Please explain the pitch/roll ratings to me.

[Thramoun]

I have been playing this game for quite a while now, very fun yes. However, there's one mechanic I don't understand. I have no understanding of IRL ship construction so bear with my assumptions:

• A wider hull decreases roll motion
• A longer hull decreases pitch motion
• Additional weight away from the center of mass along the length of the ship increases pitch motion
• Additional weight across the breadth of the ship increases roll motion

Currently, I just accept that early ship designs have terrible pitch/roll by default and try to play around it. But just now I've played around in the ship designer and come to one weird conclusion:

None of the above actually matters, just make sure that the main belt and deck are as heavy as possible.

Now, how did I get to this conclusion? Well, I've emptied out a ship hull and reduced weight everywhere as much as possible:

Empty CL, terrible roll. A reality I've come to accept.

You can see the pitch/hull is still pretty terrible. To be expected with weight pretty evently distributed on the ship. Now, what happens when I add weight to the center of mass, say, by increasing the weight of the engine?

A heavier engine leads to progressively worse pitch and roll ratings.

Whoops, it got worse? Maybe too much weight on the center of mass is bad too?

But even increasing the engine weight a little worsens both pitch and roll rating. Weird.

I try using other methods. Guns, towers, none of them have an effect besides worsening both pitch and roll slightly. And it doesn't even seem to be relevant where you place them, either.

The position of the gun doesn't seem to matter all that much. The pitch and yaw actually worsen the closer the gun is placed to the center of mass (and the ship), even when the weight offset stays relatively neutral.

And then I tried the main belt. Suddenly, both pitch and roll values plummet. Huh.

Maxed out main belt and main deck armor values improve the roll and pitch rating by about 50%. I also tried out a belted cruiser hull, for which you can get even better ratings due to the higher limit of belt armor.

So, the engine weight added to the middle of the ship doesn't improve the motion, but doing the same with the belt does? Why? And the deck works too, leading to the best possible pitch and roll values seen above.

So, that means, if I decrease the weight of the belt by changing to iron plate armor (-80% main belt armor weight) it should get worse again, right? Wrong! Only a 0.1% difference in roll.

The impact of the actual weight of the belt and deck armor appears to be insignificant than the thickness value. The combined weight is reduced by 150 tons (~30%), but there is virtually no change in pitch/roll values.

So, what am I missing? Is there something I misunderstood about how these ship motions work? Is there some weird game mechanic that I don't understand? Please enlighten me!

[UnleashtheKraken]

I also would like to know.  Right now i've given up and I just stack up main belt and center deck armor.  Armoring turrets doesn't seem to matter.  Turret position doesn't matter.  Balancing the ship does matter, and increasing speed worsens the stability.  This game often feels like a very unrealistic ship builder with somewhat decent combat mechanics.  The way turret marks (I'm going a bit off topic) are size by size, rather than an overall mark increase that takes longer to research but applies to all researched sizes, seems really unrealistic.  Many of the decisions of this game could use reworking, smoothing, and advancing.  I've given up pushing the bug that I and several others found and reported.  No reply, no 'we're working on it', not even a sign of developer notice.  I'm still playing but no longer enthused about this dev team, to the point that I'm not buying any further games from them without first doing some serious scrutiny.

[TK3600]

I thought I was crazy. Seems like early hull can be balanced! One problem, seems like AI knows this too. They frequently make weird armor distribution like 0.2 forebelt, 2in deck, 4in main belt.