Upcoming “Update v1.09” News [07/10/2022]

[DARTIS]

Hello everyone,
The work for the next major update continues and now we are ready to share some details of what is going to include. Please note that the list of changes is not final. We will certainly add more improvements or some of them may need more testing before they come live for players.

MAJOR CAMPAIGN FEATURES

• Full Global Map: The map is expanded in its maximum size scale and it includes the whole world. You will be able to travel with your fleets everywhere and now the strategic importance of Task Forces and other new technologies become a necessity.
  
  
• All Major Nations added: All 10x major Nations become available to play. The previous nations were:
  
  - British Empire
  - French Empire
  - German Empire
  - Italian Empire
  - Austro-Hungarian Empire
  
  and the new are:
  
  - United States
  - Russian Empire
  - Empire of Japan
  - Spanish Empire
  - Chinese Empire
  
  Note: For starters, their initial starting provinces will not differ according to the start year of the campaign.
  
  
• All necessary technology aspects become available: All previous not functional “To-Do” which you were seeing in the technology tree will be now fully operational, and many more. The most important to mention are the following:
  
  Submarines & ASW: The technology tree is enriched with the submarines which you can fully use in the campaign map. ASW new techs will help in the countermeasures against submarines. Fleets with no ASW and light ship escorts will be very vulnerable against submarines.The submarines will only be playable on the campaign map and will execute autoresolved missions against convoys and enemy fleets.Special mine submarines could sink enemies with their mines without engaging them.
  
  Mines: The technology tree includes a full set of mines and minefield options which can be used in the campaign map. DD and CL will have the ability to deploy mines with special components around the ports. Fleets will be able to clean them up faster if they have DD or TB with dedicated minesweeping equipment. Ports that are protected by mines can heavily damage enemies that attempt to close in for Port Strike missions.
  
  Ship Construction Flaws: Only for the campaign, the ships may have various minor or major defects when building them which you can overcome if you invest in construction technologies. Some complex components may increase the chance of defects, so overpowering your ship with the latest technology may result in defective ships if you haven’t invested sufficiently in the ship construction technologies. The “Overweight” and “Underweight” type of defects are permanent, while the extra “Hull Defects”, “Weapon Defects” can be gradually repaired with refits.
  
  New “Recon” rating for ships: The *Recon* rating represents the reconnaissance capability of the ship, its ability to report enemy movements without being detected, and greatly improves the strategic power of the fleet to gain initiative on offensive missions or get away from trouble before the enemy comes too close. “Recon” is affected mainly by the respective technology as well as spotting, detectability and speed attributes of the ship.
  
  Large and slow ships such as battleships are expected to have a smaller “Recon” rating than small cruisers and destroyers. Radio and Radar equipment greatly increase the reconnaissance capability surpassing inherited disadvantages of larger ships.
  
  Various strategic technologies: Technologies that speed up the crew training, raise the maximum training level without combat, enhance the power projection/invade/protect capabilities or even reinforce transports with more armament (and torpedoes). All in all, the technology aspects have been rebalanced and enriched so that they matter significantly and require careful planning on which one to focus on.

EXTRA MAJOR FEATURES

• Updated Shipyard graphics: New graphical improvements for the shipyard, according to the size of the designed ships. These shipyards will fit all ships, even the largest super battleships.
  
  
• Campaign Ammunition: Spending ammunition in combat is no longer free, but has a cost which is added in the fleet maintenance. Ships will gradually regain ammo according to the weight of their requited ammo, the free port capacity and their distance from it. So ships that are in Task Forces must not waste ammunition, especially if they are far away from a large friendly port, as they will be in danger of ammunition shortages.
  
  
• Detailed ship map movement and fuel: Ships travel at sea according to their cruising speed which is dependent from the designed top speed and the engine type (for example, Diesel Engines provide a higher cruising speed). According to their operational range, they spend fuel, in map or during combat (maximizing consumption at full speed).
  
  If they reach a “Low Fuel” state their maintenance becomes more expensive (simulating the necessity to refuel with supply convoys), they slow down the fleet with their lower cruising speed and in combat they cannot use the full engine throttle, so they are severely more vulnerable.
  
  Ships will gradually refuel according to their distance from a friendly port and its free capacity and the refueling cost will be dependent from the designed operational range and its cost. So now, chasing for hours withdrawing enemies may result in excessive fuel costs and shortages which will negatively affect your fleet in the next turns.
  
  
• New “Defend” Role: During wartime players can switch to “Defend Port'' when they wish their ships to not participate in any other mission than port strike defense. This was many times asked by players as a way to manage the economy without trying to exploit the mothball options.
  
  
• New “Commission Time”: When ships are constructed or are removed from mothball status, they need some time to become fully operational. Note: This new essential feature replaces the temporary very large “Repair” time when ships returned from mothball status.
  
  
• New “Repair Priority” for ports:Previously all ships in ports received immediate repairs even for minor damages. Additionally, if you moved damaged ships from a task force to a port they would not be repaired unless they participated in a battle and survived. These problems are now addressed by having a “Repair Priority” button which appears when you click to a port which works similarly as for the Task Forces.
  
  
• Detailed Refit Time: After popular player request, the refit time became more detailed, utilizing the amount of objects and tonnage changed on the ship. The refit time shows up during the refit design, so the player is well informed of his design actions.
  Undo Action in Ship Design process: Players can undo a certain number of previous actions if they make a mistake. This new feature is a work in progress and may not be fully working.
  
  
• Multiple Saves for campaign: A simple way of having different campaign save slots. We will try to include save capability during campaign battles.
  
  
• Engine Vibrations: According to engine type or technologies, the ship may have excessive engine vibrations which negatively affect the ship’s accuracy. By lowering the ship’s throttle, the vibrations become reduced.
  
  
• Shell Splashes accuracy effect: When firing at a target and other guns of your own or friendlies also fire at the target, there is a temporary accuracy penalty, simulating the difficulty to distinguish different splashes of multiple gun calibers. Rangefinders (especially the Radar) and some new techs lessen this negative effect. This new feature also enhances the ships of uniform gun caliber because shell splashes from minor secondaries is very small.
  
  
• Gun recoil accuracy effect: You will now notice a realistic recoil accuracy effect when firing guns which will be significant if your hull is too small for those guns. This effect will dissipate over a short time but can greatly affect ships which are equipped with super velocity guns, too large for the displacement of the hull.
  
  
• Updated ship physics: Ships interact with the waves more realistically. You will notice the acceleration to increase not linearly according to the size of the waves.
  
  
• Engine efficiency is more important: The engine efficiency benefits are enhanced, since the engine efficiency level can increase further to 100%. Ships with low engine efficiency will be drastically slower at sea and have less operational range, making them strategically less important.
  
  
• “Funnel smoke” and “smoke screen” new functionality: Smoke obstruction from funnels no longer causes a permanent accuracy penalty but this penalty is applied according to the direction of the smoke in relation to the target. Furthermore, this smoke obstruction affects other ships which will target with accuracy penalty when their targets are obstructed by the funnel smoke. The same functionality enriches the smoke screen which will now reduce the accuracy for targets that reside behind the smoke screen (not only inside the smoke, as before).
  
  
• Armor plate damage affects shell penetration: As armor plates become damaged their resistance against incoming shells becomes reduced. So you will notice that even the most heavily armored ship can gain weaknesses after a prolonged combat and the hazard of a catastrophic detonation increases significantly when the ship is almost a wreck.
  
  
• Flooding increases according to section damage: Various ship design aspects, crew and amount of damage received affect the flooding effects. Now the ship’s structure integrity affects them further. As a result, ships with increased damage have much difficulty to control flooding and so ships with maximum bulkheads will not feel “invulnerable” and so hard to sink as before.
  
  
• New hulls: The USS Maine (1889) and several ship variants of early technology will enrich the roster of available hulls.

BALANCES / FIXES

• Battle AI improvements to follow the new changes.
  
• Auto-Design improvements to follow the new features. It should also now not produce ships with zero superstructure armor (unless it produces a very special rare armor layout).
  
• Various balances in ship weights.
  
• HE armor penetration capacity is reduced. Overpowered large caliber HE shells should not exist anymore.
  
• Shell ballistics improvements affecting penetration mechanics. Shell dispersion should be noticeably improved.
  
• Various balances in many components and techs.
  
• Fixes of various campaign bugs (too many to mention).
  
• Fixed the turret rotation stalling when angle is not sufficient (WIP).
  
• Various minor hull improvements.
  
• Fixed issue of overpowered player technology when he started a campaign with “Own Fleet”. Previously the AI ships would be behind at least 3 or 4 years while the player would have ships of the present start year (for example 1910 instead of 1906 ships). This fix addresses one of the main reasons that AI was weaker in battles because it always started with lower tech ships than the player.

There is a pending feature that we are not sure yet if it will be needed for this patch: the limitation of Task Force size according to techs, because we need to try how the AI will respond to all the new mechanics first. We will continue to work on the patch and we will make available the first beta, as soon as we stabilize its content. Thank you very much for reading!

The Game Labs Team

===21/9/2022 Update===
Hello everyone,
We would like to share a brief information update about our current progress. We have prepared almost everything, added more fixes and improvements and all the planned features except the following:
- First Global map version: Needs a first graphical base, plus some needed mechanics.
- The Updated shipyard.
- Submarine feature: It is currently very beta to share. Needs crucial bug fixes and some remaining non-working features.

We will let you know very soon when the next beta will be available for you.

===30/9/2022 Update===
Hello admirals,
The work for the next major update continues. This update is actually the largest we have ever worked for in terms of content, so it takes more time to complete than the usual. According to what we have finished and what we consider stable for you to play, we estimate that next week, we will offer the first playable beta. It is going to have extra improvements in various aspects of the gameplay and the following limitations:
- The map is not going to have finalized province borders. The borders will look generic and will not show accurate cutting of land according to the game's provinces. Map graphics will be incomplete but mostly done.
- The submarines and mines will work but some issues in balance or bugs are to be expected.
- The new hulls will be unavailable.
- The new shipyard might not be available yet.
- Other known small issues will be fixed during the beta.

Thank you for reading, and have a good weekend!

===07/10/2022 Update===
Hello Admirals,
The first beta of version 1.09 is almost ready but some remaining critical bugs did not allow us to release it. These bugs could create highly inconsistent engagements ignoring the fleet control zones, crashes due to submarine mines or never-ending auto-refits in some rare occasions, and also the known turret rotation issue is not yet fixed (not critical though).

We try to stabilize the beta so that it is enjoyable when we make it available for you. Due to the fact that the remaining critical bugs are few, we can guarantee that by early next week it is going to be ready.

Thank you for your patience!

[Silamon]

This looks like a great update, the game really seems to be coming along.

Might have to buy it soon

[Count Sessine]

Wow amazing update. Looking forward to it. This game has come a long way :)

[Ahnassi]

" reinforce transports with more armament (and torpedoes)."

Let the player build armed merchant cruisers and Q-ships in the ship designer instead. Having transports be fitted with torps will just cause them to sink each-other once an enemy is in range.

[CakeEngine]

That all sounds very nice and engaging and I'm very grateful you guys continue to implement more realistic details and all that, but please, pretty pretty please, let us set a ship limit on campaign encounters. It's kinda hard to focus on managing your fleet, when you have to huff and puff on your CPU, when the Brits decide to bring 200+ BBs, you know?

[Ahnassi]

So officers and captains are not going to be added to the game?

[Tex]

Looks promising. Very much looking forward to try it. I will be very surprised however if we do not need the task force limitation. So far balances in economy and ship design have done little in preventing oversized taskforces or full on doomstacks. But time will tell.

[✨Hunt Solo✨]

nice
"""* Detailed ship map movement and fuel"""
i particularly like the planned additions to the fuel supply situations
changes to smoke, recon rating, ammunitions supply seem fun too.
overall update contents look very promising OwO
very hype*

[milly]

Looks great

[Blue Panzer Division]

Cool

[The White Warlord]

Add prebattle deployment please

[Ahnassi]

And pre first turn strategy ship deployment. With the huge new map it takes months for ships built in Europe to reach their holdings in other parts of the world, meaning that US, Japan and China could possible take the European colonies in the first turns of the campaign before the starting fleets can get into position.

[Vuld_Edone]

I'll be returning to Dreadnoughts soon, looks like this new update will be the perfect occasion.
Everything looking great, though the main worry will be, with this massive map and so many factions, how long the game will take to load. But optimization (and UI) can wait.

[Ahnassi]

Will we got hulls like the first USS Texas, Devestation and other early ironclad ships?

[kf.*****]

well that explains why it has been quiet for a while, you have been busy, looking forward to when we can start testing. I think at a later stage to add a role for the south american countries, as while they didn't build any pf their own ships, they did purchase ships to the result they was more of a power dreadnought wise than Spain.

[Ahnassi]

Originally posted by kf.*****:

well that explains why it has been quiet for a while, you have been busy, looking forward to when we can start testing. I think at a later stage to add a role for the south american countries, as while they didn't build any pf their own ships, they did purchase ships to the result they was more of a power dreadnought wise than Spain.

If any other playable nations is going to be added it will probably be Sweden and the Neatherlands, as both both designed and built most of their ships domesticlly during the game's time period. The Dutch are also quite importent to have in the game for strategic reasons as they controlled the oil fields in South-east Asia during this time.