Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts News

Hello all,

This a necessary update fixing some issues that came with the latest new features of the campaign and further optimizing the game's content.

*v1.6.1.0*
- Added useful information in the Ship Design window, showing the active ship count for each design.
- Fixed of an old issue causing destroyers to not emit smoke screens when they were in the same division with other ship types, such as battleships.
- Fixed a rare code exception happening when a Major Offensive began from East Poland.
- Fixed rare issue not allowing to exit the constructor.
- Fix of wrong chance applied in Rebellion events.
- Fix of a UI inconsistency showing inverse chance for attacker in Naval Invasion (In AI events).
- Fix of an issue caused by nation intervention making alliances or wars to end prematurely without notice.
- Fix of an issue causing Tonnage count in special map events to not be updated fully.
- Auto-Design optimizations.

Hello Admirals,

You can now receive a new update which offers the following:

*v1.6.0.9*

• Added ability to control alliance and war declarations. When the player's nation is more powerful then it can ask the player to declare war against the weaker nation or not, according to relations. The weaker AI nation will not desire to declare war unless provoked. Similarly the weaker nations will usually pay the stronger for an alliance. Previously the player was only passively accepting events generated by the AI, so the new feature will provide much more freedom when to cause a war or pressure to ask for money, if the player’s nation is powerful enough.
  
• Minor nations which are allied with enemy major nations can now be targeted much more aggressively by the nation’s government. Now wars between nations become much more complex and each campaign playthrough can have many different outcomes, depending on the various war incidents that cause the intervention of the major powers. You can influence such attacks by amassing large fleets in a sea region of interest.
  
• Further tension mechanics to allow smaller nations which are very weak or have a too small fleet to increase the relations between other nations, who no longer consider them a threat.
  
• Improved the Campaign AI logic to create diplomatic actions measuring the relations and power of the other nations. For example, a nation which is very powerful or has good relations, will more likely receive positive diplomatic actions and vice versa.
  
• Improved the Campaign AI logic to balance the demand for new warships.
  
• Relation effects have been balanced to follow the new features.
  
• Fixed a minor UI issue when typing the name of a ship in constructor.
  
• Fixed some other minor issues.
  

Uploaded optimized version including:
- Fix for WASD not working, temporarily, in combat map.
- Tension small adjustment. Issuing wars should be more depended on events and wars against minor nations.
You need to restart Steam to get the update fast

Uploaded optimized x2 version including:
-Further tension and relations adjustments. You should be able to do wars or try to avoid them with less fleets and on limited status. More feedback will help to optimize further.
You need to restart Steam to get the update fast

Uploaded optimized x3 version including:
- More adjustments and improvements on the tension mechanics based on your recent and very helpful feedback. There was an expected behavior to cause tension even from fleets which were not particularly large, so there have been some necessary changes to the logic, to please, hopefully, most if not all players with the result. Tension should be triggered when ships are at sea. When nations are in positive relations they can receive a very slight increase in relations if they keep their forces out of port in a reasonable number.
- Fixed issue causing the new alliance/war events to be auto-answered wrongly sometimes, and not given to the player for deciding if he wants a war or an alliance.
You need to restart Steam to get the update fast

Uploaded optimized x4 version including:
- Finalization of the full refactoring of tension logic. Tension will now be caused only by task forces which are close to their destination or stationary, which will actually allow to create tension only intentionally, for both AI and player. Fleets that pass by regions will no longer cause accidental tension and so this will greatly help nations which control canals or are near map choke points which previously received a lot of tension by big fleets that were heading to very far away destinations. Moreover, there will be extra tension caused when fleets enter zones where there is no own port, simulating a realistic diplomatic effect when fleets are near sea zones where they should not have any business. The new tension system should be now much more controllable and realistic, also allowing nations to slowly increase their good relations and issue alliances if they share common waters but keep their fleets in reasonable numbers.
- Fixed a temporary issue of the new special events for deciding when to declare war or ask for an alliance, which could be triggered two times and cancel a war at the same turn.
- Added a cool down time when using the new special event for deciding when to go to war or issue an alliance, so that it needs at least 5 turns to reappear if you choose "cancel".
- Fix of initial income/shipyard development being too low in late start campaign years. You will notice this improvement on new campaigns and it affects both the player and AI. If you have an ongoing campaign vs an AI which seems unable to support its fleets economically, it is because there were not much initial funds and Ai was never able to recover, so it is advised to restart this campaign for a more interesting gameplay.
- Fixed shared designs not having a working tonnage limit, fixing case when you loaded a shared design which had tonnage higher than allowed, it would reset to the maximum allowed tonnage and corrupting the save.
You need to restart Steam to get the update fast

Hello Admirals,

We continue to improve the basis of the game. Here is what we have readied:

*v1.6.0.8*

• Optimizations in the special event logic, addressing remaining issues of inconsistent chance to win and tonnage measurements. You will also now see in more detail for whom the chance is calculated.
  
• Fixed old issues causing VP to be sometimes wrongly given to the defender, even though he lost a province.
  
• Fixed copied design issues, causing overweight ships when building them. To prevent other kinds of issues, copying of designs is disallowed for ship designs gained as war reparations. Designs from war reparation will now be indicated with special transparent color in the Ship Design window.
  
• Similarly, to prevent issues caused by inconsistent refitting of a refit design on the same turn, now the system allows, correctly, to make a refit design of an existing refit design only if at least one ship of the refit design is built. Refit designs were always meant to work for existing ships, for ships that were built. The “New Design” option is what a player must use for making a new design.
  
• Further changes on the tension logic, allowing smaller nations to be able to not cause negative tension if they have a small fleet, which will not be considered a threat. An example is Spain, which previously was very hard to not become targeted by other nations and be brought to war. The tension system should overall be more flexible, allowing to influence alliances by positioning fleets accordingly.
  
• Several Campaign AI improvements, including its new ability to gather naval forces during peacetime against other nations which are in high tension with the AI.
  
• Improved pathfinding of task forces, refreshing promptly the task force movement on the map, triggering events, power projections calculations and meeting events on the right time. This also solves the issue of AI ships not being visualized sometimes, although they were present on a map region.
  
• Obsolete ships can now be built and sold (when mothballed) by the player, if he wants.
  
• When you click on a port you will now see which ships are unavailable to move, with their respective indication e.g. commissioning, repairing etc.
  

Uploaded optimized version including:
- Further fixes on the special events, addressing temporary issues that were reported.
- Improved campaign's minimap to work consistently in all monitor resolutions.
Please restart Steam to get this update fast

Uploaded optimized x2 version including:
- Fixed war reparation ships not being able to become refit.
- Further tunings in the tension system to be more subtle.
- Added a special message when an alliance breaks due to peace treaty and lost war.
- Fixed old issue of negative funds that could be created for a nation after paying too many war reparation funds, resulting in a never-ending dismissal of admirals and inability to build anything for the nation. This issue, if it happens in an AI opponent of your campaign, cannot be fixed, needs a new campaign.
- Balanced money shortage events for both player and AI to be more impactful. For AI, when naval funds become zero, the bonus funds are more (to prevent the same problem happening in a few turns) but the yearly GDP reduction is higher.
- “Create tension” action is now more impactful.
- Improved Campaign AI ability to suspend building of ships and reduce ship trade orders if there is not enough shipbuilding capacity.
Please restart Steam to get this update fast

Hello Admirals,

We are very happy to announce a new large update of Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts. This update focuses on optimizing all aspects of gameplay and most importantly it has significantly increased the speed of campaign loading times.

After a period of beta testing, thanks to the really helpful feedback from all who participated in the beta and the collaboration with many players we finalized the update which offers the following:

*v1.6.0.7*

• Complete overhaul of the campaign system, greatly improving the loading times. When you start a new campaign the AI will use pre-made designs so the campaign will need a few seconds to start instead of several minutes as before. We will gradually enrich the pre-made ships to greatly increase the variability of AI initial designs.
  
• The campaign loading time between the shipyard and world map or battle and world map have been decreased significantly. Previously, according to how many designs the player and the AI had active, it would often delay too much to load the next game scene.
  
• Campaign turn times have also been reduced significantly due to refactoring of the related code.
  
• New options "Mixed", "Fast", "Slow" for starting the campaign, allow you to use the pre-made AI ships according to your liking. If you want to play in the fastest way, you choose “Fast” so all AI designs are pre-made. In “Mixed” mode only the starting units are pre-made and in “Slow” mode all AI designs are generated on demand, making it a full sandbox mode, but it will cost the most time during turn times. *Important:* Mods will be compatible only with the “Slow” mode.
  
• Fixed a minor auto-resolve issue, not causing adequate transport losses in “Undefended Port” battles.
  
• Several improvements in the auto-resolve system to make results even more consistent based on the power of ships. This will not be a "hand holding" mode for players. You will expect more sunken ships for the side that is inferior in techs and overall firepower of the fleet for both AI and player. Mods are not guaranteed to have the same results, as always, so if you want to test it out, you need to use the default game values (auto-resolve is affected not only by dedicated parameters but also cost and many other aspects of ships).
  
• Fixed and improved various aspects of Campaign’s Victory points system. You will notice the impact of submarine raiding of transports more noticeably and battle results will be much more consistent.
  
• Increased the impact of Crew rescuing/healing techs.
  
• Weight fixes in several late tech destroyers, which had very heavy towers and were very difficult to design, creating delays in the auto-design. These various destroyers of your fleet will gain free tons which you can use to improve them.
  
• Added shipyard capacity indication in Ship Design and Map interface.
  
• Technology priorities/penalties got a milder effect, addressing cases where technology could either be researched too quick for the era or it could delay too much the AI, when it used the priorities.
  
• AI units will now not be able to retreat in campaign battles where they "Fail to withdraw" as Task Forces on the map. They may still attempt to fight at a safe distance but they will not try to leave the map as before.
  
• Experimental more aggressive Division AI logic making the ships which are on screen or scout to behave more independently, often more effectively as the previous AI command. This change will also affect the opponent AI.
  
• Tension mechanics tuning to make tension more dynamic.
  
• Economy balances. Army cost affects the expenses more. Transport Capacity and Crew Training costs are more dynamic, and depend more on National GDP. Fleet maintenance and repair costs increased slightly. Shipyard capacity limit affects more the building times and costs.
  
• Various minor bug fixes.
  

Thanks again to everyone who contributed in the beta! As a small mention, we have fixed a few more bugs that you reported including the retreat button not working in some Task Force battles of the campaign.

Uploaded optimized version including
- Fixed issue of "Own Fleet Creation" at the start of campaign, resulting in negative funds if your built ships exceeded the shipyard capacity.
- Fixed shipyard cancellation issue, causing tonnage to get lower than before.
- Reduced further the difficulty levels' Technology boost of the AI (it is really minimal now). After the latest campaign AI improvements the effect appeared to be strong.
Please restart Steam to get the update fast

Uploaded optimizedx2 version including
- Tension mechanics fine tuning according to feedback. Tension should rise in cases that previously was too passive. You have to know, though, that while you are allied to a nation you cannot raise tension against it.
- Fixed old issue of auto-resolve happening when leaving combat causing sometimes to reset damages made in combat.
Please restart Steam to get the update fast

Uploaded optimizedx3 version including
- Further fine tuning in tension mechanics.
- Reduced further the AI technology progress boost of harder difficulties to make the gameplay more comfortable.
- Logistics and navy power calculations improved, increasing the influence of the Navy Strength and Transport Capacity. This change will greatly affect all aspects of campaign military warfare.
- Campaign log can include much more information per turn showing all actions of the AI (when you save the log information gets limited).
- Fixed some code exceptions causing ships to disappear from the fleet or sunk ships to not be cleaned up.
- Fixed VP calculations related to transports, causing big differences in VP (old issue).
- Fine tuned overall VP calculations.
- Auto-Resolve further optimizations.
- Fixed problem that prevented shared designs to be used in the Fast mode of campaign.
- Fixed minor calculation inconsistency for event effects.
- Fixed old error causing task forces to travel in the same exact spot if they failed to merge, making it very difficult to select them.
- Other minor fixes.
Please restart Steam to get the update fast

Uploaded optimizedx4 version including
- Further fine tuning in tension mechanics. It should be much better if not optimal.
- Reduced AI boosts at higher difficulty levels to make the gameplay more comfortable.
- Fixed a loading freeze that could happen in campaign prior to a battle (a left over bug of the beta).
- A memory handling optimization.
Please restart Steam to get the update fast

Uploaded optimizedx5 version including
- Fixed some old inconsistencies of naval invasions and special events' battles causing AI to not interact properly in all occasions and also added visibility of all AI special events so that players are aware of when the AI attacks somewhere or supports a defense in allied waters. Colors of missions have changed according to nation. This is a major improvement for the campaign, which will activate AI in all the necessary military actions properly.
- Fixed bug which made ships to disappear from the fleet in the campaign.
- Fixed some bugs that prevented to save components when copying designs.
- Fixed kills caused by submarines not saved into the end campaign statistics.
- Fine tuned task forces auto-shift position on the map to avoid being merged into the same coordinates. Please note, you cannot add many task forces into singularity as previously, to maximize the tonnage in missions, you need to keep some space between your task forces.
- Fixed some minor UI issues showing not total change of shipyard capacity when selling ships.
Please restart Steam to get the update fast

Hello all,

We usually offer betas prior to the release of a major patch which includes new ships and 3D content. Now we make an exception because we have prepared something that should please the majority of the game's community,

The most frequent complaint of players was the occasional long loading times in the campaign. So we have addressed just that. Please read:

*v1.6.0.7* (Beta 5)

• Complete overhaul of the campaign system, greatly improving the loading times. When you start a new campaign the AI will use pre-made designs so the campaign will need a few seconds to start instead of several minutes as before. We will gradually enrich the pre-made ships to greatly increase the variability of AI initial designs.
  
• The campaign loading time between the shipyard and world map or battle and world map have been decreased significantly. Previously, according to how many designs the player and the AI had active, it would often delay too much to load the next game scene.
  
• Campaign turn times have also been reduced significantly due to refactoring of the related code.
  
• New options "Mixed", "Fast", "Slow" for starting the campaign, allow you to use the pre-made AI ships according to your liking. If you want to play in the fastest way, you choose “Fast” so all AI designs are pre-made. In “Mixed” mode only the starting units are pre-made and in “Slow” mode all AI designs are generated on demand, making it a full sandbox mode, but it will cost the most time during turn times.
• Important:* Mods will be compatible only with the “Slow” mode.
  
  
• Fixed a minor auto-resolve issue, not causing adequate transport losses in “Undefended Port” battles.
  
• Several improvements in the auto-resolve system to make results even more consistent based on the power of ships. This will not be a "hand holding" mode for players. You will expect more sunken ships for the side that is inferior in techs and overall firepower of the fleet for both AI and player. Mods are not guaranteed to have the same results, as always, so if you want to test it out, you need to use the default game values (auto-resolve is affected not only by dedicated parameters but also cost and many other aspects of ships).
  
• Fixed and improved various aspects of Campaign’s Victory points system. You will notice the impact of submarine raiding of transports more noticeably and battle results will be much more consistent.
  
• Increased the impact of Crew rescuing/healing techs.
  
• Weight fixes in several late tech destroyers, which had very heavy towers and were very difficult to design, creating delays in the auto-design. These various destroyers of your fleet will gain free tons which you can use to improve them.
  
• Weight fixes in several late tech destroyers, which had very heavy towers and were very difficult to design, creating delays in the auto-design. These various destroyers of your fleet will gain free tons which you can use to improve them.
  
• Added shipyard capacity indication in Ship Design and Map interface.
  
• Visual optimizations in combat environments.
  
• AI units will now not be able to retreat in campaign battles where they "Fail to withdraw" as Task Forces on the map. They may still attempt to fight at a safe distance but they will not try to leave the map as before.
  
• Experimental more aggressive Division AI logic making the ships which are on screen or scout to behave more independently, often more effectively as the previous AI command. This change will also affect the opponent AI.
  
• Technology priorities/penalties got a milder effect, addressing cases where technology could either be researched too quick for the era or it could delay too much the AI, when it used the priorities.
  
• Tension mechanics tuning to make tension more dynamic.
  
• Economy balances. Army cost affects the expenses more. Transport Capacity and Crew Training costs are more dynamic, and depend more on National GDP. Fleet maintenance and repair costs increased slightly. Shipyard capacity limit affects more the building times and costs.
  
• Various minor bug fixes.
  

This beta version should be fully compatible with your current saves (as it includes everything from the latest stable version). So you can continue your older saves or start a new campaign and use any of your current shared designs without any problem.

However, because it is a beta after all, it is advised to back up your saves, or start a new campaign with the beta in order to test it out.

With this beta, we would like to receive your feedback regarding the loading times, and if in the campaign you notice something not working right, such as the AI not following up the latest tech in its designs, does not refit often or there are pathfinding issues etc.

We also think that modders who occasionally want to restart their campaigns or pass several turns to see the impact of their changes, will find the new improvements welcome.

In order to participate in this beta, you need to follow these simple instructions:



- Find the game on your Steam Game Library and right click on it:

- Click on properties...

- ... and in the opened window, select from the list the "Betas" option. On the appearing list, select the "beta branch" to switch to the latest beta version of the game.

- If you want to switch back to the stable live version, repeat the procedure and select from the Beta list "None".

As usually, Beta Feedback can be shared in the Steam Beta Forum:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1069660/discussions/3/

or in the Official Forum:
https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/44122-beta-1607-fast-loading-in-campaign/