Must-fix items

[neph]

0. How on earth do we sill have convoy raids ending before they are all killed!?! Fixed! Thanks devs.

1. It is crazy that having both dual- and triple-barreled turrets still gives the "mixed barrels" accuracy penalty. Needs to be fixed.

2. We need to be able to accelerate time more freely.

3. We need more freedom over formations. What is a "loose" screen in 1890 is far too tight for 1940. Perhaps change the spacing toggle to a distance slider we can set in km?

4. We need front/back citadel armor (probably for citadel III & higher). Right now, an enemy that cannot penetrate your armor is the most dangerous. They will shoot you with HE & destroy you by penning your bow & stern. Damage bleed means your ship's protected spaces will rapidly become destroyed & then flood.

5. Number of hulls, beam/draft, and citadel type must be locked during refits. Possibly armor type, number of bulkheads, and barbette class.

6. Spotting needs to be increased to 150-200% of what it currently is.

7. We need a "hold formation" toggle to prevent ships from falling out of line when they take damage!

8. Please make the "reverse" button turn red when you hover your mouse of it, and/or move it away from the "attach or remove from division" button.

9. We MUST be able to share ship designs on the steam workshop!

10. Moving to ports is very buggy. If the tooltip pops up, I should always go to that port. In practice, I end up very often right next to it.

11. Moving a superstructure with barbettes/funnels attached *STILL* somehow doesn't move the turrets on those barbettes or funnels. Extremely annoying.

12. (Not sure) It seems like the width of the hull is not taken into account for buoyancy calculations. There should be a lot more floating percentage in the middle of the hull than in the bow. It seems like every segment is treated the same, which should not be the case.

13. Mothballing a ship is STILL cancelled by "add crew". Impossible to fight a war & still have ships mothballed.

14. This is supposedly the final release. Do you really want all that "aim info" in the side panel? Should we really be able to know what every component of the enemy ship is? Should we know exactly when they fire torpedoes? Is this game really finished? Anyways, should probably hide all that stuff (& eventually build an espionage system). God, this game is not release-ready.

15. Higher tech levels should have a "counterflooding" technology which reduces or prevents roll due to flooding.

16. The AI really really really needs to prioritize ship balance more. It's very rare that it comes up with a design capable of landing first hits.

17. Needs to be an "offer for sale" button in the Fleet tab. Also, you need to counteroffer a minor power with "what about this different design" or "how about this ship I already have built?"

18. Need to be able to armor the steering gear, the same way we can armor the conning tower.

19. Must investigate why battleships achieve disproportionate numbers (>90%) of deck hits vs cruisers at short (<5km) range.

20. Need to have fore/aft pitch effects due to flooding. Bow flooding ought to cause far more of a slowdown than stern flooding, due to being bow-down.

21. Naval invasions are very strange. You can be invading an army of ~300 men with overwhelming (~300,000ts in a ~30,000-ton-required invasion) force, and still fail after 6 months.

22. Deck hits are still broken (see #20). Please do away with deck vs belt and just simulate the angle of the hit. Right now, a ship with very low freeboard ONLY gets deck hits, even at very very close range!

23. We need some kind of intelligence system to find out what our opponents have/are building before we face them in combat.

Everything else I have is more extensive than a must-fix item (eg: we need distinct turret models/sizes for single vs triple turrets), so I won't include them here.

Edited February 8, 2023 by neph

[Kothra]

1 hour ago, neph said:

 

5. Number of hulls, beam/draft, and citadel type must be locked during refits.

 

Beam and draft are certainly things that have changed during refits of real ships. I'm not sure about the others, but I'm not sure why it wouldn't be possible with enough time and money.

The time and money aspect of refits is what really needs to be balanced. As far as this game is concerned though such extensive refits probably wouldn't be worth it over just building new ships, since some of the more extensive refits like the Italian battleships were done because of treaty limits which just aren't a factor in the game.

[neph]

2 minutes ago, Kothra said:

Beam and draft are certainly things that have changed during refits of real ships. I'm not sure about the others, but I'm not sure why it wouldn't be possible with enough time and money.

The time and money aspect of refits is what really needs to be balanced. As far as this game is concerned though such extensive refits probably wouldn't be worth it over just building new ships, since some of the more extensive refits like the Italian battleships were done because of treaty limits which just aren't a factor in the game.

There's a difference between building up the sides of a hull with panels to increase the freeboard & stretching the height of every deck. There's a difference between adding larger torpedo bulges & widening the frame of the vessel. One is a (relatively) modest job, the other involves deconstructing the entire ship & rebuilding it as essentially a new hull with the same components.

I think there's also a game balance argument that would say constraints drive interesting decisions. Being able to freely refit your old 12" BB with a new 13.8" setup is bad enough, but when it's enabled because you can find the extra displacement from maxing out the beam & draft sliders, that's bad game design. You should have to choose between designing a new vessel or reducing the scope of your refit ambition.

My personal take.

[Fangoriously]

There should be a refit/modernize mode, with more limited options than now, and a rebuild mode where you have full access to every option, but it takes almost as long to build a new ship if you change things like the dimensions, citadel, engines, and main guns.

 

Refit modes should build in all the passive research improvements. Make gun mk upgrades toggle able, restrict engine type upgrades,like if you have a turbine, you can upgrade to geared, but not replace it with diesel. Certainly you can't change your armor quality, and a superstructure change or moveing barbets should be the largest scope of things you can change in a refit.

[kjg000]

On 1/31/2023 at 3:56 AM, Kothra said:

Beam and draft are certainly things that have changed during refits of real ships. I'm not sure about the others, but I'm not sure why it wouldn't be possible with enough time and money.

The time and money aspect of refits is what really needs to be balanced. As far as this game is concerned though such extensive refits probably wouldn't be worth it over just building new ships, since some of the more extensive refits like the Italian battleships were done because of treaty limits which just aren't a factor in the game.

I agree some change should be possible but perhaps it should be limited to a percentage? I don't know of any ship which refitted its draft or beam hugely. Having said that I'm happy with the current system as long as hulls, particularly CA and DD, are subject to seemingly arbitrary limits. Ie I can build a 35000 ton BB but can't build a 1000 ton DD!

[o Barão]

3,4,5,6,18 +1

2 - Probably an engine limitation to prevent issues with multiple calculations from all ships firing at the same instance.

16 - The funny part is when we see new players complaining on steam forum exactly the opposite. Like the AI is cheating. IMO will never be perfect, but to be fair the devs gave us the shared design function. So nothing is stopping us to create a ship library for the AI to use against us.

14 - This is supposedly the final release. Do you really want all that "aim info" in the side panel? Should we really be able to know what every component of the enemy ship is? Should we know exactly when they fire torpedoes?

A big +1 from me. I am asking for a realistic simulation option for years already. It is ironic to see players saying that it is too easy to defeat the AI, when we got access to so many BS info to help us win.

9 - Would be nice, but no. To have access to our design files and upload somewhere to share is great. To demand for a feature that it was never promised by the devs, I can't agree.

12 - "It seems like the width of the hull is not taken into account for buoyancy calculations. "

Maybe not exactly what you want, but the change in beam and draught, will change these two variables, that will impact the ship buoyancy when taking damage.

15. Higher tech levels should have a "counterflooding" technology which reduces or prevents roll due to flooding.

We already have this in game.

[neph]

3 hours ago, o Barão said:

@o Barão

Thanks! Broadly agree with you but some nitpicks:

9—This is the sort of thing that gives a game longevity & a vibrant community. Sadly, it's 2023 & to be healthy the game's going to have to grow past its development forum. Making it as easy as possible for new players to get shared designs is really very critical. I can't overstate how important it is to have workshop integration. Setting it up is extremely easy too, want some of the weird file naming restrictions are lifted on shared designs.

12—Meaning a fully flooded section at the very end of the bow should be worth 1/5 or so as much flooding % as a fully flooded section in the middle of the vessel. It's just simple geometry.

15—That term is being misused. Counter flooding increases how much water is inside the ship and an effort to stabilize roll. There, the devs are using it to mean "anti flooding", or "getting water out of the ship".

[o Barão]

7 hours ago, neph said:

Thanks! Broadly agree with you but some nitpicks:

9 - I agree with you 100%. It would be great for us to have an easy way to share models. I also think the company could benefit with more sales if it had this feature. However, I am not a developer. I have no idea how easy or hard it is to implement this feature. And in the end, they never mentioned anything about this. So I don't feel in the right to demand this from them. Maybe we can use nexus or something similar, or just use the forum to share models.

12- Ah!! My poor english, failed me again. 😒I understand now what you are saying, and you are correct.

15- I see. Well, you are not wrong, but maybe a little nitpicking. It is a similar thing when I mention that increasing the turret weight (by armor or barrel length) should have an impact on the turret turn rate. Or the draught slider should have an impact on the spotting value. For me makes sense, but the devs always ignored when I mention this. Maybe I am also nitpicking with minor details.

[anonusername]

3 hours ago, o Barão said:

9 - I agree with you 100%. It would be great for us to have an easy way to share models. I also think the company could benefit with more sales if it had this feature. However, I am not a developer. I have no idea how easy or hard it is to implement this feature. And in the end, they never mentioned anything about this. So I don't feel in the right to demand this from them. Maybe we can use nexus or something similar, or just use the forum to share models.

12- Ah!! My poor english, failed me again. 😒I understand now what you are saying, and you are correct.

15- I see. Well, you are not wrong, but maybe a little nitpicking. It is a similar thing when I mention that increasing the turret weight (by armor or barrel length) should have an impact on the turret turn rate. Or the draught slider should have an impact on the spotting value. For me makes sense, but the devs always ignored when I mention this. Maybe I am also nitpicking with minor details.

9 - Probably doesn't require many direct code changes, just a lot of fighting with steam's developer UI/API to get the Workshop to work. Most of the hard parts should be handled by Steam, but I have heard it isn't the easiest system to set up.

[anonusername]

Some other problems I think need to be addressed:

1. Penetration still has some bugs.  e.g. Ships will block 12" guns while 5" penetrates.

2. The campaign UI doesn't provide concrete, quantifiable feedback. There are tooltips indicating that various actions have *some* effect, but it is often difficult to determine the magnitude, if any, of the effects. Even a simple "minor/major boost" notification would help. 
2a. How do logistics and army size affect naval invasion? How does the number of ships affect naval invasions? Does the bombardment capacity affect naval invasions?

2b. How do transports affect GDP growth?

2c. How do blockades and sunk transports affect the enemies performance in land battles? Do nearby navies affect land battles?

2d. How willing is the AI to accept a peace deal? What would make them more willing?

2e. How is the player's tech budget multiplying their research progress? How is the "early/late" modifier affecting research progress?

2f. How do the player's actions affect their relation with minors?

2e. What are the prerequisites for getting a mission to invade a minor? How many of these does the player currently meet?

2f. How many ships can be in a zone without imposing a relation penalty? How close is the player to this value?

2g. What proportion of shipbuilding capacity comes from GDP vs. shipyard size?
2h. How does one trigger a port bombardment? (I haven't managed to do this since the global map.)
3. The player's ability to guide the progress of their campaign is too limited.
3a. No way for the player to encourage a naval invasion of a minor.

3b. No way to influence politics and avoid crippling GDP penalties.

3c. No way to request the land army to prioritize a certain region. 

4. The map needs to be made wrap-around. This is a smaller issue than the preceding ones, but hopefully not too hard to fix.

[neph]

4 hours ago, o Barão said:

15- I see. Well, you are not wrong, but maybe a little nitpicking. It is a similar thing when I mention that increasing the turret weight (by armor or barrel length) should have an impact on the turret turn rate. Or the draught slider should have an impact on the spotting value. For me makes sense, but the devs always ignored when I mention this. Maybe I am also nitpicking with minor details.

All excellent points!

[neph]

1 hour ago, anonusername said:

<snip>

All agreed. There's a lot of missing polish that you need to call a product finished.