Not working as intended: "Splashing disabling main battery"

[neph]

  Hi @Nick Thomadis& other devs. A while ago, you mentioned that the perceived bug we have been complaining about regarding secondary batteries stopping main guns from firing is not actually a bug, and is working as intended. I was intrigued, as I had never tried using Aggressive mode, so I wanted to test it out. On my first test, I can confirm that--at least in beta 1.09--it very much does seem like either a nasty bug or that gun accuracy information is being relayed very poorly to the player. Let me show you!

(I hope that this bug isn't present in 1.10 due to the changes to the gun accuracy model, but just in case, I want to confirm that is is indeed happening as we report).

10 hours ago, Nick Thomadis said:

This is something that was not consistent and not happening as you said, although other players reported it likewise. If secondaries created a lot of splashes then main guns accuracy could become so low and the ship would prefer to automatically save ammo, unless you put guns in aggressive mode. Anyways, you can test it in the beta if this bug happens, and we can look to it, if it is a bug.

I started by making a very basic heavy cruiser design and fighting some light cruisers. I did nothing special, except that I noticed that it seemed to be worse with many rapidly firing barrels, so I put a long of single 2" guns with shortened barrels & autoloaders. To be clear--this is not required for this bug to occur! I have definitely seen it show up in ships only with a long barrel 4" secondary battery. Nevertheless, I wanted to make sure I found the bug quickly.

 

And I did. On my first attempt to recreated the bug, it rapidly appeared. Here, my main battery has stopped firing regularly. It shows 100% accuracy. Indeed, it is still firing, but very erratically. When it does fire, it hits very reliable, so it doesn't seem that low accuracy is the reason it isn't shooting.

Later, my main battery became somewhat more reliable, but my 5" battery stopped firing. Again, it still shows a very very high accuracy & when it does sporadically fire, it hits consistently.

And here they have both stopped firing, still with very high accuracy displayed to the player.

Per Nick's suggestion of a fix, I put the ship onto Aggressive firing mode. No change.

You can see from the Report panel that it has been a very long time since I firing anything. Still, the 8.8" and 5" batteries very erratically fire, and when they do, they hit consistently. You can see from the Shoot Info panel that it's actually saying that my gun splashes are very very slightly helping my accuracy! Again, either this is a bug, or information is being communicated so poorly to the player that it is impossible to tell.

You can see that immediately after I turn my secondary battery off, my main battery opens up & I rapidly score many hits (check Report panel).

This bug is very frustrating! It means there is no reason to equip your ships with a secondary battery, because as soon as it comes into range, you have to turn it off lest your main guns do not fire.

 

Edited December 20, 2022 by neph

[neph]

If possible, please fix this bug before shipping version 1.10 tomorrow. We will happily wait for the new beta, if it only goes away. Hopefully, the new gun accuracy model has fixed it already!

[Sandermatt]

I can confirm that at least in 1.09 the Main guns not firing had very high hit chances displayed.

[_Marlow]

Bug or feature, I probably find this issue to be the my largest frustration with the current version of the game. It would be fantastic if this could be looked at. I hate leaving casemates and other obvious emplacements empty, but then having to choose between secondary or main guns is disappointing. 

Also, I've also noticed that AI ships don't seem to suffer from the same effect.

If part or all of this is intentional, a couple ideas I feel could help are:

1. Reduce or eliminate this effect at very close range: Most of the time this is critical, it's when ships end up right next to each other. If this is to represent splashes interfering with aim, once an enemy ship closes within a couple hundred meters I feel like they aren't going to hold back and wait to check for a splash to adjust aim, it would be a "fire everything" moment.
2. Let us disable specific guns: If we could disable a particular type of gun to mitigate the worst of the conflict that would help a lot! This would be particularly useful on BBs and BCs. If I have a secondary battery that includes some larger (particularly 8 inch) guns and 2" guns, the 8" guns won't fire at all. Maybe this could work like the weapons in wargame or steel division, where clicking on the weapon on the status menu would disable it (in this case, clicking on the image of the gun in the lower right hand context window).

[neph]

23 hours ago, _Marlow said:

Bug or feature, I probably find this issue to be the my largest frustration with the current version of the game. It would be fantastic if this could be looked at. I hate leaving casemates and other obvious emplacements empty, but then having to choose between secondary or main guns is disappointing. 

Also, I've also noticed that AI ships don't seem to suffer from the same effect.

If part or all of this is intentional, a couple ideas I feel could help are:

1. Reduce or eliminate this effect at very close range: Most of the time this is critical, it's when ships end up right next to each other. If this is to represent splashes interfering with aim, once an enemy ship closes within a couple hundred meters I feel like they aren't going to hold back and wait to check for a splash to adjust aim, it would be a "fire everything" moment.
2. Let us disable specific guns: If we could disable a particular type of gun to mitigate the worst of the conflict that would help a lot! This would be particularly useful on BBs and BCs. If I have a secondary battery that includes some larger (particularly 8 inch) guns and 2" guns, the 8" guns won't fire at all. Maybe this could work like the weapons in wargame or steel division, where clicking on the weapon on the status menu would disable it (in this case, clicking on the image of the gun in the lower right hand context window).

I'm pretty sure AI also suffer from it, but since their designs are usually so imbalanced or their guns so large that they have nonexistent accuracy anyways it's harder to notice.