Major Issues playing Austria at legenday

[hurepoix]

I m currently playing a campaign at legendary difficulty as Austria starting in 1890, but I have plenty of problem ruining my game.

I started with the lowest GDP but it didnt caused me any problems.

Playing 25 years I had constantly to deal with the same nuissances.

My ships are far better, and more advanced than ennemies ones.

I m so rich that I cant spend all my money by far.

Despite a very low shipyard capacity building I have plently of ships, but not enough place in harbour. All my port are overloaded (red) despite I seized some big ones like Odessa or Sevastopol. It caused me extra maintenance cost, but my treasury chest still overflow.

My people are always happy

Other countries like me so much, that I have to make lot of efforts to go at war.

When I m at war I win all my battles so easilly that it is more an happy slaughters than battles. At worst I can lose a few TB / DD.
Ennemy accuracy is so low, about all my ships except DD end undamaged.

Where is the otion to play a real game, instead of an ultra easy and boring demo ?

[CheapSushi]

Challenge yourself by only using DDs for the rest of the entire campaign, even for Invasion tonnage. Or stop investing in tech, lag behind and see if your superior intellect will still win. Make it your goal to be at war with every single Empire at the exact same time and never end the wars by your own choice. Or some other nonconventional way to play. Or just complain.

This was an earlier version of the game, but the very first time I ever played the campaign, I picked Austro-Hungary too and I was basically trying to take over the United States before the real-world timeline of WW2 (I already took over Spain & France). I managed to hold Alaska for a long time and take over one or two regions at a time in the U.S. before this but the Army strength was massive. Here's my 2nd attempt, blocking all the ports with fleets, about to invade again. But I got stuck at work for a while and by the time I came back to the game, a lot of updates happened. So I'm at my 2nd campaign now. I guess my point is, if you find it easy, take on the U.S. and try to be the real world timeline of events. Image: https://steamcommunity.com/id/CheapSushi/screenshot/2103801197154102117/

[hurepoix]

Originally posted by CheapSushi:

Challenge yourself by only using DDs for the rest of the entire campaign, even for Invasion tonnage.

I made invasions using only subs.

Point here the real problem is there is absolutly no challenge nor a single diffulculty even you play the worst countries like Spain at the highest difficulty level.

I have nothing against people who want easy slaughter, but at least game should allows us to have a difficulty setting with minimal resistance.
Here legendary is a big joke. I noticed ennemy ships have well trained crews at legendary, but it is far to be enough.

[Bramborough]

From my view, the central issue is this: The auto-generator - while it has improved a little over time - is still miles away from generating designs that remotely compete with player-designed ships. No AI starting advantage or difficulty-adjusted econ advantage can overcome that fundamental flaw.

"Zero out fore/aft offset" pretty much trumps everything else. Bit of an oversimplification, but I think makes the point.

[mlangsdorf]

I've built plenty of satisfactory and useful ships that have terrible pitch and roll numbers. The AI ship designer is frequently insane:

* cruisers and battleships with minimal armor on all faces except the rear deck which has adequate armor.
* ships of all types with generally decent armor, and then 0.5" or less on either the fore or aft belt
* too many different gun calibers, especially after 1910 or so. no battlecruiser in 1930 should have a 13.3" main battery, a 12.7" support battery, a 5.2" secondary battery, another 4.7" secondary battery, and three tertiary batteries of 3.4", 3.1", and 2.6". Pick 3 or 4 calibers and stick with them.
* main battery arcs of fire compromised by secondary turrets on tall barrettes.
* gun calibers are frequently too short - 13"/35 main batteries in the 1920s which get heavily outranged by my 13"/53 cannon

Getting the AI to routinely build solid, balanced ships instead of fleets of quirky monstrosities would be a good start. Aiming for an average pitch and roll around 35% or under would be good, too, but it's not the biggest problem I see.

The tactical AI isn't very good either:
* terrible differentiation between torpedo ships that want to sweep in and launch torpedoes and long range fighters that want to stay back and shoot stuff. I've seen my own DDs under AI control turn away from an enemy while outside their own torpedo range, despite my DDs have 10-15 torpedo tubes but only a pair of 5" guns.
* well documented problems with targeting, such as preferring to fire on distant targets, no attempt to distribute primary battery shots from multiple ships to multiple enemy ships. and switching targets much too often
* similar problems with choosing incorrect ammo for the target
* sticking too closely to transports during convoy missions and getting picked off at long range by ships with superior range

I get it, AI ship design and tactics are hard. But the current designs are a mess.