Hello Admirals,
We are very happy to announce the next large update of Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts! We provide a wide range of new ships for the French fleet of the pre-dreadnought era, a significant AI enhance for the battle and campaign, a new Naval Academy mission, and a large collection of new features, improvements, fixes, things you requested many times, and we tried to offer as many as possible for this update. Please read in detail what you can find in the new patch.
A variant of the "Massena-class" Battleship
Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts v1.01 Update
NEW HULLS
- New ”French “Ironclad Battleship I” available from 1890 to 1906 with a displacement between 8,050 and 10,600 tons.
- New ”French “Ironclad Battleship II” available from 1890 to 1906 with a displacement between 8,250 and 10,900 tons.
- New ”French “Ironclad Battleship III” available from 1890 to 1906 with a displacement between 8,400 and 11,800 tons. This hull type can faithfully recreate the French Battleship “Massena”.
- New ”French “Battleship I” available from 1891 to 1906 with a displacement between 8,100 and 11,500 tons.
- New ”French “Battleship II” available from 1892 to 1906 with a displacement between 9,000 and 16,000 tons. This hull type can faithfully recreate the French Battleship “Bouvet”.
- New ”French “Battleship III” available from 1895 to 1906 with a displacement between 9,500 and 16,500 tons.
- New ”French “Battleship IV” which can be considered a semi-dreadnought, available from 1895 to 1906 with a displacement between 17,000 and 21,500 tons.
- New ”French “Light Cruiser II” available from 1892 to 1920 with a displacement between 3,500 and 4,500 tons.
- New ”French “Light Cruiser III” available from 1896 to 1920 with a displacement between 5,500 and 8,500 tons.
- New ”French “Light Cruiser IV” available from 1903 to 1920 with a displacement between 7,500 and 10,500 tons.
- New ”French “Armored Cruiser I” available from 1890 to 1920 with a displacement between 3,500 and 7,600 tons.
- New ”French “Armored Cruiser II” available from 1894 to 1920 with a displacement between 7,800 and 11,500 tons.
- New ”French “Armored Cruiser III” available from 1898 to 1920 with a displacement between 9,800 and 13,500 tons.
A variant of the "Bouvet-class" battleship
NEW GUNS
- New French Mark 1/Mark 2 guns for calibers 2-inch up to 8-inch.
- New French Mark 1 guns for calibers 9-inch up to 13-inch.
NEW FEATURES
- Design AI opponent ships in Custom Battles: You can now design the ships of your opponents by switching the view between “You/Enemy” in the Ship Design phase. As a result, you can now create your own battles with much more freedom.
- New Key-Bind Options: You may now change the key shortcuts for several control options of the game according to your own preferences.
- New Friendly Fire System for guns: Ships will stop firing at targets that are blocked by friendly ships in front of them and too close, risking being hit instead.
- New Division Command “Avoid Torpedoes: When you enable, the ships of your division -except the leader of the group- will actively avoid torpedoes automatically.
- Armor distribution affects ship stability more: Previously the belt/deck armor affected the stability of the ship only as a factor of total weight. Now adding armor to the fore/aft ends of the ship directly affects the weight distribution. For example, adding too much bow armor (something usually done unrealistically by players to have an advantage over the AI with frontal attacks) will now increase weight offset and the general instability of the ship. You will also notice that ships with an initial fore/aft armor may have some initial weight offset, which you can stabilize by making equal the armor weight distribution between fore/aft sections of the ship. All in all, the weight calculations of the ship have become more realistic and offer more design alternatives.
A French armored cruiser in action
NEW MISSIONS
- “Jeune École has failed?”: The old French strategic concept called “Jeune École” of having a main fleet based on numerous light warships equipped with torpedoes and high explosive rounds is now put to the test. The Germans are approaching with several dreadnoughts and a potent force of destroyers escorting them. They are heading near the French coastlines to threaten directly the control of your waters. You have some torpedo boats and some old cruisers and the choice to reinforce them with ships of your design on a rather strict budget. Will you build more cruisers and prove that the “Jeune École” can work or prefer to fight with some battleships instead?
CAMPAIGN
- Improved campaign AI to balance its shipbuilding strategy. Previously the AI could order for building so many ships that when they were all completed could cause bankruptcy and eventual defeat because the AI could not handle them economically, scrapping them in the end with no real use.
- VP gained from sinking Transports is now properly shown in the Battle result window. Previously these points were shown only in the strategy map report and it was not clear their effect after a battle.WIP.
- The Mission generator will create big battles with more probability. You can now unlock the 1940 initial year for the campaign.
- You can now rename your ships in the campaign in the FLEET window by double clicking the ship names and editing a new text.
- Initial Battle distance tuned so that fleets start in better starting distances according to tech era (not too far, not too near).
- Initial cash slightly increased for the late tech campaign era.
- Victory points calculations balanced for late years so that campaigns do not end prematurely after a few victories.
In the controls you can now find several key-bind options
BATTLE AI
- Improvements on AI aggressiveness/Responsiveness.
- Auto Targeting is more responsive.
- Significant AI auto-design improvement. The better, more effective ships will also affect the Battle AI positively.
OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
- Improved further the shell dispersion mechanics, especially at close range.
- Fine tuning of horsepower output for early tech engines.
- Increased cost of engines/armor for the design process, to a level that better reflects the value of the ship.
- Iron Plate armor has a new balance, simulating more effectively its historical effect.
- Sound improvements: Impacts are heard more clearly/pronounced.
You can now unlock the 1940 campaign
BUG FIXES
- Fixed visual bug of gun hovering in Ship Design interface. It was caused when the game was wrongly paused when you switched on/off the Help with the “H” key.
- Fixed some reported issues on hulls.
- Fixed bug in smoke interference which caused inaccurate calculations when smoke interference was negative.
- Fixed major bugs in UI and Y height calculations which when they happened caused ship movement arrows to disappear, torpedoes collision to break and guns to overlap with the superstructure.
This was the first major update after releasing the game on Steam Early Access. From now on, we plan to provide at least one large update each month and any needed smaller updates to address urgent issues. We wish a happy and healthy new year for you and your families and hope you will enjoy this update!
Thank you for reading! Please share your valuable feedback in our forums:
- Official Forum
- Steam Forum The Game-Labs Team
Note
There is a known issue that leads to a crash if you press enter or other buttons while battles are loading during fleet generation mode. We will fix this as soon as possible.
Changed files in this update