>>>v1.4 Feedback<<< (1.4.1.1 Opt x2 latest version)

[Tycondero]

One thing I noticed is that both wealthy AI nations as the player seem to hoard money at some point. Especially during war, when the naval budget is increased a lot, wealthy empires (e.g. Britain, Germany, France) will hoard more than they can ever spend.

Is this intended for the game? This almost amounts to unlimited money at some point. 

Furthermore, it seems to the demand territory in peace deals still doesn't work that well. I demanded a territory from Spain, but after the peace had been signed I received nothing.

Edited December 31, 2023 by Tycondero

[MDHansen]

Territory from peace deals have a chance of not happening. Cant remember the number without looking in the files

[Dave P.]

8 hours ago, Tycondero said:

One thing I noticed is that both wealthy AI nations as the player seem to hoard money at some point. Especially during war, when the naval budget is increased a lot, wealthy empires (e.g. Britain, Germany, France) will hoard more than they can ever spend.

Is this intended for the game? This almost amounts to unlimited money at some point. 

Furthermore, it seems to the demand territory in peace deals still doesn't work that well. I demanded a territory from Spain, but after the peace had been signed I received nothing.

Early on in the game, where operational and maintenance costs are a big chunk of your military budget, it's possible to burn through a pretty big surplus post-war as you move ships back to port, repair them, and eventually get them mothballed. It's also pretty easy to build more ships than you can maintain, or bankrupt yourself with construction costs.

Later on in the game, if GDP increases enough, shipyard capacity doesn't increase nearly as fast as your budget does, which means this isn't a problem - you literally can't build enough ships to stress your navy budget. And no matter how much money you throw at the problem, you can't speed up the construction of ships. 😞

This could probably be tweaked.

[Dave P.]

I have a feature request. As an American who went to public school, I realize I am regrettably bad at geography, so mock away.

But if I click a port name in the fleet screen, it would be REALLY nice if that switched to the map view and centered the port in question on the screen. Would beat the hell of out going to X ocean and then trying to hunt for it visually, hoping it's not hiding behind a fleet icon or something.

[ioulaum]

I'd suggest if ships has different destination, don't merge them automatically along the travel lane.

[Astor]

Could you please check target priorities?

I often catch my BBs targeting a lone DD 10km away, while an enemy BB is 3km next to it. The DD had a 0.5% hit chance the BB was a 3.5%. Shouldn't the ship switch target here by default?

And that enemy BB 13" was targeting my own DD about 9.5km away, and it's 10" guns where targeting one of my TB at about 11km away...

But on both sides the Battleships secondary guns all where targeting the enemy BB.

DD/TB are crazy magnets for target aquiring for big guns.

Edited January 1 by Astor

[flaviohc16]

6 hours ago, Dave P. said:

I have a feature request. As an American who went to public school, I realize I am regrettably bad at geography, so mock away.

But if I click a port name in the fleet screen, it would be REALLY nice if that switched to the map view and centered the port in question on the screen. Would beat the hell of out going to X ocean and then trying to hunt for it visually, hoping it's not hiding behind a fleet icon or something.

It already does, exactly how you asked for.

[Zuikaku]

I have to very often assign the same target over and over again since my ships decide to target something else. Switch to turn off auto targeti g woul'd be helpful!

Edited January 1 by Zuikaku

[Tycondero]

9 hours ago, Dave P. said:

Early on in the game, where operational and maintenance costs are a big chunk of your military budget, it's possible to burn through a pretty big surplus post-war as you move ships back to port, repair them, and eventually get them mothballed. It's also pretty easy to build more ships than you can maintain, or bankrupt yourself with construction costs.

Later on in the game, if GDP increases enough, shipyard capacity doesn't increase nearly as fast as your budget does, which means this isn't a problem - you literally can't build enough ships to stress your navy budget. And no matter how much money you throw at the problem, you can't speed up the construction of ships. 😞

This could probably be tweaked.

Indeed.

We need more reasonable money sinks or less income. Due to massive GDP growth some countries get massive budget. I am very much okay with some countries having an economical advantage, such as the USA, UK and Germany, as these nations did historically develop their economies very heavily in this time frame. 

I would personally be in favor of just getting a certain (small) percentage of the national budget ,with some "dictatorial" governments allowing for a higher percentage. having a feature to request more funding when required would be great. This is somewhat in the game already with events and "going bankrupt". But having it an in game action would be better I think. 

Furthermore, it would also be great if we could manually affect the naval base capacity for each territory. Some colonial bases are very tiny eventhough their contribute a significant share to the GDP. 

[Tortenschachtel]

On 12/30/2023 at 9:41 PM, Tortenschachtel said:

Question: For technologies such as "Improved tripple turrets" do i have to refit my ships for that to improve the turrets or will it be active for all ships that have tripple turrets as soon as it has been researched?

Generally speaking, how do i know what tech will be available to all ships immediately and what tech will require a refit? (Aside from tech that concerns things i have to select when designing/refitting the ship, obviously, like engine type.)

 

Edit: Experimental evidence suggests i need to refit the ships to get the improved tripple turrets.

This is probably related: Sometimes, especially during the later stages of the tech tree, my ship designs automatically become overweight. Why does this happen? It's a little annoying.

[MDHansen]

Regards the insane gdp growths*, and respective naval budgets, in mid-/late games, would it be an idea to cap the dgp growth and cap the naval budget %?

I see in the params that there is an inflation modifier, but does it even do anything? I cranked it up ten folds, but can't see any changes
 

*current campaign 1928 in an 1890 start, France has a 22% year gdp growth, US and myself (britain) pushing 17%

Edited January 1 by MDHansen

[Dave P.]

I feel like there should be an upper limit on the amount of damage a hull can absorb before it's no longer a hull. 🙎‍♂️

But seriously, I think damage values and reported damage could be reported in a way that is more helpful/informative. (Maybe cap it to the actual HP of the ship.) It would be nice to have some idea of how much structural HP a given ship has (had?) to begin with.

Edited January 5 by Dave P.

[MDHansen]

49 minutes ago, Dave P. said:

I feel like there should be an upper limit on the amount of damage a hull can absorb before it's no longer a hull. 🙎‍♂️

But seriously, I think damage values and reported damage could be reported in a way that is more helpful/informative. (Maybe cap it to the actual HP of the ship.) It would be nice to have some idea of how much structural HP a given ship has (had?) to begin with.

agree. I've had my destroyers taking 300k of damage and barely loose 20% "hitpoints".
I've never been a fan of rpg damages popping up. in my opinion the actual damage done could be hidden and just report the type (partial pen, pen, overpen, module dmg, etc).
On top of the more or less uselessness of the numbers, it gets messy pretty fast in a big battle

[Dave P.]

I"m embarrassed how long it took me to notice this, but I didn't because I'm a good little boy who doesn't overload his shipyard building capacity. But apparently there's an upper limit - no matter how many millions of tons of ships you order constructed, they never take longer than double (roughly? It seems to vary a little?) their base construction time.

So you can order 5 battleships in 3 years, or like 200 battleships in 6-7 years.

I guess this is how the AI builds those ridiculously large fleets so fast.

Edited January 5 by Dave P.

[admiral_admirer]

Hi, please resolve the issue of AI retreating as this becomes the all-encompassing strategy of the AI as you go up the years in the campaign. 

After playing a lot of battles in the campaign and trying to look for a commonality as to when the AI flees, I believe the cause of this nothing to do with tonnage, armour, tech level, or number of ships the AI has in the match versus the player, but it is in fact is a setting in the AI logic where it calculates an ideal distance in order to be at a "safe" distance from the player's cannons. 

The reason for coming to this conclusion is that the AI would flee even if it completely outnumbered me by several times, but only if my cannons were accurate enough to hit it at extreme ranges.  One of my modern cruisers fought the AI in a 1945 campaign battle (setup was: 1v1, CA v CA), for whatever reason, my ships' MK V 10 inch cannons were inaccurate as hell, and so the enemy CA for once did not try to run away but decided to close the distance, once it was within IIRC 15ish KM of my ship, I started landing more and more shells, eventually beating it.  This would explain why this AI behaviour only starts to become an issue later in the campaign... early campaign (1890-1900-ish) has your ships' accuracy so low that you cannot hit the broadside of a battleship-sized barn even at ranges of 1km or less, thus the AI has no need to "flee" and will readily engage your ship at close range, as the campaign goes on and your guns gain more and more accuracy and range, the AI ships begin to set and engagement distance farther and farther away.  It may that the extreme ranges of higher tech ships are passing a value to the the AI that it was never intended to handle or all the accuracy buffs mean the final aimed value is at a distance that is enough for it to attempt to reach a distance from the player ships of several dozen kilometers -without seeing how it's coded I can only speculate.

In (very) pseudo code, it appears the ai is attempting to set it's distance in any given match via the following (warning, very pseud code and a lot of speculation):

ai_ship_engagement_range=player_ship_long_range_accurate_fire

So if the ai sees player_ship_long_range_accurate_fire as 50 km, it will try to create a distance of 50km from your ship/s

 

My suggested resolution:

Simply multiplying whatever this "safe distance" is called in the code by a value lower than 1.0 (maybe only applicable to ships built after a certain year like 1910),  for example

 

(ai_ship_engagement_range=(player_ship_long_range_accurate_fire*0.7))

 

Or some kind of "else" statement to handle the extreme  later game distances like:

(IF player_ship_long_range_accurate_fire=<25km THEN ai_ship_engagement_range=player_ship_long_range_accurate_fire

ELSE ai_ship_engagement_range=25km )

 

One other point to note:

Ships carrying torpedoes are seemingly not effected by this IF they are not part of a group with a non-torp-armed ship.  Destroyers and I believe light cruisers will aggressively rush to your ships in order to get a launch angle on you at the AI's ideal torp range, even if it means their ships getting obliterated in the process.  I bring this up because it is clearly possible to overwrite the AI "fleeing" behaviour.

Edited January 5 by admiral_admirer

[brothermunro]

I think that if the upper limit of where the AI wants to get to is the range of its own guns so that it is actually shooting back at you that would help a lot! Currently you see them going to a ‘safe’ range that is outside their own max range but very much inside yours 😅

[Zuikaku]

Cowardly AI is forcing me to build extremely fast destroyers for pursuit only. When they manage to catch fleeing AI TF it tends to turn and fight. But this is stupid, I do not want to build these racing DDs but cowardly AI forces me to do so.

[MDHansen]

something did happen in the last patch. I haven't touched any numbers come to battle ai for 3 months, and they have stayed at their gun ranges, and smaller ships have closed in, in most battles with a few outliners here and there. As one should expect.

Now they turn 180degrees right away. doesnt matter if they got 3x the tonnage. Every AIs tech is very advanced same as mine ( I know, it doesnt tell the entire story). But they do roll in same era ships as me, and I am forcing them to use atleast latest 2 module techs

Edited January 6 by MDHansen

[Gregg]

Happy New Year everyone!

I have a bone to pick, one that I believe has been discussed here before; that being torpedo hit results on smaller ships, especially TB's, DD's and CL's.

I'm a amature Naval historian, dating back to the age of sail in the 1600's, with lots and lots of books on the subject.

In modern history (1930's until today), to my knowledge, there have only been a few cases where a DD took a single torpedo hit and survived. In all those cases the DD took hits at the stern or bow, blowing away said part of the ship off. And there is only one case in history where a DD took two torpedo hits and survived, that one case taking hits at both the bow and the stern.

So, why in a recent battle (March 1922) did a 1920 vintage 1000 ton Japanese "trained crew" DD take eleven (11) torpedo hits ( from three different DD's, 19 and 20 inch torpedos) to sink it? Said hits were mostly at the "Main Belt". It appears once a torpedo hits a section of the ship, additional hits in that spot do little or no additional damage. I've seen time and time again; DD's takes two, three, or four torpedo hits, and survive (yes with 80 plus % flooding, but they still survived). In the above battle, one of my attacking DD's took three torpedo hits (19 inch) (two at the bow, one at the main belt), all resulting in less than 1000 damage points each. Said DD survived the "Convoy" battle, with four of my DD's taking on the Japanese escort of a DD and a CL. Both Japanese escorts were sunk by a DD rush attack, and afterwards nine TR's were sunk; while I had one DD damaged as described above, and two other DD's being shot up; but all four of my DD's survived.

Also, in this last battle, the 4000 ton Japanese 1917 vintage CL took nine (9) torpedo hits (all 20 inch) to sink, again most of these hits being at the Main Belt area.

The damage inflicted on small ships by torpedos, has to be looked at, and fixed.

[Narbar]

What happens when a battle pops up on your main screen but you ignore it and end turn?

[MDHansen]

Would it be much of an ask to add a scale multiplier for ships/ports on the campaign map, much like the one for oil/rebellion?

#,,CampaingMap,,,,,,,
scale_mult_indicator_oil_rebellion,0.3,Multiplier for the scale size of the Oil and Rebellion icons,15,,,,,,

[killjoy1941]

19 hours ago, Narbar said:

What happens when a battle pops up on your main screen but you ignore it and end turn?

Nothing. It skips it. I often do this to keep the AI from getting savaged one ship at a time, and stop when it has sufficiently repositioned that it begins sending out task forces again.

If the engagement doesn't force you to deal with it, you can skip it.

Edited January 8 by killjoy1941

[Narbar]

Thanks I appreciate your help

[Nick Thomadis]

Uploaded Optimized version including the following:
- Further optimization in the auto-design process making it faster and more effective than never before. Campaign generation in 1890 should take less than 2 minutes in fast machines.
- Further battle optimizations for a faster fps performance during combat.
- Some fixes for minor issues that were reported recently.
You need to restart Steam to get this update with no problems

[admiral_admirer]

6 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Uploaded Optimized version including the following:
- Further optimization in the auto-design process making it faster and more effective than never before. Campaign generation in 1890 should take less than 2 minutes in fast machines.
- Further battle optimizations for a faster fps performance during combat.
- Some fixes for minor issues that were reported recently.
You need to restart Steam to get this update with no problems

Any AI fixes in there for the fleeing AI issue?