[Mod] The Dreadnought Improvement Project v2.0.0b1 Beta for UAD 1.5.1.6

[brothermunro]

Ok I’m going to restate the issue so I have everything right, feel free to correct any assumptions!

So we have a battleship being penned (as in a full pen) by a CA armed with 6.5” guns which have 2.5” of belt pen against 73% quality.

Your BB has 15” of armour… everywhere? Even the superstructure (thick lady!). Quality is 73%
 

You’ve eliminated deck skipping as the issue because you both expect no deck hits to pen and you’ve checked the logs to see that the hits are main/fore/aft belt or superstructure hits.

The correct result here should be a blocked hit. Maybe a blocked with fire. If they are firing HE there’s a chance they will get a partial pen - I had fixed this issue (which I think is to do with fuses) prior to the rework of guns in 1.5.1.1 but they’re back and I can’t work out why. This might also occur with SAP or something as well.

 

Edited June 8 by brothermunro

[Suribachi]

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Your BB has 15” of armour… everywhere? Even the superstructure (thick lady!). Quality is 73%

Yes.  I paid for all of the displacement I am going to use it.   I tend to prioritize armor and armament over speed.
Also, just for clarity into my line of thinking.  My understanding is that the superstructure armor covers the main and sec towers as well as funnels and general superstructure sticking up from the deck.  So the armor used is to protect the fire control built into the towers for as long as possible.  Correct me if I am wrong on this.
 

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You’ve eliminated deck skipping as the issue because you both expect no deck hits to pen and you’ve checked the logs to see that the hits are main/fore/aft belt or superstructure hits.

Correct.

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So we have a battleship being penned (as in a full pen) by a CA armed with 6.5” guns which have 2.5” of belt pen against 73% quality.

Close, I think they are actually partial pens (the cracked shield icon) I just didn't specify that in my original post.  I was under the assumption that if the armor is 2.5x greater than the shell's pen power, it should be blocked regardless but still has a chance to cause fires.  Is this not the case or is it more to due with the fuse type used? (Unfortunately I did not note the fuse type before moving on)

[brothermunro]

Ahhhh they are partials - that’s good in that I know why that is happening but bad in that it’s really hard to fix 😂

So under normal circumstances (in DIP) a shell needs to reach 75% of the pen it would need for a full pen to count as a partial. However the fuse mechanic interferes with this and also the way the fuse modifiers combine is weird. I did after much trial and error get things working about right, and then all the gun velocities had to be changed and now the fuses are causing problems again 😅 I’m working on v2 still and hope to fix it in that version, I should then be able to port the changes back to the public v1 version of the mod.

I’m going to guess that the enemy ship was using a ‘left’ shell option, something like high cap & semi ballistic ap or similar.

Edited June 8 by brothermunro

[Suribachi]

Interesting, good to know that it isn't expected behavior and that I am not going crazy.  Well, crazier than usual anyway.

Looking forward to this V2 of the mod.  Sounds like it will have some goodies to look forward to.

Edited June 8 by Suribachi

[sillyrecon]

This might be related to this earlier discussion about how armor works vs shells. I really don't know how ships with no armor are blocking Cap Ballistic AP and HE. Torpedo boats to Battleships now have been doing this to me and it really makes no sense no matter what kind of mechanic or balancing used to justify it. I'm losing battles because some garbage ship is soaking up rounds while they just chip away at mine with weaker guns. Decks should not be bouncing/blocking shells when they are this thin. My battleship has 8in secondaries and even those are bouncing off these ships at range when they should be plunging in.

[brothermunro]

@sillyrecon Ahhhh yes so “0” armour doesn’t actually exist in the game because it would cause divide by zero errors so the game secretly assigns 0.1” to any armour section that doesn’t have any. I don’t actually know if that makes 0.1” armour completely pointless or not 😅 At any rate not a thing the mod does, just the base game being odd

[Suribachi]

A resurgence of the over-pen being so huge that it overflows back to a block from a few patches ago maybe?

Last time that happened, Incendiary HE became the META.  I will try to replicate after work if I can.

@sillyrecon What was the engagement distance?  Helps to determine if it is plunging fire or not.

[brothermunro]

Mod updated for 1.5.1.6 compatibility

[Vholes]

2 hours ago, brothermunro said:

Mod updated for 1.5.1.6 compatibility

Thanks for that. Do you change the thread title to 1.5.1.6?

[brothermunro]

No! I should go do that, thank you!

[awawawa]

Thank you for the update. I found some data being wierd, like the ammo and the accuracy. Actually strange accuracy data is everywhere

Edited June 14 by awawawa

[brothermunro]

Your muzzle velocity is very high and it’s ruining the accuracy, that happens in vanilla as well since 1.5.1.1. Version 2 of the mod (which is due soonish) has a more comprehensive fix for the guns

[HE4DEYES]

should i play this or NAR? which one is more complete?

[XerMGGW-2]

20 hours ago, HE4DEYES said:

should i play this or NAR? which one is more complete?

NAR is the oldest mod which by now did everything it wanted.

However each mod does it's own mildly different thing, so mods are being picked usually out of what they aim to do instead.

Edited June 18 by XerMGGW-2

[awawawa]

19 hours ago, brothermunro said:

Your muzzle velocity is very high and it’s ruining the accuracy, that happens in vanilla as well since 1.5.1.1. Version 2 of the mod (which is due soonish) has a more comprehensive fix for the guns

Oh i see. Thanks! Never know that. I thought it's the higher the better😂

[brothermunro]

On 6/17/2024 at 10:35 PM, HE4DEYES said:

should i play this or NAR? which one is more complete?

NAR is a more ambitious project to create a more historical simulation of naval combat. DIP is mainly focused on making the game better, even if that means doing somewhat ahistorical things like no submarines or no hydrophones on battleships. If DIP happens to converge on the real world then that’s great of course! DIP started life as a combination of NAR and Admiral Snackbar’s balance mod and still uses data from NAR (with the Baron’s permission of course!).

I recommend trying both and seeing which you prefer!

[brothermunro]

23 hours ago, awawawa said:

Oh i see. Thanks! Never know that. I thought it's the higher the better😂

I mean, in the real world yes that would be sound logic 😂 In v2 I’ve lowered all the velocities so that it’s much less likely players will run into this issue.

[Somhairle]

On 6/18/2024 at 11:38 AM, awawawa said:

Oh i see. Thanks! Never know that. I thought it's the higher the better😂

For the best real-life example of higher MV is not always good see the Italian battleships of the Vittorio Veneto class. Huuuuuuuuuuge dispersion problems that were due to a multitude of things, but at least part of it was ridiculously high MV. IIRC, the German cruisers with the 150/60 had similar issues.

Edited June 21 by Somhairle
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[brothermunro]

A small update, probably the last one for version 1 of the mod. The Spanish 'Advanced Small Battleship' now has an optimum speed of 28.5 knots like the other hulls of a similar type, and to make it a viable and attractive choice for late game Spanish empires that need such a ship. My plan is to release version 2 in the next few days, I imagine that UAD 1.6 isn't too far away but I will make sure that DIP 1.14 is kept updated for 1.5.

[brothermunro]

Version 2 is out now! I fully intend on keeping 1.14 around until the end of UAD 1.5. V2 will be in 'beta' until 1.6 is released onto the live branch. Please note that v2 saves and designs are not compatible with v1, I recommend a fresh save and a cleared out design folder. If you still experience weirdness try deleting the custom battle save.

[brothermunro]

DIP Version 2

This major update affects nearly all of the modded files, it is NOT compatible with v1 save games or designs so it is recommended to clear out any saved designs you have and start a new campaign.

What's new?

Gun stats have been completely reworked using some NAR data (thank you to the Baron for helping me with this). Guns should now perform reasonably predictably.
Effects of changing gun barrel length have been reduced significantly, you should no longer see long guns having terrible accuracy or short guns being extremely cheap for instance.
When new marks of guns are unlocked has been reworked. Expect to be stuck on mark 1 guns until the 1910's. Mark 3's probably won't show up until the 20's, 30's for mark 4's, & 40's for mark 5's and so on. You should see higher marks of guns unlock sequentially from smallest to largest for the most part.
Belt penetration has been reworked to generally make guns less punchy and to make realistic armour thicknesses viable.
Changes to how weights for light and heavy cruisers are calculated to make them more in line with bigger ships. Overall this means that cruisers should have less spare displacement.
Multiple torpedo tubes are now slightly more displacement efficient making quadruple and quintuple launchers a more attractive choice.
Mine laying, mine sweeping, and depth charge components have been 'removed' (by making them torpedo boat exclusives). This was done primarily to stop the AI wasting displacement on these parts.
Engine costs have been rebalanced, turbo electric is slightly more expensive, diesels are cheaper. Overall ships should no longer reach ludicrous costs unless they are very large and very fast.
Auxiliary engines have been cost rebalanced to make high end options more viable & to stop the AI making obscenely expensive ships.
Propeller upgrades have been rebalanced and are now slightly less effective but cheaper.
Standard bulkheads will now become obsolete, this forces the AI to use at least reinforced 1 bulkheads which helps it not make crippled designs.
Adjusted the appearance of auto loaders, sonar, and radar to be somewhat later (late 1930s to the 1940/50's). Radar 3 and autoloading guns will likely now become unlocked after you have mark 5 guns.
Standard reload will now become obsolete. The AI builder is also more likely to use better reload techs if it can.
Adjusted component weights for shell types to encourage better AI decision making. For AP shells this means the AI is most likely to pick the 'rightmost' AP shell it has access to.
Base detection of torpedoes lowered to 500m to make hitting AI ships more likely.
Increased ammo detonation damage, secondary ammo detonations are now quite dangerous.
Increased flooding sinking threshold to 75% of flood-able compartments (ships have 10 compartments). This means that ships are slightly more survivable but also sinking via flooding is more predictable and obvious to the player. A ship whose citadel covers at least 3 compartments should not be able to be easily sunk by hits to its extended belt/deck.
Reduced maximum speed of some ship classes to plausible but still very fast values. (BB 36, BC/CA/CL 40, DD 45 knots). This is primarily done to help the AI not build ridiculously fast ships with no armour.
Heavy Cruisers now have a maximum secondary gun size of 5" rather than 6" to avoid problems when ships were designed with both primary and secondary 6 inch guns.
Other attempted improvements to the auto builder, such as trying to persuade the AI not to put very large guns on small ships.
Increased the partial pen threshold to 80% and reduced partial pen damage. Whilst HE is still very useful for destroying the upper-works of a ship a properly armoured battleship can now withstand a considerable amount of punishment.
Rebalance of the fuse and ricochet effects of shells to make shells behave more predictably.
Rebalanced unrest modifiers to be lower overall. This makes AI countries quite stable unless they suffer a string of defeats and/or conquer too much territory.
Adjusted map colours of Spain to match the yellow of their flag and China who are now a darker orange.
Submarines have been removed completely from the research screen.
AI personalities changed to encourage AI nations to be more aggressive with bigger fleets.
The Naval Academy has been completely rebalanced to act as a tutorial rather than a challenge mode.

[brothermunro]

Nexus messed up the upload, should be working now 

[Suribachi]

Let's F**king GO!

Just came home to a pile of Christmas seeing v2 is out.  Installing now and will inform if I run into any issues or have feedback.

[Suribachi]

No battles or wars yet so I don't have any feedback there yet.  However, I do have some feedback on the ship building.

Campaign start:  USA 1890, create own fleet, all other options default.

My usual fleet start was no longer feasible.  I usually start with a Armored Cruiser I (CA), 6,000t with 2x single 8" main guns and 3" casemates wherever they fit.  Towers are the lightest I have access to, which are usually Small Cage Masts I and III.  Funnel is usually the Air Intake Funnel (Large) variety.  No torpedoes or other secondary guns are used.  Speed is usually set to hull max of 20.5 knots.  Quarters to Spacious and Bulkheads to Maximum.  Range is usually reduced, one tick from furthest left so between minimum and middle.  Left over displacement is used in armor.  If I try to do this now, I am looking at a 7,200 / 6,000 t ship.

Now, with same towers, funnel downgraded to smallest one available, 2x single 6" guns and all characteristics set to middle, with no changes to armor or other items like citadel or engine, I am at 5,962 / 6,000 t using May 1895 tech with 100% on tech slider this entire time.

Either v2 is a bit too aggressive with the changes cruiser weight calculations or I just need to relearn historically how cruisers were designed and fielded and, to borrow a phrase from the Dark Souls community, need to "get good".

Will try and get into a fight soon to see how that behaves.

Edited Wednesday at 12:12 AM by Suribachi

[brothermunro]

I would never say ‘get good’ but I would say “you must unlearn what you have learned”. Cruiser design is much more challenging now, the max design speed of the hull is a theoretical ’maybe if we push it’ number until you get engines that aren’t terrible. Long range ships are very hard to do until you get coal. Iron plate is rubbish so proper protection is hard until you get some decent steel etc.