We are glad to announce the next large update of Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts that contains not only gameplay improvements based on your feedback, but also many new features.
The new custom battle mode allows you to set up your fleet and the opponent's and either quick start a battle or design your desired ship type. In this way you are able to explore a multitude of hulls for all nations and technology periods between 1890-1940 and experiment with scenarios you've created.
The Naval Academy has been enriched with six new missions, introduces several new ship types and allows you to save and name your designs. Detailed damage decals increase the battle immersion, while all the new balances and fixes should improve the overall realism and challenge of battles. Read below in more detail what is included in this new update.
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts Alpha-3
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NEW SPECIAL FEATURES
Custom Battles: You can now choose to fight randomly during years 1890-1930 selecting the nation, fleet composition and year for both you and opponent. The available ship designs will be based on the upcoming campaign tech tree , so errors/warnings may occur, for example ships might not be available for a nation in a specific year. We are going to improve further the functionality in next updates.
Explore all available hulls via the Custom Battles: We delayed the patch to create this additional feature. In custom battle mode you can quick-start or design your desired ship class of your fleet. You will be able to select all available hulls of the selected nation and year. Enabling the setting “Unlock” will provide you all hulls of all nations for the selected year! This feature replaces and supersedes the previous cheat mode (Unlock Parts/Techs). All cheats had to be eventually disabled, because they caused multiple issues to the game, and were replaced by this new feature which can be easily played by anyone without exploits.
Damage decals: You will notice much more detailed damage effects on ship hulls due to shell or torpedo impacts and realize where each hull penetration took place.
Improved Combat Penetration Info: Detailed “Penetration Estimator” shows up when you hover your mouse over an identified target, including information about sections that you can penetrate, your total pen power over the enemy armor, ricochet angles and side/deck hit chances. You can use this in reverse by selecting enemy ships and pressing the alt-key while hovering your mouse over your own ships. This feature should help players to understand what is the best distance and angle to attack versus heavily armored warships.
Save and name your designs: You can now save your ship design, for the respective missions. and also give custom names to your creations. This is a first simple functionality and is going to be improved further when we make the campaign.
NEW MISSIONS
Sink the Raiders: Use your Semi-Dreadnought or other ships to defend your transports from three dangerous cruisers.
Meet the US Battleships: Try to defeat two very large and experimental battleships of US Design.
Rise of the Heavy Cruiser: Design modern heavy cruisers without the constraints of treaties and confront three strong reconstructed armored cruisers.
There can be only one: A speculative Iowa vs Yamato scenario! The ships of course are not identical but their designs are based on the historical hulls.
Sink “The Cruiser Killer”: Fight versus an experimental and deadly Battlecruiser.
Heavy Duty: Design modern warships and fight versus a super battleship and its escorts.
NAVAL ACADEMY BALANCES
Increased armor of targeting ship in mission "Targeting Practice" and reduced available time to increase the difficulty.
Added +1 opponent torpedo boat in mission "Battleship vs Torpedo Boats" to keep things interesting with the new balance.
"Search and Destroy" mission rebalanced in initial distance between ships and also two light cruisers escort the enemy BB.
In the “Modern Battleship” mission, the AI fleet has one extra BB, to make it a tougher challenge, due to the new balance.
Re-allocated mission "Pre-Dreadnought conflict" in the mission row, since it is now easier than initially. Additionally, the enemy will not retreat, so that the mission can be not lost because of some enemy light ships running away.
Reduced the time for mission "Raid an undefended convoy" due to new balances.
Further rebalances as per feedback for several other missions. “Defeat the Semi-Dreadnought” allows one extra BB hull plus technology bonuses are more appropriate versus the opponent’s tech. “Destroyers vs Torpedo Boats“ mission gives to player ships less technology difference vs the opponent, so that AI ships are not overpowered on average and various more.
Ship building limit for missions became 30. Previously without limits, it was possible to build many more small ships in some specific missions, causing balance or performance issues.
COMBAT GAMEPLAY
Improved Secondary Guns' Penetration & Accuracy.
Torpedo Boats less resilient against gun fire.
Penetration rebalance for more effective medium/long range encounters. HE shells should not be as overpowered as previously.
Fixed issue with hull damage that made severely damaged ships and torpedo boats too hard to sink.
Reduced ladder aiming penalty of initial salvo shot, from -75% to -50% because it caused too low accuracy at close range.
Cordite, Tube Powder, TNT explosives rebalanced to reflect better their special characteristics. Cordite offers more explosive power but is unsafe, Tube Powder is the safest explosive and more effective in penetrating armor, TNT is very expensive but overall the best compromise.
Fixed issue of Radar towers, increasing too much the surface visibility of ships that carry them.
New Oxygen fueled torpedoes.
New 23-inch and 24-inch torpedoes.
Late tech torpedoes have even more intensified damage so they are useful against heavily protected battleships.
Torpedo protection now also increases floatability but reduces acceleration and turning speed making a ship slightly less maneuverable, yet, it will be vital for your capital ships in order to survive against the stronger torpedo threat.
Citadel armor schemes increase the armor quality, but are more expensive. Citadel is a feature not yet finalized, but this new functionality simulates better its influence in armor schemes and vitals protection.
Ship steering/acceleration slight rebalance for more realistic maneuvering. This balance addressed additionally the over-effectiveness in evading torpedoes and the unnaturally very tight turning circles of small ships, which causes also issues in formation and evasion logic.
Coal engines produce more smoke obstruction from funnels. Oil fuel engines will significantly reduce this penalty.
Engines hp efficiency and other related balances for improved ship maneuverability with the proper design and vice versa.
Reduced slightly the penetration penalty of light shells, from -7.5% to -5%. Their weaker weight and steeper trajectories at long ranges made them too inefficient.
VISUAL
Guns smoothly elevate to fire at target and depress to reload.
Water displacement effects (better waves, ship splashes and interaction with water).
Improved fog dissipation over distance.Sinking mechanic improved so that ships do not “jump” to a default sinking state as previously.
Ships will gradually sink according to their last floating state.
Fixed issues with USA battleship hull type. Now mission “Design a Dreadnought” includes a properly looking and scaled model based on BB South Carolina.
Cage mast towers are available to a series of hulls belonging to USA.
New modern battleship assets based on BB Musashi.
New modern battleship towers and hull types, based on BB Missouri/Iowa.
New Heavy Cruiser hull types based on Italian Cruiser Pola.Several other hull types unlocked to become playable.
Several new visualizations for guns according to technology.
Fixed also some issues with scale for some guns.
BATTLE AI
Slight fix of AI related with formations. AI should keep formation and respond to screen orders at better distances. The fix is not final. AI is going to be optimized on this aspect in next updates.
Fixed issues of AI related to engage mechanics. AI ships should approach more gradually and fire broadside salvos at more effective angle and distance.
BATTLE MECHANICS
Targeting became more dynamic and is affected more smoothly due to maneuvering.
Ladder aiming may be acquired faster but aiming can be lost very soon, due to evasive maneuvers. This new feature will make much more effective your evasive actions against long range guns, that previously could lock on you and progressively destroy you without a real chance to do something to avoid them.
Barbette damage now causes damage to its attached gun and vice versa. You will no longer see barbettes becoming individually damaged without any effect to the attached gun.
Detected torpedoes are now indicated by a visual warning for a short period of time.
Improved shell ballistic mechanics, addressing cases where shells could go too wide at short ranges.
SHIP DESIGN
Minor interface fixes. Some stats were not properly updated. More fixes will follow on next updates.
Improved AI ship design (with proper focusing on armor for Battleships).
Some minor bug fixes reported by players, related with ship assets.
Slight more flexibility in mounting guns/towers/barbettes/funnels. More fixes will follow in next updates.
BATTLE UI
Gun ranges now show with better visuals and are optimized for better performance. You can toggle them to fade out after some time or not, from the in-battle settings.
Gun stats show what is their propellant.
Added notification when battle time runs out.
BUG FIXES
Fixed error-message/bug caused by gun aiming calculations.
Fixed crash related with amount of torpedoes fired.
Fixed timer not reverting to maximum speed, even though enemy was completely unseen.
Fixed error of log report that could make it completely invisible for player.
Fixed bug that could make invisible AI ships traceable by using the mouse pointer.
Fixed crash that could be caused in Ship Designer interface when pressing a hotkey for a disabled category.
Fixed issues of flags that could become white at a certain angle.
Fixed a bug related with the scrolling of Help window.
Fixed issue with operational range not altering weight, in some late ship designs.
Fixed distorted damage info window for ships that disappear from LOS.
OTHER
Some game performance optimizations, increase the FPS for all pc systems.
Minor improvement on gun fire, shell trails and impact sounds.
In-game music reverted back to full functionality.
Removed possibility to enable developer debug options on build.
Much faster loading of Ship Designer interface.
Added graphics quality slider in settings.
Added option “Centimeter” in measurement system.
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