Warspite96 Posted October 2 Posted October 2 Japan 1930 campaign (its 1953 now and I have basically conquered the Pacific), my monthly balance went from +$9,000,000,000 to -$7,200,000,000 post-patch. That was a hefty economic rebalance....... 1
Aldaris Posted October 2 Posted October 2 (edited) You really should take a look at the tension mechanics. Straight -10's almost all across the board, all the time. No time at all until war breaks out everywhere. This might provide some decent battle testing opportunities, but it is unplayable as a campaign mode. This is April 1910, 3 months after campaign start: Edited October 2 by Aldaris 5
Aldaris Posted October 2 Posted October 2 (edited) So far, the issues I see that absolutely need to be adressed before this version goes live as stable: 1) save after every battle needs to come back. If you have 3 battles in a turn and the last one fails to load (a very frequent occurrence), you're redoing the previous two. This is really, really bad. 2) Tension mechanic, as mentioned above. 3) While it is unbelievably great that enemy ships that failed to escape are now forced to fight, it has had a side effect: in such misions, the retreat button for your own ships is greyed out. That seems like a relatively simple oopsie to fix. 4) Reloading and refuelling times. Unless the coal is intended to be brought aboard by packs of badly trained, geriatric turtles one chunk at a time, it is hard to see how refuelling and rearming a ship could take several months. This is a matter of hours. Warspite went back to replenish ammo several times during operation Overlord while providing supporting fire for the invasion. It didn't take until the end of WW2 to do it. An issue that should be adressed, but is not game breaking: 1) Research priority system should be reverted to previous iteration. As it is currently implemented, priorities are basically meaningless. Minimal gain for maximum pain. That takes away a meaningful decision and reduces research to passively waiting for turns to tick by. Previously, I was in that screen all the time, pondering if a priority was worth it, balancing things. Now? I don't bother looking at it. There's no reason to. Set slider to max, and wait. That's bad. Not an exhaustive list, but the most glaring issues that jumped out at me so far. Edited October 2 by Aldaris 9
justMike247 Posted October 3 Posted October 3 I’m not alone in spelling out that tension mechanics are insanely wild with this rev. I’m not sure anyone’s spelled out what the repercussions of that are in the long term. It’s bad enough when you have one country continually tanking tension by up to 80 points per month, but when you have two, three, four or even five, with an additional one or two actively engaged in hostilities, bankruptcy follows in a matter of seconds. This is compounded with a now long established bug in the Overspend mechanics introduced with Rev 1.6 where the mechanism to reduce GDP to give additional funds for the Navy frequently breaks, generating multiple warnings, but never any fresh funds. Being hit for in excess of $60billion per month almost instantly removes the ability to replace losses through new builds, much less keep pace with growing fleet size of the opposition. It’s natural to try to stem the rot as best a player can, by reducing spending elsewhere. This then paralyses port development, replacement of attrited merchant fleet, research and crew training, but even if you’re able to restore a net positive monthly balance, the funds generated are a mere drop in the bucket compared to the amount constantly being extorted. This… basically renders the game unplayable from around 1940 onwards, more in light of the latest buffs to AI submarines, where they are now virtually invulnerable unless your ASW fleet are equipped with state of the art Sonar and depth charges. Impotent political intervention is always… always… 100% ineffective; even if you succeed in improving relations, guaranteed, the very next month, the very same country you’ve just improved relations with is going to crash them again. Net result… Irrespective of how strong your navy is, nor how healthy your economy, a players inability to protect or manage the merchant fleet will rapidly bring on devastating effects to your economy, rapidly bringing you to your knees. How bad to things need to be when literally 2 months after suing for peace, the losing country is once again at max hostility… TWO FREAKING MONTHS!!... I haven’t been able to FIND my fleets within that time frame, much less even begin repairs. The atrociously glacial rate of rebuilding the merchant fleet despite throwing insane amounts of cash at it ensure that once you’re struggling, you never get the chance to recover. This mechanism is crying out for a fundamental root and branch overhaul, because in its current state, there’s precious little point playing the game… It’s a classic case of win every battle, even win every war, but you still get screwed by forces entirely outwith your ability to control. 1
Aldaris Posted October 3 Posted October 3 Another effect of the constant wars: no one has much of a fleet. Two powers (excluding me) in the game with more than 40 ships of any kind at the moment (1921). France and Spain are at single digits (6 and 8 respectively). 2
Северная Posted October 3 Posted October 3 1 hour ago, Aldaris said: Another effect of the constant wars: no one has much of a fleet. Two powers (excluding me) in the game with more than 40 ships of any kind at the moment (1921). France and Spain are at single digits (6 and 8 respectively). Yeah I have mentioned this side effect a lot. The nations have no time to recuperate losses. They are just endlessly at war and the battles become quite pathetic over time because there are no real battle lines left.
Северная Posted October 3 Posted October 3 Research priority should be less bad of a trade off. It should still be a net negative to use priorities, but right now it makes no sense. It’s never worth it. 2
Nick Thomadis Posted October 3 Author Posted October 3 Beta Update x5 uploaded. including: - Fixed issue of too large tension. - Fixed issue causing too large VP for sinking transports. - Fixed bug that caused transports to appear in the ship design window of the campaign. - Fixed some minor issues of auto-resolve. - Fixed minor visual issue causing very shiny ships due to saturated decal textures. - Added more pre-made ships for 1910+ and 1940+ era. You need to restart Steam to get the update. This beta should be good enough for a release, but we await your feedback before we release it. 5
Aldaris Posted October 3 Posted October 3 (edited) Thanks, I'll check if the free for all slapfight cools down a little! The save after every battle thing and some other issues should still be adressed though before this releases. Question: in over 1000 hours of playing this game, I just had the first occurrence of running out of crew. This seems strange - I've had the training slider on max since campaign start, I haven't lost any wars or territories, and I have hardly lost any ships. I have a fleet that's adequate, but not huge. Economy and population is very much OK. What gives? Is this intentional or a bug? With a population in excess of 100 million and maximum priority, a monthly intake of 117 men seems a bit... small. Edited October 3 by Aldaris
Северная Posted October 3 Posted October 3 (edited) 4 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said: Beta Update x5 uploaded. including: - Fixed issue of too large tension. - Fixed issue causing too large VP for sinking transports. - Fixed bug that caused transports to appear in the ship design window of the campaign. - Fixed some minor issues of auto-resolve. - Fixed minor visual issue causing very shiny ships due to saturated decal textures. - Added more pre-made ships for 1910+ and 1940+ era. You need to restart Steam to get the update. This beta should be good enough for a release, but we await your feedback before we release it. The tension situation is better than it was before, but I think fundamentally it needs a rethink. It is still leading to the same result of everyone being constantly at war - by January 1894 in the save I just clicked through, every country had 3 or 4 simultaneous wars. I have been auto-resolving most the battles to get through it, and the auto-resolve system seems much better than before. More ships are sinking, on both sides, and generally seems fair. Good work on this front. EDIT: The tension mechanic results in the same never-ending negative feedback loop and it is indistinguishable by the end of the decade compared to how it was before. Every country is constantly at war with at least 3-4 other nations. Sometimes I have seen nations at war with almost every other nation (France at war with everyone except Japan). Just because the intensity has been toned down doesn't mean the result would be any different if there is just a constant net negative factor. I really think at this point the ships causing tension concept should be completely scrapped and tension should be event and diplomacy based only if a better system cannot be devised. Edited October 3 by Северная 3
JaM Posted October 3 Posted October 3 The biggest problem of this build is technology ( i wont call it research, because now its completely passive and player must not even touch it!) Initial status - picture 1 - look at three research times, then I assign three priorities, and end result is same as if no priorities were assigned... but everything else is much worse!!! And of course, even with 100% assigned to research, i always end up being technologically behind.. so player has no way how to influence it... which makes the best part of this game (research and its impact) just annoying.... 4
Nick Thomadis Posted October 3 Author Posted October 3 Beta 5 Hotfix uploaded - Further tension balances to not cause premature wars. - Fixed a code exception when attempting to restart battles. - Other minor fixes. You need to restart Steam to get the update fast 3
xPorkulusx Posted October 3 Posted October 3 20 minutes ago, JaM said: The biggest problem of this build is technology ( i wont call it research, because now its completely passive and player must not even touch it!) Initial status - picture 1 - look at three research times, then I assign three priorities, and end result is same as if no priorities were assigned... but everything else is much worse!!! And of course, even with 100% assigned to research, i always end up being technologically behind.. so player has no way how to influence it... which makes the best part of this game (research and its impact) just annoying.... What's your GDP? My understanding is that research rate is based on both the research budget percentage and GDP. For example a $100,000,000 GDP with 100% research budget will research slower than a $500,000,000 GDP with 100% research, right? Correct me if I'm wrong though. I also want the research mechanic to be strong
JaM Posted October 3 Posted October 3 Its early game Japan, so GDP is probably weak.. but the point with the research priorities stands.. Right now, they are actually hurting the research, so player lost active ability to influence it in any meaningful way..
brothermunro Posted October 3 Posted October 3 A big reason to fix the research priorities is that the AI loves using them, so will be inadvertently crippling themselves. 1
Nick Thomadis Posted October 3 Author Posted October 3 Beta 5 Hotfix 2 uploaded - Research priority mechanics got a better balance. You need to restart Steam to get the update fast 3
Aldaris Posted October 3 Posted October 3 28 minutes ago, xPorkulusx said: What's your GDP? My understanding is that research rate is based on both the research budget percentage and GDP. For example a $100,000,000 GDP with 100% research budget will research slower than a $500,000,000 GDP with 100% research, right? Correct me if I'm wrong though. I also want the research mechanic to be strong That's not the problem. The problem is that priorities have practically no effect anymore, negating any player influence on research besides the budget slider. Before, you'd have 15" Mark III gun research sitting at 16 months to completion (arbitrary values here, but the ballpark is correct), and with a priority, you could speed it up to, say, 4 months. in return, everything else researched slightly slower, say 2-3 months extra. That gave you a meaningful decision - do I want those 15" guns one year earlier, in exchange for slowing other stuff? I could start building that new generation of BBs right now... decisions, decisions. Now, The same priority would speed it up from 16 to 14 months, for the same drawback everywhere else. Simply not worth doing anymore, and therefore, taking out an element of strategy.
Aldaris Posted October 3 Posted October 3 3 minutes ago, Nick Thomadis said: Beta 5 Hotfix 2 uploaded - Research priority mechanics got a better balance. You need to restart Steam to get the update fast You studs! 😀
Marko Dash Posted October 3 Posted October 3 i'm guessing this would be too big of a re-work, but is there any chance you could take a page out of how Rule the Waves handled research? with being able to assign research priorities on a -3/+3 scale so you could select which tech would take a hit to boost another without crippling everything else to boost one thing. if you wanted to really dive into this, you could have an amount of research points based on your budget and be able to allocate them to whichever tech trees you wanted. this would also be beneficial late game as some paths close, like DD hulls or small guns, you could then reallocate the resources from them onto other projects. 1
casperwieik Posted October 3 Posted October 3 I'll hand it to the devs, attention to player feedback on this game has been nothing if not consistent and considerate. Cheers fellas! 1
Aendos Posted October 4 Posted October 4 On latest update, no mods. Germany 1890 start, hard difficulty. Transport/Tech sliders maxed out every turn, third highest GDP behind GB/France. By 1893 I am "Behind" on Tech and every other nation is average. Had prios set on Rangefinder/Hulls.
xPorkulusx Posted October 4 Posted October 4 2 hours ago, Aendos said: On latest update, no mods. Germany 1890 start, hard difficulty. Transport/Tech sliders maxed out every turn, third highest GDP behind GB/France. By 1893 I am "Behind" on Tech and every other nation is average. Had prios set on Rangefinder/Hulls. I finally got around to trying the beta and I'm experiencing something similar. I'm playing as Italy with a 1910 start on standard difficulty, I have maxed out the tech slider from turn one, and taken every opportunity to increase GDP. I have used only one research priority for my entire playthrough (on Rangefinders) and by June 1917 I am "very behind."
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