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One of the reasons I stopped playing with this update is because of the following FOUR encounters. They were all Destroyer Assaults that I TRIED to disengage from. Prior to this update, I rarely got these and ALWAYS successfully disengaged. After this last update, I started getting them regularly and it was always a mixed bag of destroyers, mostly older models, from minor allies with me getting ONE of my more modern port defense destroyers thrown in. One of these is useless in port defense, 3-4 of them could do serious damage to a BB, but one with 3-5 oddly made, out of date, or other DD's was useless... so I try to disengage. I was successful 1 out of 5 times. This is the story of the other four times.
Engagement #1
Extreme radar range start: 30km
Ships, 1 German BB with Gen 1 Radar, 20.3"guns (Nelson style) a bunch of other guns that were useless to the engagement, armor is horrible. 6 DD's, 1 modern A-H DD (mine) with Gen 2 Radar, 8x5.9" guns (6 forward, 2 rear, 4 turrets) and 8 x 23" Electric Torps, and a mixed bag of other DD's mostly made by me but very old versions, no refits, a few Chinese and Japanese ones.
Split into 3 divisions.
Results: At start, paused after focus on my divs. Gave 'retreat' order to all divs and smoked up. Unpaused. 20.3" shells in the air, DD's accellerating and turning around roughly 180°. 1 20'3" hit on the A-H (player) DD blowing it in half and sinking it immediately. Other ships unhit and successfully disengaged.
Player Response, "Wow, hadn't seen stuff like that since 4 updates ago... very lucky"
Engagement #2
A direct replay of Engagement #1. These engagements were literally 1 turn apart. Only difference, 5 DD's not 6.
Results: same, A-H DD hit under smoke at a speed of 38 kts and accelerating away, blown in half from a single 20.3" round.
Player Response, "Okay, 1 might have been lucky, this is getting to be obvious the cheat engine is back on."
Engagement #3
Setup the same, only 4 DD's now, one was so old it only did 32kts.
Changes: I paused the game the moment the ocean became visible, didn't wait for zoom in to finish. I immediately broke my ships into solo divs and manually scattered them, fanning them out in a 90° cone away from the target, not using 'retreat' mode, kept them in sail mode. Smoke immediately on. All ships set to maximum speed.
Results: Almost the same. I knew my DD was primary target so I had it break at a 120° angle away from it's original course, away from the BB, and had it zig zag away from the incoming rounds. It STILL got hit but the main salvo struck the water WAAAAAY behind the ship and a single shell hit the ship on the oblique aft quarter, doing a large amount of damage, almost half the ship Structure health and causing a flood. The other DD's got away like before but now the BB had to hunt my DD down and eventually caught and killed it. I actually suicided the DD into the BB to end it faster, never got near torp range, second hit at 27km killed it, while under smoke and dodging.
Player Response: "Yup, definitely cheat mode now. However, not a direct hit, did the angle of breakaway matter?"
Engagement #4
Setup similar to #3, 6 DD's again, oddly not too bad of DD's this time, newer versions, but now I wanted to see if I could change the results.
Changes: Left DD's in divisions except the A-H (player) one. I set all other DD's to Retreat and put them under smoke. My DD I broke at a 90° perpendicular angle at max speed, under smoke. I knew from #3 that dodging did no good so I let the ship hit maximum speed 41kts.
Results: Salvo came in from the BB all but 1 round landing WAAAAY behind the DD. 1 round kept tracking and tracking and tracking to intercept the DD, it was 4-5 ship lengths away from the other nearest round landing in the salvo, I was laughing at it. Then I was shocked, it landed astern of the DD and MISSED! I immediately turned the DD away from the BB because I knew I had 85-95 seconds to run away. I did, and out of range of the BB's guns. The cheat engine failed... but why? Was I wrong about the hit mode before firing?
The only reason I think the 'hit' before the guns even fire (with the Cheat subroutine generating the 'hit') actually ended up missing was because some other subroutine saw how far out of bounds the shot would have had to travel to hit the ship which was nowhere near the impact point of the main salvo.
If this is true, I find it some AMAZING coding. It would mean the dev coding it would actually have the cheat mode fully in mind and have a check against it being 'caught' in the act. This could be done by making a limit in the dispersion of the shot grouping, but the only way it could be caught doing this is if a player actually managed to disengage a ship so far, so fast out of the dispersion hit zone as to trigger it. I would think that would be even more rare than hitting a DD at 38+kts, under smoke, dodging (like in #3) with massive guns that were fully ballistic once the rounds left the barrel and had NO IDEA where the target would be and randomly hitting it... 3 times in a row! I might have accidentally found a way to prove both the cheat and the cover up, sometimes I guess maybe I have dumb luck?
I'm not saying the game is coded as my thinking feels it is... however, those odds are IMPOSSIBLE so if someone has a better explanation, I'm all ears.
To OP's point, yes, the long range fire in this latest update is fully cheaty. In the previous four updates, it got better and better at looking to be done right. Even my BB's in the update before this one easily dodged the enemy long range fire as I'd maneuver immediately as it fired (I got good at timing the salvo shots). It had no way to hit at anything longer than 20km. The AI loves to go straight so my guns generally had a field day and had the enemy BB sank before we even hit 19km. Yes, that's obnoxiously long range but keep in mind the game isn't historical.
The reason you can hit at long range is how you work the Research Tech Tree. If you do it right, you can have highly advanced guns through 17" by the early 1950's and targeting systems, advanced shells, and advanced powders to be very accurate. The game models a theoretical maximum performance that you can get close to even during the WWII years, and reach before 1954. So you're not shooting the most accurate version of a WWII BB like an Iowa class, you're shooting what the theoretical maximum of all those systems could be in a digital, high performance era like today. Now, I think it's a little over zealous of an interpretation of that, but it might be possible for a modern 16" gun in perfect function condition (broken in, running perfectly) to do with modern know how.
We could easily have steerable munitions, air burst shrapnel/incendiary, or Carbide/DU penetrators, etc. So, such hits at such ranges today might be easily possible. They weren't in WWII, but today...
The game isn't historical. It's alternate history. Accept that and the game makes much more sense.
1. Accuracy, penetration and stored ammo are way higher, at otherwise battles would be quite boring. A typical BB had ca. 80-100 shells per gun, 33%-50% APs. With hit rates around 2-5% and dud rates up to 50% maybe, you would spend your whole ammo, and both BBs go home lightly damaged in an (unlikely) 1 vs 1 situation.
2. A lot of stuff ingame goes faster as it should, like acceleration, deacceleration, turning and shells flight time. Propbarbly made to make the game with a bit more action and dont have players cry all the time about beeing unable to evade torps.
3. You can build your own ships with your own gun calibers, thats one of the main points of the game. Thats fine as some hulls, like the German BB III limit the gun size you can mount down to less then 11" as example. You are free to only use historic calibers if you want to limit yourself. This game is not to meant to be played with historic designs only and after 1920 historic designs will be way to weak compared to ingame possiblities. Try to fight a 150.000t BB with 530mm guns with your tiny iowa... one hit at 35-50km will do it.
And in history there were some odd calibers too, like 149mm, 180mm, 265mm, 320mm, 343mm and much more... Its freedom of choice not ahistorical, as the game is only somewhat tied to history.
Sometimes even the name of the gun and its calibers wont mach, especcially with german guns. The 15cm gun has 149mm in realtiy, the 280mm 283mm, and so on...
You can easly increase a guns caliber by a bit, ca 15mm, by simply drilling the barrell out, like the italians did on their old dreads from 305mm to 320mm.
4. Yes super-BBs of more then ca. 50.000-60.000t are costy and need a lot of investment in infrastucurtre like bases, shipyards and docks and wont find through most canals. But ingame you have so much money you can build 100s of BBs, and you only need to increase your max. shipyards size enough, mostly you will reach 100.000t and above around 1910...
Yes these gigants dont make much sense, even the yamatos were a total failure, and guns over 16" dont make much sense either as they damage the own ship shooting them, but again its not a historic correct game and let people play, nobody forces you to build them.
There is a thing to keep in mind with ships cost and maintenance ; The game seems to had been made to also please kids, allowing them to play a '' risk onthe sea''. So game is made to allows players to have fleets of hundreds of BB in order to conquiere the entire world.
Yes it is silly, and I regret there is no difficulty setting for mature/serious players, with more restricting budget and, for exemple, reffit rules.
Yeah fighting 12 enemy battleships in 1 fleet usually ends in instant death or somehow winning and basically wiping out their navy in 1 battle, there is no inbetween.
The ai and most of the game is coded badly, the campaign map decides engagement on rng and is so poorly made even a 1998's game would outcompete it.
Torpedo boat spam somehow wins you the game up until 1910 since the ai is reactionary, not even an ai just a piece of code to react and not prematurely prepare against them.
The ai auto generated designs are garbage, there should be some decent built in designs that are part of the games code to give more of a challange.
Agree to all of this, as a navy buff myself. BUT...
1) Playability is important: very few people would buy a game with fully realistic gunnery models, because it would be slow, inconclusive and plain boring -- except to naval experts. And no player base = no game.
2) As others have said, non standard calibres were not uncommon; what bothers me is the lack of standardisation within a navy, which would have led, in RL, to a logistic nightmare.
3) There should be a "Washington/London option" of sorts for players who (like me) do not want to build (or face) 150.000 t behemoths -- but again player base seems to like them, and pre/around/after the Treaties every major navy planned very large battleships -- and in a world with no air threat like the one of UAD this would probably have been the logical evolution of surface combatants. I agree strongly that costs should go over the roof, however.
Post scriptum: your objections explain perfectly why campaigns should end earlier, not later than 1945. Late game diverges too much, IMHO, from a reasonable historical simulation.
The hard part would be fixing the RNG-based hit percentages. Even in a long range BB duel, it's quite blatant. You can tell which shots will hit when they're about halfway to the target, and often the rest of the salvo will go nowhere near, while the shells that were rolled to hit slam perfectly into the target.
If you want that, you will also had to include barrel life time, that was around 200 round for the yamato 18.1 inches guns. Probably you will have to send your ships in reffit to change guns after each battle ;-)
i wouldnt go that far lol just a reasonable decrease in accuracy of the ships guns would be enough not too much but not too little of course this would also depend on gun calibre and distance aswell as ship class