Increasing Starting Campaign Funds

[PalaiologosTheGreat]

How do I increase starting campaign funds? It's not fun fighting 70 ships with your 8 ships lmao

 

Yes, I win on legendary difficulty, but I wanna see huge battles, I don't want to see my 4 BBs and 4 DDs destroy 10 CAs, 5 BBs and 15 CLs in one battle and then have the AI surrender the next turn 

 

[william1993]

I wish I knew. You can't ever build enough ships with a create your own fleet

[Mandric]

There are easy guides on youtube that show you how to edit your game save, its surprisingly simple.

[william1993]

2 hours ago, Mandric said:

There are easy guides on youtube that show you how to edit your game save, its surprisingly simple.

not talking about hte save- talking about the naval budget at the beginning of teh campaign- to increase it so we can build more ships

[UnleashtheKraken]

42 minutes ago, william1993 said:

not talking about hte save- talking about the naval budget at the beginning of teh campaign- to increase it so we can build more ships

Right now, without editing save, there's no way to adjust campaign funds.

[Traslo]

I think being able to customise the campaign more in general would be great. You can save-edit but it's kind of a big mess to navigate.

Would be nice to customise our own stats, AI's stats, e.g. budget base level, how fast tech goes for player and AI (I'd love to double the research speeds via a slider or something so we all progress faster). Perhaps custom campaign options could be added in the future.

[PalaiologosTheGreat]

On 5/23/2022 at 4:10 PM, Mandric said:

There are easy guides on youtube that show you how to edit your game save, its surprisingly simple.

This applies to starting campaign stuff? 

[Gregg]

Yep, you do start out with funds to build only a few ships.

I just started a 1920 campaign as Germany, and only had the money to build 4 really good BC's, 2 really good CA's and 4 really good DD's.

First turn (January 1920) I started building more quick to build ships;  6 CL's, 2 CA's and 12 DD's.

Also during the first turn, I fought two big battles with the English; and sank a total of 4 BB's, 3 CA's 5 CL's and 4 DD's, without the loss of a single ship. Funny thing about the first battle, all but one ship was French, but the defeat was chocked up against the English. I've seen this happen many times in the past. (See the attached battle results)

Ended up at the start of the second turn with only 1 BC, 1 CA and 3 DD's operational. Currently fighting a group of English ships; 1 CA, 1 CL and 1 DD with my BC and 2 DD's. Should sink all three of them at medium range with the BC. Then there is a Convoy battle to follow with my CA and remaining DD against a English CL and 2 DD's.

It sure would be nice to have the starting funds to build a few more ships. 50% of the English tonnage would be a lot more fair.

[Candle_86]

seems they broke it with 1.06, can't read the json file's anymore, its encrypted now, not sure why but i guess back to figuring out how to make cheat engine work with it

Edited May 28, 2022 by Candle_86

[Dirlinger]

I think this game would profit, sometimes in the future, adding options in the options menu, for customizing your own game, like starting funds etc...

This was done wonderfully done in a indy game Gear City. Obviously, the dev (only one guy) went really deep into it but it gives general idea:

 

Edited May 29, 2022 by Dirlinger

[Candle_86]

Sure it would, but they've removed 90% of the fun of this game, and turned into an overly boring slog. You can no longer fix their mistakes like giving the correct 1890 technology that actually existed, you can't build even close to realistic ships because of this as well as if you do your penalized because you don't get enough starting funds. Now they've turned into a method of you play it our way or not at all, I mean I guess they already got my money, but if they don't reverse this change they won't get anymore of money, and I'll remove my recommendation for any of my friends to try this out, and I'm waiting to see seath17 mention this change, the weird stuff he does on youtube likely grabbed at least a quarter of the audience, and if he tells folks not to buy it anymore, there goes new players. I'll wait to see if nick says this is only temporary, but if he says this is the new normal even when out of early release, well I'll hide this game from my library, leave the discord, and remove this forum from my favorites. Yea they got my money, based on the fact that 1.01 was fun when I watched Stealth17 play it, and if this change is permanent i will regret the $34 I spent on this game.

Edited May 29, 2022 by Candle_86

[SpecTRe_X]

You should still be able to change your funds, prestige, etc using CheatEngine or various trainers around the web. Unfortunately this doesn't solve the start tech or similar issues.

[Werwaz]

I think the custom ship budgeting problem mostly comes from the fact that your starting budget is compiled from the previous 5 years before the campaign starts, and your peacetime budget is quit a bit smaller than your wartime budget. However, I think I have found an interesting, but not completely viable workaround to this issue.

Basically, you let the AI auto-design your fleet in the beginning, then rebuild their ships to be better during the peace before the inevitable wars break out.

For example, in my latest UK 1920 playthrough, I let the AI design my fleet, and I got crap but rebuildable BB and BC designs, only good for scrap metal CA design, and decent CL and DD designs. More importantly however, the AI built a great many hulls, totaling to about 10X more in money than I could otherwise build from the custom option. 

On the first month of the campaign, I took the old BB  design, a 47k ton ship with 4x2 short 14 inch guns, secondary spam on the deck, bad armor scheme, and outdated rangefinders, and rebuilt it with a 3X3 layout of max length 14 inch guns, a well organized and uniform secondary battery, excellent armor / protection / damage control, and cutting edge rangefinders. I designed a similar rebuild for the BCs, used the CAs as cannon fodder until they could be replaced with better designs, and kept the CLs and DDs. The rebuilds took about 16 months, and cost significantly less than building a ship from scratch, so much so that I could refit more than half of the BBs and BCs at once on the measly peacetime budget, whist still having max transport and research expenditures.

The wars usually start about 1-2 years into the campaign, which should give one just enough of time to complete their rebuilds, or if the wars come a bit early, the rebuilds will be close enough to completion that the remaining stopgap ships can hold the line until the rebuilds are recommissioned.

Once all of the rebuilds are brought online, one would play the campaign as normal, putting AI abominations at the bottom of the sea where they belong. 

In my above 1920 UK campaign, I was able to defeat Germany in about 6 months once all 11 of my rebuilt capital ships were online, and the CAs were replaced with a better class.

TL,DR: its a lot easier if you rebuild the AI starter ships and have a lot more good enough ships than creating a few superb ships from scratch. 

It ain't a perfect fix, but it does create a bit of a challenge in trying to make something decent out of the clown cars the AI gives you. 

[Skeksis]

On 5/30/2022 at 12:22 AM, Dirlinger said:

I think this game would profit, sometimes in the future, adding options in the options menu, for customizing your own game, like starting funds etc...

This was done wonderfully done in a indy game Gear City. Obviously, the dev (only one guy) went really deep into it but it gives general idea:

 

We need this +1.

I’m disappointed we can’t edit the save files too but clearly the alternative is more ability to setup the campaign.

The biggest editing factors are:

• Campaign Funds.
• Shipyard starting size.

We can start with these. Sometimes I edit the growth factor too but this is not that important. But I think these values should be as bonuses which are added after initializing the campaign.

Edited June 1, 2022 by Skeksis

[havaduck]

@Werwaz has a interesting idea. I thought of something similar, after my try where I let the AI design my fleet and it had spent vastly more than I had ever available in terms of funds. The breakdown of that is in clown car thread.

 

Tbh so far funds havent really been a porblem. It looks bad just into to campaign, but within a year or so, everyone including me is rolling around in cash and designs I deemd to expensive and not worth it are no "pfft we got so much cash, why not?".

I would so much wish the sliders for research would allow me to spend more so I can get research done faster.

[Spitfire_97]

Considering how much effort it would take to add an option to the campaign start screen to do this, I find it really disappointing that they instead chose to take away player freedom. Just add another option beneath Difficulty, that adds a multiplier to starting funds. Literally nothing else has to change. Simple, easy fix, huge quality of life improvement for the players, but nope, instead they chose to encrypt the save files 🤦‍♂️

[Werwaz]

On 6/2/2022 at 11:53 AM, Spitfire_97 said:

Considering how much effort it would take to add an option to the campaign start screen to do this, I find it really disappointing that they instead chose to take away player freedom. Just add another option beneath Difficulty, that adds a multiplier to starting funds. Literally nothing else has to change. Simple, easy fix, huge quality of life improvement for the players, but nope, instead they chose to encrypt the save files 🤦‍♂️

You do gotta remember they were bought by Stillfront (Basically Swedish EA) of all companies a year back. 

https://www.stillfront.com/en/stillfronts-strategy-for-growth/

Edited June 5, 2022 by Werwaz

[Candle_86]

20 hours ago, Werwaz said:

You do gotta remember they were bought by Stillfront (Basically Swedish EA) of all companies a year back. 

https://www.stillfront.com/en/stillfronts-strategy-for-growth/

seems to me they arn't like EA at all, EA focuses on console and PC with a handful of mobile titles, this company seems to think mobile is a good bussiness model. I've heard of some of there games, and I've heard how garbage they are.

Edited June 6, 2022 by Candle_86