justMike247

You... don't play the game huh? The glaring disconnect between the outline you've described and how the game actually is is... blindingly stark. I suggest you try playing sometime... It'd be... enlightening... maybe humbling, ought to be vividly revealing to understand the full scope of just how utterly and thoroughly wrong you've been with every "update". In its current state, the game is totally unplayable... I honestly can't think of a single aspect of the game that isn't comprehensively, totally, thoroughly and utterly fuq'd. But don't take our word for it... See for yourself.

Clearly a huge disconnect between what should be, and what is... 3 months... just 3 months to go from 100% merc strength down to just 5% with current rev

As stated in previous post, game crash toasted all game saves, trashing my previous campaign. Restarted, got three years in to fresh campaign before installing latest update. 50% of mercant fleet disappears... Fair enough; a 200% strength fleet never made much sense. What makes less sense is 33% of a 100% strength merchant fleet being sunk in a single month without a single solitary engagement notification, and despite engaging/destroying every opposing force coming into my home waters. But that's just tip of the iceberg. I started paying particular attention to what's going on in the gazillion fleet v's one or two raider engagements. Seems the opposing A.I. now gets a 500% accuracy buff, along with 1000% damage buff; case in point. Opposing British DD v's fleet of 5x BB, 5X CA, 10X CL... DD out-spots my fleet, as usual... DD charges around at 32kts, firing both its 107mm guns at 10km range... Manages to hit/cause damage to critical systems with every salvo... Exactly how does a 107mm shell manage a partial pen against BB main belt armour of 350mm at those ranges, much less cause 247 damage when the max damage of its shell is less than half that value at point blank range? How is there any penetration at all when the penetration distance of that main belt is over 5000mm? (BB was bow-on to attacking DD). How does a hit chance of 1.5% generate a 50% hit rate? How does a single DD with just 2 main guns score more hits than a 20 ship fleet? In over 40 years of wargaming, I've had my share of wins and losses... I can deal with both graciously... However... This horseshit is a whole different ballgame. GDP slashed by 50% in just 2 months through merchant fleet attrition and we're utterly powerless to do anything about that. Trying to survive the opening decade when naval budget is just 10% of that of the other Majors, despite having near identical GDP. Enough's enough... Every update simply makes the horseshit deeper while making token effort to undo errors that never needed to be there in the first place... I'm done! I've never encountered any other game where despite a numerical and tech disadvantage that is, frankly, eyewatering, I don't lose a single engagement, yet still lose due to out of control nerfage and economic attrition...

Lost campaign after game crash. Reboot found zero saved campaigns,despite religiously manually saving after every engagement.

"It's life, Jim... but not as we'd like it..."

Kk... Given the premise of your outline... A target passing through an exchange that is already at "oughta be impossible to miss" range can't fail to collect withering fire. As for damage sustained, although potentially serious enough to induce "mission kill", (see USS South Dakota damage, Savo Island), guns of the calibres you mention should be utterly incapable of troubling a properly armoured citadel. Any gun captain missing at those ranges outa be keel-hauled before being flogged around the fleet. I'm still struggling to understand why you believe this is a bug.

While it might seem infinate, bear in mind that because they're "contracting out" the R&D and port development we have to grind out, they have significantly higher disposable cash to play with. Couple that with the A.I.'s continuing habit of hanging on to hulls long after they're obsolete, and those numbers really shouldn't be as intimidating as they appear at first glance. Developing issue I'm having is... the Minors aren't so minor no more; near a decade of the other Majors continually beating three shades of crap outa each other has resulted in them all being weak enough for Minors to stomp through them like a virus. Compound that with their untouchability *by us at least*... and we have a pretty serious problem, made worse by Minors being permitted to unilatterally attack our provinces, and there's not a damned thing we can do about that if those Minors aren't allied to another Major we're not currently at war with. Somebody really hasn't thought this mess through properly.

I doubt you're likely to see either anytime soon, much less both...

Damned politicians oughta be put up against a wall an' shot... the whole bloody lot of 'em... Firstly... welcome aboard... As for your predicament... I hear ya bro... I'm 25 years into a campaign (US) and this one's been the toughest grind of the lot so far. Trying to keep my head above water with a Naval Budget just 10% of the other majors has been... challenging; my tech level was Very Behind before the first year was out... It's only just changed to Behind... Progress!! Gotta love it. I'm counting myself lucky that my biggest defense is two bloody big oceans protecting my flanks; by the time any determined opposition forced their way over, they were running on fumes. Anything more potent would make mincemeat of my clown-car navy... Suffice to say, I haven't been shy in using Admiral Sheer's Battle Turn tactics judiciously whenever it became obvious that there's been more nerfs applied to this rev than just tweaks to the budget; nerfing aiming to generate a 50% chance to miss at 1000m is... hitting below the belt. Hell, I was shooting at that range with just iron sights back when I wore the uniform. Once the dust settled after getting bounced by 3 of the other Majors, I've kept my head down, grinding my way through a complete fleet replacement; there's only so much you can do to the initial clown cars to upgrade them. In the tween time, the others have been religiously ripping each other apart, so it'll be interesting to see the results when I let my dreadnought fleet off the leash.

Ah.. I understand what you’re getting at now… Just to confirm… Lets say the action is a stern chase, targeted ship is the closest which receives disproportionally fewer hits than the ship immediately ahead of it; am I close? I gotta be careful how I word this because last time I vented on this subject I got my wrist smacked. A simplified example of how harmonised fire control should work would look something like this… Imagine a tabular grid, three cells wide, three cells high, the target ideally being in the centre cell. The goal is to hit the target with at least one projectile per salvo. The difficulty is, despite having the best fire control hardware, you can’t be 100% certain that the target’s going to be precisely where you think it will be when your salvo arrives at that point; the target has some say in this equation too and can change course/speed to throw off your targeting. So… To cover as many permutations as possible, fire control aims to deliver at least one projectile into each of those cells, theoretically guaranteeing at least one hit per salvo. In practice it’s far more complicated than this, but that’s the broad strokes, at least in RL. The game however, isn’t remotely like this; RL ballistics never have to deal with deliberate nerfage. In game, it’s decreed what percentage of each salvo will strike the target, which then raises the problem, “what do we do with the other projectiles?” Based on observation, it’s clear that someone decided to “dump them all over here!”, a point invariably long (in range) and ever so slightly offset to one side or the other. The lateral offset differs between engagements but applies uniformly to all batteries sharing a common target for the duration of the engagement. There’s no dispersal based on differing angles from different firing platforms in formation, which leads to a potentially devastating weight of fire raining down on that point. Any other ship occupying that particular point in space is, unfortunately, going to suffer significant emotional events until the original target changes. The thing that threw me was your insistence that this is unique to very early era engagements; not so! Historically, “state of the art” ballistic fire control could guarantee a shot dispersal no greater than 350yds at ranges in excess of 30,000yds; given the explosive potency of naval projectiles, that fact gives me cold chills whenever I read it. However, in-game, correction of fall-of-shot is, frankly, atrocious at best, probably non-existent, an assumption easily verified by witnessing salvo after salvo ending long and off to one side slightly. While I can stomach such inaccuracy in an era where fire control is a “forthcoming attraction”, by the time you’ve ground out the tech and paid the price in cost and weight to fit the tech to state-of-the-art capitol ships, it’s infuriating to see that the fire control scripting hasn’t been modified at all to factor for the improvements in accuracy.

I've seen it all now... Game Date April 1894, US... at war with Germany... Question... How do 350 ton TB's carry enough fuel to make an Atlantic crossing and still have fuel to zip around like bees with their butts on fire? Situation... Germany tries to conquer Maine. Maine has an army greater than 25k; German invading force is a single solitary TB, yet that T.B. is logged as having a tonage of 24k... Combined total of all German forces in the Atlantic don't come to half that amount, much less have that localised for conquest. Chance to succeed is never greater than 5%. Just to make sure, I've a fleet stationed just off Portland. Fleet's presence has negligable effect on required tonage. Conquest succeeds. Maine's German army strength now logged at 25,123... Question... how did they get there given the absence of supporting naval forces? I immediately launch an attempt to recapture; required tonage now 161k+ Evidently these German chappies have some new fangled engines that enable tiny hulls to carry in excess of 100,000 troops... I'm guessing they use hydrogen for fuel... So much for grabbing a quiet smoke on the fan-tail.... I's strongly recommend whoever wrote this particular piece of game code be screened for illegal substances cos this is just plain batchit crazy

Lord knows there's precious few occasions when I stand up for the dev's, but having read this thread top to bottom and had a damned good think about it, I can honestly say that in all of my logged 4400 hours grinding through this mess, I've never seen what you guys are complaining about. You expect high accuracy with basically Nelsonian era fire control? Seriously? Firstly, in the era you're talking about, every gun is under local control with precicely zero tech available to accurately determine, much less accurately predict target range, target speed, target bearing, target heading, your own ships speed, your own ships heading, your own ships' pitch, your own ships' roll, your own ships' rate of turn and a gazillion other factors involved in figuring the art of naval ballistics. There's precicely zero tech available other than years of hard won experience in each gun captain, and while they're doing their level best, they're not exactly accurate. Bear in mind that ships guns are high (for the era) velocity rifles; the trajectory for the shell, especially at short range is going to be a rather flat parabola. So it stands to reason that anything intersecting that trajectory has a reasonably high chance of collecting damage. Footnote... To the O.P. I trust your recovery goes well...

Came across a "feature" regarding Minors during the tail end of my last campaign. Minors allied to Majors, fair enough, that makes sense. Finally being able to swat them when they decide to get proactive is... welcome... Should have been a no brainer to include from the outset, but... better late than never... However... Non-allied Minor decides to attack one of my provinces at a time when I wasn't actively fighting anybody... and there's nothing I can do about it. Reinforcing the province under attack by docking a fleet there had zero effect on army size within the province. Trying to blockade the only port where the attack originated had similarly, zero effect, and of course, I can't attack either the attacking province nor its Capitol state (Romania) because they're not allied to anyone, much less another of the Majors.

Historically there's two, possibly three schools of thought on this... First, Jacklie Fisher's Battle Cruiser plan, where armour is sacrificed in favour of speed... See Jutland for how well that worked... Second and third are sorta kinda related;- most BB's were designed to have an armour plan that was "proof against their own guns at battle ranges". This invariably leads to asking, what exactly is battle range? That... depends on how you picture the ship fighting... Stand off at long range and snipe (circa Iowa class) or to get in close and maul the target. The problem with the mauling concept is it's impossible to armour any vessel to the point that it's invulnerable to everything, so... you need to make educated guesses re which potential threats the class is most likely to meet, and design accordingly. The primary thing to bear in mind; it's impossible to protect any vessel against stupidity... (see USS South Dakota at Savo Island).

Become a vertically challenged concieted biggot with a fetish for dancing?? **le violent shudder**