brothermunro

VP is linked to ship costs and the costs went waaaaaay up. It’s somewhat fixed in 2.0.1 but there’s still some fine tuning to do!

I use custom component weights so there shouldn't be any change there. Armouring logic I've done my very best with, I honestly don't know what else I can do! The ship pack should help a bit, but it takes time to make all the designs (just released a set of 1890 ships for those starting a campaign)

Initial ship pack is ready and on the nexus, only 1890 ships but should help with the very long campaign loading times.

New 2.0.1 patch to address this. Ships will be a little bit heavier and expensive compared to before (1.5/DIP v2b), especially if you use maximum bulkheads, but not by much.

I’m aware costs are all over the place but I’m not sure exactly what the developers changed (I didn’t change any price parameters) - working on it!

Well that’s a fun one 😂

Ok version 2 is out for 1.6! Full change log for 2.0.0. Please note that a lot of the changes in 1.6 have been ignored as I already had my own balance values for the stuff they changed. Gun stats have been reworked using some NAR data. Effects of changing gun barrel length reduced. Gun marks have 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. Belt penetration rework. Changes to how weights for light and heavy cruisers are calculated. Multiple torpedo tubes are now slightly more displacement efficient. Mine laying, mine sweeping, and depth charge components have been 'removed' (by making them torpedo boat exclusives). Engine costs have been rebalanced, turbo electric is slightly more expensive, diesels are cheaper. 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 reload will now become obsolete, the AI builder is more likely to use better reload techs if it can. Standard bulkheads will now become obsolete. Adjusted the appearance of auto loaders, sonar, and radar to be somewhat later (late 1930s to the 1940's). Adjusted component weights for shell types to encourage better AI decision making. Base detection of torpedoes lowered to 500m. Increased ammo detonation damage. Increased flooding sinking threshold to 75% of flood-able compartments (most ships have 10 compartments). Reduced maximum speed of some ship classes to plausible but still very fast values. (BB 36, BC/CA/CL 40, DD 45 knots). Attempted improvements to the auto builder (this is why the maximum speeds were lowered). Increased the partial pen threshold to 80% and reduced partial pen damage. Rebalance of the fuse and ricochet effects of shells. Rebalanced unrest modifiers to be lower overall. Submarines have been removed completely from the research screen. Adjusted map colours of Spain to match the yellow of their flag and China who are now a darker orange. AI personalities changed to encourage more aggressive AI nations with bigger fleets (experimental). Naval Academy has been rebalanced to act as a tutorial rather than a challenge mode. Heavy Cruisers now have a maximum secondary gun size of 5" rather than 6". Attempted improvements to the auto builder to increase chances of ships having armour, and to the auto resolver to make armoured ships very weak. Fixed stats for Ballistite, it is now considerably more dangerous to use. Made Austria a slightly darker shade of brown to improve contrast.

You are quite correct that hydrophones were commonly installed on battleships & other large vessels. The only reason I’ve disabled them is to make large ships vulnerable to torpedo attack if they are unescorted which is purely a gameplay thing.

The ai will only use a shared design if it has every single component and technology that was used for the shared design. Practically this means it’s quite difficult to get shared designs to show up, although you can load @NathanKell’s tweaks DLL to make them more likely to show up.

Just to let folk know that if you do pick up the new multiplayer mode the resources file for that is kept separately from the main game, so there are no issues playing single player with DIP interfering with the multiplayer. I assume modding the MP mode is not possible without causing serious issues, sadly no DIP multiplayer. Unless the devs want to allow private servers (nudge nudge wink wink).

That’s the one. Hmm. Usually the building new ships hang is because there’s a design the ai is getting stuck on. Figuring out which and why is tricky though.

Hmmm that’s a new one! You've probably done this already but check that you have no shared designs loaded and delete the custom battle save file, both can cause the building ships hang. If it’s not that I’m not sure what’s going on - is this on DIP 2.0.0b2 or b1?

Hiei is an interesting example, she suffered badly from her upperworks being shot up. But it was a night battle, at very very close range. There were also American cruisers with 6 and 8” guns (and the small matter of torpedo hits to her). Now in UAD terms a BB being overwhelmed at night by small ships, losing steering/fire control/conning tower and finally being put down by torps - a reasonable battle. A BB burning down in seconds in broad daylight at range to a bunch of incendiary shells not so much. (I know Hiei was a battlecruiser not a BB)

Long term I want to fix that sort of thing, but I don’t really want to start on it until the developers say they’re done adding hulls as it’s very tedious to do and makes keeping the mod up to date very annoying

I’ve been trying to nerf HE/partial pens for many iterations of DIP, the good news it’s relatively straightforward for the devs to fix HE spam by: Increasing the ‘extensive fire’ threshold (somewhere in the 90’s works well) Lowering HE pen Lowering the partial pen damage modifier Increasing the partial pen threshold (I use 80%) Reducing all of the fuse modifiers (by a factor of about 10) That’s all text file work, no coding needed.

Of course the instant I make an update there's a fix to do 😅 Thank you! Will adjust.

A little update, trying to help the AI remember that armour is in fact important. I've upped the armorminhint in shiptypes (which probably won't doo much but it might) and I have doubled the importance of armour in the auto resolver. It is now the most important thing for auto resolve, meaning that weak ships should get themselves sunk pretty quick.

After my experience with the last beta I’ll probably wait until the devs start talking about ‘release candidates’ before I start work porting DIP v2 over to 1.6 so please be patient 😇

A feature request primarily for modders although I think it would also be helpful for the dev team as well (there’s two options, either would work in my opinion so whichever is simpler): Configurable armour minimums Rather than the current minimum armour in shiptypes which only applies to the main belt; strings are added for minimum main belt, fore/aft belt, fore/aft deck, superstructure, & conning tower Calculated armour minimums The current minimum armour is changed by a configurable scaling factor for the other armour parts, for instance main deck minimum = 0.5*main belt minimum This would help modders & the dev team guide the AI towards more sensible design choices

Boy am I aware of it. I had the auto builder working pretty well and then the developers ’improved’ the builder logic and now it’s back to tin foil ships. It will take me a while to work out how to make it be sensible again.

Adding components is a thing that can be done but it makes the mod more complicated to install so it’s not in scope until I can make some sort of installer package (which is a long way off!)

Seems decent to me! If you did want to make any changes you could do any of the following to free up weight: Reduce the gun length - DIP v2 makes long guns not terrible but they are heavier and slower to fire, sometimes a slightly shorter barrel gives you more bang for your buck Your mid deck armour is very thick and quite heavy you light be able to shave it down a touch (or make the citadel smaller, see below) The modern tower V is also very heavy, you might get some weight back with little performance impact from a smaller, lighter tower (especially if you can also get a smaller rear tower & shorten your citadel) Hope that helps!

Let me know how it goes! V2 of DIP is a bit of a change from the first version, and radically different from vanilla in terms of feel and ship design it can take some getting used to but I’ve been finding it a lot more interesting and enjoyable (If you’re curious as to why cruisers are harder to build now it is because they now follow the same under the hood rules as the bigger ships rather than having their own weird rules that led to the AI’s beloved hyper speed ships)

If you’re referring to the ‘how to build heavy cruisers’ video I did a while ago there’s some significant changes for DIP v2, especially if you are building an early game Armoured Cruiser: Speed: The ideal design speed of CA hulls is more of an aspirational target. You’ll need better engines and probably oil fuel to reach optimal speeds. Going over the design speed is going to make engines very heavy. Reducing beam helps a lot! Armour: You need less armour in DIP v2 overall but it’s worth pointing out that iron plate is really bad. You probably won’t have really solid protection until you get decent steel. Generally speaking an 8” belt is actually very good on a CA now. You don’t need a lot of deck armour. Extended armour should only be enough to keep out HE shells from other cruisers and (optionally) 5” or lower AP shells - 1.5” does the job just fine. Firepower: Depends on the hull but for a typical 10,000 ton ish modern heavy cruiser you’ll be looking at 8-10 8” guns as a sort of ‘medium’ balanced option. You don’t need a ton of armour on the turrets - 10/5/8 is plenty. Torpedoes and secondaries can add a fair bit of weight so if you upgun your mains that’s an area you can cut back on. Best thing to do is to look at the bottom right of the info panel in the builder and look at the weights (it’s ordered by heaviest to lightest). I’d expect the top items to be hull, fuel, & bulkheads. If anything else is up there then that’s a good place to look to for weight reductions.

It’s on the to do list!