Tiered Naval Construction

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number47
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by number47 »

Implementing something like this (tiered construction facilities) would make absolutely no sense without connecting it with "upgrade/expand facility" option.
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Nerei
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by Nerei »

To be fair pretty much the same can be said about warships in general. Having the only way to modernise a dreadnought battleship or super carrier be to basically scrap it and build a new one is frankly a horrible solution.

Also the way aircraft carriers are implemented in general makes no sense as the game does not care if I am landing a a 1931 FF-1 or F-14 on my carriers. Some of the best carriers period are from the 1920-1940's and in many ways outdoes brand new ships like the Ford.

Honestly both of these bother me far, far more than not being able to expand a shipyard. That is not to say I do not think we should be able to do so. In general the complete lack of upgrade options for existing units and buildings are quite annoying.
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by georgios »

Everyone can make the implementation of his choice. For example upgraded plants will be more expensive so even the big countries dont need many high tech industries with the majority beeing low tech plants for light units (riflemen, boats, UAV's ...) So the uprade can be optional, not automatic.

The problem for me is what building icon to use for every level, to be easy recognizable ingame.
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by YoMomma »

Nerei wrote: Mar 28 2018 To be fair pretty much the same can be said about warships in general. Having the only way to modernise a dreadnought battleship or super carrier be to basically scrap it and build a new one is frankly a horrible solution.
And the AI cant even handle scrapping, let alone all the stuff people want in this topic, no1 is talking about the AI.
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by Nerei »

YoMomma wrote:
Nerei wrote: Mar 28 2018 To be fair pretty much the same can be said about warships in general. Having the only way to modernise a dreadnought battleship or super carrier be to basically scrap it and build a new one is frankly a horrible solution.
And the AI cant even handle scrapping, let alone all the stuff people want in this topic, no1 is talking about the AI.
You read the first page, right?
Nerei wrote:It probably needs to be official as I got a nagging feeling that as the AI is right now it will just pick a single type of facility either limiting its production capability or blue water capability depending on what it picks.

Also I agree that additional shipyards can be added or exiting ones changed along the way. Mr. Latour already have a spreadsheet and it can just get a page there. Shipyards needs an overhaul anyway as countries like the ROK is missing something like 8-10 shipyards if memory serves me right.
Uriens wrote: Mar 06 2018 I plan to do some changes to factories for my own mod. I'll do some testing and if i find anything useful i'll post it here. I know that AI for some reason favored factories with production of 2 units but IIRC those factories had similar costs as normal factories do i vanilla SRU. I'll see if i can separate infantry and armor production and how AI responds to those changes.
Uriens wrote: Feb 28 2018 I do remember creating 3 types of factories for my mod. One had only 1 unit production, second 2 and third ... well ... 3. I tested them in game and indeed they had production as intended. I didn't limit them to only one certain type of units but I do remember AI favoring to build the factories with capacity 2.

For the record I am fully aware of the limits of the AI. This is the main reason I am not going to try and bother modding things like this.
I am also aware the AI is bad at modernising its army and generally just mass produces hardware. Improved pathfinding and limiting the unit spam would go a long way towards improving it.
Personally I could also see upgrading units as a way to keep the unit spam down (naturally assuming the AI can do it) as giving say a ship a mid-life refit would most likely involve taking up a shipyard production spot that would then not be used to make another unit.
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by YoMomma »

What will happen is you will limit the AI instead of improving it and big countries are even more untouchable. Basicly there is already tiered naval construction, since small naval powers are limited big time by unit designs and trading ships/designs is very limited to non existent in game, so imho you already have a big gap compared to rl.
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Nerei
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by Nerei »

If you want small nations like the Philippines to build capital ships yes then it will be harder but really should they?

The short answer is "no".

The game tries to have a realistic economy with realistic unit prices and lets face it a global reach blue water navy is insanely expensive.
Just the build price of a Gerald R. Ford class carrier is comparable to or greater than the yearly defence budget of most nations. It is comparable to the combined GDP of something like the 15 poorest nations (by total GDP). It is nearly comparable to the Canadian defence budget which is in top 20. That is not even considering development cost, an airwing and escort which is going to make the price explode. Creating the infrastructure to build such vessels is also quite expensive and demanding.
Battleships around the time of the great war is largely the same story. If my memory is correct when at its worst Imperial Japan dedicated something like 25% of the state budget towards the navy.

We keep saying the AI is stupid and it should be smarter. Well "not" having minor AI nations wasting resources building anything larger than a FFG or coastal defence ship is a good start when it comes to the navy.


Not all US, Russian or PRC shipyard can build super carriers so really it would put a greater limit on how many super carriers or Aegis battleships the US can build concurrent. Yes it is possible to expand this production capacity but it will be more expensive and as mentioned it is not something minor AI nations should care about as they should not even consider building major capital ships.
Not having all shipyards effectively be Newport News shipbuilding also means it is easier to argue for the inclusion of smaller shipyards around the world so it can expand the construction capacity of smaller nations.

As for construction times the greatest sinners are larger ships. The relatively small and cheap vessels operated by littoral navies are far more accurate so making build times more realistic would affect major nations such as the US Navy carrier construction far more than say the Bangladeshi navy.


Also lets face it the navies of major navies are largely speaking untouchable by smaller counterparts unless they happen to get lucky. Also the counter to something like a US navy battlegroup is not to send your own fleet out to meet it in an open fight. SSK's or saturating the air defences of the escorts with anti-ship missiles is the way to go.


I know some will bring up that they can grow in size. Yes, yes they can. It is possible to create domestic capital ship construction programs. Japan used 50 years getting to the point where battleship construction was possible and that was at great expense. So far the PRC has used 40+ years on its carrier programme and it was only last year the first domestic build aircraft carrier was launched and that was still largely a Soviet design. Project 003 which will be the first truly Chinese carrier was only laid down early last year. A CVN is at least a decade away unless 003 against expectations turns out to be one.
Keep in mind those countries had far more cash to throw at this than say Southern Sudan can.


I agree we need more ship design (and unit designs in general) for nearly all region groups maybe except the US (although the US could do with a proper post cold war nuclear escort) but for nations like the Philippines what is needed is SSK's, FFG's and maybe a DDG or two not a 100.000 tonne CVN that realistically they would need 50 years to get to the point where they can construct.

edit: accidentally typed that Canada is in top 10. It should have been 20.
Last edited by Nerei on Mar 30 2018, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by SGTscuba »

+1 to Nerei. I would expect the Goats to "fix" the AI to be able to use the different facilities rather than just have the AI go for one particular type.
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georgios
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by georgios »

This is a balance issue, for so many countries and units is difficult to expect from devs. The best they can do is to give some advice or some modding tools, as with the map editor and leave the customization to us.
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by YoMomma »

Im just worried that devs see number of people that want this, and do it. Now they say to people who want improvements to stop people from asking features, so here we go.
What exactly does it add? OP and i guess the rest expect a more balanced fleet? How will small naval powers climb up the ladder?

First i wouldnt expect AI to upgrade facilities, because in 20+ years we still dont have it, even worse i see big regions building tons of med. consumer goods, they need 20k CG why they build med. facilities..
Then further improvements to the game, it just give more work.
You also facing UI adjustments.
What will happen all regions have to get the appropiate naval facilities and are therefore limited, and most regions are stuck in patrol and transport if upgrading is not there. How is this realistic to a player who just get the best design in the game and exploits it? True exploits cant be stopped, but 99% will do it myself included because i like options not limitations.

With small naval powers i ment more regions like Netherlands. There were plans in the '60's for a carrier, have few capital ships, our subs sunken the US training fleet on several excersises without even detecting them, and in game have 2 naval fabs.. So let me get the picture, level 1 is transport patrol, level 2 escort+subs and level 3 carrier and capital ships? I mean OP proposed values of tonnage is very weird value to go from to me. Most likely an escort ship from US weight way more then one from Algeria or Netherlands, so how does the AI makes difference between subs/escorts/patrol and transport? I have no idea on tonnage of those, but yeah from a new player POV i wouldnt guess that, that's for sure. So you are most likely also talking about big UI changes, which devs already said they dont see the room for more. Those are the 2 proposed methods i think? Makes it confusing tho.
What will Netherlands get? Thats only 1 region, like few hundred other regions left to do research on (4 time lines)...
That said im just confused by proposed tonnage of OP to go from, maybe there are clear differences between the classes, but also think about UI and new players.
.
US building less air carriers (as far they are usefull to the AI) is very hypothetical. AI only know two settings building. ON or OFF, since US should be at war at most times (just like Russia or any other big power), it should be auto build on like it is programmed now. Fine tuning this, and making US actually involved in the world is by far a bigger priority for me. I dont see how US gets harmed in anyway, and that was the reason for the proposal? So small naval powers will become stronger?

If you want to lower the training of capital ships on which i agree, just give AI more focus on build times and lower focus on tonnage or something, but i think it's more that the AI only use capital ships on offence and escort ships are sitting infront of port or surrounding regions without ships, subs are used more for area defence, so it builds capital ships because it looses them? Usually if they have the designs it builds a decent balanced fleet. To introduce such a big change for such an issue, i dont get it. Ill leave you guys to it, just my 2 cents. But now we are talking about tonnage i understand why in modern era the minister prefer to build WW2 and CW over modern sometimes. It's not a mather how big it is tho, it's how you work it :D
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by YoMomma »

I noticed something which i noticed before but never mentioned. The AI has no priority in researching naval units. For example if you select the priority for the AI in multiplayer it even removes it if you reload the region after a couple of days.
I know all the stories of taking 50 years of developing a "tier", but again there is no trading of ships except transport and patrol, maybe an obsolete escort, but no trading of unit designs.
When a region is not at war, the low priority also effects building of ships, so that also explains why small naval regions have hardly any ships, so naval combat is pretty dead except between the bigger regions as long unit pathing isnt too far.

So question remains open.. do you want devs to waste hundreds hours of resources for tiered naval construction, or do you actually want to fix naval combat and fix 100 other small issues/fine tuning?
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by Nerei »

Unless you happen to have inside knowledge about how the AI is programmed I would say you are going to have a hard time estimating how much work is involved. It might be very simple, it might be very hard or it might be anything in between but only BG will be able to tell us.

As for fixing naval combat being an alternative. If you think that is easy I suggest a career at Paradox as a programmer as I have yet to play a Paradox development studio title that did not have mediocre or worse naval combat.

You should also distinguish programmer time from game designer time. Fixing shipyard placement is not programmer development time which I assume your wished for fixes are.

You also bring up points that are only peripherally relevant. Yes the AI does not trade unit designs and units properly. Yes the AI does not have the option to buy units at another nations factories. I would just as much consider this a problem with tanks and other ground units as I would like to see most 3rd world countries in say the cold war either use US/UK/German/french or USSR equipment depending on what sphere they are aligned with.
To me that is far more important than if Australia buys an old british aircraft carrier or not.
Yes I would not mind seing this being better at all. I might actually prefer it to this change but that is another topic.


I am fairly certain I have seen the ROK trade away Sejong the Great class Aegis destroyers. In terms of size those ships are larger than what most navies in the world operate barring the odd replenishment ship or second hand aircraft carrier.
I know I have seen them sell ChoongMoo class destroyers before. Again few navies have suface combatants this large. That is some of the best surface combatants of the ROKN and generally pretty decent ships.

If you look at what is generally traded in terms of warships it is not not nuclear powered attack submarines or aircraft carriers. It is transports and patrol vessels with some submarines and the odd escort. Ships like ChoongMoo and smaller easily covers well above 90% of surface combatant trades.

But X once bought Y aircraft carrier from Z. Yes but how many missile boats, corvettes or frigates do you think the USSR have sold for every carrier sold worldwide? Chances are that number is pretty darn high.
Not saying the AI should not be capable of trading aircraft carriers or missile cruisers but considering you want BG to focus on the most relevant things I would say this by that criteria should be ignored as again ChoongMoo type ships and smaller easily covers nearly all surface combatant trade.


Also what fixes you want and what you consider important is entirely subjective. I might consider the not exactly amazing placement of shipyards in Asia a priority while you might not. That could be tied to this.
I might consider the fact that building a proper naval manufacturing infrastructure capable of matching the US, Russia or Japan is a task even a remotely decent country can do in a year or two to be problematic.

I might also find it interesting if nations after a few years of gameplay where not largely identical except for unit designs which if all region groups had largely matching unit designs would wipe out even this difference.

I might actually like if the US or Russia is a different gameplay experience from say Ethiopia except for the time where I build up my economy to buy and build the 6 unit designs with which I will conquer the world.

I might also consider it significantly problematic that replacing an Aegis cruiser is largely comparable to replacing a few tank units in terms of production time while in reality replacing lost warships is a process that takes years in most cases leading to a somewhat different situation with warships.
When playing Hearts of Iron it certainly feels different to me to lose a super battleships that might take 3+ years to build compared to losing a few mechanised infantry units that can be replaced in a few months. In this game that is not exactly the case.
The long replacement times really makes me personally act differently with my fleet and that is something I really miss.

I can also mention how I really love the feeling of launching my first domestic build battleship in rule the waves after having spend time building up my own shipyards or finally reaching the point in Victoria where I am capable of building ironclad warships as say an asiatic or south american nation. That feeling of achievement is something I am also missing.



You might not agree with me in terms of what is important and that is fine. Having different ideas of what is important is part of being human but please accept that what you consider important I or someone else might not even consider remotely relevant and vice versa.
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by YoMomma »

Whats your obsession with aircraft carriers? They are useless imho especially for AI.

OP brought up the topic of small navies underperforming, so i explain the reason for that. Tiered naval construction is not gonna help, as i explained. If you cant imagine UI changes in an already busy UI taking alot of work, well that's your problem. If you cant imagine that ANY follow up work to navies, like scrapping and reserving, brings more work, again i cant help you.

ROK might be isolated in trading ships and working together with other nations, Netherlands is not, they are working with tens of nations to improve their navy. Im not asking for this feature, but you brought up it takes 50 years for Philipinnes to design a capital ship, that might be the case but they have some, so whos bringing up useless stuff? You mention things and contradict yourself often in the same post nothing to do with tiered naval construction or small navies underperforming (in 1 post you even claim small navies have no change against the big ones). That's fine, it's a discussion, but i have the right to speak, stonger devs told people that if they want improvements and fixes they should tell people to stop asking features. Im just showing the effects, as i know pretty well how the AI reachs to situations after playing MP for so long. And yes i have programming knowledge plus mod this game, so i can definetely make a rough estimation.

The issue of small navies building capital ships or carriers might also be connected to issue of small navies underperforming (if so its very small i can tell you that, because of lack of naval priority if not in war), if that can be fixed with a tiered sea port i guess thats fine, i have yet to see community fix all those regions and time lines, but if you want to do that just for preventing AI to build carriers, go ahead. Keep in mind tho, they still have to push those changes to the files eventually. Meanwhile modern regions are stuck for 3 years researching WW1 techs 6 months past WW1 release. I rather get some help on modern regions and brining their science and region from the 80's to today.
Im not gonna respond to tiered land construction, just fetish of levels and upgrading i imagine, cant see any use in it for the AI, but again so i didnt for naval.
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Nerei
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by Nerei »

I fully accept you have an opinion. You telling other and I quote
YoMomma wrote: So question remains open.. do you want devs to waste hundreds hours of resources for tiered naval construction, or do you actually want to fix naval combat and fix 100 other small issues/fine tuning?
"waste" is a charged word indicating you consider what others might like what you just said a waste of time. You might regard it as that and that is fine but that is telling others that their opinion does not matter. Please do not argue "I have a right to say what I want" after basically telling others their desires does not matter because that is effectively what you did there.

That and reading your second to last reply here makes me really not want to continue this discussion.

So I think that is all I will say in this topic to avoid it turning (more) toxic.
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Re: Tiered Naval Construction

Post by SGTscuba »

I am only suggesting that a tiered system may make it easier to construct a system with better naval AI (having a better scope of assets allowing more flexible responses and fleet compositions). I've posted suggestions on how to improve the naval AI's response elsewhere on this forum.

See here if you want to respond:

viewtopic.php?p=188109&sid=5dba779cf8c5 ... fc#p188109

I'm no AI programmer (just a regular control systems engineer) so I can't tell BG how to program it, or even how long it'll take, but I can at least give suggestions on optimisation and actions. Its a shame that the AI behaviour with units cannot be changed, only the weightings for deployment - its something I've messed with in Arma using the FSM's, or am I wrong about this?
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