Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts News

Hello all,

We are happy to announce that we have started working on the next Major Update v1.6 and we now offer its first playable version as a beta. This beta version is fully playable and should be already a clear improvement in gameplay and stability compared to the older v1.5. You can read what it includes in the changelog below.

The final v1.6 will have more improvements based on the received feedback and many new hulls, guns and ship models. Those will start to become available after the end of this summer in subsequent beta updates.

***WARNING - VERY IMPORTANT***
Old campaign saves and old ship designs are incompatible. When you install and launch the v1.6 all old saves will be automatically deleted (Naval Academy progress should remain intact). It is mandatory to clean up shared designs manually.

[h3]*==MAJOR UPDATE v1.6 BETA==*[/h3]

*NEW HULLS*
- POSTPONED FOR FUTURE

*NEW GUNS*
- - POSTPONED FOR FUTURE

*OPTIMIZATIONS AND GAMEPLAY IMPROVEMENTS*
- Improved the side guns’ targeting mechanics to use a more effective logic with less cost in game fps performance. You should notice your secondary guns to auto- target much more efficiently.
- Fixed inconsistencies of gun splashes mechanics and rebalanced. Now the gun splashes play a more significant role in the ship’s overall accuracy and make stereoscopic rangefinders more distinct.
- Various balances in gun reload rates and accuracy tables, always faithful to basic historical data. Overall, the guns will fire now faster and the combat pace matches more the upcoming multiplayer version of the game. Fast forwarding of the game’s speed should not be overused, as it can drop performance and players will certainly lose the advantage in tactical factors, far more than in the previous version of the game.
- Ship costs/weights major rebalance, so that the actual combat cost of each vessel is accurately reflected by its final price.
- Crew losses surrender threshold increased from 40% to 60% following the new balances.
- Campaign’s economy balance to be stricter. Building too many battleships should now be very hard (in the previous version of the game, the economy was less demanding and most players built too many overpowered ships which resulted in easy gameplay).
- Penalties of blockading and losing transports increased. A nation can now collapse more easily after a prolonged war.
- Battle AI improved to follow the new balance and is now more opportunistic as a good player would be.
- Campaign AI improved in its shipbuilding decision making and in naval invasion behavior.

*VISUAL*
- In 3D combat, Division main unit cards now show the silhouettes of ships (Previously they had a generic ship icon).
- Aesthetic improvements in the UI in pre-battle and after battle windows.
- More weather environments.
- Minor improvement on ship foam effects.

*FIXES*
- Major repair in the save system of the campaign. Previously, some errors related to Naval invasion saving and other, could cause the game to not function properly and eventually collapse at the start of a next battle. Those errors could be resolved when the game was restarted. Due to those repairs, we had to upgrade the save version of the game, therefore all previous saves will become incompatible and deleted.
- Fixed problems of map resolution in ultra wide monitors.
- Fixed small bug causing the accuracy penalty of low speed to seize to function at zero speed.
- Fixed inconsistency of transport losses calculations in auto-resolve.
- Fixed code exceptions of the UI that could rarely happen during the 3D combat.
- Fixed a rare issue which could cause guns to not rotate and get stuck for some time.
- Fixed issue which could make minor allies to place orders on ship designs that were taken as war reparations.
- Fixed a rare error causing an empty template of design for a war reparation ship.
- Fixed a glitch allowing wrongly to edit the name of a refit main design.
- Fixed bug caused when renaming ships that were refitted.
- Fixed an old bug causing ships to become fully damaged when losing all crew in the campaign.
- Minor fixes in some hulls.
- More will be added…

*SPECIAL*
- Added crew options for submarines.
- Added the operational range in the ship design description in the campaign.
- Added Shipbuilding Capacity to Build and Refit Ship PopUp Windows on Design Window.
- Added tooltips showing information about the ships offered as war reparations.
- Refit designing allows using guns of older techs (Not yet ready).
- More will be added…

*LANGUAGE SUPPORT*
- The Chinese translation is updated using the corrections of forum member “Weiyang” who generously offered them for free as fan work. We thank him very much. Chinese players can provide feedback to help us improve further the Chinese text.
- Various minor fixes in the text in various languages.

*==============================*

You can now visit the Beta feedback threads:

Steam forum
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1069660/discussions/3/

Official forum
https://forum.game-labs.net/topic/44017-beta-v16-feedback/#comment-786383

Hello admirals,

We are happy to announce one more small but very important update:

Optimization Update v1.5.1.6
- Optimizations in Ship movement mechanics, adjusting speed of ships to more realistic levels.
- Optimizations and visualization improvements on ships' funnel smoke and water foam emissions.
- Further optimizations in section hit logic, making even more consistent the calculated hits depending on the ship's orientation in relation to gun fire direction. This improvement affects the applied gun accuracy.
- Fixed old bug that could be caused when single ship divisions followed each other and the leading division received damage, causing a logical loop and a game crash. Thanks to player "godspeedthunder" for his persistent help about this matter.
- Fixed minor issues in the calculations of time needed to arrive for ships in the campaign map.
- Auto-Design adjustments: improving AI efficiency on placing parts
- Fixed problem of torpedo friendly fire mechanics making them to not work properly.
- Other minor fixes in UI and localization.

Enjoy!

The Game-Labs Team

Hello all,

You may receive another update which improves further the game. Here it is:

Optimization Update v1.5.1.5
- Ships will no longer exceed their maximum designed speed in an effort to maintain their formation in a faster way. This change in general should be positive and fix long standing issues of ships becoming too fast or other problems reported.
- Engine vibrations dissipate faster according to speed.
- Optimizations in ship hit boxes, affecting positively the applied accuracy of ships, and making the hits on ship sections more consistent according to shell trajectory.
- Optimizations in the targeting logic of side guns.
- Improved the torpedo aiming prediction making torpedoes more easily fired.
- Optimizations in auto-design making AI ships balance better the ship's protection versus speed and firepower.
- Other optimizations affect the game's stability when loading battles or fighting battles vs many ships.

Enjoy!

The Game-Labs Team

Hey Admirals,

Here is the latest small update which should fix and improve things you lately reported:

Optimization Update v1.5.1.4
- Refactored the code of Gun recoil so that it now is more consistent. Previously it could fail to update if there was no other gun firing on the ship. Modders should check to rebalance their mods regarding recoil values.
- Fixed engine vibrations being not consistent according to UI update.
- Improved campaign logic making very rare the possibility to trigger pointless meeting battles vs a lone AI ship which failed to escape. The AI ships will make a successful effort to escape most of the time.
- Balanced the negative impacts of the economy so they are not so harsh on the nation's GDP when losing TR ships. Previously the provinces could reach zero income or a nation such as Britain could very fast dissolve after some months of blockading, for example.
- Fixed cases which could cause a fatal error at the start of a campaign battle.
- Fixed issue which prevented a nation from cancelling an alliance.
- Minor optimization in combat fps.
- Optimizations in ship movement mechanics.
- Battle AI optimizations.
- Destroyers and Torpedo boats will receive bigger damage from torpedo hits.
- Other minor fixes.

Enjoy!

The Game-Labs Team

Uploaded Optimized version including the following:
- Further optimization on the Battle AI code. Fixed rare issue which could cause ship freezing on campaign depending on the amount of time played continuously and fps rate.
- Fixed rare issue which disallowed refitting a ship that had the same name with another class of ship.
Please restart Steam to receive the update properly

Uploaded Optimized version x2 including the following:
- Fixed a temporary problem of refit that came with the previous update.
- Fixed 3-Mast cruisers hitbox inconsistency not allowing them to receive belt hits.
Please restart Steam to receive the update properly

Hello Admirals,

You can now receive a new small update including the following:

Optimization Update v1.5.1.3
- Removed various internal debug reports, which are now unnecessary. You should notice a significant fps increase in combat and a faster loading of processes.
- Improved torpedo friendly fire mechanics. You should notice a more efficient launching of torpedoes from your ships, on average.
- Fixed a rare issue that could cause a temporary stucking of gun rotation.
- Fixed remaining issues of combat UI refresh which affected gun recoil and accuracy calcs.
- Improved ship hitboxes, fixing issues where bow/stern hits were becoming very rare or other similar issues.
- Fixed a potential issue which could cause ship freeze error when playing in fast forward mode. We cannot address issues caused by players editing of files or poor pc system optimization while pushing the game to play in 10x fast forward mode.
- Other minor fixes.

Enjoy!

The Game-Labs Team