My thoughts about the current campaign

[Dman1791]

The last time I bothered with the campaign was back in 1.05, when it was only the short 10-year stretches. I do like most of the changes that have been made, but there are a lot of issues still, both new and old. I also have some suggestions. I'll probably add more at some point.

Campaign map

• I think it's meant to be them going back to port to repair, but most task forces entirely dissolve after one or two battles. This would be less jarring and annoying if the task force at least tried to stay together, but it seems that they often scatter to the hills.
• On a related note, ships sometimes seem to just decide to move ports at will sometimes. I noticed this most readily in some possessions I had in the Mediterranean as Germany, where a force of cruisers in Tunisia meant to protect my trade kept showing back up in Germany.
• The UI for for moving ships desperately needs a tonnage total. It would also be great if ports told you their current tonnage and future (incoming fleets included) tonnage.
• The lack of a Kiel Canal makes me sad.

 

Campaign mechanics

• Fleets causing tension when operating nearby makes sense at peacetime. It doesn't make sense for Britain to get pissy when I'm just trying to fend off France. It leads to a weird cascading effect where one war tends to cause more and more nations to join in. I'd suggest that the tensions only rise when one of the following are true:
  • You are at peace
  • There are no enemy fleets near yours
• I'd really like to have some way of cooling things off outside of events. It feels bad that the only tool I have for diplomacy is making them angry with fleets.
• I'd also like to see some way of managing port expansion. If I'm Germany and don't think Russia is a threat, I'd like to be able to expand my bases in the west at the expense of my bases in the east. A simple weight value would probably work reasonably well.
• Another huge one I'd like to see is the ability to form divisions. I prefer to keep battleships grouped by class, so that I don't end up in situations like a division of 21kt dreadnoughts being slowed down by an old 18kt BB. A division would stay together at all times as far as ports and task forces go, while battles would almost always draw from preexisting divisions.

 

Ship design

• Copying a ship seems to block out modules that have been researched since the source design was built. I'd like to be able to make an entirely new ship after copying; it could really cut down on the tedium in 1895.
• Some hulls seem to, by default, be absurdly front-heavy. You can heap on aft armor and put literally every module you can aft of center, but on some hulls even that barely makes a dent. I feel like something's broken there. I can understand terrible pitch and roll in older hulls, but weight offset really shouldn't be such a consistent and insurmountable issue.
• Some guns still have massive outlier stats. I used 8.9"/+20% guns on my CAs as Germany. The Mark 1 version of these had something like 40% accuracy at short range, which was easily twice everything else. Even Mark 2 9.0"/+20% only had something like 30% on the same hull.
• I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but I get a lot of battles where the tonnages are comparable, but the classes of ship are completely out of whack. Something like 3 CL vs 2 CA. If the current mission generator is trying to even out tonnages, I really think it should place some more emphasis on classes.

 

Battles

• Please, PLEASE allow at least x5 time acceleration at all times, and be more liberal with x10. I'd honestly prefer generally uncapped time acceleration, especially when ships can't see each other. I imagine the main reason for this is to prevent physics weirdness, but when I'm chasing retreating smoke I'd like to be able to leave it on x30 until I sight them.
• Large battles are completely unplayable. I don't mean performance wise, I mean control wise. It's not at all feasible to pay attention to so many ships at once, so you have to leave a lot of the fleet to the AI through things like Scout and Screen. But the Scout AI especially, and AI in general, are suicidal. Scout TBs have it the worst, committing ritual suicide by CL. This is to say nothing of the issues with over-eager ship avoidance, but at least that can be turned off now.
• Please fix the forced deselection whenever a ship sinks. It is infuriating, especially in large battles where there are TBs and CLs dropping like flies.
• I feel like the auto-resolve should be a lot more decisive in situations where one side is massively outclassed. A few 1890 CLs should not be able to get away with light damage when encountering a task force of 1901 CAs.
• DDs and CLs seem to have an extremely annoying issue where they will refuse to aim their weapons if they're turning at any appreciable rate. This makes them almost worthless at shorter ranges, which precludes a lot of their uses in the early game.

Edited August 17, 2022 by Dman1791