bug report An issue regarding the accuracy of fire when an interloping ship intersects the ideal trajectory of a shell fired at a further ship.

[Captain Meow]

@Nick Thomadis

The issue still exists.

[UnleashtheKraken]

On 2/25/2022 at 10:44 AM, Captain Meow said:

@Nick Thomadis

The issue still exists.

Yes, confirmed.  I'm playing an 1890's campaign as Italy.  In the one battle I've had (my game has stopped giving me battles at all) I had my 2 battleships lobbing fire into a group of 7 CA.  I intentionally aimed at cruisers to the rear, when nearer ships would cross the line of fire, and generated the out of norm hit percentages (over 60% hits when the accuracy on the ship card said 7%).  That said, the new accuracy/precision mechanics seemed to have some effect.  The impact pattern looked more like actual naval gunnery by trained crew, so kudos there.

[UnleashtheKraken]

Been a couple months, no response, bump to try for dev awareness, again.  Still happening as of 1.05 public release.

Also once more, good wishes to all the team with the current tragedy ongoing.  Slava Ukraine.  F*** VP. 

Once more asking for forum mod to move this to the appropriate forum, or tell me how I can do it.  Thanks in advance.

Edited April 18, 2022 by UnleashtheKraken

[UnleashtheKraken]

BUMP.

 

[Captain Meow]

Version 1.3.9.9, still there...

[UnleashtheKraken]

As far as I know, it's not listed as a fix for 1.4 either.  There are great things about UA:D, and there are things that make me despair.  I want to open a port on the map, and build ships from there, instead of build ship, go to fleet list, assign port from a scrolling, small list.  Especially destroyers, I actually have trouble sometimes, finding the right port.  That's just one example.  I think the game desperately needs QoL passes.  I think they'd be well worth it, and this bug with intercessing accuracy actively affects how I handle ship maneuvers.  I daren't cross ships close by, or the AI will likely deeply damage, or sink, the one they're not even aiming at.

[Tindahbawx]

15 hours ago, UnleashtheKraken said:

 Especially destroyers, I actually have trouble sometimes, finding the right port. 

I hate this also with a passion, mostly because the port list doesnt seem to be any particular order that I can discern, nor can you apply any form of sorting to it. Hell even alphabetical by port name would help a lot. I know that the ports are clumped together in their geographical areas (mostly...sort of) but there doesnt seem to be any sense applied to how those geographical areas are sorted! It gets maddening when you have a large amount of ports.

 

Edited September 18, 2023 by Tindahbawx

[Captain Meow]

Just a post about having encountered this issue again....

[Captain Meow]

So, as the issue keeps being there as a natural outcome of how the shooting is realized in the game, here how it affects the play:

I use only "ahead" for formations. If I use "abreast" then it's likely some my ship will intersect the red aim line of the enemy & will take all the damage onto itself, regardless of how much armor it has or how inaccurate the enemy is.

I don't use "screen" order or I might lose that ship in seconds if it intersects enemy's aim line.

I try to aim only on closest enemy & especially on ship which was about to intersect the aim line - to be fair.

 

I believe the issue is because every ship has 100% penetration of itself by default & when you select to shoot at "that one" ship - physically the hits only apply for that ship with decreased penetration chance & decreased accuracy THAT ship assigns to your guns. Yet between your ship & that ship ALL shots physically travel along the red aim line, while what is seen is pure decorative visuals.  So when a different enemy ship intersects that line, it receives all physical shots with accuracy 100% & penetration 100% too (because this ship doesn't assign which accuracy/penetration your guns should have for it).

So a solution should be either to stop shooting the aimed ship if someone's intersecting the red aim line - not sure how if for your guns only a ship you aim at exists.

Or automatically switch to aim at closest ship if such gets near the aim line between your ship & aimed ship.

Edited September 24, 2023 by Captain Meow

[Captain Meow]

November 2024 so far. Confirming the issue does STILL exist & STILL is unfixed!

Custom battle, 1895 tech, enemy lost a full-health armored cruiser in a couple of seconds just cause it itersected the red aim line between my & enemy's BB.

@Nick Thomadis

Edited November 8, 2024 by Captain Meow

[justMike247]

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...

[TheFurTrapper]

Quote

You expect high accuracy with basically Nelsonian era fire control? Seriously?

Nobody is saying that. The issues is that we are observing high accuracy against untargeted nearby ships.

Once you see it happen once, you'll see it again and again. Try reproducing this in a custom battle:

• Set up a battle with 1890-1900 tech, two of your CLs vs one enemy CL.
  • Pick a hull that can take some armor and won't get nuked down in seconds.
  • The guns on the enemy ship don't matter too much, but many smaller guns make this more noticeable.
• Start fighting. When contact is joined, break your formation apart. Set up one CL approx. 500m behind the other, so that the enemy ship and both your ships lie on a single line. Manipulate speed and course to maintain this relationship. Don't worry about firing back.
• The enemy CL should target the closer ship (makes sense) and probably won't have a very good solution (1-5% initially).
• Observe as the further ship gets absolutely peppered with the missed shots, while the closer ship takes hits at a much lower rate.

A more common un-scripted case is when the enemy has two lines of ships moving in parallel. If one ship drops out of line due to damage and comes near the other line, the ships not getting shot at will get obliterated.

I've seen DDs get swatted at 20km by the opening battleship salvo simply for being in-line with the intended target. You never see this happen if they are displaced in azimuth, only range (despite errors in both ostensibly affecting the overall accuracy of the gun).  I feel like someone misplaced a decimal point somewhere when implementing the 'incidental hit' code...

Edited November 9, 2024 by TheFurTrapper

[justMike247]

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.   

[Северная]

On 11/9/2024 at 3:33 PM, TheFurTrapper said:

Nobody is saying that. The issues is that we are observing high accuracy against untargeted nearby ships.

Once you see it happen once, you'll see it again and again. Try reproducing this in a custom battle:

• Set up a battle with 1890-1900 tech, two of your CLs vs one enemy CL.
  • Pick a hull that can take some armor and won't get nuked down in seconds.
  • The guns on the enemy ship don't matter too much, but many smaller guns make this more noticeable.
• Start fighting. When contact is joined, break your formation apart. Set up one CL approx. 500m behind the other, so that the enemy ship and both your ships lie on a single line. Manipulate speed and course to maintain this relationship. Don't worry about firing back.
• The enemy CL should target the closer ship (makes sense) and probably won't have a very good solution (1-5% initially).
• Observe as the further ship gets absolutely peppered with the missed shots, while the closer ship takes hits at a much lower rate.

A more common un-scripted case is when the enemy has two lines of ships moving in parallel. If one ship drops out of line due to damage and comes near the other line, the ships not getting shot at will get obliterated.

I've seen DDs get swatted at 20km by the opening battleship salvo simply for being in-line with the intended target. You never see this happen if they are displaced in azimuth, only range (despite errors in both ostensibly affecting the overall accuracy of the gun).  I feel like someone misplaced a decimal point somewhere when implementing the 'incidental hit' code...

Yeah I see this happen all the time especially on opening salvos it is very noticeable, like a DD getting nuked.  Or it often happens with TR, you target one (or an unrelated warship) and other TR get way more accurate fire that you aren’t even targeting.

[Captain Meow]

Let's say, 1890 tech, your CL & enemy CL have plenty of low caliber (51mm & 76mm) guns that fire at each other non stop, the distance between ships, for example, is 2km (or within the guns' reach). Then an armored enemy BB gets between them, very slowly crossing the red aim line from bow tip to stern tip. What would happen? EVERY gun of your CA that fires during the BB transit will get a 100% penetration/accuracy & the BB will loose a lot of HP in no time.

[justMike247]

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.

[l0rDn0o8sKiLlZ]

I have not encountered this "bug" consistently enough to really verify it per se, but I know what they are speaking of.

I will attempt to illustrate as best I can:

Ship A, of our fleet, fires at Ship B of the enemy fleet. For the sake of clarity and contrast, we will assume in this example that Ship A has a 0% chance to hit Ship B.

Now enter Ship C. It is immaterial with regards to this "bug" whether Ship C is ours or the enemy's ship.

Ship C, having entered the engagement, finds itself between Ship A and Ship B.

The fire from Ship A will, with unerring accuracy, score nothing but direct hits on Ship C in this case. Also, Ship A's fire will not respect the armor of Ship C, dealing full damage, penetrating shots with every hit scored regardless of range, regardless of shell type, regardless of caliber. Ship A's fire will also not respect Ship C's angle, with none of these "bugged" shots ever managing to ricochet.

This is the bug as I have observed it as late as the final 1.5 patch.

I have thus far refused to update to 1.6, and have resolved to try it whenever 1.7 rolls around.

Sincerely Yours, Admiral SONAR

[Captain Meow]

And how would you like this, related to this same issue of course:

Custom Battle, 1895 tech, my BB vs 1BB, 2CL, 2TB. Starting distance is 10km between both sides.  The moment my BB spotted enemy BB far on the horizon, it made a random shot at enemy with a bow twin 302mm gun - in the distance I saw it showed I just made 4.1k damage!!!  That with a first shot!!! I went to see the enemy BB as it was the only visible spotted ship, but it was 100% intact, in report I saw I actually hit a TORPEDO BOAT which wasn't even spotted & it's unknown at which distance from my ship it was, but such case can only happen with the issue well discribed, discussed & being ignored in this thread.  The unlucky TB simply was crossing the red aim line & it was at different distance from the enemy BB.  Of course those 2 shells would miss this spotted enemy BB & would likely fly over & hit water far behind it, but those TWO shells flew right into a TB which was somewhere between both BBs.

The accuracy of a first shot at the first spotted ship would be like around 1% before the guns would aim a bit better, yet 4.1k damage!  @Nick Thomadis

 

Edited November 15, 2024 by Captain Meow

[DougToss]

Incredible 

[Северная]

On 11/15/2024 at 3:58 PM, Captain Meow said:

And how would you like this, related to this same issue of course:

Custom Battle, 1895 tech, my BB vs 1BB, 2CL, 2TB. Starting distance is 10km between both sides.  The moment my BB spotted enemy BB far on the horizon, it made a random shot at enemy with a bow twin 302mm gun - in the distance I saw it showed I just made 4.1k damage!!!  That with a first shot!!! I went to see the enemy BB as it was the only visible spotted ship, but it was 100% intact, in report I saw I actually hit a TORPEDO BOAT which wasn't even spotted & it's unknown at which distance from my ship it was, but such case can only happen with the issue well discribed, discussed & being ignored in this thread.  The unlucky TB simply was crossing the red aim line & it was at different distance from the enemy BB.  Of course those 2 shells would miss this spotted enemy BB & would likely fly over & hit water far behind it, but those TWO shells flew right into a TB which was somewhere between both BBs.

The accuracy of a first shot at the first spotted ship would be like around 1% before the guns would aim a bit better, yet 4.1k damage!  @Nick Thomadis

 

Yes this is what I described in my post.  You often get these first shot nukes at unseen, escorting DD or TB.  That’s just because they were crossing the red line.

[UnleashtheKraken]

On 11/7/2024 at 10:43 PM, justMike247 said:

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...

Firstly, recovery has been rough but progressing.  I can mostly walk again.  On the other hand, the world sucks worse and worse.  So, meh.

I took a break from the game, and this thread.   The last week I've been back to playing.  The bug still exists.  I tried asking for help, pleading, yelling.  nothing works.  At this point...nevermind.

As to the bug - it has nothing to do with fire control, close grouping, nor any other behavior.  It's all to do with game math logic, as best I can determine. 

Firstly, all shots are pre calculated as 'hit/miss' the moment they are fired, not at the end of their trajectory.  At very long ranges (20+ km), you can even see shots 'bend' in the air if it's a precalc hit against a turning, maneuvering target.  The missed shots are at that point visual noise - if the game has calculated the shot is a miss, it will not hit another ship.  There IS a chance for a secondary target to be hit by one of these other shells, but again, that is precalced in advance, if the secondary target is within the potential 'footprint' of the guns firing.

The bug occurs as follows:  Shooter (A) fires at target (B).  Interloper (C) intersects the ideal trajectory of the shell from gun barrel of A to target B.  When C intersects that trajectory, accuracy of fire becomes 100% for every shot that is intercepted in trajectory (not just firing line, picture the arc of a shot through the air), but is still affected by armor, pen chance, etc.

I'm glad of the support.  I do hope this gets picked up by the devs and fixed.  It's time and past.  Getting attention to this bug has become my millstone, and my neck is tired.  😕

Edit:  Drinking game, take a shot every time I use 'firstly'.  

More important edit:  This firing line bug also affects 'interlopers' that are AFTER the target, but still on the firing line, and at that point the arc of falling ideal shot no longer matters.  So if A shoots at B, and C is further away but on the firing line from A to B, it will be hit, and at longer ranges.  So if shooting at targets in line formation, crossing the T can become lethal beyond the tactics- shoot a ship in mid-formation, rather than the front, to have shots land both up the line and down, with near 100% accuracy.

Edited December 20, 2024 by UnleashtheKraken

[Северная]

I don’t even think they would know how to fix this kind of bug to be honest.

[Captain Meow]

On 12/20/2024 at 9:15 AM, UnleashtheKraken said:

At very long ranges (20+ km), you can even see shots 'bend' in the air if it's a precalc hit against a turning, maneuvering target. 

 

Homing projectiles??? Good gracious!

 

Basically saying, each ship has by default 100% penetration & if it's not a target but simply crossing the red aim line it will be penetrated by 100%. 

Edited December 22, 2024 by Captain Meow

[UnleashtheKraken]

5 hours ago, Captain Meow said:

 

Homing projectiles??? Good gracious!

 

Basically saying, each ship has by default 100% penetration & if it's not a target but simply crossing the red aim line it will be penetrated by 100%. 

So as far as I can tell, armor pen calculation is done at the moment of impact.  So a ship maneuvering to present stronger 'angles' can help.  But maneuvering won't help chance to be hit in the first place if the shot is already a calculated hit.

[Captain Meow]

I just accidentally read the game had its final update, if the issue still exists... well, then lol whatever!  

Edited 18 hours ago by Captain Meow