Feedback & Suggestions

[slipper]

are there any plans to upgrade pacific fleet to Atlantic fleet standards please?

[CCIP]

One suggestion I have, and maybe it's one suited to a (potential future?) PC version:

I'd like to see a "doctrine" feature, per unit or perhaps per combat area. What I mean by that is: have a chance to set orders for units in an area, for example to order submarines to sail submerged by day (and reduce their risk of taking damage from air attacks, but also reduce their chance of spotting convoys), or to order surface units to be either close convoy escort or act as hunter killers (affecting the type of battle that will be created in an area), or otherwise affect initiative at the start of battle. That might give the player (and the AI) a bit more control on the strategic level, without getting too micro-manage-y. What do you think?

[Niedowidek]

I see that there's new version with torpedo problem fixed (when they were lost from ship's inventory but not fired) and added saving between each Battle of Atlantic engagement. These are great additions

[Killerfish Games]

Originally Posted by Niedowidek

I see that there's new version with torpedo problem fixed (when they were lost from ship's inventory but not fired) and added saving between each Battle of Atlantic engagement. These are great additions

Yes 1.07 is a big update addressing a lot of bugs and initial issues with the game. There's still a few bugs lurking about which we'll address in future updates.

[HoneyFox]

Hi, this game is just awesome! I have to say, for me, it might be the best one that I've ever played on a phone.

Several suggestions I would like to raise:
1. I would hope that in campaign mode, player can spend some (or lots of, that depends on how hard you want the game to be) renown to "purchase" extra ship slots (i.e. maximum ships in your fleet, currently only 10 in campaign mode) and commanding capability (i.e. maximum ships that you can send to a battle, currently only 3 in campaign mode). I know that this will make the later missions too easy... well, we can always add more ships to the enemy side as well.
In a word, I like it to be with a bigger scale, more ships, more firepower, more explosion, and more flexibility and possible tactics as well...

2. Turn-based torpedo seems to be sometimes troublesome when: in the first turn, my torpedo advances and reaches almost the bow of the enemy ship from its side. if it's not turn-based, it should have been able to hit the target just a moment later, but in turn-based game, the enemy ship can go forward for a distance much longer than its length, which means the torpedo won't be able to hit the target. Will it be possible to make the enemy ship move at the same time when there's any nearby (threshold distance can be set based on how long that torpedo can run in one turn) hostile torpedo?
In a word, a semi-realtime mode for torpedo impact checking.

3. I would hope that the carriers can be "buff"ed a bit by allowing more intensive aerial engagement. (we already have the Ready/Launch/Engage/Recover steps which makes the carriers far less OP as they were in PF) Currently if you launch 4 aircrafts, in the following 4 turns, only one a/c can engage a target in each turn. If two (4 will make it OP again) aircrafts can engage targets sequentially in one turn, some more interesting tactics can be deployed (especially for the torpedo bombers as some interesting torpedo patterns can be used making enemy harder to evade).

4. Star Shell. I would hope that it can be combined into normal AP/HE mode, so that we don't need a specific turn just to fire one star shell. Like, normally we launch 9 rounds AP/HE for Nelson class BB, now if I switch to AP+SS or HE+SS mode, it will launch 1 Star Shell and 6 rounds of AP/HE (I don't know if it's possible for one turret to launch two different types of ammo from different gun barrels, if it's possible, it should be 1SS+8AP/HE). Currently I will usually leave that job to a DD or any ship that has the least firepower, simply because it would waste a lot of firepower if I use those BB/BC/etc.

Hmm... that's all I can think about right now. Hope that even one of these suggestions can be taken.

[Killerfish Games]

Glad you're enjoying the game.

1. We're looking into a difficulty option to increase the player fleet size in BotA games. As you mention, adding more to the mission Campaigns would likely trivialise their difficulty.

2. Good suggestion, but unfortunately somewhat impractical to implement as it would be quite complex timing various torpedoes vs ships and then syncing the ship's subsequent movement phase.

3. Agree, but the game is based on a single attack action per turn. This is similar to requests to be able to fire torpedoes, main guns and secondary guns each turn which we feel slows down the turn cycle. In next update we're looking at increasing the carrier wing sizes as we agree carriers need a little boost.

4. Interesting, however star shells are usually fired at a higher elevation than the target to light up the area behind the target as well as keep your ships out of the illumination range. So the salvo would be too high and miss.

[HoneyFox]

Thanks for the reply.
For point 2 and 3: as you said, the game is based on turns which composite of a movement phase and an engage phase. and these two phases cannot be split (e.g. let some other phases to be executed simultaneously or between them) easily, nor can a ship has more than one engage phase in one turn. I once thought that the game might contain some data structure like Queue<Phase> and each ship enqueues its own phases into the queue, then the game later executes these phases by dequeuing them one by one. Now it seems like it's more closer to a Queue<ShipTurn> and each ShipTurn has two members (or states in a state machine, well whatever it is): Movement phase and Engage phase.
Hmm... as a game developer as well, I understand the great difficulty of changing fundamental part of game design when the game already has high completeness level. So perhaps I could expect them in the next game you will release someday?

For point 4: good point, unless we can setup multiple sets of elevations which is not possible in the current system, or perhaps we can just add an extra constant or proportional angle (like +10 degrees or +30% of elevation angle, clamping it up to turret's max elevation is needed of course ) only for the turret that is going to launch star shell, for other turrets they just use the elevation given by UI. Talking about this, another question just reaches me: is it reasonable for a ship to use a range of elevations for different turrets/barrels (e.g. 12 degs for turret A, 14 degs for turret B, 16 degs for turret C, etc) when trying to find out the correct elevation for its target? I don't know if any ship did like that in real.