"Naval Arms Race" mod overhaul. BETA v11.4 - for UAD v1.5.1.6

[Finwenolofinwe]

29 minutes ago, o Barão said:

In game is "armor_damage,0.16,damage multiplier due to partial penetration,0.33,,,,,," which I think is already too much but in battle I can have a different experience.

I believe the main problem is that turrets are far more survivable in game than they aver were in reality. Eben ricochets stood a decent chance of at least temporarily jamming a turret. In game there does not seem to be any temporary disabling of turrets and they seem to often survive even full penetrations.

[Fangoriously]

Ever since citidels where actualy added to the game, there has been missing a damage log type that differenciates between an outer hull partal pen, an outer hull pen that does not penatrate the citadel, and a penatration with detonation inside the citidel. Hell, there should probably be a log type for an overpen of both sided of the citadel and outer armor. Or an extended penatration, that comes in at enough of an angle so that it also penatrates the citadel. Just have to guess what you got based on the very high or very low damage roll you get.

[o Barão]

N.A.R. uploaded with the following fix:

"Thin funnels" variants missing from DD III fixed (germany and russia)

[SpardaSon21]

@o Barãoyou should look at penetration, too.  I believe it is far lower than IRL.  According to Nathan Okun's tables the 5"/38 could punch through around an inch and a half of the latest armors at 9km... with SP Common shells.  Even the incredibly old and outdated 5"/51 could get partial pens on that much at the same range with basic uncapped AP with no windscreens.  Right now its possible to get an 1890's CA with a belt immune to 8" gunfire at ranges of less than 2km, and combined with how Resistance adds ricochet chances and how shell types with more pen have more ricochet chance counter to IRL development and performance you wind up struggling to beat armor.

[o Barão]

2 hours ago, SpardaSon21 said:

@o Barãoyou should look at penetration, too.  I believe it is far lower than IRL.  According to Nathan Okun's tables the 5"/38 could punch through around an inch and a half of the latest armors at 9km... with SP Common shells.  Even the incredibly old and outdated 5"/51 could get partial pens on that much at the same range with basic uncapped AP with no windscreens.

Interesting, I just checked several guns. It is not the 5" inch guns that have low pen value, but it is (and this is worse) all medium and low caliber guns. The difference that is easy to notice starts around the 8" guns and below. And the problem is not the data I got to write the penetration table values. It seems to be that it is some modifiers from the "guns" file that are having a negative impact in the penetration value.

 

It will be fixed.

 

[SpardaSon21]

I wasn't speaking specifically of the 5" guns being an issue, but rather as an example of historical disparity.  But I am glad I could help you find where the problem was, anyways.  Can't wait for the fix!

[o Barão]

7 hours ago, SpardaSon21 said:

I wasn't speaking specifically of the 5" guns being an issue, but rather as an example of historical disparity.  But I am glad I could help you find where the problem was, anyways.  Can't wait for the fix!

The opposite also happens with bigger caliber guns with unrealistic high belt pen values, and the overall deck pen is incredibly high for all guns. Which is strange to see this now since I remember to use a software and historical shells data to get the values a few months ago and at the time I was happy with the results.

The belt pen values are easy to fix (already done). The deck pen fix will take some time.

[o Barão]

On 5/18/2023 at 2:16 PM, Dirtnap said:

1922 USA (1920 start) 17000t CA is supposed to unlock modern CA II but it doesn't show up in the ship designer

liking the mod so far 👍

I found the issue. It is from stock game. The hull is unlocked but because the minimum hull weight is 18.2k tons, you need to unlock heavy cruiser, 19000 tons hulls in the tech tree to be able to build them.

[o Barão]

N.A.R. alpha 0.8.4 part I

Changelog:

• Major overall fix for gun pen values. Now it should be closer to historical values.

[Callsign]

@o Barão I've been modding the game myself for a while and I've figured out how to have the French quad Bofors model available to the US and Britain. It was an extremely easy fix found in the parts.txt, while I was at it I also made some modifications as well as adding a hull as close to Vanguard as I could and even going as far as changing the British 15" gun model for it to make it more accurate. I also made a more efficient and modern rendition of the Tribal class, making many of the same part type modifications you did. Another modification I made that some might be interested in is the addition of atomic age systems, atomic fuel for ships after Oil III, atomic submarines, atomic HE shells that are thoroughly OP but should only be available in the last year of so of the campaign, modern turbines, more powerful late-game radars and autoloaders, and finally, quad guns on CLs and DDs, though this only applies to the Bofors style guns. 

[clavernever]

5 hours ago, o Barão said:

N.A.R. alpha 0.8.4 part I

Changelog:

• Major overall fix for gun pen values. Now it should be closer to historical values.

Absolutely beautiful designs doable with your mod, not needing a secondary tower enables much cleaner layouts with short hulls (aka when you minimise displacement).

- sadly, the ship can't be launched cause the game still requires CLs to have a secondary tower even if none are available. Rip creativity xD

- after a quick test I also found out that the issue also breaks auto-design for hulls that don't have sec. towers (currently this only seems to be the Gun Cruiser hull). The AI designer keeps retrying designs until it reaches 100% and then leaves an empty hull, because it has no sec towers to place and thus always gets an invalid result.

The player can avoid the problem by not choosing the affected hull, but I worry the campaign AI might not do the same thing and end up with a bunch of empty cruisers.

# Just double checked your update notes and realised this might have been an oversight (I thought you intended some CLs to have no sec tower, I now think your intention was just to remove an unnecessary option and let other towers take it's place).
Apparently the removed towers were the only ones available for the "Gun Cruiser" hull, thus the problem.

Edited May 22, 2023 by clavernever
added test result

[o Barão]

N.A.R. alpha 0.8.5 part I

Changelog:

• Added secondary towers to Chinese "Gun Cruiser" hull. (it was missing)
• Added thick small funnel variants to Chinese "Gun cruiser" hull.
• Created and added "Compact Ultra Funnel" variants for Ger/Aus/Spa/Chi/Rus DDs and "Recon Cruiser" GerAus

Edited May 23, 2023 by o Barão

[clavernever]

Typo in Russian Destroyer funnel, rip capacity.

Not terrible cause there's plenty alternatives, but still, that funnel ain't gonna get used anytime soon xD.

Here's me hoping to help with hopefully helpful help.

[o Barão]

9 hours ago, clavernever said:

I thought you intended some CLs to have no sec tower...

That was an error by me when editing the "parts" file. Thx

 

[o Barão]

16 hours ago, Callsign said:

@o Barão I've been modding the game myself for a while and I've figured out how to have the French quad Bofors model available to the US and Britain. It was an extremely easy fix found in the parts.txt

 

Many thx!! ✌️

[clavernever]

 
> Guns/torpedoes refuse to fire when the ship has too many launchers.
> Removing guns/torpedoes solves the issue.

All launchers have good firing arcs, all torps are well within range and way faster than my CAs, plus they'd be firing backwards in the most ideal of conditions. Same goes for the guns, plus crew is veteran and the ship has good pitch/yaw/offset ratios so their accuracy should be as good and not the culprit.

### After further testing it seems to affect both AI and player ships, and seems to be related to the too-many-guns-firing bug.
The more torpedo launchers you have the more likely it is your guns/launchers will stop shooting, and removing launchers/guns (especially rapid fire secondaries for obvious reasons) seems to significantly help the problem.
Furthermore, if you have a ton of launchers your ship won't shoot at all, and turning torps off will make all guns go back online. For some reason, the opposite doesn't seem to help. Turning guns off won't make your torps launch, only removing them in the designer will.

######## After even more furtherer testinger, the firing cap seems to be affected by any and all guns pointed at the target. This means 360 turrets are the bane on the firing penalty and one should make sure side turrets are never 360. This also applies to (and is way worse with) torp launchers... however most deck launchers will almost always be 360 if they have a decent firing arc, thus they're a nono in 99% of cases.

Torpedo launchers seem to count toward the limit whenever they're enabled, not just when they fire. It's as if they were always shooting a stream of ghost bullets. If I had to guess, the game must be doing lots of calculations under the hood with torpedo launchers. They behave differently from guns and have such low rates of fire that you can't afford to let the AI screw it's aiming, so maybe the game makes tons of checks to ensure torps aim properly.

At this point I'm starting to believe the gunfire limit is a critical issue, and needs to get looked into by the devs.
Way back before 1.0 it wasn't so bad, but lately it's become a constant issue that nullifies many ship designs.. which is made worse by all the secondary-heavy hulls introduced with 1.3

If you have specific tests in mind or need to playtest a specific change, you can tell me and I can help.
Just say what to modify or what to test, I know how to mod UAD, I can do it.
That being said you know much better than I what your mod changes and how the game works, so I'll air on the side of caution and report any issues here before taking action on my side.

Edited May 23, 2023 by clavernever
Modified after further testing. Issue doesn't seem to be caused by NAR but I can't report it to the devs on a modded game, so here it goes.

[o Barão]

1 hour ago, clavernever said:

AI refuses to launch any of it's 750+ long range torps at my slow CAs

AI also refused to shoot for a while, albeit that may be blamable on low accuracy.

Both are stock game bugs. About the guns is not because of low accuracy, in fact we can see that the 6.2" guns have almost 80% hit rate. The issue here is the 2.8" guns, which are working fine. There is a critical main bug in game that will happen when low caliber guns with a big ROF are being used, which will cause the main guns to not work. If it is your ship and the same thing happens, you can always disable the secondaries to force the main guns to work, or design your ships without small guns with a big ROF (mk3;mk4;mk5) until the devs release a fix for this issue.

1 hour ago, clavernever said:

Just say what to modify and what to test, I know how to mod UAD so I can do it. Since you know much better than I what your mod changes and how the game works, I'll air on the side of caution and report the issue here before taking any action on my side.

Not a test, but I failed to add 4" and 5" casemates guns to CLs.  Maybe you can find a solution.

The files that are important are: "randparts" and maybe a change in the "technologies" file is needed for them to work. Open the "randparts" and search for "casemate". You will see the lines for casemates for the different ship classes. If you could find a solution for this, that would be amazing.

Edited May 23, 2023 by o Barão

[clavernever]

12 minutes ago, o Barão said:

Both are stock game bugs. About the guns is not because of low accuracy, in fact we can see that the 6.2" guns have almost 80% hit rate. The issue here is the 2.8" guns, which are working fine. There is a critical main bug in game that will happen when low caliber guns with a big ROF are being used, which will cause the main guns to not work. If it is your ship and the same thing happens, you can always disable the secondaries to force the main guns to work, or design your ships without small guns with a big ROF (mk3;mk4;mk5) until the devs release a fix for this issue.

Not a test, but I failed to add 4" and 5" casemates guns to CLs.  Maybe you can find a solution.

The files that are important are: "randparts" and maybe a change in the "technologies" file is needed for them to work. Open the "randparts" and search for "casemate". You will see the lines for casemates for the different ship classes. If you could find a solution for this, that would be amazing.

I'll try to add them later! (either today night or tomorrow)

I'll post here if I get it to work.

That being said, I updated my previous post with more findings and a conclusive conclusion. Check the ####tagged sections for the new stuff.
TLDR: apparently torps are just as, if not significantly worse, than 2" guns when it comes to the bug you mentioned. Also you never want 360 wing turrets, and especially not 360 wing torps.

Edited May 23, 2023 by clavernever

[clavernever]

1 hour ago, o Barão said:

Both are stock game bugs. About the guns is not because of low accuracy, in fact we can see that the 6.2" guns have almost 80% hit rate. The issue here is the 2.8" guns, which are working fine. There is a critical main bug in game that will happen when low caliber guns with a big ROF are being used, which will cause the main guns to not work. If it is your ship and the same thing happens, you can always disable the secondaries to force the main guns to work, or design your ships without small guns with a big ROF (mk3;mk4;mk5) until the devs release a fix for this issue.

Not a test, but I failed to add 4" and 5" casemates guns to CLs.  Maybe you can find a solution.

The files that are important are: "randparts" and maybe a change in the "technologies" file is needed for them to work. Open the "randparts" and search for "casemate". You will see the lines for casemates for the different ship classes. If you could find a solution for this, that would be amazing.

I know that's just what is shown to the player, but unless someone's successfully put 13" casemates on battleships or 5" casemates on destroyers, I'd guess there's a hard game engine restriction that locks casemate calibre to secondary gun calibre. There is a possible workaround though: adding/modifying a tech so that 4" and 5" guns become secondary in CLs at some point. Doing that will probably unlock casemates for those calibres as a side effect (plus I'd say it makes some sense gameplay-wise, I'd consider 4" and 5" guns a bit small for a CL's main battery from 1920 onwards).

I'll test it once I learn how to change main/secondary gun calibres for ships xD

[Fangoriously]

If you guys do figure out 'main gun casmates' for cruisers, how about up to 8in turrets on CL and 12in turrets on CA?

I'd also change whats considered main guns for cruisers in general, like 6,7,8in are main guns on 20th century light cruisers and semi-armored cruisers, with old style protected cruisers having only 4in-6in mains.

Heavy cruiser main guns i'd make 8in-12in, there are no 10k ton 8in gun naval treaties in game, if you want to make one of those use a light cruiser hull with newly usable 8in guns.  I'm just tired of seeing the AI send 6in and 7in CAs after me.

[clavernever]

@o Barão MWAHAHAHAHA I'VE DONE IT !!!  it only took me god knows how many hours and I 100% didn't stumble into the solution by brute spreadsheet force I promis

The solution was in the shipTypes file, and it was deceivingly simple: increase CL secondary caliber from 3 to 5.

|
The overlap with main gun caliber seems to cause no issues. I play tested it and literally everything  just  works. 
 It has the side effect of letting you place 5" deck guns as secondaries, but the game recognises them as both types meaning you'll still complete main gun requirements as you would expect.
Furthermore, say you pick a 5" from your main guns tab and then another 5" from your secondaries tab, in-game they all get correctly grouped according their location and barrel count (centerline/casemate/side/twin/single/etc).
I'll reiterate, everything  just  works .

It feels too god to be true but it is, indeed, true.

[clavernever]

2 hours ago, Fangoriously said:

If you guys do figure out 'main gun casmates' for cruisers, how about up to 8in turrets on CL and 12in turrets on CA?

I'd also change whats considered main guns for cruisers in general, like 6,7,8in are main guns on 20th century light cruisers and semi-armored cruisers, with old style protected cruisers having only 4in-6in mains.

Heavy cruiser main guns i'd make 8in-12in, there are no 10k ton 8in gun naval treaties in game, if you want to make one of those use a light cruiser hull with newly usable 8in guns.  I'm just tired of seeing the AI send 6in and 7in CAs after me.

Totally doable, but I'd advise caution as the caliber disparity would send accuracy penalties through the roof.
I think it could be ok if limited to no more than two large caliber twin turrets, to stop the ship from being torn apart by gun recoil.

As for historical counterparts, Fisher himself was involved in the design of a couple of ships that had to be down-gunned cause their hulls couldn't hope to take their main battery recoil; I can't remember the details but I do remember the story.

Of course in-game your ship wouldn't sink, but if you went with a full battery you'd get a "own gun's recoil" penalty bad enough to effectively make the ship useless.

Still, fun idea, I'll check it out some other day

[Dirtnap]

1 hour ago, clavernever said:

As for historical counterparts, Fisher himself was involved in the design of a couple of ships that had to be down-gunned cause their hulls couldn't hope to take their main battery recoil; I can't remember the details but I do remember the story.

It was Furious and her single 18" gun iirc.

Anyways, is there a way to get rid of the 'different turrets' for twin/triple turret combos (doubles superimposed over triples or vice versa)? it's not a huge penalty but it shouldn't be a penalty at all given that several ships had them.

(also also, any plans to make turrets like these for the USN mk4 7"/8"/9" guns? it's kinda dumb that you have to wait for mk5 for the baltimore style 8" turrets but i love the look of these and the ones from the Northampton/New Orleans/Portland class)

Edited May 24, 2023 by Dirtnap

[o Barão]

1 hour ago, clavernever said:

@o Barão MWAHAHAHAHA I'VE DONE IT !!!  it only took me god knows how many hours and I 100% didn't stumble into the solution by brute spreadsheet force I promis

The solution was in the shipTypes file, and it was deceivingly simple: increase CL secondary caliber from 3 to 5.

|
The overlap with main gun caliber seems to cause no issues. I play tested it and literally everything  just  works. 
 It has the side effect of letting you place 5" deck guns as secondaries, but the game recognises them as both types meaning you'll still complete main gun requirements as you would expect.
Furthermore, say you pick a 5" from your main guns tab and then another 5" from your secondaries tab, in-game they all get correctly grouped according their location and barrel count (centerline/casemate/side/twin/single/etc).
I'll reiterate, everything  just  works .

It feels too god to be true but it is, indeed, true.

Holly shit, you did it!!! I just tested and everything seems to work fine.

So many thanks, this is without a doubt, what was missing to make the protected cruisers feel right in the game.

[Fangoriously]

Bravo gentlemen! At the very least those awful armored cruiser, semi armored cruiser and protected cruiser hulls should feel slightly less pathetic.

In addition to these general global settings, there are quite a few hulls with main gun size limitations as well, their individual file must contain override on gun size. The Spanish version of the new modernized dread can only have up to 14in guns for example, may be worth digging through there to find the override line. Though slightly tedious, you could change all the protected cruiser gun sizes to be different than you might find on a modern light cruiser. Maybe modern battleships shouldn't be build able with smaller than 14in guns, to protect the auto design from itself, etc.