AurumCorvus

To somewhat solve the BB's (or whatever your main combat line is) out of control, turn off their collision avoidance. It ensures that DDs avoids BBs and BBs don't avoid DDs.

But sadly nobody has made a good enough 3D counterpart; even UAD is struggling to reach the scope and breadth of RtW2, let alone what has been confirmed for RtW3. So, yes, I will continue to promote RtW2, until we get something near there.

To add to your point: I highly encourage people to explore Rule the Waves 2 (and/or its sequel RtW3 which will be on Steam... soon-ish) to show the difference between gun-based warfare and plane-based warfare. War on the Sea also is a good game to show the difference, though it's nowhere near complete. Guns and battleships are what UAD is currently built for. It's all about maneuvering on a very tactical level, masking/unmasking guns, and picking the correct targets. It's also a very pressed action, as once combat is engaged, the majority of the battle happens right now. Carrier-based gameplay is wildly different. First, the range is huge. A gun shooting out 20km is extreme range for battleships. For carriers, that's not knife-fighting range; that's like being so close that you can't even properly punch the other person. As a corollary to the range, a huge part of carrier-based warfare is just sitting around and waiting for your scouts to report back and try to decipher their reports (which may be garbled, incorrectly coded, or just flat-out wrong). RtW does a great job of showing this; in the pre-dread era, the sea is huge. In the battleship era, the sea is still big. In the carrier era? The sea is downright tiny. For example, in the Med, you have no room to maneuver your carriers effectively, while just the Adriatic Sea is big enough to have an entire pre-dread war. When you finally think you know where the enemy is, you put together one attack. It's not a gun battle where you lob hundreds of shells while slowly adjusting yourself. You send out one attack and hope that it finds the enemy. If you fail, you're vulnerable until they come back. It also takes time to put together this one attack. Hiryu during the Battle of Midway was able to put two attacks against Yorktown with a gap of two hours in between (launch times of 11:00 and 13:31). This is one of the best Japanese carrier crews working under tremendous pressure as the sole surviving carrier. Carrier battles just work on an entirely different time scale than battleships. So, yeah. UAD is not built for an appropriate scale yet. Would I like to see it eventually? Yes. Actually putting graphics to carrier battles would be awesome, and the design-your-ship element of AA and aviation would be awesome. But it's not likely to bring the game any closer to completion (rather, it's more like opening an entirely new can), so it should be a DLC at the very least.

You really can't declare war with a BRB that says "Declare War". It just doesn't make sense from where you are; you're the head of a navy, not the head of state. Rather, you should focus on the opinion modifying events with France, and eventually lowering opinions to the point that a war is declared. Also, though the game frames it as France starting the war, it's better to say that "War has broken out between France and [your nation]." RTW uses that phrasing and is much more apt for what is happening. Essentially, you've warmongered and created enough tensions that something, somewhere went wrong and your two nations are now at war due to an unspecified incident. It's kinda like what caused WWI, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand causing war between Germany and everybody, but abstracted. Or Japan running short of oil and deciding to attack America in WWII (yes, that's a horrible abstraction, but somewhat true). Or the USS Maine sparking the Spanish-American War. Wars are "started" by some small event, but you can only affect the chance that such an event goes south as possible. In game, you can think of it as the war declaration as to an event as per what you want to think. There's room for roleplaying/imagination in the game.

I'm a few betas out of date (but I have kept up with the patch notes), but as it used to be, upgrades are only added to new ships. Unfortunately, saves are encrypted these days so it's harder to check if the behavior was updated for refits. However, it would make sense for refitted ship not to be; those ships are still the product of their time, with all the limitations that is. This would model the real life issues with the Standards and other WWI/Interwar dreadnoughts during WWII, when you have carriers and much more modern battleships running around.

Most of the newer models automatically do remove lifeboats for anything. It's probably an older model, and you might have better luck specifically naming which hulls/towers/funnels are the issue.

And while there are plenty of good tips in this thread (yours included), they're not the point. OP probably has a bug and that needs to reported. He should have some range found bonus because there is nothing in the UI that says he shouldn't. Accounted for crew training as well.

You'll note he does have target-lock, though. Notice how the guns are "Aimed" in the screenshots. While you are bringing up good points, this honestly seems to be a bug. He should have *some* range-found bonus. It doesn't need to be equal, but there should still be some. Again, if OP is on latest version and not cheating, this should be a bug report.

Not sure that should matter. Crew training is factored into the calculations. It's the fourth thing from the top from the screenshots. And OP doesn't seem to have only a single turret firing on the enemy, so he shouldn't be blocked from the "range found" mechanic as well. If he's on the latest version, this should be a bug report.

One of slightly annoying parts of the ship designer. If you have set your guns longer/bigger (for example, I was placing 20.9 with +20%), when you're placing the part, you're shown the normal gun w/o modifications. But the moment you place it down, the game replaces it with the modified gun. The problem is that a longer gun requires more space for firing. So you'll place a gun with green arcs, but then it'll get replaced w/ the modified gun and it might not be able to fire or it might have severely limited firing arcs. Basically, give us the modified part while we're placing things so we can use the green arcs.

While it's awesome that more people are thinking about this stuff (certainly, we players get out of hand sometimes), you might be interested in some of the findings of people who have save-edited. Through hyper-inflating a repeatable tech (I believe it's gun_mech_end, and you need to take it up to a 1000), you can eliminate the entire loading time, achieving a firing rate of "Infinity". This isn't quite "Infinity", though, the game just fires as soon as the animation cycles (flash and a bit of smoke). For small guns, they can achieve a 'stream' of shells, while big guns still have a gap. Nonetheless, the game is still very stable with such edits, even when you have a full fleet firing at this RoF, with hundreds of barrels with various calibers. I haven't had a chance to do such a test with the absolute latest update (18), but this was still the case in the earlier versions of 1.05. (Just as a reminder, if you want to run a test with an edited save, any bugs should not be reported to the devs)

Even better, it'd be nice if we players could make the decision, rather than an arcane calculator and game logic deciding to send them a captain feels like. On the post-battle summary screen, just let click a checkbox for RTB and select a valid port to go back to (i.e.. heavily damaged ships might not be able to sail half-way across the globe, but at least let us choose nearby ports, varying the range on how heavily damaged the ship is).

Just as a counterpoint to your feeling about the timers (noting that I used to feel that they were completely pointless), it's important to note that most naval actions breakoff at nightfall, even with WWII radar (though most are finished with a retreat much quicker than that). I've come around to accepting that it's not just a timer, but rather of how much daylight is still present and when your ships will be forced to disengage due to fading daylight/crew exhaustion. Admittedly, this is not a perfect reconciliation. It does feel extremely odd when a timer cuts off a point-blank execution of an enemy ship. Also, a more dynamic skybox would be necessary to make this really work. Nonetheless, as a placeholder mechanic, I can kinda accept the timer.

You're not entirely wrong, mind you. But here's something to consider: If there are so many bugs by trying to expand the absolute barebones of the framework, how bad would it have been if the devs had tried to expand a fully-fleshed out framework? It might have gone without a hitch; a refined system might've taken the expansion quite easily. However, it is equally likely that everything would've broken down entirely. It might've required the devs to build the game twice (once for GB v Germany, and then again after the expansion bug onslaught). Yes, as gamers, this patch is horrible. I haven't been able to drum the interest to play the game for a few weeks. However, I've settled into a... quiet acceptance that I'd rather have these issues sorted out now rather than at the end when we're getting ready for the game to release a final version.

This is definitely one of those lingering problems. One of the times it really matters is if you link the main tower and the secondary tower to create a fixed superstructure. Then, when you move one of the towers, both towers move, but none of the stuff on the second one moves (or even the barbette that's also linked, or the turret on that barbette [sub-sub-link?]) I've grown used to working around the linking feature (by not using it), but it should be fixed nonetheless.