Dear Admirals,
Thank you for waiting patiently for our next game update but also for continuing to provide your valuable feedback. Your ongoing suggestions and reports helped us to add more improvements, as many as possible.
The Alpha-2 update offers several crash fixes, improves FPS performance and includes many game balances, according to your feedback. Here is the list of changes:
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts Alpha-2 v.62
BALANCES
Penetration rebalance (Not so high drop-off of penetration strength, better shell shatter threshold for not so frequent partial-pens of HE). With the new settings however, angling will be even more important in order to inflict critical hits to heavily armored ships.
HE penetration strength reduced slightly for compensation, making HE shells not so powerful compared to AP as before.
Lyddite shell damage increased slightly to continue having its historical impact.
AI chooses shell ammunition more efficiently. It should switch to HE as a human player would do.
Main Guns/ Sec Gun fire rate rebalance (+15% Big guns, -10% Small guns).
Main Gun ammo increased to compensate for the new reload balance. Ammo numbers should be also close to historical data.
Increased slightly the impact of flooding, making AP and torpedoes potentially more hazardous, as their hits can cause flooding with more probability.
Targeting became slightly sharper (fixes issues of very low accuracy at close range, due to very rapid change of bearing).
Cost rebalance of the Yamato type hull, so that in mission "Modern Battleship" it is less possible to build many weaker battleships. It is still possible to do so, but they should be so weak that they will be worthless (especially with new penetration balances).
Increased the accuracy of electric torpedoes further, but now they cost +12.5% more.
Reload Mechanism now affects range, turret traverse speed and aiming, instead of accuracy. Together with some weight/cost rebalances it is added an extra reloading tech component with no range drawbacks but is much more expensive.
Improved Auto-Designer to build ships favoring stronger main armament (and be more competitive against the player).
Fixed an issue with ship stats that affected torpedo detection range for towers (causing them to be too large and battleships to respond too early without the need of escort ships.).
Fixed issue that caused surface visibility to not be at realistic levels, according to ship size. - Now big ships should be visible at reasonable distances. Late missions have been rebalanced in initial distance and duration to compensate for the new improvement.
Fixed stats issues not updating properly several components in late techs, for example, citadel bonuses on resistance.
Transports’ damage control systems is not so efficient as before, so they should become destroyed if they are having extended fires and flooding. The mission “Undefended Convoy” became rebalanced to have some form of challenge.
NAVAL ACADEMY
New Mission “Defeat the Semi-Dreadnought. Design and built ships that can defeat a Semi-Dreadnought and two escorting Light Cruisers.
New Mission “Numbers don’t matter”. Your main adversary is a huge battleship with technologies of the 1940s. You will be outgunned, outperformed in every way, but you have the numbers!
The mission “Pre-Dreadnought Conflict” was rebalanced to work with less ships. We will add more ships or offer a similar mission later, when the game’s FPS performance improves further.
The mission “The Power of Dreadnoughts” provides less money to player. It could become too advantageous.
1st Mission has less duration to be not a pushover.
Increased +1km of average initial distance of opponent CL (2nd Mission) to reduce chance of an early lucky shot that can destroy the cruiser too soon.
"Destroy Full Fleet" mission is rebalanced and moved higher in the mission list, to reflect better its difficulty.
AI
Improvement on how AI decides to move to optimal engage distance. The AI should not steer so sharply and mix its formation lines. This improvement will also affect player fleet, when setting up screen formations.
VISUAL
Waves now properly follow the wind direction and several fixes/improvements on their mechanics (Affecting positively the game performance).
Ship flag is now more accurately switching according to wind direction and ship speed.
TECHNICAL/BUG FIXES
Many performance optimizations and graphical fixes. You should notice an increase in FPS and less crashes due to game lag.
Fixed issue with launcher which made it to not close properly when exiting the game.
Fixed an error that caused guns to stuck.
Fixed error/crashes related with numerical key commands.
Fixed errors caused by unstable bug report button.
Fixed bug that could cause the ships of the main menu to rotate wrongly.
Sound optimizations affecting positively performance.
OTHER
Faster armor increment/decrement by using the buttons.
Armor can be adjusted by text.
Various hotfixes in texts.
Game speed is reduced automatically to a rational minimum level according to distance from enemy.
Damage inflicted by player (penetrations, detonations etc.) is indicated on the right top panel. It is a WIP feature.
Thank you for reading! See you in our forums: Official Forum New Steam Forum
UPDATE 26-10-2019
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Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts Alpha-2 v.63
Hotfix: Game Speed limits are much softer now. 3x is the minimum auto-adjusted game speed. 10x game speed became available when fleets are very far away and not in contact. This system protects you from some known bugs related to game speed, that can cause also crashes. Please be patient and in next updates we will improve as per your suggestions.