by The PC Collector