Post by boatlet on May 22, 2019 21:38:22 GMT -6
Really enjoy the game, here are some thoughts based off of Austria-Hungary/Italy.
1: Airbases: With the addition of aircraft which I can say is a lot of fun has its downsides. By about the late 40s France, UK, A-H and Italy have constructed huge amounts of airfields and combined with carriers it was the norm for every battle to involve almost 3000 aircraft. As a result every battle has about 10% air losses and nearly endless air actions most of which are irrelevant for the battle at hand. The result is a long time spamming the fastforward button for a long time hoping to end the game when its over. Setting all the ships to port before the inclusion of aircraft was a good way to end the battle (unless they are killing TRs or land targets). Now, you can set ships to port and watch empty ocean for a long time as planes do irrelevant stuff for a long time. I havent timed it but im sure others will have noticed.
Land based aircraft are also exceptionally powerful and never seem to attack friendly ships on accident. So what happens is, at least in my games, I engage briefly to damage the enemy then retreat while planes battle it out. I dont even need CVs by about 1955 as land based air power dominates.
2: Errors and Fishy things:
I know some of this is realistic to a degree and the famous Malta and Crete battles are evidence of the importance of landbases but as far as gameplay goes it is bland to have near perfect hordes of planes who, due to their volume and frequency of attacks are mathematically going to sink almost all the ships that they oppose. Anti Air and AI fighters (I dont think their fighter designs are very good) are just not effective.
If I could offer some suggestions to fix this issue it would be to try add the element of miscommunication and navigation errors to planes. I believe Italy had huge white and red stripes painted on their ships to avoid friendly fire, but in this game planes never seem unsure of their targets. Planes never seem to get lost. I feel like they hit far more than they should too, every time my planes drop torpedoes I get a chain of 4-10 torpedo hit messages.
The other method to fix land base air is to add other commitments to the planes. If a large portion of planes are assumed to be in rotation, assisting in the defence of the nation from strategic bombing, assisting in strategic bombing the enemy, patrolling and many, many more duties and jobs I would suggest turning land based airpower into a hybrid of subs and ship in implementation. Have airpower battle it out in an abstract VP screen like submarines, but in battle you get a random portion of airpower allocated to you from land that you can request much like CVs work.
Combine the 2 fixes above and land based airpower wont turn the game into "watch the air messages for 30 minutes" while your ships sit in port or swim in circles.
Now to be clear, I love how the planes work in terms of developing them. In fact I would love it if you could request ship designs in a similar way (but you can tweak them) as an option one day. I love how the CVs work mostly too. Most of the game is great but the above issues stop me from playing another game for a bit. I have thought about playing without building the bases, but then id have the same issue except the AI will rule the skies.
This is a huge wall of text probably with errors but I havent seen it discussed in my brief look.
There are a huge host of minor issues too like:
Auto ship design adding DP but you cannot untick it because its greyed out. Meaning you have to restart the design to fix it.
Enemy Designs are sometimes well ahead of their time, especially early game. Late game their designs can be terrible, I once saw the Graf Zeppelin at 30k displacement with a hangar capacity of 2 planes for example.
At the beginning of a lot of battles, where you cannot change the course at the beginning, the lead ship does a U -Turn forcing all the ships to turn and follow until air recon or radar spots the enemy allowing you to control your ships.
At one point I tried to win the game with nearly no ships, so scrapped most of my fleet. I still won the war by sheer airpower from land but the game spawned in random ships which had been scrapped sometimes back in the first decade of the game for me to fight with. Forcing me to build more ships until i stopped getting ancient ships from the past resurrected to fight my battles.
The massive amount of land based planes sometimes lags out the game, resulting in the game ending, but continuing in the background, resulting in more endscreens trying to pop up with errors.
Operational losses are insane, for a long time I would suffer about 150 operational losses a battle and the AI a similar amount with air kills and AA kills being a rarity. Maybe its intentional but I find it kind of weird how, say when I have 200 zeppelins 30 would be lost as operational losses. Over time this decreases but it just feels like its way too high.
I cant think of anything else... I hope this gets read. Dont get me wrong I love the game, have played 2 full playthroughs at 1900 start. I will try the pacific and see if the issues are the same as int he Med.
If someone is playing in the late game and wants a chuckle, build a heavy cruiser about 10k displacement with a lot of 6inch guns with autoloader, DP and max AA (dont worry about armour or torp protection) and build a DD version of 2k Displacement and watch as your hit log is spammed with endless hits (use gunnery training). 3 CAs and a bunch of supporting DDs with such a rate of fire is insane and they sometimes even shoot down Aircraft.
Also the zep mentioned earlier
1: Airbases: With the addition of aircraft which I can say is a lot of fun has its downsides. By about the late 40s France, UK, A-H and Italy have constructed huge amounts of airfields and combined with carriers it was the norm for every battle to involve almost 3000 aircraft. As a result every battle has about 10% air losses and nearly endless air actions most of which are irrelevant for the battle at hand. The result is a long time spamming the fastforward button for a long time hoping to end the game when its over. Setting all the ships to port before the inclusion of aircraft was a good way to end the battle (unless they are killing TRs or land targets). Now, you can set ships to port and watch empty ocean for a long time as planes do irrelevant stuff for a long time. I havent timed it but im sure others will have noticed.
Land based aircraft are also exceptionally powerful and never seem to attack friendly ships on accident. So what happens is, at least in my games, I engage briefly to damage the enemy then retreat while planes battle it out. I dont even need CVs by about 1955 as land based air power dominates.
2: Errors and Fishy things:
- After enemy Torps from planes are dropped in a large number for some reason I get a message that the ship being torped has struck a mine. Now this could be normal but it just seems weird how common it is. Is this some sort of special ordinance or a genuine error?
- Putting CVs to port crashes the game if some planes are still in the air. In order to save my game I have to spam space bar and click save and hope the click registers between the error message.
- Fighters are only good on the defence. I dont bother sending fighters as escorts because they just die and seem to have little effect on the death rate of the CAS planes. I have a lot fighters but keep them for defence and often on most games my fighters killed 250+ planes at a loss of about 40 in air to air combat. Anti Air, even in the 60s is lucky to get 8 kills.
- Continuing on from above the AA is weak. I built a fleet entirely of AA, maxed AA to the maximum. I could do this because even though I hadnt maxed my airbase caps (not even close) my ships barely had to fight unless it was night and they happened to meet. Even then they seemed to be no better off than outdated ships with no AA. Airbase AA is even weaker (I would assume they would be superior to naval AA).
- Lighter than Air renders recon irrelevant. If you build Zep bases everywhere (just 8 each) every game they scour the world for ships. I never other with floatplanes or recon from CVs etc because the lighter than air does it better and instantly launches. Catapult launched recon from BBs and so on, should be really important but zeps make them a waste of weight.
- Medium Bombers. I see no reason for them, not once have they done anything. Even if they bomb an airfield it seems inconsequential as there are little to no long term effects and many hits are duds.
I know some of this is realistic to a degree and the famous Malta and Crete battles are evidence of the importance of landbases but as far as gameplay goes it is bland to have near perfect hordes of planes who, due to their volume and frequency of attacks are mathematically going to sink almost all the ships that they oppose. Anti Air and AI fighters (I dont think their fighter designs are very good) are just not effective.
If I could offer some suggestions to fix this issue it would be to try add the element of miscommunication and navigation errors to planes. I believe Italy had huge white and red stripes painted on their ships to avoid friendly fire, but in this game planes never seem unsure of their targets. Planes never seem to get lost. I feel like they hit far more than they should too, every time my planes drop torpedoes I get a chain of 4-10 torpedo hit messages.
The other method to fix land base air is to add other commitments to the planes. If a large portion of planes are assumed to be in rotation, assisting in the defence of the nation from strategic bombing, assisting in strategic bombing the enemy, patrolling and many, many more duties and jobs I would suggest turning land based airpower into a hybrid of subs and ship in implementation. Have airpower battle it out in an abstract VP screen like submarines, but in battle you get a random portion of airpower allocated to you from land that you can request much like CVs work.
Combine the 2 fixes above and land based airpower wont turn the game into "watch the air messages for 30 minutes" while your ships sit in port or swim in circles.
Now to be clear, I love how the planes work in terms of developing them. In fact I would love it if you could request ship designs in a similar way (but you can tweak them) as an option one day. I love how the CVs work mostly too. Most of the game is great but the above issues stop me from playing another game for a bit. I have thought about playing without building the bases, but then id have the same issue except the AI will rule the skies.
This is a huge wall of text probably with errors but I havent seen it discussed in my brief look.
There are a huge host of minor issues too like:
Auto ship design adding DP but you cannot untick it because its greyed out. Meaning you have to restart the design to fix it.
Enemy Designs are sometimes well ahead of their time, especially early game. Late game their designs can be terrible, I once saw the Graf Zeppelin at 30k displacement with a hangar capacity of 2 planes for example.
At the beginning of a lot of battles, where you cannot change the course at the beginning, the lead ship does a U -Turn forcing all the ships to turn and follow until air recon or radar spots the enemy allowing you to control your ships.
At one point I tried to win the game with nearly no ships, so scrapped most of my fleet. I still won the war by sheer airpower from land but the game spawned in random ships which had been scrapped sometimes back in the first decade of the game for me to fight with. Forcing me to build more ships until i stopped getting ancient ships from the past resurrected to fight my battles.
The massive amount of land based planes sometimes lags out the game, resulting in the game ending, but continuing in the background, resulting in more endscreens trying to pop up with errors.
Operational losses are insane, for a long time I would suffer about 150 operational losses a battle and the AI a similar amount with air kills and AA kills being a rarity. Maybe its intentional but I find it kind of weird how, say when I have 200 zeppelins 30 would be lost as operational losses. Over time this decreases but it just feels like its way too high.
I cant think of anything else... I hope this gets read. Dont get me wrong I love the game, have played 2 full playthroughs at 1900 start. I will try the pacific and see if the issues are the same as int he Med.
If someone is playing in the late game and wants a chuckle, build a heavy cruiser about 10k displacement with a lot of 6inch guns with autoloader, DP and max AA (dont worry about armour or torp protection) and build a DD version of 2k Displacement and watch as your hit log is spammed with endless hits (use gunnery training). 3 CAs and a bunch of supporting DDs with such a rate of fire is insane and they sometimes even shoot down Aircraft.
Also the zep mentioned earlier