Open letter to the developers regarding gameplay problems

[dougalachi]

I have hundreds of hours in this game but this is my first post because I have never been more incredibly upset.

1. Your algorithms send my cruisers into shore bombardment missions where the radius of port protection surrounding the target is greater than the range of my guns so that I can't attack it. This is ridiculous and a waste of players' time. Also, how are you determining what ships that are available in the region to send in for the shore bombardment? Often, I have BCs and BBSs available in that, but you send in my 6" armed cruisers to attack 9-11" coastal guns. Again, RIDICULOUS!

2. I can send greater numbers of ships into a theater of operations than the enemy. Despite this, fleet engagements, especially when trying to stop an invasion of your territory, FOR SOME REASON, always seem to end with the AI being able to marshall his entire force in the sector while I am left with fractions of my available force, typically around half. WHAT IS THE RATIONALE FOR THIS? Why does the enemy always get to choose the battle size on their terms to their advantage while I am left holding the bag. This happened EVERY TIME during my campaign as UK while defending Canada from the US.

3. The "hidden flaws" in UK warships, which are somewhat derived from historical narrative, have decidedly taken on ridiculous size. Repeatedly losing multiple capitol ships in setpiece battles from HIDDEN FLAWS is absolutely unacceptable. The suspected historical problem was training to leave magazine doors open and creating an environment conducive to massive magazine explosions. TRAINING, NOT STRUCTURAL FLAWS. Why is this then continually a problem? Are we to believe Brits don't ever learn from their mistakes?

4. In general, I as a player get the very strong impression that the AI knows next to everything about my lineup in the bigger battles and gets to choose in what manner he will engage me. In comparison, I get shafted repeatedly because your game takes away my agency, the agency that the opponent AI seems to very well enjoy. What is your rationale for this? No admiral would choose to send his ships piecemeal against massively larger forces. Yet you keep forcing me into those confrontations. It is absolutely distressing to the point that I often regret purchasing this game and put it down for several months at a time. Give me the option to take every ship available if I so choose, even if it affects battles in other areas of the same region. This is not how you get someone to be a repeat buyer.

5. Why do you not model in conflicts between other nations to an extent beyond simply increasing my tension points? It is always the player nation that seems to be the focus of world aggression and attention.

6. I have repeatedly had situations where I was forced to build ships for the admiralty or lose. However, after choosing the half option, I have been saddled with the full ship amount.

7. You provide the opportunity on occasion to blow up ships at anchor, yet when this succeeds, the enemy sustained no actual loss of the kind of destroyed ship (BB) to their inventory.

8. When trying to negotiate the ends of wars, I get the feeling like it doesnt even matter what option I choose. Often I will receive a message that the enemy wants to surrender and is willing to negotiate some loss of territory or without border changes. When I select that we should accept their offer on lenient terms, more often than not the game will tell me that the negotiations failed. IS THIS ACTUALLY WORKING AS INTENDED? The enemy wants to surrender, I want to be lenient, and yet the gameplay algorithms say NO. WHY???

9. Where are your guides explaining the intricacies of combat management of single squadrons and targeting individual ships for each squadron?

10. Do US battleships have a hidden survivability modifier beyond the hidden flaws disadvantage of the British?

11. WHY IS IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SLOW DOWN SHIPS AFTER I HAVE DETACHED THEM? Several times a game, I lose ships to flooding because they want to go 16-20 knots after being detached from a battle for damage. Idiot AI are too stupid to slow down and I cant seem to stop them. I honestly can't think of anything more frustrating in this game than watching my ships sink on their way back to port because they don't know how to slow down to stop flooding.

I may add more points over the next few hours as more thoughts materialize. I prefer to play as Germany, but I have never had a more frustrating time than in my UK games. US games are absolute easy mode every single time. Is this also developer intention? Why not then simply note that?

[cteb]

Regarding 3: If I recall correctly the effect of this condition actually does decrease with every successive detonation. I don't recall the exact number but after perhaps 3-4 occourances your rate of flash fires becomes the same as other nations without the effect.

You are right that this condition has taken a situational truth applying to a very specific period of time out of context and applied it to the whole first half of the 20th century, to my understanding it is a contrivance to allow non-UK players to put some kind of dent in the UK's often monolithic mid game fleet.

[director]

While in general I agree with you, let me try to play Devil's Advocate.

RtW1 and 2 are intended to be a ship-design-and-budget sort of game that lets you test your ship designs in combat. The operational part - the force organization and mission assignment - is the barest sliver of tissue to connect the two, and for that reason it is the worst part of the game. We do all need to keep in mind that the game was not designed to be a war simulator, it was designed to let you test your designs in combat. Those are different, and the RtW approach is a lot simpler to code.

Because of this the game does not model things like wars between AI nations - at least not yet.

Hidden flaws can be switched off. There is some disagreement about the amount of blame spread over bad handling practices, general lack of flash-tightness, impurities in cordite propellant or a simple penetration of the armor, the latter leading to the loss of at least one BC and two CAs at Jutland... I do not believe there is a consensus around blaming handling procedures alone, nor were the British the only ones to suffer explosions... Leonardo Da Vinci, Mutsu, Maine, Liberte, and Vanguard all exploded outside of battle in modern times.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Ships_sunk_by_non-combat_internal_explosions

All messages asking for your input are in the manner of senior government officials asking for an opinion from a senior leader of a service branch - they are not obliged to give it much weight, though they can. You may recommend leniency, but if your government leader is someone like Kaiser Wilhelm II or Clemenceau, the war may well continue.

No, the US Navy doesn't have any special protection that i know of... but when Flash asks Bruce Wayne what his super power is, he says, "I'm rich."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-r7o7Ec9uA

The game doesn't have a lot of resources other than the guides, but the forum does. There are a number of threads on ship-handling and combat you can look up, or you can start a thread, or PM someone like me. I'll be glad to help if I can.


I share your frustrations and would add more of my own... but I hope this gives some perspective.

[rimbecano]

Feb 26, 2021 20:47:55 GMT -6 cteb said:

Regarding 3: If I recall correctly the effect of this condition actually does decrease with every successive detonation. I don't recall the exact number but after perhaps 3-4 occourances your rate of flash fires becomes the same as other nations without the effect.

You are right that this condition has taken a situational truth applying to a very specific period of time out of context and applied it to the whole first half of the 20th century, to my understanding it is a contrivance to allow non-UK players to put some kind of dent in the UK's often monolithic mid game fleet.

So there really were three problems that contributed to the British flash fire problem:

1) Poor flash safety procedures. This was recognized and corrected. On some ships it was not a great problem (e.g, Lion, whose gunnery officer, some time prior to Jutland, ordered the magazines swept and the sweepings dumped in a pile on deck. He then dropped a match into the pile with the turret crews looking on, after which everyone wore their magazine shoes).

2) Poor armor on BCs. This was recognized and corrected on new construction, but not much could be done for existing ships.

3) Touchy powder. Seydlitz survived a dual turret fire that actually reached both magazines involved, whereas I'm not aware of any British vessel that survived flash reaching the magazines. This was never corrected. IIRC, the British lost a BB (Royal Oak?) to a spontaneous flash fire in port in WWII, and the USN did a test on the flash susceptibility of US vs British powder in WWII in which the British powder did very poorly. Depending on where exactly the shell that destroyed Hood went off, this might have made the difference (e.g, if the shell went off in the engine room and sent splinters into the 4" magazines, then less volatile powder might have prevented the loss of the ship. If the shell went off in the middle of a magazine, the ship was probably doomed with any powder).

[Deleted]

I have always jokingly said that if you want to play as the Royal Navy, the "hunt for Bismarck" in this game would look like this:
Germans have Bismarck, but also both Scharnhorst BBs, both Hipper CAs, both Deutschland BBs, both Deutschland CAs, all light cruisers and destroyers, but the Royal Navy has no Prince of Wales, Rodney ofcourse cannot go faster than 23kts, the force H doesnt join the fight. And even if you can damage Bismarck´s rudder without force H, Bismarck can just fix it in an hour or so (the same applies to its radar).
The game basically pushes into building bigger, better and more expensive ships, because if you want to go for quantity instead of quality, the game screws you on every occasion.

[dia]

Feb 26, 2021 20:48:55 GMT -6 director said:

RtW1 and 2 are intended to be a ship-design-and-budget sort of game that lets you test your ship designs in combat. The operational part - the force organization and mission assignment - is the barest sliver of tissue to connect the two, and for that reason it is the worst part of the game. We do all need to keep in mind that the game was not designed to be a war simulator, it was designed to let you test your designs in combat. Those are different, and the RtW approach is a lot simpler to code.

You're not wrong, but the operational aspect of ship designing is just as important as the physical. Ships are designed for a purpose and role. The game super simplifies that using classes with strict roles with little player input and an overreliance on dice roles to model reality. While there is a good amount of design leeway for the player in this system, it ultimately results in meta designs that fit the expected deployment of their class type. There's no point building specialized ships unless you can cheese the system using the status feature - which only works for TP and raiding really. Even CLAA's are a joke. Even with the necessary equipment to make a CL and CLAA they end up deploying in the wrong formation most times. I can see situations where you can't deploy your CLAAs as screens, but why the hell would anyone organize a force of plentiful general purpose CLs and CLAA's under the same flagship, in the wrong formations? I see this all the time in fleet battles.

I've seen and made my own suggestions to allow players to assign roles or sub-classes to designs, possibly from a predetermined list, to help the battle generator "understand" what the player's intentions are with a specific design. But I've never seen any kind of feedback. 
 

[jatzi]

I've heard and it makes a lot of sense that the battle generator often tries to balance battles so that no one is overly out numbered, even the AI. There may be a slight bias towards letting the AI have more ships, if available, in battles and this again makes sense from a certain point of view. The AI cannot hope to match us players in combat skill, the difficulty settings make the game harder by removing more and more control from the player not by making the AI better. Player ships can usually be counted on to be better than AI ships as well. As such it stands to reason that they'd often have more ships in battle to offset this skill, and ship quality, disparity by way of numbers.

[dougalachi]

Feb 27, 2021 0:37:13 GMT -6 jatzi said:

I've heard and it makes a lot of sense that the battle generator often tries to balance battles so that no one is overly out numbered, even the AI. There may be a slight bias towards letting the AI have more ships, if available, in battles and this again makes sense from a certain point of view. The AI cannot hope to match us players in combat skill, the difficulty settings make the game harder by removing more and more control from the player not by making the AI better. Player ships can usually be counted on to be better than AI ships as well. As such it stands to reason that they'd often have more ships in battle to offset this skill, and ship quality, disparity by way of numbers.

Nothing personal, but when you are playing against the US, that argument doesn't hold water. It is VERY hard to outproduce the US Navy. If you want any hope of winning, you need decisive battles where you can throw everything at the wall and make something stick while you have the chance. They have created a dynamic that artificially helps the AI to the point that  you are very unlikely to win against an opponent that can outproduce you if they limit battles to when they aren't disadvantaged. I don't have that ability as the player, but the strongest AI nation who can outproduce anyone else gets this? It's ridiculous. Why bother playing UK then if your main competitor is always able to neuter your fleet campaigns by choosing how many ships they want to fight against.

[director]

dia - you're not wrong, and I have argued strenuously in other threads that the game mechanics need a major overhaul of the operational elements.

However, the game was designed and intended to be what it is - which was the substance of my reply. I agree that it could and should be something more... but it is what it was intended to be, and that's why the operational aspect is just a sketch.

My analogy is that you get to be the team owner and manager. You get to decide on the budget and draft the players, and you get to coach them in the game... but you have no control over who plays, or how many players you get, or which position they get assigned to or even which field they play on. So it doesn't matter if you spend money for a terrific batter, or running back, or point guard, because they'll either be left on the bench or have to play frisbee golf in Alaska.

My current frustration is that it is 1950 and I'm in a war with Spain, but I can barely afford to keep my CAs and CLs in service - I can afford to operate no capital ships other than a handful of carriers, and I run fewer airplanes than any other power. Oh, and 10-20% of my entire sub fleet has been sunk, turn after turn - by Spain. If and when I win this war my reward will be a budget slashed so hard that even if I put every single ship in reserve I'll still go bankrupt.

So really... why go on? How is this remotely realistic? Can you name a naval power of WW1 or 2 that literally could not afford to keep a single capital ship in service? Some were sidelined for political reasons (Germany) or resources (Italy) or swamped by airpower (Japan)... or for obsolescence (Britain) or damage (US)... or even for lack of ports (Russia) but absolutely nobody worried about balancing the budget to the degree that the #2 naval power could not pay to run a single capital warship.

This... is not fun, nor realistic, nor reasonable. It is a symptom of a game system that has been pushed outside the limits it was designed for and the coming DLC seems to argue that the solution for these problems is to push the time-frame out even farther. I do not think this will help.

I can tell you flatly that I will not buy a DLC unless or until it addresses the issues with mission generation and force composition - that's become a hard deal-breaker for me. Players have been nicely and politely and helpfully talking about game issues and suggesting fixes for years, and dia, you are not alone. None of our suggestions have ever had a meaningful, substantive reply, or even an acknowledgement that there are issues, much less seen or heard of progress toward resolution. I don't think the designers owe us a reply - I just think it would be smart and in their own best interest to make some effort to talk to people who have given them money, praised the game, advertised and recruited for it and who are now willing to pay more to have some annoying problems fixed. I would also point out that the extended silence has not made criticism go away, but given the lack of people on the forum these days I think players are going away and this is one reason why.

The game does a lot of things right. The ship design aspects are very good. The tactical AI is better than any other I've seen, though something is out-of-whack with night combat and torpedoes. The airpower system and the radar mechanics have some fun bits and mostly work OK. The graphics and UI are clunky but oddly charming. The technology system works and the strategic level does a good job of putting you in the CNO's seat, working to get the most bang for your limited bucks. I've gotten more than my money's worth of entertainment value from the RtW games.

But after you've played for a while it all seems pointless if generic all-purpose ships are always the best option, if you have little or no say over operations and can't afford to keep ships manned in wartime anyway.

So here it is: redo the mission generator and give players some control over force composition. Or you can extend it back to the Napoleonic Wars and forward to antigravity for all I care, because I won't be buying it.

[dia]

director
I'm in total agreement. The game lacks longevity and I think it's starting to show. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like more and more players are getting fed up too. You and OP hit most of the reasons why. RtW2 is a great game, but it has its flaws and I think the biggest is what you said. The game system is stuck between 1900-1925 but now with aircraft and carriers. I mean up to the 1940's isn't too bad, but after that the game just falls apart. I won't ever play Italy again because of how ridiculous the Adriatic Sea situation is in the late game. I still have ships deploying in the English Channel in broad daylight post 1955. There's also sub spam and ridiculously broken trade warfare and ineffective ASW which exasperates late game issues because more nations are likely to be in sub spam mode by then.

Going back to the longevity point, there's only so many missions and situations. The variety is just not there and I do understand how time consuming creating missions are. But there's also a lack of mod support. I know some games that haven't been touched by devs in almost two decades that are still fresh because of modding, but modding this game is such a pain in the ass. And good luck trying to ask about a mechanic or feature because if the playerbase hasn't figured it out you won't get an answer. That's why I'm probably not going to bother with my role playing surprise attack "mod". I don't want to mess with or give other players advice on a system I don't fully understand and no one on the dev team seemed to want to help. 

And now like you said instead of fixing the base game, they're extending the timeline even more. When they came out with the official announcement with zero mention of fleet organization or taskforces - despite bringing up the dlc/expansion teaser whenever users were asking about that kind of stuff - I was taken aback. I was excited for the Persistent ship histories point more than anything else. That was also what was keeping me onboard but now I'm not so sure once I thought about how messed up it would be if the mission generator gave me missions meant for WW1 armored cruisers to missile ships. I just asked about this in the Expansion thread and the answer will likely be the deciding factor if I buy it. Barring of course a surprise announcement of some kind of fleet organizer and/or changes to the mission generator. The sub and sub/escort changes may convince me too, but I'd have to wait until the expansion is out to see if it's really a fix. I'm not holding my breath.

The worst crime of all is that there's features in the base game (edge lifts, deck park) that don't even work yet. Will they work in the expansion? Will you have to pay to get features that you already paid for?

Keep in mind I don't have an issue paying for an expansion, if it actually fixed issues with the core game and added mechanics to increase the longevity of the existing timeline. Like a DLC with a taskforce/fleet organizer, expanded diplomacy, AI wars, greater variety of missions. Of course there could be more announcements of features coming to the expansion so I'm not going to completely count it out yet.

On a final note, I do feel the dev team doesn't actually listen to us and so far this Expansion and certain other items seem to suggest that. I've written some stupidly long suggestions before and I don't think I've ever received a meaningful reply. Do I think I'm entitled to one? Not really, but it's a little salty when you think you put effort into something and it gets nothing but the thread with like three lines does. I was working on a suggestion for National Experience/Efficiency Modifiers and ASW improvements. I also started a thread for more strategic aircraft involvement, but I didn't finish it. Don't have the motivation to complete either.

[akosjaccik]

Feb 27, 2021 5:05:59 GMT -6 dia said:

(...) The game system is stuck between 1900-1925 but now with aircraft and carriers. I mean up to the 1940's isn't too bad, but after that the game just falls apart. I won't ever play Italy again because of how ridiculous the Adriatic Sea situation is in the late game. I still have ships deploying in the English Channel in broad daylight post 1955. There's also sub spam and ridiculously broken trade warfare and ineffective ASW which exasperates late game issues because more nations are likely to be in sub spam mode by then.

I do believe that "the issue of the legacy systems" is a rather good observation on yours and director's part regarding the plausible roots of the problems, I do feel as well that the more RtW reaches out, the more it struggles to deliver a coherent experience, even though I don't necessarily find the core systems inherently problematic (for example I think the air aspect is plenty good enough, but once the individual elements start to interact with each other, Bombentorpedoes start to fly around and 400 a/c attacks start to hit players who have budgets for ~6 capital ships etc). Which is on one hand absolutely understandable, given the resources available for the team and the scope it hands over to the player (1900-1970 from Small historical Spain to Very Large US), but it also raises the question: is it ultimately a wise thing to aim for such a scope? Hence why I advocated for "better 1900-1945" rather than "more 1890-1970" - even though a "DLC" should indeed expand on the experience strictly speaking and not create a different pair of superior and subpar base game, but oh well, if I must pay for something, I'd rather pay for that. But in all honestly, that's just one of my concerns with the expansion - more on that later.

On a final note, I do feel the dev team doesn't actually listen to us and so far this Expansion and certain other items seem to suggest that.

Purely personal, but I think this criticism is only half-validated. For example, I - among others - brought up the problems with LBA, which got addressed later by implementing a "slider" for land base capacity. Now, it's still problematic and granted, I'm not entirely certain why set a bottom limit for it so the ability to set one's experience is only partial, but teeechnically it got addressed. And not just that; licensing issues get addressed almost immediately as well. (...and then I've waited four days for the storefront - arguably these issues shouldn't be there in the first place, but that's another matter.) My impression is that they very well listen, but choose to speak very carefully, and also limit the outer influence on their vision. This, if done properly, is actually and very likely a good thing I believe. Communication in general, sharing information about the game's systems, having a discussion about say, bugs etc. is fairly "3,6 Röntgen", that's sure as hell, but I don't see them outright not listening.

The worst crime of all is that there's features in the base game (edge lifts, deck park) that don't even work yet. Will they work in the expansion? Will you have to pay to get features that you already paid for?

..soo, yyeeah, about that one. Because NWS is a small company with products not above criticism, but products I can absolutely respect for the amount work being put into, and because my personal experiences with the staff is ranging from exceedingly positive to neutral at the very least, I mostly just ranted about this on Discord's thin air sometimes so far, but I'll be brutally honest: yup, it does left a bad taste in my mouth. Why? Take missiles (which is funnily enough, as hinted at above already, a thing I don't care much about for in RtW at all), they got their reserved panel on the design screen and a hint that it is for "later implementation". Cool. Fast forward to one of the later patches, people are hyped for missiles, and missiles finally arrive - only SAMs, and only medium ones. The rest? "Let's think about that", and then it finally crystallizes that those will pretty much come as a "DLC". It screamed that halfway along development the idea surfaced that for this insane amount of work the customers may as well pay more. And you know what? For all my shock, I can understand that. It's entirely within their rights, and the "more work -> more pay" is anything but devilish. But the execution? Cut content. It's the textbook definition of cut content. It's just not elegant, I would've preferred if not even SAMs get patched in, and instead from as early as possible, when we were still "writing the contracts" this would've got disclosed.
Since then I largely got over this "hiccup" and likely-probably-maybe will buy the expansion, but it indeed threw a wrench into my enthusiasm with a spectacular force. Again, not the "what", but the "how".

[vonfriedman]

I state that I consider RTW1 and 2 to be two very good products made by a rather small team and that I personally found all the support I could want from NWS.
In my opinion they need only improve some aspects of RTW2 (e.g. battle generator and - IMO - air warfare) relating to the period 1900-1945.
Going back in time, in the period without radio communications, would introduce the problem of information exchange between ships and between ships and the admiralty on land. It would take a big development effort to recreate, say, just the American Hispanic War or something similar. Even more effort would be requested to recreate the age of sailing.
I am also skeptical about the usefulness of pushing the game beyond 1945-1950.
Personally, I've never tried to push the game that far and I'm curious to know the experience of someone who has. When does it happen that players have to abandon their super battleships to switch to the ships of today, almost unarmored and full of complicated s/w and h/w?
And finally, what historical data are there to develop the game in order to achieve a realistic trend?

[talbot797]

On point 11, I would advise keeping them under manual control, once detached, for as long as possible before switching to AI, and ordering a reduced speed for several minutes. Then when you switch to AI they don't tend to speed up. If you switch to AI they tend to continue at as close to the speed of the main squadron as possible. Works for me, I learned from the first time I sank a destroyer because it was trying to keep up with my main force.

[wlbjork]

Feb 26, 2021 18:36:15 GMT -6 dougalachi said:

I have hundreds of hours in this game but this is my first post because I have never been more incredibly upset.

1. Your algorithms send my cruisers into shore bombardment missions where the radius of port protection surrounding the target is greater than the range of my guns so that I can't attack it. This is ridiculous and a waste of players' time. Also, how are you determining what ships that are available in the region to send in for the shore bombardment? Often, I have BCs and BBSs available in that, but you send in my 6" armed cruisers to attack 9-11" coastal guns. Again, RIDICULOUS!

Historically, up to the later part of WW2, I believe that it was in fact pretty rare to dispatch a battleship for bombardment purposes - remember, these are RARE, EXPENSIVE and PRESTIGIOUS units that you don't want the enemy to get a cheap propaganda claim against. More often, purpose built Monitors were used - but that is not an option as the game is currently, so that leaves Cruisers.

2. I can send greater numbers of ships into a theater of operations than the enemy. Despite this, fleet engagements, especially when trying to stop an invasion of your territory, FOR SOME REASON, always seem to end with the AI being able to marshall his entire force in the sector while I am left with fractions of my available force, typically around half. WHAT IS THE RATIONALE FOR THIS? Why does the enemy always get to choose the battle size on their terms to their advantage while I am left holding the bag. This happened EVERY TIME during my campaign as UK while defending Canada from the US.

Sounds like you are unlucky. Last few times I was defending against a US invasion (Caribbean and Canada both), I did get my full force available...and quite handily ripped through the invasion fleets, stopping the attack dead.

3. The "hidden flaws" in UK warships, which are somewhat derived from historical narrative, have decidedly taken on ridiculous size. Repeatedly losing multiple capitol ships in setpiece battles from HIDDEN FLAWS is absolutely unacceptable. The suspected historical problem was training to leave magazine doors open and creating an environment conducive to massive magazine explosions. TRAINING, NOT STRUCTURAL FLAWS. Why is this then continually a problem? Are we to believe Brits don't ever learn from their mistakes?

Yes, it bugs me as well. It can be turned down in options, I can edit the saved game data to eliminate it entirely. 

4. In general, I as a player get the very strong impression that the AI knows next to everything about my lineup in the bigger battles and gets to choose in what manner he will engage me. In comparison, I get shafted repeatedly because your game takes away my agency, the agency that the opponent AI seems to very well enjoy. What is your rationale for this? No admiral would choose to send his ships piecemeal against massively larger forces. Yet you keep forcing me into those confrontations. It is absolutely distressing to the point that I often regret purchasing this game and put it down for several months at a time. Give me the option to take every ship available if I so choose, even if it affects battles in other areas of the same region. This is not how you get someone to be a repeat buyer.

The AI is very conservative, and will try to avoid battles not in it's favour.

As for ships engaging piecemeal, that became the norm, at least in the European Theatre post-WW1. The British had nothing available to stop the Channel Dash. When hunting the Bismarck, HMS Prince of Wales was still working up (to the point they still had civilians on board) whilst HMS Rodney's engines were badly worn and she was officially limited to 20kn top speed. Heck, even Graff Spee was hunted down by a pair of 6" Cruisers later joined by an 8" Cruiser.

Depends what you mean by "every ship available". It takes hours to warm up the boiler of a steam train to operating temperature. Ships have bigger boilers that are more awkward to repair and service, so you'll probably want to be even more careful with those - so any ships where the boilers are cold aren't available.

Ships may be in dock for resupplying or even a minor repair/refit that doesn't show up on the main screen.

Yet again, ships could be drastically out of position with no real hope of an intercept. In the early part of the game, communications options are more limited, even when wireless was available it wasn't always easy to get a message to the ship you wanted. Indeed, lackofgravitas on the spacebattles forums has an anecdote about not being able to communicate with higher command on the Falkland Islands in the 80s.

5. Why do you not model in conflicts between other nations to an extent beyond simply increasing my tension points? It is always the player nation that seems to be the focus of world aggression and attention.

Would be nice, but the game needs to be able to auto-resolve fleet battles on a consistent basis for this to be viable.

6. I have repeatedly had situations where I was forced to build ships for the admiralty or lose. However, after choosing the half option, I have been saddled with the full ship amount.

Can't say I've noticed this, but then can't remember the last time I didn't want as many ships as the Admiralty anyway.

7. You provide the opportunity on occasion to blow up ships at anchor, yet when this succeeds, the enemy sustained no actual loss of the kind of destroyed ship (BB) to their inventory.

Check their ship losses. Your saboteurs might have sunk a ship...doesn't mean they have identified it correctly. I seem to remember once being informed that they had sunk a battleship, checked the ship losses to find they had blown up a garbage ship.

8. When trying to negotiate the ends of wars, I get the feeling like it doesnt even matter what option I choose. Often I will receive a message that the enemy wants to surrender and is willing to negotiate some loss of territory or without border changes. When I select that we should accept their offer on lenient terms, more often than not the game will tell me that the negotiations failed. IS THIS ACTUALLY WORKING AS INTENDED? The enemy wants to surrender, I want to be lenient, and yet the gameplay algorithms say NO. WHY???

As others say, yours isn't the only voice involved. All it takes is one diplomat to act in bad faith and it can completely derail the negotiations.

9. Where are your guides explaining the intricacies of combat management of single squadrons and targeting individual ships for each squadron?

I agree it would add to the accessibility of the game

10. Do US battleships have a hidden survivability modifier beyond the hidden flaws disadvantage of the British?

I must admit that it does feel like it sometimes.

11. WHY IS IT IMPOSSIBLE TO SLOW DOWN SHIPS AFTER I HAVE DETACHED THEM? Several times a game, I lose ships to flooding because they want to go 16-20 knots after being detached from a battle for damage. Idiot AI are too stupid to slow down and I cant seem to stop them. I honestly can't think of anything more frustrating in this game than watching my ships sink on their way back to port because they don't know how to slow down to stop flooding.

Pretty sure this has been reported multiple times, and we've had a "we're looking into it", but so far we've had no changes.
[/quote]

[axe99]

Hidden Flaws is my big grumble-moment (which, to be fair, isn't that big) - from my reading, there's no evidence whatsoever that British designs were more susceptible to catastrophic failures (a reading of Friedman's US Battleships (a US book by a US author) actually suggests WW1-era US dreadnoughts had greater safety issues in terms of flash-tightness and magazine safety). Whether I'm playing as the UK, or someone playing against the UK ("Ooooh, this'll be a tough fight. Oh, wait - three of their capital ships just spontaneously exploded") it's never been satisfying. It feels a little too "memey" for my liking. If it's a balancing factor, then it's a bit odd that there's a balancing factor for the UK but not for the US (which, by the end of the game, has by far the largest budget and usually fleet/naval air arm).

And while turning down overall flash risk helps, as far as I understand it also affects the rest of the flash risk for everyone else - so UK ships are still more likely to go boom.

Other than that, though, and no 11, I haven't had the same experience playing it (and I recently finished games as the UK (flash-fire risk left on - I try and get into wars early and have a few capital ships blown up early on to get this under control - that the gameplay mechanics encourage deliberately trying to get ships destroyed early game is, I think, a sign that the mechanic has its issues!) and Austria) and:

1) Seems much better. Used to happen all the time to me, now it's very rare, and comfortably at the level where it doesn't bother me. There'll always be room for more polish in the mission generator, and I hope that each release involves some more effort spent here, but I haven't found this to be an issue.

2) Even with my Austria-Hungary game (in wars against Italy - anyone else had too large a fleet for me to test!) I didn't find this was the case. If I had more ships for a fleet battle or a battleship engagement, or even a destroyer fight, I often but-not-always outnumbered. There was a fair degree of randomness to this, but there was an advantage for having more ships on average, over time. Given the degree of randomness to this historically, I'm currently happy with this balance, as I've experienced it.

3) Covered above - feels like a feature put in to placate the ghost of ADM King.

4) I haven't got this impression at all. Sometimes my position is better, sometimes there's is - with a bias towards the side with the greater forces generally having a better position (but with a wide distribution of results).

5) This would be nice to have, but it's clearly a 'new feature' rather than a bug - and I would imagine a fairly high-resource one to develop if done right.

6) This sounds like a bug. On this one, the figures for Austria-Hungary are often literally impossible to do with their budget (one cruiser request would have required me to scrap all of my fleet and even then I would have built ten cruisers so weak and slow they would have been pointless). There are issues with this event - but it's one event that pops up a handful of times each game, so while I agree it would be nice to fix, it hasn't got me that worked up.

7) This also sounds like a bug and well worth reporting.

8) Given we're playing the chief of the navy and not the head of state, I have no issue with this. Over time, I've felt my selections matter, but again with a fairly high distribution of randomness. I understand that this can be frustrating though, and perhaps adjusting the text in the event to make it clear that it's just an 'influence in the big picture', to manage player expectations may help here?

9) Plenty of far larger games don't have detailed documentation - so this feels more like a "nice to have". That said, I tend to play in "Admirals mode" with lots of ships, so I haven't really gone down this path and can't comment from experience.

10) Hahaha - I suspect this comes from the US' budget again - their budget means that before too long, they'll be spending more on research than anyone else, and all those little bonuses add up, and it could mean their ships are less likely to go boom without a nation-specific modifier. As per my comments above, I do find it a little odd that there's a somewhat memey 'balancing factor' for the UK, but the US have something of a blind eye turned to their historical weaknesses. As you well say, the US is easy mode.

11) Ah yes - the AI here can still be pretty wonky. I've had ships detach, and accelerate into the enemy battle line, or go off in directions that seem all sorts of odd. The poor performance of detached ships influences the way I play tactically (if an important ship is reduced to 15kts, say, with some flooding, I won't detach, I'll sometimes slow down the whole battle to 15kts and try and withdraw/keep the damaged ship from running away on its own until the damage is stopped). Once a ship is seriously damaged and detached, I manage my emotional response by assuming it will end up sunk, but even with this, I can find the AI here a bit hard-to-take at times. Having to manoeuvre a fleet to compensate for wonky AI can be frustrating, and I hope more development time is spent on this going forward. Having multiple capital ships detach and sail towards enemy airbases in the 1950s as Austria (it's not as if I had a lot of caps) to be lost is not the most enjoyable experience ever!)

That being said, all of our experiences and responses vary. I've got many hundreds of hours in RtW and RtW2 combined, and still enjoy the game immensely, but have to pace myself as too much at once can be a bit much (but this can be said for me of any game) - and even though it's still one of my favourite games, it does have its frustrations - but it's also trying to do an awful lot, and does a lot of this stuff better than any other game by far.