3 New Bugs (1.18)

[gildeddawn]

So far I'm loving the new patch, but I have encountered 3 bugs that I would like to mention. I didn't notice any previous post regarding any of them. The first 2 are related to battles and quite problematic, while the third is more of a balance/immersion problem, although it is still a problem.

All of these are from the same save:

France 1900, Very Large fleet size

It's worth noting that this save was started on patch 1.15, from which it was updated directly to patch 1.18 at around 1924 in game.

I will start with the worst bug. This only started after I started building Carriers (i.e. it never happened when it was only BBs and BCs as capital ships).

With CVs, however, the game throws some variant of the following error on I would say around half of large engagements (Fleet Battle, Battleship Engagement, etc.):

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It always does it for multiple divisions, in this case Carrier Division 12 and Destroyer Division 17. It is usually a core division that is supposed to be attached to one of the lead divisions that the player controls, plus any other divisions that would have been attached to that core division (in this case the destroyer screen).

In battle this manifests as the core division spawning far apart from its lead division, usually next to a different core division. For this example:

The lead division of the CV force (Carrier Division 5), is on the left along with the second CV division (CV Division 9) and their escorts. The BB force is in front of them, and is a separate force. CV Division 12 is on the right, next to the battlecruiser force, although it is still set to be attached to the CV force. In this case, they are not too far apart, but I have seen it be much worse.

[gildeddawn]

An astute observer might notice that Destroyer Division 17 is missing from the above screen shot. If we zoom out a bit,

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Found it!

Obviously, it will not be participating in the coming battle. Missing a destroyer screen from the third CV division of the CV force is probably not a huge loss, but I'm also pretty sure they aren't supposed to be down there.

[gildeddawn]

Here is the save folder.

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Had to split it to get them both under 1 MB.

[gildeddawn]

The second problem is more straightforward. The game will sometimes generate coastal raid missions where the static land target is located right next to the base, too far within its "minefield" for light cruiser guns to be able to reach it. Thus, if all you have is light cruisers and destroyers, which is not unusual for that mission type, then it is literally impossible to destroy the target. The bases I've encountered this problem at are Colon in Panama and Pensacola in Gulf Coast. Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot.

The last problem has to do with AI ship construction.

I have added a number of new design templates for the AI to use. Some of them are from Dizzy that I downloaded via his mod, while others are of my own creation. With these new templates available, the AI has started using them, which is great.

The US has already constructed a BB of 89000 tons.

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You can see they are also constructing some 72000 tonners. This isn't a problem in of itself; it's actually what I wanted. But, with that being said there is a problem:

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Their dock size is 64000, which is (according to maths) considerably smaller than 89000, or even 72000. Germany is also currently building an 89000 ton battleship. Their dock size is 65000.

In addition to it being immersion breaking, this presents a balance problem since I am not currently capable of building a ship that could challenge one of these monsters, and I won't be for a long time. Of course, I could remove the offending template and add it back later once everyone has larger docks, but (a) I would rather not have to do that and (b) it probably wouldn't be enough.

The AI seems to have a strong preference for picking the last template for BBs for the appropriate era, and BCs to a lesser extent. This is X9 for both B4 and B5. If you go to the ship designer and tell it to autodesign a BB in the save I included (I will attach the IDes file I'm using), there is I would say at least a 70% chance it will give you a design using the B5X9 template, even though the country I'm playing as doesn't have large enough docks to build it either. It will sprinkle in some other templates if you keep spamming autodesign, but it is clear who the favorite is. When I did this a couple years ago in game, the template next most often used was B4X9, which was already pretty obsolete by that point. Autodesign will still regularly give you BC4X9 at the current date if you tell it to design BCs, but it doesn't seem to have the same preference for BC5X9 as it does for B5X9.

Also, if you select other countries' docks and then autodesing, it might use some other B5 templates more often (AH will even still give you B4X9), depending on what caliber of guns that country has access to. Even if it that country doesn't have 20 inch guns, it will still pick B5X9 some (using smaller guns, but still with an 80000+ ton displacement). But, once a country has invented 20 inch guns it seems to usually go for B5X9.

Based on the ships the AI countries have been building, I suspect their designers are looking back to previous eras some as well. A country will build a class of state of the art BBs or BCs, and then its next class will look like it was designed a decade ago, probably because it was. This is not unique to transitioning from B4 to B5. For some ships types, such as CVs, there seem to be hard cutoff dates when the designers will switch to the next era, but BB and BC designers appear to have some flexibility.

I doubt someone using the default templates would experience any of this, but since I am not I thought I would bring it to your attention. I apologize if that got rambly, but the main problem is just the AI building ships substantially larger than its dock size, although I would be interested to know the calculation for how the AI chooses which design template(s) to use.

[gildeddawn]

The IDes folder:

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[williammiller]

Thanks for the reports, will add these to our internal list.