lumpy
New Member
Posts: 30
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Post by lumpy on Jun 24, 2019 12:30:14 GMT -6
I really like this game, and I am having a lot of fun with it. But sometimes, it feels as though large parts of the game is just sitting through engagements where I do nothing but wait for the time to pass. Almost half, if not more, of the battles I fight are ones which I decide are not worth fighting, for instance if you get two destroyers pitted against an enemy CA. Now, I think it is reasonable that such matchups can happen, we are subjected to limited intel, after all. What really frustrates me is that I have to excruciatingly wait until the battle time is up, and more often than not, time can't be accelerated faster than 'fast', because the AI shoots up some random merchants.
It doesn't help that even when you turn off all of the 'pause' events, the game resets the time to 'normal' whenever offscreen AI divisions sight each other. This means you have to actively babysit the time acceleration setting, even though you have nothing to do at all. This is the single most frustrating aspect of the game for me, and it turns this game into more of a time sink than it has to be.
Is there any particular reason we are not allowed to set time acceleration to 'ultra high' when player controlled divisions are not in sight of the enemy? I find myself skipping the notorious coastal raid missions almost always, because the risk of getting a handful of destroyers pitted against a more potent enemy force is just too great. The imbalanced battles are not the problem, the fact that we have to sit through those engagement is.
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Post by rimbecano on Jun 24, 2019 13:13:42 GMT -6
I think it's meant to forestall situations where the player accidentally hits the 3-hour or "forever" button at ultra-fast time acceleration in the middle of combat, which could have disastrous results.
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Post by cogsandspigots on Jun 24, 2019 14:26:41 GMT -6
Sorry, man, this isn't a spongebob square pants game where every 1.0873 seconds your senses are assaulted with something new to keep you riveted to your chair, toothpicks in your eyelids. This is a real naval sim and uhhh... ships are slow, bro. Can you ever disagree with someone without being a jerk about it? |
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Post by dizzy on Jun 24, 2019 14:32:03 GMT -6
Sorry, man, this isn't a spongebob square pants game where every 1.0873 seconds your senses are assaulted with something new to keep you riveted to your chair, toothpicks in your eyelids. This is a real naval sim and uhhh... ships are slow, bro. Can you ever disagree with someone without being a jerk about it? Tell you what, cogsandspigots, if it turns out that lumpy has never seen a spongebob squarepants episode, I'll apologize. |
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Post by Blothorn on Jun 24, 2019 14:32:18 GMT -6
IIRC higher time settings increase the simulation timestep rather than just speeding up animation, which means that combat fidelity is lost at higher speeds. I recall advice in RTW1 that even fast speed could cause trouble in torpedo engagements between small ships, and higher speeds would probably do worse things.
I think the simple/relatively safe solution is a persistent "fastest available" option which would drop to fast when uncontrolled ships entered combat and automatically reset to ultra-fast when possible, which wouldn't do much to speed up resolution but would avoid most of the tedium.
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Post by rob06waves2018 on Jun 24, 2019 14:50:22 GMT -6
I really like this game, and I am having a lot of fun with it. But sometimes, it feels as though large parts of the game is just sitting through engagements where I do nothing but wait for the time to pass. Almost half, if not more, of the battles I fight are ones which I decide are not worth fighting, for instance if you get two destroyers pitted against an enemy CA. Now, I think it is reasonable that such matchups can happen, we are subjected to limited intel, after all. What really frustrates me is that I have to excruciatingly wait until the battle time is up, and more often than not, time can't be accelerated faster than 'fast', because the AI shoots up some random merchants. It doesn't help that even when you turn off all of the 'pause' events, the game resets the time to 'normal' whenever offscreen AI divisions sight each other. This means you have to actively babysit the time acceleration setting, even though you have nothing to do at all. This is the single most frustrating aspect of the game for me, and it turns this game into more of a time sink than it has to be. Is there any particular reason we are not allowed to set time acceleration to 'ultra high' when player controlled divisions are not in sight of the enemy? I find myself skipping the notorious coastal raid missions almost always, because the risk of getting a handful of destroyers pitted against a more potent enemy force is just too great. The imbalanced battles are not the problem, the fact that we have to sit through those engagement is. I too find this annoying. I just skip coastal raids by default unless I'm sure they don't have ships in the area. If you've the VP to spare, who can be bothered? Destroyer battles fall into the same category. Here's hoping tortuga power gets his auto-resolver working soon. |
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Post by zabieru on Jun 24, 2019 16:13:32 GMT -6
Can you ever disagree with someone without being a jerk about it? Tell you what, cogsandspigots , if it turns out that lumpy has never seen a spongebob squarepants episode, I'll apologize. I've never seen a spongebob squarepants episode and I agree with Lumpy: running out the clock on non-fighting engagements is obnoxious. You see, unlike Dizzy, I have a "life" and also "things to do" which means that I am too busy with "real man activities" to enjoy sitting around watching my 34kt destroyer run away from the 22kt CAs and clicking the advance-time button again every time the game pauses because of a report or shot at a merchant.
Some sort of autoresolve or autodisengage would be a real help. The "No contact between fleets" end-condition is halfway there, but a more robust version would be great: first, make it optional (because I've had no-contact-between-fleets trigger in the early morning, when there was plenty of battle time left to fight after dawn/floatplane o'clock) and second, make it user-triggerable (so I can call for the game to check and verify that my ships are more than X distance from theirs and have enough speed to escape). Extra credit for allowing a sacrifice play: you know, "the following vessels will be caught and likely destroyed, are you sure you want to end the battle?"
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lumpy
New Member
Posts: 30
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Post by lumpy on Jun 24, 2019 16:14:54 GMT -6
Sorry, man, this isn't a spongebob square pants game where every 1.0873 seconds your senses are assaulted with something new to keep you riveted to your chair, toothpicks in your eyelids. This is a real naval sim and uhhh... ships are slow, bro. I'm sorry, this isn't even a response to the point I was making. I am not complaining about the slow pace of the game, which is pretty much a given, and appreciatedly so. I am pointing out that fairly often, there is nothing to do at all besides upping the time acceleration and waiting for the engagement to conclude, because I either don't even have divisions under my control anymore, or I chose to disengage with my controlled divisions. In so far, you didn't really address what I was saying. Nice attempt at sounding elitist, though, two thumbs up. I think the easiest solution would be something like what Blothorn is suggesting, some special "handsoff mode" checkbox that automatically keeps setting the time acceleration to the fastest possible level. Even when unticking every automatic pause condition in the preferences, the time acceleration switches back to 'normal' when AI forces meet, even when 'fast' would be possible. This means I can't just wait handsoff and do something else while the AI forces duke it out among themselves, I actually have to sit through the whole thing and periodically up the time acceleration again. In engagements with longer time limits, this can take up to 10 minutes and more. |
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Post by JagdFlanker on Jun 24, 2019 16:24:02 GMT -6
IIRC higher time settings increase the simulation timestep rather than just speeding up animation, which means that combat fidelity is lost at higher speeds. I recall advice in RTW1 that even fast speed could cause trouble in torpedo engagements between small ships, and higher speeds would probably do worse things. I think the simple/relatively safe solution is a persistent "fastest available" option which would drop to fast when uncontrolled ships entered combat and automatically reset to ultra-fast when possible, which wouldn't do much to speed up resolution but would avoid most of the tedium. a 'fastest time available' checkbox on the battle screen would be amazing, especially when i send my ships back to port early and i still have to run out the clock
having to keep pressing the 'c' key because the enemy keeps bumping into my KEs and messing with the time speed settings is a pain when i have no ships to control to do anything about it
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Post by williammiller on Jun 25, 2019 10:58:13 GMT -6
Let me repeat myself, for the Nth time over these past few weeks:
READ THIS ANNOUNCEMENT, PLEASE:
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Post by mycophobia on Jun 25, 2019 12:34:03 GMT -6
Continuing the discussion here, I know the team had mentioned that “Force ending scenario” are not done to prevent players from avoiding losses by simply “quitting”.
I’d suggest that in scenarios where player’s fleet had successfully gotten away from the enemy, prolonging the scenario just to see how many merchant ship the enemy could sink is a huge time waste for the player. In those cases, where either player fleet is entirely within port, or sufficiently far from the enemy, we should have an option to end the engagement and accept loss of all/most merchant ship in an area around enemy ships or a flat VP loss.
Player cans till have the option to wait if they so desire, maybe a Friendly AI BB patrol will catch the raider or something. But they shouldn’t be made to wait. (Even with a “max possible speed” option, I feel some of those 1000 hr coastal raids would still take too long, since AI will constantly pop in and out of vision of some transport or patrol boat all the time)
Not every coastal raid needs to be a exciting “hunt the scharnhorst” scenario, but if the player have to retreat and let ai do whatever with their transports, I feel some degree of abstraction will not detract from overall realism and helps smooth out gameplay
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Post by williammiller on Jun 25, 2019 12:56:23 GMT -6
I point Fredrik W to the suggestions in this thread about possible ways to address time issues, thanks. |
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Post by dizzy on Jun 25, 2019 14:34:35 GMT -6
The game works fine concerning speed and shouldn't be changed in this regard. How can you? The problem is that there is no 'one size fits all' to ending a scenario for the reasons stated in above posts. I do agree with one aspect that may be fitting, mycophobia says some situations are 'a huge time waste for the player' and an option to force quit the scenario should be offered, although with conditions to alleviate concerns the devs had with preventing more casualties/cheating. - All player Divisions must be either sunk or ported. - Anything left is auto-destroyed/sunk. - Edit: This still has a problem with what happens to aircraft. I really don't know how to fix that, nor have I read of any good ideas how to. That way you aren't sitting there waiting to see what happens to one or more merchant ships. If anyone has a better idea, I'd love to hear it. lumpy also has a good idea with 'checkbox that automatically keeps setting the time acceleration to the fastest possible level.' |
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Post by zabieru on Jun 26, 2019 2:18:50 GMT -6
The game works fine concerning speed and shouldn't be changed in this regard. How can you? The problem is that there is no 'one size fits all' to ending a scenario for the reasons stated in above posts. I do agree with one aspect that may be fitting, mycophobia says some situations are 'a huge time waste for the player' and an option to force quit the scenario should be offered, although with conditions to alleviate concerns the devs had with preventing more casualties/cheating. - All player Divisions must be either sunk or ported. - Anything left is auto-destroyed/sunk. - Edit: This still has a problem with what happens to aircraft. I really don't know how to fix that, nor have I read of any good ideas how to. That way you aren't sitting there waiting to see what happens to one or more merchant ships. If anyone has a better idea, I'd love to hear it. lumpy also has a good idea with 'checkbox that automatically keeps setting the time acceleration to the fastest possible level.' Aircraft are easy to handle: check if they still have a base, check if they have range to get there, check the time and speed to see when they'd land, then let them make the appropriate landing roll.
Dunno if I'd go quite as far as auto-destroying every straggler, myself. A little lightweight auto-resolve logic would go a long way, there: anything that's currently spotted (by a non-sinking enemy) dies. Anything unspotted and faster than any enemy gets away. Anything unspotted and farther from any enemy than X+(speed difference*remaining battle time) gets away. Then do a bit of pairing-off: for every two 30kt+ destroyers they have, they catch and kill one of mine. The rest get away. And so on. The possibility of enemy airstrikes is an issue, but you could handle that by counting some number of aircraft (based on tech/class/etc) as another auto-destroyed straggler. Probably stragglers like this should have a higher chance of mine/submarine encounters, too, but not catastrophically high.
That goes double for ships outside player control. Some CL in the Support Force on the other side of the island and totally out of reach shouldn't sink just because I hit the button.
I don't personally find the "put flag division into port, wait for flag to transfer to next out-of-contact division, point it at port, rinse and repeat" gameplay loop very compelling, especially when the divisions in question are three minor destroyer divisions and three detached single destroyers. (Though that could also be solved with a "all divisions make for port" button as well.)
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