Dave P.

I always thought the numbers for total warships sunk were a little high, so I clicked through a campaign without ever engaging in any wars. (Well, except for one conquest of a minor power's territory.) And it still showed hundreds of ships sunk. It looks like the Wars Fought summary is either made up, or it's for all the wars the AI powers fight amongst themselves. Too bad I can't get a "score" for just my own nation.

I was happy to see that when a minor nation invades my territory, I almost always get an conquest event that lets me take it back. The annoyance for me is that when a minor nation is landlocked, it will repeatedly invade me and, being the navy, don't really have a recourse. Even when it's allied with my friends, it seems to want to get its home territories back no matter what. They lose more often than not, even if I'm outnumbered 100:1, but it's still... weird?

Similar vein as above: I just sank the Cruiser Rurik... and then sank it again, and again, and...

Another issue. At some point, the game stopped generating random numbers for ship names when it runs out of pregenerated names. I think I complained a little about that before, so, ok, cool, right? But then I ran into this: I'm playing as Italy here, if it matters. Noticing that if I build, like, a lot of the same class of ship, the names get recycled pretty quick. And what's worse, it screws with the refit system: When I try to refit the second CL Puglia, the game just keeps refitting the first one over and over. Now, I can just rename the "duplicate" ships and it works fine. So yeah, workarounds exist. But its kind of an annoying micromanagement thing. I just want to build 200 escort/ASW ships, let the game autoassign them to all my ports, ignore them for a few years, then either refit or scrap and build new ones. Having to go through, sort by name, find duplicates, ensure uniqueness... bleh. Anyway, have a nice day.

I found a small visual disparity. When a ship is listing severely, the main battery guns usually can't fire at a target unless it's directly in front of you. However, the bearing of the guns doesn't seem to adjust for the list - it seems to still point at the angle that it would if the ship weren't listing. (Which means it's not actually pointing at the target.) Minor thing, again. I doubt anybody cares, just thought I'd point it out.

I don't think you're able to ask for peace if there's an active naval or ground invasion ongoing; any chance that was the issue?

I wonder if there might be a future-proofing argument in favor of it as well - I have some older games which work in windowed mode, but some decade+ worth of DirectX, GPU driver, or Windows updates have broken their ability to work in fullscreen mode reliably. Crashing when alt-tabbing is a common issue. Mind you, I don't know enough about game programming to know why that's a issue. But yeah.

@Nick Thomadis - do you think we could ever get a "full screen windowed" or "borderless window" mode for the game to run in, so when I click onto my second monitor to fast forward through a podcast ad or something, the game doesn't auto-minimize? Minor QoL thing.

I've typically had the opposite experience. If we knew the algorithm for the autobattles and ASW battles, at least we could sensibly minmax it.

I've had similar issues - I was under the impression that it gets teleported to the nearest port, but the distance is calculated "as the crowd flies" and not routed. (So my ships damaged while invading the Baltic get send to ports in the Black Sea, not the Med.) But what you observed, that doesn't sound like that.

This. Although I usually stick with DDs and CLs in my ASW forces because of their disposability. I get that subs sometimes get lucky and ASW crews sometimes get unlucky, but if you're going to let a submarine sink a capital or near-capital asset, it would be nice if there was some kind of player skill involved in the outcome instead of just RNG magic.

That's normal - ships slow down when they take flooding or engine damage, and they will also slow to keep pace with the slowest ships in their units/division. If you hover over the ships division it will popup a list of ships in the division and their maximum speeds. If you have a single ship in a division, you can set the speed control higher (into the red portion of the slider) but it won't do you any good, the ship will just putter along as fast as it can. They also slow down when turning - larger ships and tighter turns have to slow down more. So if you issue a bunch of course change commands to a ship and don't give it time to turn, stop turning, and speed back up to cruising speed, you can sort of "freeze" them in place.

Ah. I see. Or rather, I don't see, since you're not actually showing the damage report for your own ship there, (:-p) but I still think I see your point. I'm actually interested in this hoverover: As you can see here, this BB has taken a couple hundred small caliber hits but the vast majority of the actual damage is coming from those 10" and 13" hits. If you're going by the logs, those few hits are absolutely lost in the noise. First of all, historically, any ship hit by several hundred shells, even small ones, is going to be having a BAD day and probably rendered combat-ineffective. (See: last battle of Japanese battleship Hiei.) The in-game mechanic of disabling ships with too many crew losses is basically what happens IRL. I'd also point to the battle of Tsushima, and the fate of the Russian battle line, as examples of HE shells rendering ships combat ineffective even if they didn't sink them properly. Secondly, small hits to actually ablate heavy armor. Example (testing done on a tank): You can see that even hits which don't penetrate the armor plating cause damage, thinning the armor and allowing other followup hits to penetrate more easily. One thing which isn't modeled in-game is armor plates are usually bolted on to be easily replaced; enough non-penetrating hits can actually knock them off completely. Anyway, from a design standpoint, it's usually assumed that an armor plate can block its rated shell once, after that all bets are off. Anyway, tl;dr - Big guns are for hitting battleships at range. Small guns are for melting destroyers and cruisers if they come too close to you. Keep the range open and you won't get hundreds of small caliber hits.

Those hits aren't doing a lot of damage. 5-10 points per hit? That's piddly. But they can set your ship on fire and that will cause DOT. What does the overall damage summary show? (When you hover over the damage total it will give you a damage breakdown by caliber types, etc.)

Also, it seems like the recent changes to minor nations ship building/buying/scrapping has done something annoying - my allies are no longer offering to buy my mothballed ships even if they are offering to buy new construction versions of the same model. I'm fine with scrapping them - it was never a huge income source. But it's weird from a RP perspective.