More information in Ship Design

[tomthehand]

Hey guys. I've been playing for a few weeks, and I have some suggestions related to the Ship Design screen.



It would be great if some more information were available about guns. I would suggest adding to the "Gun data" popup. I'd like it if this popup had arrows to change gun caliber without actually affecting the ship; I'd like to be able to scroll through possible adversary guns to see what kind of immune zone I have. Designing based on your own guns is great for battleships, but I might just want my light cruiser to be protected against destroyer fire.



Another addition I would want to see on the "Gun data" screen is rate of fire information. It's hard to truly make informed decisions without this; I realize that 6" guns will fire faster than 7" guns, but by how much? I'd like it if the unused space at the bottom right of the popup window displayed rate of fire per barrel in casemates, single open/shielded mounts, single fully-enclosed turrets, twins, triples, and quads. It's six lines of text and should fit nicely. It would then be easier to decide between, for example, four twin turrets or three triple turrets, depending on your current level of technology.



It would also be helpful if the popup displayed gun damage. Again, obviously a 7" shell does more damage than a 6", but by how much? Shell weight might be a good way to express this, since damage "points" are a little immersion-breaking. Again, just a line of text, so it should be easy to fit and would be very handy.



And on a related note, but not tied to the "Gun data" screen, it'd be really helpful if somewhere in the design screen you could view HAA, MAA, and LAA ratings, as well as ASW rating. It'd help us make intelligent tradeoffs and help us understand how different factors interact.



Anyway, thanks for reading. I'm really enjoying the game so far.

[tomthehand]

I have some additional suggestions for the Ship Design screen, and I figured I'd reply to my own semi-related thread instead of creating a new one.

• The 3" limit on the belt armor of light cruisers seems arbitrarily low. I'm not even thinking about huge 6"-gun cruisers like the Clevelands; even the Atlantas had more. Similarly, USS Olympia was a protected cruiser with 4.75" of armor on the sloped portions of the deck, which the game represents with belt armor.
  

• It would be nice if there were a visual indication that you have installed simple gun mounts (single mounts with <2.5" of armor) versus powered turrets with their weight penalty. Also, auto-loading should probably force a heavy, powered turret.
  

• If the decision has been made to disallow 0.5" armor, it shouldn't appear in the menus. However, I would argue that it should be allowed, perhaps via a technological development. On belts and decks, it would provide splinter and strafing protection (the Fletchers and later US destroyers had protection on this scale for that purpose). On belt and deck extensions, it could represent splinter protection of otherwise-unarmored areas; I would suggest that such armor should not cause a ship to lose the all-or-nothing bonus.
  
  On turrets, in addition to splinter protection, 0.5" of armor could provide "morale protection": a ship with completely unshielded turrets could take a rate-of-fire penalty when under enemy fire. Turrets could be allowed without roof armor for this purpose, perhaps in thicknesses up to 1-2". 0.5" roofs are probably reasonable to allow, for turrets which are fully enclosed but which don't really have much overhead protection. Unshielded turrets and turrets which have frontal gunshields but which aren't fully enclosed could become unserviceable in heavy weather.
  

• In "Armour scheme", selecting "sloped deck" doesn't cause the UI to update. You have to make some other UI-updating change to see the weight and cost results. "Protected cruiser" and "Flat deck on top of belt" do cause everything to update immediately.
  

• Once you have developed torpedo defenses, the "Torpedo defence" box only allows settings that you have developed. However, before you have developed torpedo defenses, it is possible to change the value in the "Torpedo defence" box to anything, including negatives. Checking or saving the design will catch invalid positive values, but the box should still be locked to 0.
  

• When you attempt to add a catapult, invalid options are sometimes displayed. For example, when you first open Ship Design and attempt to add a catapult, "A - Forward" is displayed. Some activities, like auto-designing a BB, seem to cause a validity check to occur and remove invalid options, but some other ship types, like CVs, will continue to display them (even though they're illegal on those ship types as well).
  

• In a similar example of late validity checks, main battery wing turrets are displayed even if you don't have the technology; however, if you try to add one, an error is displayed and then the invalid options are removed from the menu.
  

• I often find that catapults get discovered frustratingly late, and would like to suggest that flying-off platforms be added as an earlier tech. Perhaps they could only allow aircraft to take off into the wind at light weight and/or have a very long turnaround time.