Pro-German bias of this game has become a joke
 

It seems that the SeS team have extraploted from Beatty's poor performance in the "Race South" that somehow German ships were inherently superior at gunnery, and that every Royal Navy ship suffered from poor ammo handling.

A recent battle I created; the HMS Lion and HMS Queen Mary (two of the newest battlecruisers) against the Von der Tann and the Moltke, the oldest German battlecruisers, a two-on-two duel just off Amsterdam.

Further north, I had the SMS Bayern leading the four oldest German dreadnoughts, Nassau class. On the British side, I had four modernised Queen Elizabeth class superdreadnoughts, along with two American ships, the USS New York (carrying 12 14-inch guns) and a Wyoming class (carrying 12 12-inch guns). I crossed the German T, brought every single one of my guns to bear on the German dreadnought line, and yet somehow I only managed to sink the Bayern and one of the Nassau class.

In exchange, they destroyed three Queen Elizabeths, badly damaged the fourth, and the other three Nassaus were getting away. Further south, the Queen Mary was sunk without ever even scratching the Von der Tann the oldest German battlecruisers sunk the newest British battlecruisers without even breaking a sweat or taking on anything more then light damage. Then the Lion was sunk. It was a slaughter that seems a-historical.

I've looked at the underlying data, you give different values for British and German directors, and every British ship (whether in the Grand Fleet or Battlecruiser Fleet) is subject to poor ammo handling. This is simply ahistorical. We know that;

(1) The Battlecruisers at Rosyth, unlike at Scapa Flow which is so huge they were able to carry out gunnery exercises in the fleet harbour. The Battlecruisers at Rosyth were not. So Beattie focused on shooting as quickly as possible, which created problems as crews stacked up cordite bags and left open flash-tight doors. Admiral Jellicore warned Beattie about this, but Beattie was overconfident. The ships at Scapa Flow in the Grand Fleet had better gunnery, and did not have the same poor ammo handling practises as the Battlecruiser fleet.

(2) When the High Seas Fleet actually engaged Grand Fleet , British gunnery was superb, even withering. In the initial period they managed 49 hits on German dreadnoughts and took only 3 of their own. I think Iron Duke managed something like 7 hits in 15 minutes with their 13.5 inch guns. Not a single dreadnought/superdreadnought of the grand fleet was sunk at the engagement. It's precisely why the ships in the van of the High Seas Fleet turned away to retreat, even without orders, so devastating was the British bombardment and so thoroughly had they been outmanoeuvred by Jellicoe.

(3) British and German directors each had their own pros and cons. Drachinifel's channel is a good place to start if you want a primer on this.

To assign values that are ahistorical (that all British ships had ammo-handling problems, and that they all had terrible aim) results in the kind of outcomes we see in the little scenario I created.

I really love this game. I want to see a renaissance for it. I can see work has been done for Baltic and Caspian Sea fleet DLCs. I want to see it improved. I want more people to come back into the Jutland community. But issues like this must be resolved, take it from someone who loves the game.

It always was a joke and the anti-Russian bias in Distant Guns is as bad or worse.

Would be interested to know where these mods are since the game files seem to be still encrypted and off limits to modding or editing. Don't know why anyone would do a Caspian Sea mod since the only potential belligerents there were Imperial Russia, which kept a handful of small gunboats there and Persia, whose Caspian flotilla was virtually non-existent. Perhaps you mean the Black Sea?

The series is broken in so many ways and yet had so much potential. All wasted.

-C