-=Beta v1.4 Planned for end of next week=-

[Nick Thomadis]

Hello everyone,

We hope you enjoyed or you are still having great summer holidays. We would like to share a quick glimpse for the next major update which is going to become available in early form at the end of next week. In a first summary, here is the planned content:

• Many new hulls and ship parts, mainly for cruisers of the interwar period but there will also be new hulls for other ship types and for the late tech era. 
• Fixes and improvements of the ship design system, allowing more flexibility especially on side barbettes.  Those fixes will also affect the auto-design which will become faster and even more effective, resulting in faster loading of campaign turns.
• We refactored and optimized the loading and saving processes of the campaign resulting in noticeable improvement of waiting time when switching from one state of the game to the  next. For example, the time to exit the refit design window can now be 10x times faster.
• We optimized battle map processes and now you will  have a much smoother fps during combat. The optimized processes include aiming which is now more consistent and dynamic, affecting the ship accuracy positively. 
• We improved the campaign AI in multiple aspects. The campaign AI will manage the economy more efficiently, and will send land armies in major offensives more logically, evaluating in more detail the strength of the enemy in the target provinces. The campaign AI will also manage the fuel state of its ships and will no longer send them in suicidal missions with low fuel, making them very weak in a potential combat.
• Ships costs have been rebalanced to evaluate more accurately the combat value of a ship. This change is very important as it affects campaign economy (which was further balanced) and the battle AI decisioning. A battleship will now cost significantly more than a destroyer, for example.
• The mission generation system of the campaign got further improvements and the port strike missions were improved to show the auto-resolved transport losses.
• The campaign can now be prolonged up to 1965.
• Custom battles can now be set to a date up to 1950.
• The Battle AI has been improved to keep more effective firing distances and keep its main formation closer to the enemy.
• Tooltips will no longer obstruct the interface as there is a short time delay before they are triggered. 
• We added a new setting which configures the armor quality in the gun penetration data. You will be able to set it from default 0% up to 200% in order to help you understand the applied penetration of your guns in the game.
• [*] Barbette types have a new stat that improves Flash fire protection.
• Various minor bug fixes that were reported.
• New Naval Academy missions.

The first beta will include all the above except not all the new hulls and missions. Thank you for reading!

The Game-Labs Team

[flaviohc16]

I love these new improvements.

I hope that the land war logic really improves, also for our nation, as we can't control the land war.

Also, the longer campaign is lovely and the armour scaling is a huge QOL improvement.

 

Can I ask for some tweaks here?

-Add 8x centerline guns, it just makes sense from a design perspective

-Make the engine start from the funnel, as it was in real life, instead of making the funnel being the middle of the compartment, this makes balancing the ships hard.

- I hope that the new economics doesn't disincentive war, as it is the case right now, where the best way to win is not play the game.

[o Barão]

28 minutes ago, flaviohc16 said:

Add 8x centerline guns, it just makes sense from a design perspective

You can have 8x centerline guns by placing the side turrets in the middle.

28 minutes ago, flaviohc16 said:

Make the engine start from the funnel, as it was in real life, instead of making the funnel being the middle of the compartment, this makes balancing the ships hard.

Not all ships designs followed that rule. Extreme examples you can find in the Japanese navy. Yamato, Tone, Mogami.

Edited August 31, 2023 by o Barão

[flaviohc16]

6 minutes ago, o Barão said:

You can have 8x centerline guns by placing the side turrets in the middle.

I know, i even had japan modernized Dreadnought with 10-11 main guns, but i becomes messy, especially with the aim  and recoil penalities, and the balance

6 minutes ago, o Barão said:

Not all ships designs followed that rule. Extreme examples you can find in the Japanese navy. Yamato, Tone, Mogami.

true, but the let us choose

[brothermunro]

Interesting, and most welcome to see all those performance improvements! A possibly cheeky question but is the team still planning/working to add multithreaded support? 😇

[Astor]

The changes/fixes/additions sound very nice. I hope that battle performance makes a nice bump upwards.

Also one thing I might want to ask, if we will ever be able to have different designs of same classes in custom battle?

We can't for example use Destroyer Leaders and smaller DD in the same battle. It's limited to 1x BB, 1x BC, 1x CA, 1x CL, 1x DD, 1x TB design.

It would be nice for example to field 3 different BB classes instead 3 ships of the same class.

If we would get that freedom in custom battles, it would allow for way more endless possibilities and scenarios to play.

I am also really thankfull that we can go to 1950 in year and later in campaign, a welcome change!

Edited August 31, 2023 by Astor

[Nick Thomadis]

Another additions became included in the list:
- New quad guns for all techs,  all calibers and all nations.

[Nick Thomadis]

5 hours ago, flaviohc16 said:

-Add 8x centerline guns, it just makes sense from a design perspective

Easy to add.

 

3 hours ago, brothermunro said:

Interesting, and most welcome to see all those performance improvements! A possibly cheeky question but is the team still planning/working to add multithreaded support? 😇

This is mostly a Unity optimization question, as the game is already supposed to work with multi-threading and it does, but would need a complete refactoring of the code, to make it work perfect, as it theoretically could.

[kineuhansen]

really hope minor nations is getting an upgrade like we could choose what minor nation we want an alliance or invade an enemy minor nation and if some minor nations could have thier own ship design like holland had and perhaps a way to influence a conquest battle ohh and let us have a war with minor nations with out any major

[Admiral Unterhosen]

I've been going past 1950 for a while now, but a legitimate method is good.  New hulls too!  Yay!!

[AdmER]

Great

Really hope you will look at the 1st years of the campaign, 1890 to 1910  new hulls and diversity between all nations.Almost every nation except France build on the same CL and CA hull and towers. France is the only unique nation to play at the begining of the campaign.

More precision on caliber research would be great, like in real life focusing on specific caliber to develop by nation.

Thanks!

[basedana]

These changes seem good, but I wish we had the ability to refit ships under repair, and also be able to build refitted designs. Another little detail would be the removal of smoke effects when a ship is equipped to burn oil instead of coal, since oil does not make the plumes of smoke coal normally makes due to inefficiency and ash. Also it would be nice to be able to tell your fleets to directly attack a port, because it is annoying how undefended ports go 7 turns uncontested until your fleet decides to do something.

 

Edited September 1, 2023 by basedana

[King_Tiger_II]

Is there any hull to make a Tillman Battleship? I know it is unlikely, but I can dream in bald eagle.

Edited September 1, 2023 by King_Tiger_II

[MRweng121]

China ship hull are bad..... we want to more way to DIY player country. such as research on different countries ship hulls.I think you have too many restrictions on players, even if there are punishments. I also want to develop a better hull. There is only one CA hull in China, and the compact BB hull is very difficult to use. In the later stage, all small guns were upgraded to a turret type, so the hit box became larger and cannot be more freely installed. Therefore, I would also hope to use the gun shield type again, which can give players some freedom to define their own game.You can set a switch that allows players to choose between hardcore or light gameplay. If hardcore is selected, it will impose stricter restrictions on the player's hull, artillery, and research direction. If light is selected, it will allow players more freedom to research various artillery and ship bodies, Choosing different types of artillery (cannon shields or turrets) now requires many players to modify their game save to allow them to use their desired designs. This is really bad, and you need to make some concessions. Enable different players to have fun.Not just masochistic players

[o Barão]

Since we are not going to have an infinite map scroll, I need to mention this issue.

Subs range does not work in the same way as ship. This is not a problem. The problem is the maximum range as show as circle perimeter does not take into account the possibility to "teleport" to the other side when the sub reaches the border. Now in stock game, subs have unrealistic high ranges, so most likely that the players will never notice this.

 

But in N.A.R. with limited subs range, it is impossible to cross the Pacific because of this limitation.

This screenshot is from an old game version, but I suspect that it was never fixed. If it was already, I apologize.

[German CL mk II guns]

Improvement of battle AI for large formations is much needed

[AdmER]

We also totally need a ship placement prior to battle. Most of our collision problems come with repositioning of ship at begining.

So a positioning screen before battle is a must!

[Urst]

Still waiting for a wraparound map.

[PalaiologosTheGreat]

Can we have an easier way for shared designs to be shared between years. Like go and say, 'Make this shared design between 1910-1915'? I don't wanna make the same ship 10 times in a row when building a roster for the AI 

[Kiknurazz91]

20 hours ago, Admiral Unterhosen said:

I've been going past 1950 for a while now, but a legitimate method is good.  New hulls too!  Yay!!

how?

[Admiral Unterhosen]

Discovered by accident that pressing 'Esc' when retirement window appears it will go away.  Game continues as normal.

No more pink slips! Time to sink more ships!

[aradragoon]

Any chance to address the U.S. super heavy cruiser hull? Specifically, the towers don't make sense. The towers are more like Atlanta, which causes 7in and above to not work correctly on the hulls. Doesn't make any sense for a "super heavy cruiser" hull.

[Zuikaku]

For the mental health sake please fix AI running away as soon as battle is started, without even bothering to make visual contact first. This is especially frustrating in Cl vs. Cl missions.

And fix now useless submarines. They can not sink anything since the 1.3 and new mission generation mechanics.

Edited September 2, 2023 by Zuikaku

[kineuhansen]

new modern british towers for bb 1930/1940 could use some huge visuel diffrence between them and for modern heavy cruiser 3 could use some more towers so it dont look like a small battleship

[casperwieik]

This update seems to be a very nice step in the right direction. The loading issues between turns and when leaving the refit-menu being solved are a godsend.

The only question I have regarding the future is this:

Is it possible to add mod-support via steam for the game? I do not know how long UA Dreadnoughts will stay in active development, but giving the playerbase themselves the tools needed to add or balance stuff would probably also make it easier on you guys' part since (hull) requests could be done by the playerbase themselves.