Aldaris

Depends on what you want. Haven't tested the new release yet, but last I played (2-3 weeks ago) - perfectly playable, but lots of glaring issues that could and should be so much better. So, if you want a playable game, it is that now. If you want a game that lives up to its potential, it needs a lot more love. And I mean a lot. Especially in the campaign, many systems feel more like placeholders than fleshed out mechanics. Meaning they're kinda servicable, but don't feel final, if you know what I mean.

I haven't actually, because slowing a CL down to 10 knots in torpedo range of significant enemy targets is usually not a good idea...

Regarding underwater tubes - a long standing issue that I have when I use them with larger, more modern torps, on more modern hulls: they are EXTREMELY fiddly to actually launch. Most of the time, they don't. I can run a modern CL along an enemy ship, overtaking it, with the torps set to aggressive, and they won't launch most of the time. I don't know if this is down to the extremely narrow arcs they have, but they're almost useless in my experience. A fix for that would be much appreciated, as especially a lot of modern CLs are too slim to mount modern launchers on the deck beside the superstructure, so as soon as you want to upgrade your CLs and the older launchers you initially could fit there get more bulky in the upgrade, they don't fit anymore, and the underwater tubes might as well not be there for all the good they do. An aspect of the overall problem of guns getting more bulky with higher marks, often not fitting anymore. Most egregious example of that was a German 15" triples BC I built in my latest campaign. The only available tower is the one with the integrated barbette in the front, and the Mark IV onward didn't fit there anymore (well, it did fit, but it couldn't rotate). So I was stuck with leaving it on Mark IIIs and without radar, or downgrading the main battery to lower calibre. which REALLY sucked.

Now THAT is a fantastic idea! Love it. The ship designer is the heart and soul of this game, and the prospect of being commissioned to design ships for others that meet defined criteria gives a great reason to do something other than what you usually do. The challenge I think would be to dynamically define criteria that make sense for the technology level in question. Don't know if that is feasible. But if it is, I'd love to see this added to the game.

Similar thing happened to me just now, just not as important. The US keeps the war going, indefinitely, because they keep. spamming. those. naval. invasions. Endlessly. Making peace negotiations impossible (can we PLEASE change that?). Just now they succeeded for the first time after what must have been 30+ attempts (not kidding), with capturing Rhodes. Because I couldn't bring their task force there to battle. Every turn I tried, every turn I kept getting fed a single destroyer, and they kept sitting there. They still only had a 27% chance or so to succeed, because there was close to 400K tons of mine sitting there trying to fight them, but miraculously, that worked for them. We NEED a way to target a specific enemy task force for engagement. This felt incredibly stupid and ridiculous. "The enemy invasion force is about 100 km that way. They have been for months. And they're not even half our size." - "yeah, but we're busy fighting a destroyer this month. Nothing we can do".

That's usually the case for me, and it's kinda bullshit to be honest. Especially since the AI can spam out naval invasions regardless of its actual available force. Had a war against the US as Germany. I had sent the entire US fleet to the bottom, they started the war with 200+ ships and had 2 CLs and a couple subs left at that point. And yet, they spammed invasions of Germany. You and what tonnage, buddy? So I have to wait for this invasion to be over. Sigh. But then, the original time keeps getting adjusted upwards, which is another thing that drives me crazy. Starts with turn 1/6 for example, and at some point we're at turn 6/11. I imagine that scenario in real life. Invasion transports are ready to go, troops all loaded up. Only to be told "boys, we need to hold on for a minute. There's a Bazillion German ships in the way, and we don't exactly have a fleet to cover us at the moment, but we're building stuff that we'll trickle in little by little. That should do the trick over the next year or so, so sit tight. No, we're not calling this off. Are you crazy?" EDIT: Loaded up the save real quick. Here they go again, 1 CA in the theater, and yet, they'll try. Score is about 2.5 million VP for me vs. 120k for them, and yet, peace? No, we're about to turn this around, for sure!

To be fair, this isn't a regular occurrence, but it did happen. No idea why. On the whole though, I'd kill for some kind of fleet management system. Assign ships to fleets/task forces, name them, assign them home ports. A man can dream...

Besides the submarine issue - the allocation of repair ports is still incredibly weird and random. Playing as Germany, I had a destroyer damaged in an engagement in the mediterranean, off Benghazi. I have bases in the med, the black sea, and of course, Germany itself. It teleported to Kwajalein for repairs. In the Marshall Islands. I plotted a course from there back to the fleet, and it is 45000 kilometers away. I mean, wtf??

Can we take another look at submarines, please? This is a dedicated anti-submarine taskforce engaging 2 subs. Those are modern CAs, CLs and modern DDs. All with latest sonar and depth charges. I set up a couple of those because I was so fed up with subs. So here they are, doing their job. Engaging 2 piddly little 300 ton boats. The results? Yeah, this feels bad. I mean, really bad. I get why you want subs in the game. Otherwise, destroyers wouldn't have to have anti-sub equipment. But this is simply an anti-fun mechanism. I literally don't know what else I can do. If you have to have those little bastards in the game, at least make transparent what the values mean, and what I need to build to counter them. Because my only recourse is building. I can't beat this with skill. There is none involved. I just click a button, and it tells me I lost a CA.

I can also confirm the "minor allies aren't interested in buying my mothballed ships anymore" bug that was reported earlier. Which is weird since they're attempting to order ships of the same classes new, but they won't buy the upgraded version of the same class they could have right now...

Believe me, I'm aware. I've posted about this before, extensively. But as it stands, the offset is there, it's caused by very strange things (like you said, tiny secondaries cause huge shifts), there are few ways to effectively counteract, and it affects the performance of the ship. I still almost always get my ships into the below 1% range, but it often requires dumb compromises. And if it's too annoying to get anything good with low offset out of a hull (the experimental heavy cruiser hull with it's destroyer like breaks in the deck is a prime example) I usually don't even bother trying anymore.

If you mouse over the offset value in the ship details panel on the right (in the yard) you'll see details. 28 front offset should be a base accuracy penalty of 8-9%, plus a bunch of other penalties. That's pretty significant.

69 barrels? Nice. Also, go and fix that forward offset. We ain't building a submarine optimized for emergency dive here!

I never use autoresolve except in low stakes fights - something like 6 DDs of mine against one or two enemy DDs. Anything else is not worth it. You can have ridiculous superiority, a full fleet of 4 BBs plus plenty of Cruisers and DDs vs. a single DD, and you're still quite likely to have a BB with heavy damage afterwards, which will put it out of commission for half a year. I haven't seen a result this bad though. Ouch!

I can't tell yet if it's consistent, but I'm fighting A-H right now in the 30's and their fleet seems to be almost entirely modern ships that are ugly as sin, but fairly competitive. A bit slow, but well armored and with decent armament and fire control. That's very encouraging!