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

[Sharpe_95]

Hi Devs,

I wrote this review for Steam, but it was to long to fit, but it has feedback and recommendations in it as well. Please note that while the tone appears rather negative, I would like to thank the dev team for bringing this game to being - it reminds me of when I was a kid a game (Steel something of the other) came out - I loved it. I hope this is useful to the devs, there are so many points in this that I couldnt add, but I hope they help and make the game better.

I would also add that I would be very happy to help the devs and/or talk through these items and more if requested. Just DM me.

This review has been updated since completing 100+ hours in game.

TLDR:

This should be a really good and fun game, but it is massively let down by poor optimisation (causing huge time lags and waits in game), poor GUI for the campaign map and poor ship movement options in 3d. The game is clearly supported by the devs (x3 updates from the Devs in about 10 days) - its just that the patches seem to have made the game worse rather than better (take what you will from that).

Detail:

This game has a HUGE amount of potential, and clearly the devs are keeping the game updated and alive based on the updates list. But the game has a ‘low quality’ / ‘poorly produced’ feel about it. The idea is great and the game (if the developers improve their game) should become very good. Although I am concerned that they have only got this far in about 2-3 years since (IIRC) the game first hit the scene.

Ship Building:

- Good fun.

- GUI doesn’t quite work, sometimes it helpfully grabs many parts, sometimes not (there is no controlling this) sometimes you want to grab and move only one part and loads of stuff you don’t want to move leaving you to delete whole sections just to move one bit.

- Is very laggy and poorly optimised (a story for the whole game), especially the new super battleships.

- Has odd behaviours in campaign where certain bits of kit are available for one battleship type but not another (I know sometimes there are era specific bits of kit, but why not give the option of sharing them and allowing there use on other ships of similar size?).

- Some of the structures have poorly thought-out barbets attached to the front/rear towers that don’t allow for certain gun sizes or types (accepts 9” Mark 3 but not 9” Mark IV due to size). This really needs to be better thought through (although as I play German, it may be specific to that nation).

3d battles:

- Generally work well, and are good fun but the GUI is massively lacking.

- I cant get a group of ships to turn in place (ie, all turn 90 degrees right at the same time, or hook 180 degrees at the same time). This is basic naval manoeuvring dating back to the age of sail – why is it not possible in game?

- The player does not have the option to split fire on different targets with different batteries (ie, primary and secondary guns) – you have to not target ships and let the Ai do this if you want to achieve this type of split fire.

- The Ai targeting is generally poor – it keeps switching between targets, which is not good as this ruins the aiming of the ship.

- Torpedo mechanics are just plain broken and barely work. Players should be given the choice of what ship to target with torpedoes and when to fire.

- There is no player led deployment of ships, and the AI attempt is laughable – which means you spend the opening part of any battle trying to reassemble and deploy your force in a sensible configuration. I wouldn’t mind if this was just ‘poorly laid out’ but when you have ships of the same division either side of the formation, that’s just stupid.

- There is no way before game to set up divisions, which means you are left with whatever divisions the AI gives you (generally not too bad, but really – why not let players choose either before the battle or in the campaign map?).

- It would be nice to see better effects from damage (rather than ‘holes painted onto the ship after hits’). The ships lose their turrets from flash fires etc, but would be nice to see the ship get properly chewed up (although I appreciate this could be a really hard ask).

- Division mechanics are not ideal. Especially when you wish to remove one ship – it seems almost random that one ship will detach or the whole division.

- Division spacing options should include additional settings for being further spaced out than ‘loose’ currently allows 'very loose' for example.

- When the game gives you a hint at where ships are ‘smoke to the south’ – this mechanic is either poorly implemented or currently broken. At the start of a battle how comes I am seeing ‘smoke to the south’ then ‘smoke to the South East’ Then ‘Smoke to the west’ (and no, I was not on super speed going around the hidden force – this can happen within minutes of one direction instruction, followed by another saying go 90 degrees in the opposite direction).

- There should be an option for ‘keep station’ ie, if you have a ship in a position you are happy with, relative to another, they should be an option for ‘keep station’ so the ship can maintain this relative position to a friendly target point/ship.

- The end sequence is appalling and (quite literally) makes me feel sick. Please stop blurring and just fade it to dark or don’t blur at all (or at least provide an option in settings to turn the blurring ending off).

- Ships sinking mechanics/graphics is very poor – can we not see ships capsize or break in half, go down by the bow/stern etc? Also, when a ship goes up with a catastrophic flash explosion can it not break in half (or more bits)? While on the subject of flash, when the ship does have a chain reaction, history would suggest the in game times between the chain reaction explosions are both too long at the moment and should (rapidly) result in a single (large and catastrophic) explosion, rather than watching a turret blow itself sky high every 10 seconds or so (although this is always amusing for ships with 10-12 guns, but I suspect not realistic).

Campaign mode/screen:

- The campaign GUI is in serious need of quality of life improvements.

- Initial campaign load time is lamentable (and if anything, has been made worse by the recent patch that was supposed to fix it). How can the devs say there are improvements when there clearly isn’t (and/or its making things worse).

- The campaign fleet organisation is clunky and poorly implemented. There are loads of better ways of doing this (look at HoI4 as but one example).

- There are so many goofy flaws in the campaign I cannot list them all. But its silly stuff that speaks to a low grade dev team, rather than seasoned professionals. For one, there are spelling and typo errors in LOADS of the pop ups and messages (this should be a really simple fix/quality check and the massive volume of these errors says a lot to me about the quality control and professionalism of the dev team – if they cant get this right then………)

- Fleet movement a clunky and appalling system. For example, if you want to split a fleet to go to two different locations, you can only order half the fleet to move because the way the mechanic works you select the fleet, tell (say) half of it to go to a new location then when you want to move the other half somewhere else you cannot click on it to move it as the game only allows you to select the first half that you moved.

- Players should be able to move ships from location to location EASILY - the current system is worse than hitting ones fingers with hammers.

- Hunting for AI fleets is very hit and miss. Perhaps this is intended? But I seems to spend ages moving ships from place to place to attack enemy fleets only for nothing to happen. Its got to the point where its better to stay still and let the AI come to me (tactically not ideal, but given the idea of the game is to blow up enemy fleets its would be nice to 'attack enemy fleet' with a high chance of forcing an engagement.

- Players should be able to define fleets and divisions from the 2d screen (these should flow into 3d). The current ‘task force’ mechanic is almost like a half useful work around until something better gets put in. Except its not a work around, it’s the system you use.

- You cant give ships orders to be ‘limited’ while they are at sea. I get this from a game mechanic perspective, but surely its not too hard to code it in that if you want your whole force to head for the nearest port and be set to ‘limited’ on arrive then this could be done without ‘cheating’ the game by saving money while ships are at sea.

- There should be an option for sending ships to ‘train’. Despite the current update, it is unclear if ships train while in ‘sea control’, ‘in being’ or ‘limited’. Given the game mechanics (tension etc) there should be an option for training that maximises training, does not impact tension and is perhaps cheaper than Sea Control and In Being, but more expensive than Limited.

- Ship information data pop ups are the same time overpowering, intrusive and broken (despite yet another recent claim from the devs that they have improved/fixed this – they have not). Hover your mouse over any item/ship and you get a massive info blurb about the ship. Not an issue in its own right, but there are too many parts of the screen that bring this up. Further, they are not scroll-able - either reduce the information or ensure you can scroll. It leaves players unable to see the information they WANT rather than just the bottom load of modifiers that are meaningless. Pop up information does not fit to screen correctly, nor does it show information i want to see (or perhaps it has fallen off the screen, but I have no way to check/look).

- There is no range information on the map, making ship ranges impossible to judge.

- Events pop up saying ‘do you want to take action a/b/c that has these effects on tension with a country’ – but there is nothing to say what your current tension is with that country and you cannot go into the politics screen to find out while you are dealing with the event pop up – leaving you to make the decision completely blind to whether you will go to war, annoy a country but not go to war or just annoy a country you are about to ally with – this is really stupidly basic stuff to at least have the event pop up and tell you your current status with that nation!

- Campaign save mechanics need to be fixed. First, there are only 5 save slots (seriously devs, it’s the 21st century now!). Second, the game autos (every turn?) over the campaign file you are in. This creates two problems. a) There should be a separate auto save file (again, 21st century devs…) b) because the auto save goes over the players save point there are no ‘safe save points’. I don’t mean this from a game exploit position, but rather (as has just happened to me), if a bug prevents you from moving on you have nowhere to go and have lost hours (in may case about 8 hours) of game time down the toilet just because you have no ‘go to last work save’ point (which should be player selected) as I can only go back to the auto save point – which is broken. Thanks devs – great thinking!

- The Ai ship designer logic is very poor and the optimisation model/design model needs a lot of fine tuning. It is pulling out designs that are not so much 'bad' or 'sub optimal' as just plain stupid. This is worse for custom battles, but there are some really odd campaign ship designs as well.

- The campaign is taking way to long to play because of the poor optimisation of the ship designer (not just AI but human as well). It takes AGES to get into the ship designer to look at a ship/check something, and even when not saving changes it takes ages to get back to the campaign map again. Campaign turns are getting longer (despite the recent patches) due to poor optimisation of AI ship design. This is making the game quite a drag as (battles aside) I am spending the highest proportion of my time looking at loading screens for the game turn to tick over. (Oh and yes, my PC well exceeds the recommended specs for the game).

- There need to be slightly more input on what is happening on the ground. Perhaps spending naval prestige to increase number of people at a front line (why am I defending a mainland territory with only 50k troops vs 600k+ angry Frenchmen? Especially when I have France blockaded, noone else fighting me and almost all the French fleet sat at the bottom of the med.

- There should be a more effective (and clear) way to initiate and maintain a blockade.

Conclusion:

This game still has the feel of an open Beta. Clearly the devs are still working on it a lot, which is a really great thing, but I am not sure they have (any) quality control on their patch note statements – a lot of the time they say they have changed/fixed/improved stuff with said items rarely improving, often just getting worse (in my very singular experience).

There is sooooooooo much more that could be done with this game - but its just absent right now, or broken, or poorly implemented. This is a shame as I could (and should) be giving this a 5 star review, telling people to buy it and telling the devs to raise the price of the core game. But I cannot do this as the game just feels rushed, poorly thought through and poorly executed in terms of game play and optimisation.

I dont have time to list all the other qwirks and flaws in the game - I just hope the Devs see this review and post a detailed roadmap for what is coming next and FIX THE GUI and slow game play, followed by adding to the game in terms of content (especially for campaign mode). This game should, and could be 5 star and genuinely unique. 

I hope I get to re-write this review in half a year with loads more updates and fixes making the game and the campaign mode both pleasurable and easy. On the up side, I think I will be (ultimately) proven wrong as the devs do seem to care and do seem to patch the game and update the game quite a lot – hopefully a sign that for all the current flaws, the devs have a goal they are working to achieve.

Edited October 28, 2023 by Sharpe_95

[Nick Thomadis]

Uploaded repaired version including the following:
- Fixed remaining issues of Campaign Fleet Generation.
- Fixed crashes and issues related with the Army Force Distribution logic. 
Please Restart Steam to get the update properly

[Sharpe_95]

4 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Uploaded repaired version including the following:
- Fixed remaining issues of Campaign Fleet Generation.
- Fixed crashes and issues related with the Army Force Distribution logic. 
Please Restart Steam to get the update properly

Thanks to the devs for this hot fix (especially at a weekend) - fix sorted my stuck campaign game 🎉

[Harwood_39]

On 10/27/2023 at 7:12 PM, Aldaris said:

I do similar things, and it works, most of the time (typical mid to late battlefleet of mine is 3-4 BB, 3 CA, 2 CL, 6 DD).

Subs rarely sink anything of mine. Even in my earlier example of Spain with 200+ subs, they got a grand total of 3 ships over a multi year war.

My Problem with subs is that they're not fun. The core of this game is designing ships, and using them in real time battles. The rest is there to give that a frame.

Now, I get that subs need to be in there in some capacity for a whole lot of the relevant tech in the game to make sense. No need for ASW without them.

But.

There either needs to be more in depth gameplay with them (design/battles) for that to be fun, or they should be limited in some way as a proportion of the surface fleet. Yeah, Germany in WW2 had a small surface fleet and hundreds of subs, so, historical realism, blah blah. I don't care. I want to play Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, not Ultimate Admiral: Autoresolve 5 times a turn for 20 VP per sunk sub. That's simply not fun.

For the record, my fleets are typically 2bbs, 2bcs, 9 CA/Cl, 10 DD. All the ships have up to date sonar and all the cruisers and DDS have max depth charges. (not to mention the torpedo protection on the ships), but I've still lost multiple battleships and cruisers to submarines in this campaign despite all the precautions. 

If they were actually real-time battles where you need to search for and hunt the submarines and there are ways to try and avoid losing your important ships, I'd be fine with that, but at the moment I feel like I'm doing everything I can and it's frustrating that this stuff is still happening. 

[Hasty R]

Hello,

I've been playing Italy with the latest update and no mods. The Battleship II and III hulls are nigh on impossible to use (I just received them in the 1890 campaign in 1898). The issue is the huge dead spot in the middle of the hull that results in all the weight being forward of the beam (and incurring a massive weight imbalance penalty). Please help! I can include screenshots if need be. I assume this is easy to replicate as I am not using any mods and latest update to game. Maybe a bug?

Thanks, Roland

[Lima]

9 minutes ago, Hasty R said:

Hello,

I've been playing Italy with the latest update and no mods. The Battleship II and III hulls are nigh on impossible to use (I just received them in the 1890 campaign in 1898). The issue is the huge dead spot in the middle of the hull that results in all the weight being forward of the beam (and incurring a massive weight imbalance penalty). Please help! I can include screenshots if need be. I assume this is easy to replicate as I am not using any mods and latest update to game. Maybe a bug?

Thanks, Roland

The solution at the moment looks like this. Certified by the Abomination Design Bureau.

[Harwood_39]

One thing that came up today. I deleted a ship design thinking I had made a refit of it. Turns out I didn't (idiot!) I'd love for there to be the ability to generate a refit if you still have a ship in your fleet but may have deleted the design for one reason or another. 

[killjoy1941]

22 minutes ago, Harwood_39 said:

One thing that came up today. I deleted a ship design thinking I had made a refit of it. Turns out I didn't (idiot!) I'd love for there to be the ability to generate a refit if you still have a ship in your fleet but may have deleted the design for one reason or another. 

You can copy the design and then build from there? Do you have even one design that's in the same progression tree?

I've panic-built otherwise correct ships only to realize I had the original inspiration available all along. It's obviously not the same ship progression, but it's the same design progression, so you get the effect you want if not the spirit of the thing. 

[Harwood_39]

3 hours ago, killjoy1941 said:

You can copy the design and then build from there? Do you have even one design that's in the same progression tree?

I've panic-built otherwise correct ships only to realize I had the original inspiration available all along. It's obviously not the same ship progression, but it's the same design progression, so you get the effect you want if not the spirit of the thing. 

Alas no, I deleted the original design thinking I had refit it. Also did that to 2 CA designs. So on the "ship design" tab the design doesn't appear, it only does in the "fleet" tab.

 

Also the hulls are now obsolete, so I can't build progressions anyway. 

Edited October 29, 2023 by Harwood_39

[Urst]

1 hour ago, Harwood_39 said:

Alas no, I deleted the original design thinking I had refit it. Also did that to 2 CA designs. So on the "ship design" tab the design doesn't appear, it only does in the "fleet" tab.

 

Also the hulls are now obsolete, so I can't build progressions anyway. 

If you go to your fleet and select the active ship you want to refit and hit "view" you should be able to hit the refit button from there.

[flaviohc16]

1 hour ago, Urst said:

If you go to your fleet and select the active ship you want to refit and hit "view" you should be able to hit the refit button from there.

I was never able to do that, both with my ship and the ones that I got as war reparations 

[Hasty R]

12 hours ago, Lima said:

The solution at the moment looks like this. Certified by the Abomination Design Bureau.

Perhaps one of the ugliest ships I've ever seen. Italian designers don't do ugly, lmao.

[Dave P.]

Hey. I've noticed that when I autoresolve convoy battles, when there are X transports, usually some number of transports less than X are sunk. Which makes sense.

But sometimes (like one in ten-ish?) the number of transports sunk is, like, several times larger than X. (I've seen numbers sunk as high as 50, with single-digit convoy sizes.)

With all the hotfixes coming, I figured it would get caught and dealt with, but I'm on the latest patch and just sunk 31 out of 13 transports so I figured I'd better say something. 🙂

Have a great day.

[Harwood_39]

8 hours ago, flaviohc16 said:

I was never able to do that, both with my ship and the ones that I got as war reparations 

Same here @Nick Thomadis is this something you could look at? Allowing us to refit ships if we accidentally delete the design in the "Ship Design" Tab?

[Dave P.]

I think the AI ship builder might still need some adjustments? A 117,896 ton cruiser is... something.

 

They have a tonnage-appropriate level of hit points (I was able to "sink" them by killing crew until they surrendered.)

Edited October 30, 2023 by Dave P.

[Dave P.]

Another issue - I'm currently in a war with France, and the Politics screen says they have 800k troops, but the different regions they're invading, the invading forces total like 1.5M. What gives?

Edited October 30, 2023 by Dave P.

[Harwood_39]

2 hours ago, Dave P. said:

I think the AI ship builder might still need some adjustments? A 117,896 ton cruiser is... something.

 

They have a tonnage-appropriate level of hit points (I was able to "sink" them by killing crew until they surrendered.)

With that speed, I'm surprised you caught up to it 😆 It doesn't even look that well-armoured.

[lordcmdr]

3 hours ago, Dave P. said:

I think the AI ship builder might still need some adjustments? A 117,896 ton cruiser is... something.

 

They have a tonnage-appropriate level of hit points (I was able to "sink" them by killing crew until they surrendered.)

If this was a different game I’d be liked GG Russian bias. 😝 do you have any screens of this abomination?

[Lima]

3 hours ago, Dave P. said:

I think the AI ship builder might still need some adjustments? A 117,896 ton cruiser is... something.

 

They have a tonnage-appropriate level of hit points (I was able to "sink" them by killing crew until they surrendered.)

Similar situation

 

[Lima]

“Experimental 3-Mast Cruiser” for China and Spain - anti-submarine gun

 

 

[Lima]

What is a "Navy's Power Rating" and what it affects?

This is in from my revived AH 1920 campaign (as of 1943). All have a very low "Navy's Power Rating".

And if it surprises you that there are 100 battleships, I built them at the same time, it's faster than waiting for gradual construction. In the late game, a huge tonnage is needed for successful landings.

[Nick Thomadis]

1 hour ago, Lima said:

What is a "Navy's Power Rating" and what it affects?

This is in from my revived AH 1920 campaign (as of 1943). All have a very low "Navy's Power Rating".

And if it surprises you that there are 100 battleships, I built them at the same time, it's faster than waiting for gradual construction. In the late game, a huge tonnage is needed for successful landings.

Probably something broke from your edited save? What year is it?

[Lima]

13 minutes ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Probably something broke from your edited save? What year is it?

This is not an edited save. It's 1943. This campaign was hanging on "Next turn", but after the latest fix, I was able to continue it.

 

[tvaishar]

On 10/23/2023 at 12:23 PM, brothermunro said:

I have some serious concerns about the new penetration and armour balance. As an example here is a British 12" 60 calibre twin gun using super heavy tube powder 3 TNT 4 shells. With capped ballistic as the shell type selected you get this pen table in 1935 against 163% quality armour (modern 2 all or nothing): https://e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ0I8sZ9w8jkVHoeKjjv31L2FzzOfEgMapy (I can't upload pictures to the forum anymore 😅)

In 1935, at 20,000m I can go through 13" of belt, and 7.4" of deck* and get extremely high accuracy to boot. With the new armour limits this means I can threaten basically anything. If I load up with a bunch of them on a high resistance hull (like the Russian super battleship 1) I end up with a ship that will completely shred absolutely any target. The game feels very shallow now, big guns seem unnecessary as no target has enough armour to warrant their use. Armour seems borderline pointless against battleship calibre weapons, its really only there to block secondary fire. Using historical builds against each other (when you can actually build them, ships like Hood are impossible with the new armour limits) feels very odd, ships will quickly cause massive damage and sink each other in moments and is a coin toss on who wins based on which ship gets the range found bonus faster.

Overall I am having less fun with the game in the builder (with ships with loads of displacement spare and awful pitch & roll, a lot of the time I just end up not building cruisers at all), and in battles, to the point where I don't want to play a vanilla campaign or custom battle at all (which is a first for me, I've played the game a lot since alpha 4 and I have over 1000 hours on stream). 

*So able to go through the Iowa-class armour scheme which was 12.1/6"

I absolutely agree here. The armour limit has a huge impact on the game (and even bigger in campaign). Some armour limitation is desirable, but it has to be implemented carefuly. Current implementation not only hampers general survivability of ships (some classes more than others) but it also makes them worse gunnery platforms as the main belt and deck armour was used to reduce pitch and roll. And if you factor in campaign enviroment - you will lose more ships and your ships will stay longer out of service due to repairs. Not to mention changes in economy.

But the "Icankilleverythingwithmy12inchers" problem is a coin with two sides. The other is the variety in charges, propellants, gun calibre and barrel length. You can equip your ship with a large gun of basically any calibre and have a large range of pen values over various distances. It is hard to build ship that counters that. I remember that before this variety was implemented I was able to build ships with immunity zones - with armour reliably protecting the ship against predictable pen value in certain range of distances. And work with this in battle. I don't think it is possible now. Nowadays we count much more (it was always a thing) on our gunnery being better than AI's rather than on armour.

[Fun Police]

So here's a question. At the start of the game, I have no problems getting my transports up to 200 percent. But if I lose some of of them in a war, the replacement rate never seems to go beyond 0.25, even in a long peacetime. Is it tied to naval capacity? Eco? I've seen it happen on most nations I play.