Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts News

Hello Admirals,

We would like to provide a small insight of what is coming in the forthcoming update “Alpha-3” which is scheduled to arrive within this month. First of all, several gameplay fixes, balances, additions as follows:

• 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.
  
• 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.
  
• 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” will include a properly looking and scaled model based on BB South Carolina.
  
• Fixed issues of AI related to engage mechanics. AI ships should approach more gradually and fire broadside salvos at more effective angle and distance.
  

• New Oxygen fueled torpedoes.
  
• New 23-inch and 24-inch torpedoes.
  
• Penetration chance better details: When we hover our mouse over a ship, the pen chance will update also according to angle, so the info will be more accurate for player.
  
• Cage mast towers will be available to a series of US hulls.
  
• Detected torpedoes will be indicated by a visual warning for a short period of time.
  
• Improved AI ship design (with proper focusing on armor for Battleships).
  
• Many game performance optimizations, increase the FPS.
  
• Further reduction of crashes and instability.
  
• Loading of Ship Designer will be faster, battle loading will be slightly faster.
  
• You will be able to name your ships.
  
• You will be able to save your ship design, for the respective missions.
  
• New hulls improving the variability of ship class designs.
  
• New missions based on the new hulls.
  
• In-game music will be reverted back to full functionality.
  

• Damage decals will improve the visuals for the battles.
  
• Various water displacement effects (waves, splashes etc.).
  
• Better fog and particles affected by the atmosphere at distance.
  

As the patch gets closer to completion, more features and improvements will be added. Soon we will post the roadmap that will show the major features we plan to deliver before launching the game on Steam.

Please let us know if we missed anything you consider VERY IMPORTANT for this patch that must be added or fixed.

Hello Admirals,

We deeply thank you for all the support and feedback you are providing. We would like to inform you about our work for the next patch, which is scheduled to arrive next week. First of all, some 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.
  
• AI choses 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)
  
• 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.
  
• 1st Mission has -2 minutes 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.
  

The second part of the patch will be mostly dedicated to several crash fixes and fps optimizations. Two more missions and some other improvements are also scheduled for the next patch. We will provide more information in our final patch notes.

Have a good weekend everybody, and enjoy the game!

The Game-Labs Team

PS: For those players anticipating problems in purchasing the game, we will soon offer alternative payment methods to suit their needs.