>>>v1.5 Feedback<<<(Latest version: v1.5.1.6)

[Nick Thomadis]

Hello Admirals,

There is a new update to check out and some interesting news!

v1.5.1.1
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1069660/announcements/detail/4195742629914367846 

[PhoenixLP44]

I was expecting literally anything but this is awesome as well

[marine0351w]

I'll check after I update the game, but since there is no mention of recoil in the patch notes I'll say my 2 cents:

There is a consistent issue with large guns (9 inches and over) becoming unable to fire because of recoil not dropping until after the ship has been specifically selected and the recoil has been allowed to drop significantly.  The issue seems to go away after the recoil is allowed to drop below 10 percent, but I'm not positive.  I'm trying to post a bug report in game every time I see it but wanted to post here just in case others are seeing the same thing.

[o Barão]

Ok, that is really unexpected. I was thinking in many other small things, but that sure is a BIG one that will make the community very happy.

@Nick Thomadis great improvement!!

[Panzergraf]

That's pretty huge! Looking forward to trying this

[SirTrafalgar]

My mind is blown! Thank you, Devs!! 

I hope that multiplayer gets developed to the point it allows a multiplayer campaign. 

[killjoy1941]

That's not what I expected at all. Hopefully it does really well so we can get more DLC content.

[Fangoriously]

Now that is a surprise!

[Grizli60rus]

This is VERY cool! Thanks!!!

[Werwaz]

16 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Hello Admirals,

There is a new update to check out and some interesting news!

v1.5.1.1
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1069660/announcements/detail/4195742629914367846 

Multiplayer sounds cool, and I would be interested in purchasing it when it comes out in a playable state. However, I found something in the patch notes that makes very little sense:

- Balanced the accuracy system, so that the difference of accuracy between short barrel and long barrel length guns is not as vast as before, simulating better the effects of gun barrel erosion. In certain cases the extreme length of the barrel will be overall not as effective for accuracy at long ranges. The gun length for your designs should be now offering more options, than forcing you to maximize the length and become overpowered vs the AI.
- Adjusted the Battle AI to the new accuracy system.

I noticed that when I am playing, the longer guns cant hit the broad side of a barn, even at point blank range, while guns with horrible velocity and highly arced trajectories hit more often. I saw nothing wrong with the previous accuracy system, and if anything, the design capabilities of the AI need to be vastly improved, rather than kneecapping players with ahistorical nerfs. I am fairly certain that the AI ships have been the butt of many jokes ("clown cars", etc.) since I started playing back in the alpha days. Previously, longer barrels were balanced out by the longer reload times and heavier weight, which seemed to be perfectly fine. In regards to the barrel erosion argument, the propellent has far more to do with erosion than the length of the barrel, and as such, accuracy modifiers tied to erosion should be tied to the propellent and not the barrel length. I will probably be playing on the last version until this gets rolled back or properly fixed.  

an interesting paper on gun erosion:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA440980.pdf

 

[Nick Thomadis]

6 hours ago, Werwaz said:

Multiplayer sounds cool, and I would be interested in purchasing it when it comes out in a playable state. However, I found something in the patch notes that makes very little sense:

- Balanced the accuracy system, so that the difference of accuracy between short barrel and long barrel length guns is not as vast as before, simulating better the effects of gun barrel erosion. In certain cases the extreme length of the barrel will be overall not as effective for accuracy at long ranges. The gun length for your designs should be now offering more options, than forcing you to maximize the length and become overpowered vs the AI.
- Adjusted the Battle AI to the new accuracy system.

I noticed that when I am playing, the longer guns cant hit the broad side of a barn, even at point blank range, while guns with horrible velocity and highly arced trajectories hit more often. I saw nothing wrong with the previous accuracy system, and if anything, the design capabilities of the AI need to be vastly improved, rather than kneecapping players with ahistorical nerfs. I am fairly certain that the AI ships have been the butt of many jokes ("clown cars", etc.) since I started playing back in the alpha days. Previously, longer barrels were balanced out by the longer reload times and heavier weight, which seemed to be perfectly fine. In regards to the barrel erosion argument, the propellent has far more to do with erosion than the length of the barrel, and as such, accuracy modifiers tied to erosion should be tied to the propellent and not the barrel length. I will probably be playing on the last version until this gets rolled back or properly fixed.  

an interesting paper on gun erosion:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA440980.pdf

 

The erosion is depended on shell's muzzle velocity in the game, is not affected directly by gun length, but gun length affects muzzle velocity greatly. which previously made the very long barrels unrealistically powerful and more accurate and so, they were abused by players.

Still, guns that can achieve very high velocities, have increased penetration and much increased range, so they are not underpowered.

[Nender]

Multiplayer!? This' just got way better!

[justMike247]

5 hours ago, Werwaz said:

I noticed that when I am playing, the longer guns cant hit the broad side of a barn, even at point blank range, while guns with horrible velocity and highly arced trajectories hit more often.

Glad I'm not the only one to discover this. In my last 5 battles, Mk5 15" guns with Gen II RADAR managed to achieve main gun accuracy of just 1.5% shooting at ranges between 28k to 5k. Factor in the nerfed AP ammo that bounces more reliably than Wilson tennis balls, and what used to be a floating weapons platform is now merely a target burdened with some very expensive ballast. In three seperate battles, my BB's have shot through their entire stock of AP rounds for the main guns, achieving an average of 15 hits, for less than 300pts of damage. That's just 300, not 3k, not 30k, not 300k... I've no idea what they were shooting at at the time as every target in the opposing fleet was identified with the same question mark, and we all know how auto-targetting loves to ignore manual target selection.

 

I personally don't see the point contemplating a multi-player platform when the dev's preferred error fix is to continually nerf player designs/equipment until they're just as bad if not worse than AI generated contraptions.

 

Addressing the gun barrel erosion issue, even the Mk1 BL 15" design recognised that barrel wear was an issue, that barrels wore at a predictable rate that depended on the number of rounds fired by that particular gun tube, and had compensation for said barrel wear incorporated into the fire control. When coupled to "modern" fire control RADAR, those same Mk1 BL 15" turrets when fitted to Vanguard consistantly hit targets with an accuracy that even the New Jersey class could only dream of.

[Panzergraf]

2 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

Still, guns that can achieve very high velocities, have increased penetration and much increased range, so they are not underpowered.

It's also worth mentioning that very long guns have worse deck penetration due to that flatter trajectory.

[Aldaris]

4 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

The erosion is depended on shell's muzzle velocity in the game, is not affected directly by gun length, but gun length affects muzzle velocity greatly. which previously made the very long barrels unrealistically powerful and more accurate and so, they were abused by players.

Still, guns that can achieve very high velocities, have increased penetration and much increased range, so they are not underpowered.

I don't know about under- or overpowered, but this adjustment feels VERY strange. I have 2 BCs with 4 triple MKIV 12"/50 guns each (capped ballistic II shells, heavy shells, tube powder III and TNT IV, coincidence V, Radar I), and I really, really struggled in a long range gun duel with 2 CAs and 4 CLs. When I closed in, a lot of my fire just straight up bounced off the CAs, and most of it missed, at between 4-8 km. At which point those guns could probably be almost bore sighted and hit.

24 12"/50s on ships with good fire control and decent crews should absolutely murder a couple of cruisers in a gun duel, at any range, but especially at long. And a length of 50 calibers seems like a very reasonable length for a 12" gun, I think I even shortened it a little from default, which may have been 52 or something.

Something seems broken here, and I'd urge you to look into it. I'll roll back to the previous version for now.

On a positive note, I have the impression that I'm going up against a lot more decent AI designs lately. There are still some wild stinkers coming up, with 10" decks and almost non existent main belts, but the proportion of decent, usable ships seems a good deal higher. So good job on that!

Edited May 7 by Aldaris

[Nick Thomadis]

1 hour ago, Aldaris said:

I don't know about under- or overpowered, but this adjustment feels VERY strange. I have 2 BCs with 4 triple MKIV 12"/50 guns each (capped ballistic II shells, heavy shells, tube powder III and TNT IV, coincidence V, Radar I), and I really, really struggled in a long range gun duel with 2 CAs and 4 CLs. When I closed in, a lot of my fire just straight up bounced off the CAs, and most of it missed, at between 4-8 km. At which point those guns could probably be almost bore sighted and hit.

24 12"/50s on ships with good fire control and decent crews should absolutely murder a couple of cruisers in a gun duel, at any range, but especially at long. And a length of 50 calibers seems like a very reasonable length for a 12" gun, I think I even shortened it a little from default, which may have been 52 or something.

Something seems broken here, and I'd urge you to look into it. I'll roll back to the previous version for now.

On a positive note, I have the impression that I'm going up against a lot more decent AI designs lately. There are still some wild stinkers coming up, with 10" decks and almost non existent main belts, but the proportion of decent, usable ships seems a good deal higher. So good job on that!

There is going to be uploaded a hotfix to adjust any remaining accuracy problems.

[Nick Thomadis]

Uploaded optimized version including the following:

- Fixed remaining issues of accuracy.

Please restart Steam to get this update

[Dave P.]

After the latest update, the popup that appears when you hover the cursor over diplomatic/event choices sometimes fails to appear for some of the choices (usually the top one.) Sometimes it appears eventually (after a few seconds), and sometimes it never does.

[justMike247]

- Fixed remaining issues of accuracy.

 

what... exactly was this patch supposed to correct? I've had two battles since installing it, and on both occasions, results were exactly the same as achieved in battles prior to the previous update, i.e. Mk5 gun accuracy with Gen II RADAR and Stereo V rangefinders engaging at ranges between 38k to 3k achieve an average hit rate of 1.5%. Of the misses, 100% of them were shooting long (up to 50% of actual range)and to the targets' starboard side, irrespective of targets orientation, which makes a mockery of any pretence of optical tracking and RADAR ranging, much less any attempt at correcting fall of shot.

[XerMGGW-2]

I guess shells with very high amount of propellant tend to have Italian Quality, causing inaccuracy no matter how much of everything else the turret has, with gun barrel completely new and was never shot out of before...

[Dave P.]

1 hour ago, XerMGGW-2 said:

I guess shells with very high amount of propellant tend to have Italian Quality, causing inaccuracy no matter how much of everything else the turret has, with gun barrel completely new and was never shot out of before...

Longer barrels tend to flex during firing, causing "barrel whip" - this actually will decrease accuracy IRL. Also, "barrel droop" is a thing. Googling finds a lot of discussions for these as they apply to human-sized firearms, but the principles apply to naval guns too.

I don't know if this was the intent of the patch or not, but it sounds like they are either trying to account that, or they're just nerfing longer guns for gameplay reasons. *shrug*

AFAIK the Italian issue was more to do with QC on the shells. (Weight variations.)

-------------------------

Anyway, I noticed my turrets floating in the air. That's neat. (13.5" MkIII on a Standard Barbette, Dreadnought I hull, playing as Austria-Hungary.)

Edited May 8 by Dave P.

[Aldaris]

2 hours ago, Dave P. said:

Longer barrels tend to flex during firing, causing "barrel whip" - this actually will decrease accuracy IRL. Also, "barrel droop" is a thing. Googling finds a lot of discussions for these as they apply to human-sized firearms, but the principles apply to naval guns too.

I don't know if this was the intent of the patch or not, but it sounds like they are either trying to account that, or they're just nerfing longer guns for gameplay reasons. *shrug*

Sure, but the stated reason was to simulate barrel erosion. A concept that would be nice to incorporate actually, but would have to be simulated a different way.

There would have to be a durability stat for guns that goes down over time, negatively influencing accuracy. That could tick down faster depending on certain factors like barrel length, weight of shot and propellants used. That could be fixed with a one month refit in port, simulating the guns being swapped out for new ones and the old ones being shipped back to the manufacturer to have a new liner installed.

That would actually present interesting gameplay - do you go for absolute peak performance at the cost of more frequent maintenance, or do you go with something more rugged that will last longer. There would have to be a stat of expected durability in number of shots in the gun overview. If you fail to swap out the guns in time and go over that, accuracy will drop off hard.

However, erosion affecting factory new guns doesn't make any sense. If a certain length of gun is impractical because the inherent barrel droop or whip would make the guns completely inaccurate, don't offer that length as an option - or at least communicate when the player is about to go over practical length clearly. But the length tradeoff between low deck penetration, low rate of fire and high weight vs. lower range and velocity and reduced pen in the previous system worked perfectly fine as far as I was concerned.

Edited May 8 by Aldaris

[TK3600]

Nerfing barrel erosion through accuracy nerfing is a weird concept. Why not just up the maintnence cost as you have to replace barrel more often?

[Drenzul]

So have the following issues being fixed yet?

1> Build direct to refit spec not possible
2> Build becoming "overweight" so can't be built anymore
3> Drunk following ships in formation

Really hope they go through the ship designer at some point and make the stats there make sense but given up hope of that after waiting so long

[Astor]

I still notice that BB tend to focus too much on smallest ships first with their main guns while secondary guns focus on bigger ships. Like the priority goes like TB/DD -> CL -> CA -> BC/BB

Once enemy BB get very close, only then they tend to focus their main guns on them. It's just stupid to see a BB focusing on a lone TB/DD at very long range while a bigger target is closer and way more dangerous for the ship.

Edited May 9 by Astor