Fleet management: the next steps

Hi everyone,

With Monday’s patch we introduced big changes to fleet management that many players really didn’t like. So, we’ve spent the last couple of days going through the feedback and considering the next steps. All of which we’ll cover in this post.

Problems with the original system

Going back to the beginning for a minute, let’s look at the original problems related to fleet management that needed to be fixed:

Flagship levels were confusing for players

The flagship level may have been 5, but whether you could actually fit 5 ships in the fleet depended on their sizes (see image below)

The merge fleet command wasn’t always available (due to the limited fleet radius)

But it wasn’t clear to the player why it wasn’t possible to merge when the flagship level hadn’t been reached

Fleet formation presets were limited due to the constraints of the fleet radius
New players found fleet management generally frustrating (especially manually forming fleets)

The original system: the flagship level was 5 but it wasn’t possible to add another of the same ship

The new system

The idea we had – and implemented in the last patch – was to remove the limits of the fleet radius entirely:

Instead of ships having to be within X meters of the middle of the fleet (represented by the fleet circle in the original system), each ship would have to be within X meters of another ship
The distance limitation from another ship ensured they wouldn’t be placed too far apart from each other
It also meant the damage done by splash weapons could be balanced so that 2 or 3 other ships would always be affected
New fleet formations could be more varied, less confined, and still work with larger ships e.g. 16 battleships in a straight line

These changes were covered in the release notes for that patch. We were keen to get some hands-on feedback from players as early as possible, but probably should have spent more time refining it internally before releasing and apologize for not doing so.

What went well

The new grid looks good and makes it easier to understand distances between ships and how far splash damage would reach
Locking the camera over the fleet prevents getting lost
Bugs related to merging fleets via the context menu were fixed

What didn’t work well

There were four core issues players had:

The 300m meter distance limitation between ships is too small
Splash damage hasn’t been balanced and missiles and torpedoes are OP
A fleet’s formation is reset when a new ship/fleet is merged in
Rearranging ships within a fleet is frustrating

If moving a ship to a new position means another ship will then be in an illegal position (more than 300m away from another) it isn’t possible to move that ship
To do so, you have to first move the other ships into what would be legal positions based on what would be the new position of that ship :/ (like arranging a puzzle as it was described on the forum)

Addressing the issues raised

Tomorrow, we’re planning to release another patch targeting these issues (except ‘Rearranging ships within a fleet is frustrating’, which we’ll get to in a bit):

Increase the max distance allowed between ships in a fleet to 600m (up from 300m)

Many of the player fleets we looked at would now be in a legal formation with this change (after the last patch the player saw a message that no changes could be made as the ships were in an illegal formation)

Decrease the splash damage done by missiles and torpedoes inline with the 600m max distance between ships (the aim is that 2 or 3 ships would be affected by splash damage)
Fix fleet formations being reset when a new ship/fleet is merged in (merging 1 ship into another fleet will just place that ship on the side of the existing fleet, but with more ships in the fleet it will be like joining 2 circles together to form the number 8)

Following up tomorrow’s patch

The changes we’re making should go someway to improving the situation with fleet management, but they won’t go far enough because they don’t tackle the ‘Rearranging ships within a fleet is frustrating‘ issue discussed above (the other changes were things we could implement quickly but this wasn’t something we had an immediate fix for).

But as more feedback comes in following the patch, we’ll consider whether to investigate fixing this issue and continue with the new system (if it can be done so to a satisfying degree), or to look at some other options we have.

Thanks for your patience

We understand this change caused a lot of frustration and your patience is appreciated while we work towards getting fleet management right and the outstanding issues resolved.

Keep the feedback coming on the forum, and we’ll update you again as soon as we know more.

Comments

Nylon says
February 14, 2019 at 12:26 am

A few notes I want to leave for you consideration.

1. Putting up a forum post explaining this new system would have greatly reduced public outcry. Although it is not a particularly difficult system to use, it is certainly not intuitive to people who have not seen something like it before. This applies to future changes also. Taking some time to make sure people know what they can and cannot do, why, and how, goes a long way.

2. As long as the fleet manager is using distance between ships, area-of-effect weapons will have to be re-balanced regularly with fleet manager changes to prevent them from becoming too strong or weak.

3. The lack of large weapons choices exacerbates the area-of-effect weapons problem. In this particular instance it makes everyone who can field ships with large weapons way too strong instead of invalidating entire fleets of battleships because they only have single target weapons on them.

Valor says
February 14, 2019 at 2:20 am

Thanks for the update, this type of communication is greatly appreciated. I agree with the changes your making. I also want to stress that I an NOT frustrated with the rearranging of the ships in the grid. It did take some getting used to however once you play with it for a bit and learn how it work it becomes easy.

A suggestion: We need the ability to save a few custom formations. So when we are forming our typical fleets we can pick a formation we have saved and the ships will line up as such. If there are more or less ships then the saved formation calls for, then a lack of ships will just be subtracted from the outer most positions or an access ships then they are just added to the outer most positions and the player can re-position them as fleet management allows.