Game difficulty

[hurepoix]

I just end my second full campaign as Japanese 1890-1950, at hard difficulty level, and it was very very very easy. It seems this game follow the modern fashion ; this is a game for king kids and you cant lose. I ended the game conquering UK from japan.
Summary showed I destroyed almost 100 battleships and 400 cruisers and lose 1 and 5 of it. I presume I was lazy and played some battles using auto combat options.

I presume it is the same thing for everybody. I saw many critics on the game, but my main one is ; this game terribly lack of tension and challenge.

I restarted a new one at very hard and italian, but despite I started with the poorest country and the lowest naval budget, in a few years I was the only one to be very advanced. As result a single BB with 3 DD sunk 24 cruisers in a battle, around 1900, before to leave and let live the survivors, ranning out of ammo.

I even dont hope to see one day this game become a ''true'' game.

[pombruv]

Personally, I like the game to be easy and so do many others considering the amount of moaning on this forum about the AI cheating. However, I can understand that there are those who prefer to be seriously challenged and they should be accommodated. Provided those who are finding it easy are not doing so by "modding" the files then perhaps the difficulty levels should be looked at.

From stuff I've read on here, the main way of determining difficulty has been to chuck money at the AI to guarantee better fleets faster. Is this still the case? If so then this seems to lead to lots of unwanted side effects that have caused much distress to the purists. Maybe the developers need to determine difficulty in more subtle ways?

My own preference is to up the RNG effects in the hard levels to the point where disasters and command errors are compounded and there is a greater likelihood of "bad luck" in almost all engagements. Weather could suddenly change. Parts might fail - and so on. This would more closely resemble real life and give those who prefer hard and legendary difficulty levels something to think about. If you believe that would unfairly penalise the intelligent planner then I would say you can't have it all ways. The greatest Admirals in history have come to that lofty position not by just being smart but also by being incredibly lucky.

However, it's at this point that the poor developer is probably on a hiding to nothing. Many are prepared to reluctantly accept the decisions of fate or the whim of Gods, but definitely not the coded bias of some lowly developer and their bloody RNG :)

[hurepoix]

I took italy in legendary, which have reputation to not be a top one. But probably china or Russia are worst.

[Shad]

The main issue the fact that:
1. AI cannot seem to design worthy ships. The player can easily make invincible BB squadrons that will wipe entire fleets with 0 losses. And even smaller ships tend to lose badly in equal engagements. You only need to add some DDs/CLs later to prevent sub attacks, but they don't need to actually do much in battle.

Just trying auto-design will show you the true horrors the AI spits out. I suggested a while go that "minimum" bulkhead should straight up not be avaliable to military ships (at least to the AI), as it creates glorified target practice. Even "standard" is kinda bad and should be discouraged for the AI. Armor should also be appropriate for the ships class. Just these 2 small thing will already make the ships less terrible.

2. It's too easy to make invincible ships for the player. Battleships that can tank half a dozen torpedoes of the same era with only moderate flooding. Armor that is is borderline invincible unless hit at a particular angle (I've seen capital AP shell bounce off destroyers...). Damage control, that can handle pretty much anything part the 1890s. Destroyers, which need their own thread to describe. They only reason the player would lose a major combatant is due to either negligence or the one undefeable enemy: auto-resolve.

This is in a fair part due to the incredible and utterly unrealistic ease of refits. "Refits" allow you to rapidly change the ship at will, short of changing the hull type and displacements. Even things like hull tech get retroactively applied.

This isn't just a "realism" complain, it has massive implications for gameplay. Ships design was, and should be a game of compromises between "today's" tech, the techs under research that could well be a gamechanger, and the urgency in needing these ships. Ships did in fact go obsolete, sometimes before they even launched. That was literally the core of the era. But none of that happens, when you can can "upgrade" a ships with all the latest techs in a few months.

Ship refits were lengthy affairs, lasting up to a couple of years for capital ships, and even then, a lot of thing were "baked in" and could not be changed: Hull weight saving, hull form, a lot of the bulkheads, armor scheme, main guns location, main turret size, main belt...