>>>v1.6 Feedback<<< (Latest version: 1.6.0.6 Optx6)

[MDHansen]

yes. AI runs away almost no matter what now. I could adjust this in params before (1.5 maybe), and just recently no matter what I do, it doesn't work.

If anything is on your priority list, please move it down, and put this in top. For the first time in 2400hrs I'm gonna put this game aside, and wait until this is fixed.

[Nick Thomadis]

Uploaded optimizedx4 build including:
- Auto-Design further optimizations.
- Further shell dispersion optimizations.
- Further ship movement optimizations.
- Rudder options became more distinct in their effect.
- Aiming became more persistent when hitting the enemy.
- More aggressive Division AI logic for Screen/Scout commands (passed the change from the current beta)
You need to restart Steam to get the update.

Note: The beta version of the game will be updated soon, most probably today.

[flaviohc16]

1 hour ago, Nick Thomadis said:

.

Note: The beta version of the game will be updated soon, most probably today.

Does the new beta have an "unpack" feature so that we can use mods again?

[Nick Thomadis]

1 hour ago, flaviohc16 said:

Does the new beta have an "unpack" feature so that we can use mods again?

We will offer choice to run campaign without the packed AI designs, so it will run as before for mods.

[flaviohc16]

49 minutes ago, Nick Thomadis said:

We will offer choice to run campaign without the packed AI designs, so it will run as before for mods.

How much will this impact performance, aka  slow down the turns?

I don't really care about how much time it takes to start the campaign,bu wait time between turns is important 

[Nick Thomadis]

Uploaded optimizedx5 build including:
- Fixed issue in Campaign forcing the AI to design ships too often, delaying the turns.
- Further optimizations for auto-design.
- Further improvement on how snapping works in the ship constructor, fixing previous problems causing difficulties to add guns on barbettes.
You need to restart Steam to get the update.

This optimized version should be good and stable enough until we finalize the beta, which will offer all the radical improvements in campaign loading times.

[Panzergraf]

I repeated the tests I did two weeks ago to see if the issue with very high resistance has been fixed, and it really hasn't.
At 193 resistance you still get -100% gun damage. True, this might be a rounding error as my ship still takes some damage in this case, but it's really minimal - single digit damage numbers scored by even full penetrations by 20" guns.

The issue has been somewhat improved since last time, with fewer hulls now being able to achieve the -100% gun damage modifiers, but it can still be done and I still think it's a problem that should be looked into.

(and yes, my game here is completely vanilla, no mods whatsoever)

I think this could be solved by either adjusting the resistance values on all hulls so that they have their stated resistance values when their displacement slider is in the middle rather than at minimum, which is currently the case (even then they have more resistance than they should have, but that might be because of techs?), and so the hull resistance can be increased or decreased from there by adjusting displacement up or down. This could be achieved by reducing all hull base resistance values by 15 to 20%

OR just have a hard cap of -80% or even -90% gun damage, and no matter how much you increase resistance from there. This would still give hulls with high base resistance an advantage, as they could reach that cap more easily without having to minmax components.

(prior to 1.6.0.5 I don't think you could get any better than a -70% gun damage modifier, or at least not a lot more)

[Северная]

Nick, I really wish you would revisit the calculations used for hull offset.  Most hulls in the game have egregious amounts of front weight offset in particular, but I have an example here of some of the nonsensical logic at work.  This is the German Battlecruiser III hull in 1915 in the ship designer in 1.6.0.7, not in campaign.  

Firstly, the ship in what appears to be a very logical layout with very logical balanced armor scheme - something you said you wanted to encourage as opposed to supposedly encouraging "unrealistic" armor schemes and ship layouts - has a really crazy 42% front weight offset with just using the available 5" and 3" casemate positions.

But what is really crazy, the indication that something is not really working as maybe you intended, is that if you remove JUST the first forward pair of 5" casemate guns in the bow, each gun and their ammo weighing a combined 38t (76t for the pair) on a ship with a displacement of 31,000t, the front weight offset goes from 42% all the way down to 32.7%!

Otherwise, I am very happy with the improvements in 1.6.0.7, but this system introduced in 1.6 is still one of the worst implemented new systems and I hope it gets addressed.

Thanks in advance,

Severnaya

[Fangoriously]

4 hours ago, Северная said:

Nick, I really wish you would revisit the calculations used for hull offset.  Most hulls in the game have egregious amounts of front weight offset in particular, but I have an example here of some of the nonsensical logic at work.  This is the German Battlecruiser III hull in 1915 in the ship designer in 1.6.0.7, not in campaign.  

Firstly, the ship in what appears to be a very logical layout with very logical balanced armor scheme - something you said you wanted to encourage as opposed to supposedly encouraging "unrealistic" armor schemes and ship layouts - has a really crazy 42% front weight offset with just using the available 5" and 3" casemate positions.

But what is really crazy, the indication that something is not really working as maybe you intended, is that if you remove JUST the first forward pair of 5" casemate guns in the bow, each gun and their ammo weighing a combined 38t (76t for the pair) on a ship with a displacement of 31,000t, the front weight offset goes from 42% all the way down to 32.7%!

Otherwise, I am very happy with the improvements in 1.6.0.7, but this system introduced in 1.6 is still one of the worst implemented new systems and I hope it gets addressed.

Thanks in advance,

Severnaya

swap the rear tower and funnel and it will be fine.

[Северная]

6 hours ago, Fangoriously said:

swap the rear tower and funnel and it will be fine.

That actually DOESN'T fix the underlying issue and even if it did, it is an absurd and undesirable band aid solution that is literally the exact opposite of making a realistic looking ship as Nick claims to want to do.  Why not just advocate for something good and obvious instead of advising me to do something very obviously stupid to just get around a broken game mechanic?  Also, on many ships, you can't even place a funnel behind the rear tower, FYI.

Edited September 28, 2024 by Северная
spelling

[Steeltrap]

On 9/28/2024 at 7:49 AM, Panzergraf said:

I repeated the tests I did two weeks ago to see if the issue with very high resistance has been fixed, and it really hasn't.
At 193 resistance you still get -100% gun damage. True, this might be a rounding error as my ship still takes some damage in this case, but it's really minimal - single digit damage numbers scored by even full penetrations by 20" guns.

The issue has been somewhat improved since last time, with fewer hulls now being able to achieve the -100% gun damage modifiers, but it can still be done and I still think it's a problem that should be looked into.

My view has always been, as far back as 2019 when I joined closed testing, that the whole concept of 'resistance' is a flawed design choice. It's an arbitrary "pulled from nowhere" number to fit a system, and you are demonstrating its issues at the margins. Sure, there has to ba "a damage system", but I don't see any reason for this 'resistance' thing other than covering for simplified design consequences (and I DON'T mean that as a criticism, simply an opinion as to what I think is happening).

But, hey, I am the crazy person who suggested a far better design would be to allow players to input various requirements and have the system produce a hull, NOT be limited to however many hulls the devs get around to producing. More work initially, sure, but FAR more flexible in the long term.

What's more, it would allow more realistically for players to experience the tug of war between protection, firepower, speed and navigation range that dictates EVERYTHING about warship design, with tech setting the limits on those at any given time.

But that would also entail a damage model that places things in their exact positions in the hull and thus relative to each other, which I'm led to believe is NOT what we have. THAT would address some of the weird weight stuff we deal with, too, but it would also be better for more realistic battle effects etc.

Not quite sure why I'm repeating all this as it's pretty clear it's never going to happen, LOL.

Cheers

[Panzergraf]

13 hours ago, Steeltrap said:

My view has always been, as far back as 2019 when I joined closed testing, that the whole concept of 'resistance' is a flawed design choice. It's an arbitrary "pulled from nowhere" number to fit a system, and you are demonstrating its issues at the margins. Sure, there has to ba "a damage system", but I don't see any reason for this 'resistance' thing other than covering for simplified design consequences (and I DON'T mean that as a criticism, simply an opinion as to what I think is happening).

I actually like Resistance as a concept. It's arbitrary, yes, but as you say there has to be some kind of a damage system. Resistance, as a system of damage reduction, is a decent way of simulating how some ships can just sustain more damage than others if their armor is penetrated. An alternative would be to bloat the hitpoint numbers of big ships compared to smaller ships, similar to how games like World of Warships does things, but that would in the end be just as arbitrary. I don't have a problem with there being arbitrary systems in a game though, they always have to be there to some extent.

I am demonstrating its issues at the margins, but that's where the issues are IMHO. If the maximum percentage of damage reduction was capped at a lower number, it would work much much better.

[Nick Thomadis]

Uploaded optimizedx6 build including:
- Possible fix for minor nation ships not cleaning up after being sunk in battle.
- Optimization in ship movement at sea mechanics.
- Optimizations in shell ballistics (affects penetration due to different shell physics applied).
- Optimization in environment lighting for battles.
- Optimization in auto-design.
- Optimizations in Battle AI.
You need to restart Steam to get the update.

Note: This version aims to be stable and good enough as a safe build to revert if you have any issue when we make the beta version finalized and released. We will offer a release candidate of beta tomorrow.

[justMike247]

On 9/29/2024 at 7:30 PM, Panzergraf said:

I actually like Resistance as a concept.

Problem with this is... it's entirely without basis... no foundation. Exactly what is it about a bare hull that provides protection against kinetic penetrators if armour is discounted? The main belt/deck armour plan should provide the greatest protection for the citadel (armoured box that protects the ships vitals, i.e. engineering spaces, magazines etc. The citadel itself comprises up to three levels of additional armoured protection. But once compromised, what you have is the exact opposite of what's illustrated in game.

 

Lets say, for example... an AP shell manages to breach all four layers of protection, detonating inside the boiler rooms. What happens then? That citidel is effectively a strong but somewhat leaky pressure vessel, so when the shell detonates, the resulting over-pressure is pretty catastrophic. In addition to shell fragments flying in every direction to crash/smash into equipment that doesn't react nicely to being thwacked by seriously fast moving lumps of flying metal. There's a better than even chance that at least one boiler and/or high pressure steam lines lose integrity, and that's when the majority of the damage occurs. An escape of superheated steam (120degC @ 280PSi) will instantly fill that engineering space, rapidly escaping into adjacent spaces too, almost instantly cooking any poor soul trapped inside those spaces at the time. Timely repair is impossible until the pressures and temperatures reduce to levels that are "survivable". Structurally, the bulkheads and decks are subjected to temperatures and pressures they were never designed for, with a probability of weakening them significantly along with the risk of additional structural distortion (in addition to that caused by the incoming projectile that is). As for the typical damage... Google for images of high pressure boiler explosions... Check out pics of steam trains that blew up because their boilers were compromised, look really carefully at the sustained damage, and then try to imagine all that force confined inside a very space-limited armoured box...

 

Net result, assuming this is all the sustained damage... The engine/turbine supplied by that boiler will be down on power until/unless it can be cross-connected to undamaged steam circuits. It will be impossible to work at "optimum efficiency" in the adjacent spaces because of the increase in pressure, temperature and humidity; bear in mind that under normal operating conditions, these spaces are already bordering on intolerably hot. Dry dock for weeks, if not months.

 

Thing is, you can't just look at this in isolation; the spaces between inner/outer citidel belts aren't just empty voids, they're secondry and tertiary engineering spaces. They could house electrical generators, turbo pumps etc, all critical equipment, just not so critical that it'd warrant the highest level of protection, and for that projectile to have reached the innermost spaces, it had to pass through these too. Damage sustained in any of these spaces will contribute to the overall damage sustained, farther compromising the fighting efficiency of the ship.

 

While the citidel plating is certainly structural, its primarily there for protection, but once compromised, there's nothing inherent within the "squishy bits" of the hull construction that would render it resistant to damaging effects, much less render anything approximating invulnerability.

 

To me, the whole Resistance thing, if concieved independantly of armour scheme, makes as much sense as a partial penetration... but that's a whole different ballgame...

 

Edited October 1, 2024 by justMike247

[Steeltrap]

On 9/30/2024 at 4:30 AM, Panzergraf said:

I actually like Resistance as a concept. It's arbitrary, yes, but as you say there has to be some kind of a damage system. Resistance, as a system of damage reduction, is a decent way of simulating how some ships can just sustain more damage than others if their armor is penetrated. An alternative would be to bloat the hitpoint numbers of big ships compared to smaller ships, similar to how games like World of Warships does things, but that would in the end be just as arbitrary. I don't have a problem with there being arbitrary systems in a game though, they always have to be there to some extent.

I am demonstrating its issues at the margins, but that's where the issues are IMHO. If the maximum percentage of damage reduction was capped at a lower number, it would work much much better.

My issues with it are:

1. It's largely outside the control of the player, who's supposed to direct all the parts of the naval design process, and thus that doesn't make sense if the premise of the game is to be believed, and

2. It ought not be necessary. Why not? Because the damage done by a shell ought to be the same to ANY ship IF that shell detonates within the ship's hull, for example. A hull with more compartments, not to mention larger ones, and possibly armoured bulkheads and a splinter deck, will contain that damage better, sure. But not WITHIN wherever the initial detonation is.

I suspect we have it because we DON'T have a 'proper' hull compartmentalisation model such as appeared in the wonderful "Great Naval Battles of the North Atlantic: 1939-43" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Naval_Battles:_North_Atlantic_1939–43).

It had a far more detailed system, including the fun fact you could activate a "shell tracker" so if you hit something it would jump to that ship's damage model (depicted as a bunch of 'cells' where each scheme was a different deck) and you'd watch the shell enter the relevant deck and punch through until it went bang, so to speak. Best bit? Essential equipment was laid out on those schematics, as was flooding and fires. That shell that hit on the waterline? Yes, it started flooding, too.

You had damage control teams to assign, you could counter-flood but had limited pumps, etc etc. It really was astonishingly good when you consider in was released in 1992.

Back to the point, however. As I said, I don't see why such a mechanism (i.e. "resistance") is necessary. Yes, you WOULD have to have something that had a way of applying damage to a target that also reflected the internal structure, but, as I said, I suspect the reason we don't have that here is because we don't have a genuine internal structure model (or at least how do small calibre HE shells 'overpen' the HULL of a merchant ship, for example, without exploding in the engine spaces or cargo or something if hit from astern? That's never made sense to me, and still doesn't). Without such a model, I suppose 'resistance' is a way of making something more of a bullet sponge.

Well, it hardly matters, as clearly it's not going to change. But I find it highly unsatisfactory and don't like it, regardless.

Cheers

[justMike247]

6 hours ago, Steeltrap said:

I suspect we have it because we DON'T have a 'proper' hull compartmentalisation model such as appeared in the wonderful "Great Naval Battles of the North Atlantic: 1939-43" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Naval_Battles:_North_Atlantic_1939–43).

You're showing your age Steeltrap...  😜

I've fond memories of that game... It prompted me into my first ventures in PC upgrades (memory, soundcard, graphics card)... Seriously detailed models despite VGA graphics, but awesome gameplay. Had to be seriously proactive with damage control, counter-flooding etc, and the ability to fight 4 simultaneous targets with a single capitol ship.

[Zuikaku]

Damage control minigame in Great Naval Battles was just awesome!! I always hoped UA Dreadnoughts woul'd give us something similar, but...

[justMike247]

post deleted because.... brainphart... apologies

Edited October 1, 2024 by justMike247
wrong thread