Feedback by an enthusiastic beta tester

[Stormsword]

So far, I'm enjoying the game a lot - despite the inevitable beta-testing jank, I do feel that it has a huge amount of potential, and the gameplay can be addictive as anything for my hyperfixating self. I do, however, have a couple of suggestions. I'll rank them in order from most pressing to least pressing.

Post-1920 Light cruiser and destroyer towers
I love the ship design for this game so far. Different nations have distinct style of construction that inform gameplay significantly, and generate unique aesthetics across the fleet. It's one of the best part of the game, in my opinion. Ignore this comment when it comes to light cruisers and destroyers. Barring a handful of nations, none of which are yet implemented in the campaign, every damn light cruiser gets the same set of towers. It's more than an aesthetic difference - the shape, size, and attachment points of a ship's towers are really important for defining what you can feasibly fit onto it. When you have the same sets of towers, you end up making the same light cruisers, spread across every nation. Destroyers run into much the same problem, though it's admittedly a little better because of differences in hull shapes. This, currently, is probably the biggest issue for gameplay that I experience regularly - light cruisers are probably the most interesting variable part of the OOB, and they'd be a lot more fun both in the campaign and in custom battles with more variability at the fingertips of the player.

AI designs are still ridiculous
A large part of the enjoyment this game offers is through immersion, and it's admirable how well it can pull that off when things go right. However, there is nothing that can crash that immersion quite as efficiently as scrolling over the horizon and seeing the Frankenstein's monsters the AI pulls out of the hat. Performance-wise, they're pretty variable - some AI ships can be pretty lethal, while others, like an Austria-Hungarian BC armed with 9.1" guns I recently ran into, are about as dangerous as a wet piece of cardboard. Taken as overall, though, I think making campaign designs AI-only is a disservice. The solution I'd suggest would be to create a Steam-enabled resource in which players could submit more balanced ship designs, which could then be reviewed a bit and composed into folders from which the AI could draw to put interesting designs on the playing field to challenge the player more thoroughly. It could possibly also be organised into subsets for each kind of ships - ~20" maximum BBs, ~18" super battleships, more balanced ~16" designs for battleships, ~11" supercruisers, ~9" large cruisers, and ~8" heavy cruisers for heavy cruisers, as an example, to provide a bit of structure, and variability for how the AI responds. I wouldn't want to have the AI replaced, mind you - this would just be an option you can choose instead of the AI, which, I imagine, will become progressively better at building balanced ships as development continues. However, I don't know much of the coding for the game, so this might not be possible - just a suggestion, really.

Torpedo spam isn't just a problem, it's a nightmare
On the topic of AI building, a persistent issue I've run into with the AI is that everything up to 20k tonne super cruisers arrives with half their weight made up of torpedos. While it does make some sense to have specific styles be torpedo-heavy (the IJN particularly was famous for that), having every damn sub-capital flood the battlefield with 20-track torpedo broadsides can be incredibly annoying. It often makes the ships themselves very weak otherwise - a destroyer with a single 4" gun and 20 torpedos can only really do one thing well.

Transports get away scot free
In a convoy escort battle, sinking the escorts means the battle ends with the transports getting away, meaning you either need to ignore the escorts entirely and send a 40kn monstrosity to go grab the convoy, or string along a half-dead cruiser until you can get the convoy dead. Killing the escorts should mean you automatically kill the transports - either that, or don't end the battle and give me the satisfaction of massacring the poor, defenceless transports. Maybe I'm a bad person.

Fore-aft balancing can be a pain 
Now, this one isn't quite as pressing for gameplay, but it's something that can sometimes irritate me when creating a ship. It's not terribly difficult to balance a ship down to <1% fore or aft offset. However, getting it down to 0 is genuinely painful. I'd propose the option to (heh) offset this by adding ballast on the fore or aft, possibly with a minor weight and/or pitch penalty. This isn't super pressing though - maybe it's just a skill issue on my part.

The system of parts clicking onto points on the hull poses an aneurysm risk 
The number of times I've sat and had my eyes nearly pop out of my head with irritation because a barbette or secondary tower clicks onto the hull a metre or two away from where I want it has probably had serious health repercussions for me by this point. I don't necessarily want to change the system entirely, because it's very useful, but a bit more granularity in where one can place the parts onto the hull would do wonders for my mental and physical health - forgiving systems save lives.

The campaign map system is, err, hmmm
This one's very low on the priority list because the current campaign system is clearly a beta version intended to allow players to get a small amount of campaigning to spice up gameplay, not to get a final system. However, it's pretty jank as is - there's little ability to duplicate actual strategy beyond putting fleets in a general area and hoping they do the job you want them to. My ideal system would be to get it to something like Rule the Waves 2, where you continuously control the locations and actions of various forces, but that's perhaps not achievable - a more arcadey system would still be great fun, but please, a little more actual campaigning. Also, in the far future, being able to do stuff like bombarding ports would be a welcome addition.

On a general note though, this game is incredibly promising, and I'm going to follow it very closely - hopefully by playing it as much as possible. Keep up the good work!

Edited September 8, 2022 by Stormsword