Post by brygun on Jul 17, 2020 7:26:52 GMT -6
Greetings again friends,
After being adventuring in other seas I've sailed back to enjoy the Rule The Waves 2 environment. That is a big positive, that even after many hours of play, many hours away that someone will still come back for more.
Now for the constructive negative for improvement. A mix of suggestion making and bug report.
There are mattes about the "detach" commands that are a frustration that I do feel is manageable in the amount of coding to change.
1) "Escape" command
This is addressing that "Detach" is not reliable. No, it is not. A few battles in I've already seen this example: With a line of ~11 dreadnoughts when one is struck by a torpedo, lets call her Sinky. This is before any torpedo protection and thankfully the torpedoes are still weak. I manually detach Sinky and sail her away from the battle at a slow five knots. There is an ongoing maneuvering and the battle with full speed ships gets near Sinky. Sinky rejoins the battle formation she came from. Sinky now steers toward the enemy. This is wrong. In a LOTR Gollum voice Sinky needs to "leave and never come back!"
I understand that the AI detaching and repairing has a place in the game. I need a way to ensure that ships I choose will not be caught up in this return to battle behaviour.
I believe the coding is simple to achieve by adding a new line to the formation orders. Call it something like "Escape". A ship on Escape has a cut-paste of the existing "detach" except an edit that prevents access to the "rejoin formation" part of the AI. Because of this being a cut-paste with a snip this should be easy to do.
In this model the player manual selects "Escape". The AI navy might or might-not get access to it as making that decision is a more complex AI coding matter. The "Escape" though does give the players a sense of proper control without the screaming at your laptop in a coffee shop of seeing Sinky sail back into battle.
2) Option not mandatory for DD on detach
The vanilla game assumption is that when a ship is detached for damaged to always grab one or more DD to escort it. This is not always correct for the tactical situation or for the player's fleet concept.
This gets really annoying in large battles after a few detachments what was 2 of 3 DD formations is now a cluster of single DDs. I have add dashing torpedo runs broken up by this scattering.
I acknowledge this is often a concept and the AI likely will retain this.
I would like an option to keep my DDs where they are.
This could be an option on the doctrine page.
This could be a manual selected "detach alone" or as part of the "escape" code above.
3) On rejoin merge orders where possible
When Sinky was going away a CL was sent to protect her on "Screen". When Sinky rejoined her formation the CL formation didn't go to screen that formation but instead went on "Independent" with a blank assigned formation.
I feel its appropriate that formations assigned to a detachment that rolls up should have their assignment changed to that merged formation with same type. In this example when Sinky rejoined Battle Force 5 that the CL should have had its orders changed to Screen assigned to Battle Force 5.
There can be an issue with the "Core" order but all the others are doable. I'd rather see "Core" as an exception or left out for now with the simple code change for screen/support/scout etc set up like this.
Thank you again for the game. There are many amazing aspects to it.
I hope you can agree that the suggestions here are of manageable amount to code to implement the improvement in this game.
Sinky needs to stop thinking they have the Princess onboard.
After being adventuring in other seas I've sailed back to enjoy the Rule The Waves 2 environment. That is a big positive, that even after many hours of play, many hours away that someone will still come back for more.
Now for the constructive negative for improvement. A mix of suggestion making and bug report.
There are mattes about the "detach" commands that are a frustration that I do feel is manageable in the amount of coding to change.
1) "Escape" command
This is addressing that "Detach" is not reliable. No, it is not. A few battles in I've already seen this example: With a line of ~11 dreadnoughts when one is struck by a torpedo, lets call her Sinky. This is before any torpedo protection and thankfully the torpedoes are still weak. I manually detach Sinky and sail her away from the battle at a slow five knots. There is an ongoing maneuvering and the battle with full speed ships gets near Sinky. Sinky rejoins the battle formation she came from. Sinky now steers toward the enemy. This is wrong. In a LOTR Gollum voice Sinky needs to "leave and never come back!"
I understand that the AI detaching and repairing has a place in the game. I need a way to ensure that ships I choose will not be caught up in this return to battle behaviour.
I believe the coding is simple to achieve by adding a new line to the formation orders. Call it something like "Escape". A ship on Escape has a cut-paste of the existing "detach" except an edit that prevents access to the "rejoin formation" part of the AI. Because of this being a cut-paste with a snip this should be easy to do.
In this model the player manual selects "Escape". The AI navy might or might-not get access to it as making that decision is a more complex AI coding matter. The "Escape" though does give the players a sense of proper control without the screaming at your laptop in a coffee shop of seeing Sinky sail back into battle.
2) Option not mandatory for DD on detach
The vanilla game assumption is that when a ship is detached for damaged to always grab one or more DD to escort it. This is not always correct for the tactical situation or for the player's fleet concept.
This gets really annoying in large battles after a few detachments what was 2 of 3 DD formations is now a cluster of single DDs. I have add dashing torpedo runs broken up by this scattering.
I acknowledge this is often a concept and the AI likely will retain this.
I would like an option to keep my DDs where they are.
This could be an option on the doctrine page.
This could be a manual selected "detach alone" or as part of the "escape" code above.
3) On rejoin merge orders where possible
When Sinky was going away a CL was sent to protect her on "Screen". When Sinky rejoined her formation the CL formation didn't go to screen that formation but instead went on "Independent" with a blank assigned formation.
I feel its appropriate that formations assigned to a detachment that rolls up should have their assignment changed to that merged formation with same type. In this example when Sinky rejoined Battle Force 5 that the CL should have had its orders changed to Screen assigned to Battle Force 5.
There can be an issue with the "Core" order but all the others are doable. I'd rather see "Core" as an exception or left out for now with the simple code change for screen/support/scout etc set up like this.
Thank you again for the game. There are many amazing aspects to it.
I hope you can agree that the suggestions here are of manageable amount to code to implement the improvement in this game.
Sinky needs to stop thinking they have the Princess onboard.