brothermunro

Yup! The only way to affect component choice is to mess with the ‘weights’ in components but this affects all ship types equally. There’s no way to tell transports to follow different rules in the text files so sadly beyond modders.

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.

Nexus messed up the upload, should be working now

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.

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.

I can tell you why they can’t let you build old ships, or rather why the game obsoletes hulls. It’s relatively trivial to turn this off and have all hulls available all the time which is great for the human player who can make sensible choices but the AI builder is a different kettle of fish. It basically chooses from the available hulls at random, it has no way of evaluating if they are any good. So you’d have the AI in 1950 building pre dreadnoughts. Hilarious yes, but fairly terrible for game balance.

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.

The scrap limit checks the total fleet tonnage against the value you set in Params. If the fleet tonnage is larger than the scrap limit then the ai is allowed to scrap ships. So in vanilla if the AI has a fleet of 50,001 tons it can scrap ships, the game doesn’t seem to check in between each ship being scrapped it all happens at once. (So for example the ai could scrap 2 10,000 ton ships and reduce the total fleet tonnage to 30,001 tons)

As far as I can tell if an AI country has more than the scrapping threshold it is allowed to scrap ships and this is only checked once per turn. So you can have a scenario where the ai nation has the scrap limit +1 tons of fleet then decides to scrap its entire navy all at once (though this seems rare as the AI doesn’t seem to like scrapping large numbers of ships at once)

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.

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!

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

I know that not everyone is aware of this but speaking personally I’m no longer worried about new updates requiring a new save since you added the extremely useful version control in steam. A more restrictive economy was one of the things I tried to do via modding, and I got relatively few complaints about it (though not none, I don’t think that’s actually possible 😂)

No! I should go do that, thank you!

Mod updated for 1.5.1.6 compatibility

@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

With performance the issue seems to be the underlying engine which is only capable of using a single core of your CPU. Because of this the game loves single thread performance which many modern processors aren’t very good at. Changing that requires updating the game to a newer version of Unity and that is probably a massive endeavour.

I’m not sure when they did but currently the targeting is a lot more sensible, prioritising ships that are close, the AI isn’t as obsessed with sinking a destroyer on the other side of the battlescape anymore 😅

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.

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.

@sillyrecon I'm currently working on version 2 of the mod, the exact design you came across (or as near as I can make it) is 20% overweight so I think whatever the issue is you came across will be fixed once v2 comes out

Latest update, just compatibility with 1.5.1.5 for now

There’s a fair bit in there! I will say that a lot of work has been going into the next version of the mod and I haven’t seen that version be able to produce a fast brick like that. Indeed that design seems absolutely bonkers and is probably an issue with that German hull. I’ll have a look into it. With only being able to pen things at medium range I think you are running into deck skipping. This has been a problem on and off in UAD since always thanks to the way the pen system works but it’s been more prevalent since the 1.5.1.1 rework of guns. Best advice I can give you with that is you can try to lower the muzzle velocity of your guns (make them shorter or use slower propellants). Sorry to say I can’t fix wonkiness with land combat, or how the mission generator system basically allows the AI to decide what battles get fought (something I was complaining about at length in a video I recorded today) as all that stuff is hard coded and there’s no text parameters for me to adjust.

You give me far too much credit sir! I did have an issue with the AI admirals overspending in the early game which often caused their entire nation to implode. I solved that by making the ‘collapse’ of a nation very difficult by setting the GDP to province income threshold 0.8 which makes countries extremely stable. If the AI overspends they can usually recover, or just go massively into debt which will stall out their crew training and tech development (this is because I also raised the scrap threshold to 500,000 tons otherwise they’ll just delete their navy which is no fun).

Updated for 1.5.1.4 Opt x2