Voting for Fleet Problem #2

[Legate of Mineta]

Alright, Captains, let's have the votes for the next set.

Ground rules:

1) No Belles from Fleet Problem #1, got to have everyone shine a bit.

2) This is going to be a Night Battle, so...if you bring a Carrier, that's on you.

3) This should be a gun line, so maximum 1 submarine, or else it's going to be a hit-and-run...or a convoy battle, depending.

[lazarusdw]

who was in the first fleet

 

[lazarusdw]

i know that Nautilus  Boise and Henley , Arizona were in the fleet but who else

[lazarusdw]

fleet A. kaga, henley, fubuki, arizona, nenohi, velasco, kumano

fleet B. Boise, New Orleans, Kirov, Nautilus, Lexington, Mahan, Admiral Graf Spee

this was the first test

[lazarusdw]

for the vote do we submit whole fleets or is it single belles

[Legate of Mineta]

Either! We’ll smash them together as we did last time.

[David J]

I will go with Salmon for Submarine, Salt Shaker and Bulldog are my other two votes

Love Kaga's design by the way and its good to hear the voices of the Belles

[lazarusdw]

HMS Hood                                        Kongou                     

R.N. Axum                                     Shch-205 Nerpa
 

Gneisenau                                     USS Mississippi (BB-41)
 

Algérie                                                 Profitern
 

La Motte-Picquet                                      Aoba
  

Camicia Nera                                   Leningrad

here are my picks
 

 

[lazarusdw]

1 minute ago, David J said:

I will go with Salmon for Submarine, Salt Shaker and Bulldog are my other two votes

Love Kaga's design by the way and its good to hear the voices of the Belles

same hearing them all was nice. you know when they were not ripping out your heart when sinking

[David J]

1 minute ago, lazarusdw said:

same hearing them all was nice. you know when they were not ripping out your heart when sinking

Agreed I felt pain right in my heart

[lazarusdw]

4 minutes ago, David J said:

Agreed I felt pain right in my heart

get the feeling unless victory is 100% without losses then i will be doing alot of runing at the start

[Armnorn]

Don't have a whole fleet setup but I would love to see Kitakami, Kongou, Nagato, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Hood (this is totally not me just trying to get a sample of what the Voice Actors are going to sound like)

[Dmnt]

Canarias

 

 

and Béarn

[Legate of Mineta]

Recorded'em!

[Ninjapacman]

Oh boy have I got a set of things to say.  I'll lay them out here and put them in spoiler tags to make it organized.

1. I AM MAD.

2. General Comments

3. Excellent reveal

4. The voices seem to be on point.

5. Questions

6. My votes for #2

Spoiler

I AM MAD.  See my sig if you don't already understand why.  I feel this fleet test was horrific and unjust, and should be re-filmed with events occurring properly.  It's only insult to injury that the fire which did such ungodly things was started by the obsolete 200mm casemate guns of an aircraft carrier.  I demand a redo, in which the best ship performs the best, as it should be, rather than taking the single largest damage number in the test from a first level fire.  I'm also rather disappointed that there wasn't more of Kenobi.  She got taken out of the action far too quickly.

Spoiler

 

This will just be my general comments, and a few issues I noticed.  First of all, I love the design as it's finally evolved from the many tests you gave us in previous updates.  The name and HP plates are good looking and distinguished, and the Flagship is clearly well marked.  The gun firing animation seems to have been fine-tuned quite nicely, and I think the hit and miss animations for both guns and torpedoes are excellent.  I enjoyed watching the fires grow as their severity intensified (Save for a certain one which did not...) and I liked how the flooding grew until the point when that final compartment breach sank a ship that would otherwise have still had HP remaining. 

This brings me to the first of a couple criticisms.  I had to watch the video a few times to understand that that was what had happened to Kaga, and it's a problem that persists for all four of the corner ships.  It's impossible to see what parts are damaged when the text is blocked by an admittedly rather pretty belle.  When Boise was sunk in one strike, it was impossible to see any of the many critical damage notes she had.  Often it was impossible to see what critical damage any of the corner ships had taken when their figure popped up blocking the view of them.  After watching on both my phone and computer, I determined that the text was also much harder to catch on the phone, rather than the bigger computer screen.  Another major issue with the critical damage was the Xs.  Each time there was a major critical hit, one would appear, but often a bit nonsensically, mainly with one of two major flaws.  The first is a lack of correspondence to the ship part damaged, an example being when Lexington's turret was knocked out and it placed an X on the front of the flight deck, despite the fact that the turrets on her, and the Essex-class model she had were both around the island.  The second flaw was a lack of critical details, in that most of these ships have more than one turret.  Even when multiple turrets were damaged (again the example being Lexington) there was only a single X, so I had no idea how many or which of the ships' turrets had been hit.  The engine damage Kirov repeatedly suffered seemed to also have no effect on her moving up with the rest of her fleet to the second echelon of the movement bars, whatever that meant.  Also in keeping with lack of information, when the fighters would pass each other at the beginning of each stage, each would lose one plane, but it seemed to have little or no significance on the rest of the battle. I don't know what they did, if they were taking out bombers or anything like that.  It seemed to just be a fun graphical effect, but had no impact on the battle whatsoever.  Is there information that isn't being seen, or was it really just a fun graphic?  Anyways, I think I'll leave my critique here for now, and will respond with more if I catch anything else that needs addressing.

 

 

Spoiler

I think it was a very good idea to introduce Kaga in this fleet problem.  The fan base has been getting antsy for some time about no "real" updates, and adding a new girl reveal (And such a good one at that) to the actual gameplay was simply brilliant.  Kaga's voice is excellent, and her design couldn't be better for Japan's first aircraft carrier.  A few little details I found interesting: The crossbow is a very novel aircraft launcher, even if all of her little stubby-Zeroes don't have horizontal stabilizers or elevators.  I can just imagine her firing those tiny things playfully or angrily at another belle.  I wonder if they'd hurt... Anyways, her voice was actually just the right tone, and the VA did excellent work.  Her flight cap with the ponytail sticking out is very novel and cute as well.  Unfortunately, due to her sins in this particular video, I must find myself hoping that the next time she is shown, it's after taking a 1000lb and three 500lb bombs.

 

Spoiler

As mentioned, I found many of the voices in this video to be enjoyable and on point.  Arizona's, while fun, does seem a little too stereotypical Texas south, rather than Arizona.  Most of the discord seems to agree the "south" in her voice was laid on a little thick.  Overall I was proud of her fight, though.  As for the rest, My beloved Spee stands at the top of excellent voices, and so far I think the German fanbase agrees that she was done very well.  She has just the type of proper polite and controlled tone I'd expect of such a wonderful lady.  I fear that Kenobi's voice, while the snippet we had was cute, was not nearly enough for me to get a read on it.  Nawlins has an excellent voice for her character.  Nautilus is a bit more gung-ho than I was expecting, but looking back on her character, it certainly fits.  Kirov's lines have been re-done nicely since the original voice reveal video, as have Henley's.  I'm a fan of Kumano's and I think her voice and Fubuki's are both very good, but I'd have to hear more to pick out why.  Lexington is having tons of fun as usual, and I enjoyed the heck out of her lines.

Spoiler

 

Now I have a few questions.  I'll number these too so the answers can be made clear.

1) Will there be an option for subtitles?  A lot of players might want to know what the non-English-speaking belles are saying.

2) I found the movement markings a little bit hard to understand.  Will it be covered in a tutorial or otherwise help page what the range markings and such mean?  

3) I've noticed that for most of the ships you used the same models, all destroyers appeared to use the German Type 1934 profile (I could be wrong on the class, but that was the closest match I remembered off the top of my head), whereas both Kaga and Lexington were portrayed in their damage models as Essex-class.  Without going through an exhaustive list, will ships have correct profiles in the final game, or are we sticking with the generic Submarine-Destroyer-Cruiser-Battleship-Aircraft Carrier portrayals for all ships of those types?  The same question for the aircraft, for which the role of fighter is played by the A5M, and all bombers by the TBD Devastator and Fairey Swordfish.

4) In some relation to question 3, in earlier versions I noted that you marked damaged parts by highlighting the shape of the part in red, but now you just bump an X over the relative position of the object (With a couple mistakes, as noted earlier with Lexington's turrets).  Is that what we're going for in the final version?

 

 

 

Spoiler

 

Gosh, this took a while, didn't it?  Here's my votes for #2.  Rather than putting them in any specific fleets, I'll merely vote for 14 girls I wish to see in the battle.

1.Diether Von Roeder

2.Lebrecht Maass

3.Scharnhorst

4.Nevada

5.Swayback Maru

6.Yavuz

7.Nagato

8.U-29 (I did have to include that one allowed submarine, of course.)

9.Wicher

10.Pola

11.Camicia Nera

12.Rawalpindi

13.Bulldog

14.D'Aosta

 

 

 

 

[Legate of Mineta]

Recorded!

For (some) of your q's:

The ship silhouettes and their damage markers are generic, and not tailored to the actual ship. The good news is, that it is possible to do both specific to the actual ship, but for Launch it will be generic. That's just a function of the time, artwork and placement needed.

For the corner ships and critical hits, oh boy we went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Ultimately, we opted to go with the lovely Belles making their appearances, even if it does obscure. It seems likely that will be how it is until Beta- it is possible to turn those off, for instance, and maybe that's an option that can be given to the Player after that. We'll see how everyone feels then.

One issue with criticals, which will be ongoing until the Crafting Module, is that there are many types of them (it's actually based on what you equip.) Kirov's engine hits are small Knot reductions in her speed, which meant that she could keep up. There are more severe criticals which could render her immobile, however. In Crafting, the critical names (although not the small x's) will be more indicative of what's going on.

The fighters scrap in the dogfight until they run out of ammunition or are damaged/shot down. They will actually go after Bombers if they aren't in the dogfight, though- if, say, Kaga had brought more fighters than Lexington, you would have seen them trail the Bombers and try to knock as many down as possible before their attack- likely in one of the future Fleet Problems you'll see that. The next one is at night, so...not then, though.

If it makes you feel any better, Lexington's Fleet Command has her usually going after Kaga. More often than not in the other tests we ran, she sinks like a stone.

1) There isn't a plan for subtitles. We have the English translation, of course, but no UI work has been done to provide subtitles. That doesn't mean it couldn't be done, but I wouldn't expect before Launch.

2) The movement chevrons are covered in the tutorial, but basically they describe how close the Belle is to the other side. A large number of chevrons, like in Nautilus' case, means that she is essentially next to Arizona's Fleet.

3) As above, all can be specified to the exact ship or squadron, but default to a generic type. I suspect that will be the case until Launch.

4) Yep- it used to be the whole ship section, but the x's seemed a *little* more understandable.

 

[Wellington99]

Well I don't have a full on fleet idea. I'd just like to see Hood, Bulldog, and Rawa to make an appearance, one or all three.

[Ninjapacman]

Well, thank you Legate, you did answer pretty much all of my major concerns.  Now all I have to know is whether Kaga's little sans-stabilizer bolts are more useful for pranks or sport hunting of captains.  I really can't wait for whatever update gives specific profiles.  Those would be pretty cool.  And yes, I think an option to turn on and off the pretty girls that block the screen would be welcome.  That might just be me, though.

I also would like a little more specifics on that crafting module hooey and how it affects criticals and whatnot, but I suppose if that's classified I can live without it for now.

[Dmnt]

I think the "middle" option would be to have the belles appear *behind* the overlay, so they don't obscure information, rather than disabling it altogether.

I agree with Pac in that subtitles would be very welcome. That being said... it'd also mean having to translate each line(and it seems there'll be a ton of them) for EVERY language the game will be in.

[Legate of Mineta]

Dmnt;

Actually, we tried it- but it looked pretty odd, unfortunately.

We'd likely only do subtitle for English, for the same reasons that we're only doing Story for English. Although...about that...well, we'll see.

Ninja;

We're doing one Module at a time- Crafting is towards the end, but it's coming.

[Ninjapacman]

By “the end” do you mean launch?  It would be great if we got that whole system at launch, but if we have to wait for an update I think it would still be rather welcome.

[Legate of Mineta]

Crafting is before the Beta, even.

[lazarusdw]

Or maybe split the belles into two rows

[Dmnt]

BTW, I add Leningrad to my voting.

[Legate of Mineta]

Recorded!