Naval Estimates: The Dreadnought Age - Free Naval Grand Strategy Wargame
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The Ashitaka-class battlecruiser, a Japanese design of 1912, under way in the 3D viewer on tripod masts, with a caption bar giving her dimensions and performance
update

Build 1.2.0

Build 1.2.0 is out. The United States and Japan join the roster, along with a 1920 start date.

The other big-ticket items: masts, reworked turbine machinery arrangements, enforced engine layouts, various armour improvements, improved seakeeping and turning calculations, the option to build different scenes and environments in the 3D view, and a first version of a penetration testing tool.

Existing saves should load fine, and old designs can be imported - though machinery and casemates may need adjustment before a design is valid again.

Hotfixes 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 followed; their notes are at the foot of this post.

Additions

  • The United States and Japan are playable, and 1920 is added to the start dates
  • The historical gun roster extends to 1920 for all four nations
  • Masts, placed as both fore and mainmasts, in seven types: pole, tripod, quadrupod, heptapod, cage, pyramid and tower. Suggest will auto-place them, and more use for them is coming beyond spotting
  • The 3D viewer has selectable scenes - open sea, morning, dusk and heavy weather - each with its own weather and wind
  • A Speed slider and a Heading dial in the 3D viewer let you show your ship under way
  • Salvo command in control, which animates the chosen battery for one firing cycle
  • The sea in the 3D viewer is improved, along with rain and other environmental effects
  • Penetration model mode: click the ship in the 3D viewer and the chosen shell fires along that line of sight
  • Compare popup in the gun designer
  • National (Light) and National (Dark) themes that follow the nation you are playing
  • A UI Scale in the header menu, from 75% to 120%, plus an Auto mode
  • Casemate embrasures gain a configurable sill
  • New design rules to ensure casemates are properly placed
  • Reworked turning calculation, including a turn path visualisation
  • Raked bow added to the existing options
  • Various adjustments to armour configuration options
  • Machinery layouts sort themselves into valid buckets, custom layouts included, and throw an error when invalid
  • The designer now errors when freeboard is too low along the hull
  • The superstructure list shows weight
  • Summarize cards have an option to follow your theme, and there is more information in the gun and ship summary cards
  • Escape closes the designers’ menus, filter popups and editors

Fixes

  • Major ports on the strategic map were not reliably clickable
  • Map information now updates according to the start date
  • Deck superstructures painted over mounts in the profile view in some situations
  • Shattered shells were counted as penetrations, inflating early uncapped and soft-capped belt figures
  • Machinery rooms and their sizes were reworked
  • Fixed the way inclined belts affect the calculated area of other armour items
  • Embrasure mouths stood proud of the hull in some cases
  • Closing a Summarize dialog or the 3D viewer while the image was saving produced a corrupt or empty PNG
  • Improved Escape handling in the ship designer
  • Removing the last mount of a battery left its ammunition hoists behind, still taking up space and still costing money
  • The mouse wheel silently stopped honouring its step law sometimes

Balance

  • Seakeeping is rated against real sea states rather than an abstract scale
  • Machinery footprint rebuilt from real reference drawings
  • Teak backing behind armour scales with the plate it beds
  • Straight bows stay honestly near-plumb across the whole era, and the new raked bow type covers the straight-but-raked cases
  • With Historical Infrastructure Limits on, Suggest and Auto Scaling no longer propose plate the nation’s mills cannot roll
  • Ammunition hoists for pedestal and base-ring batteries default to a more sensible depth

Other

  • Bore and armour thickness are entered in either millimetres or inches, depending on the chosen unit set
  • Mount bases, hoist heads and room heights move on a 1 cm grid, for better handling

Hotfix 1.2.1

Released shortly after 1.2.0: masts were missing from the ship summary card.

Hotfix 1.2.2 - 16 August

A second quick patch, mostly to the masts and armour work that came with 1.2.0.

Additions

  • The turret designer warns when gunhouse plate is thicker than the nation’s mills can roll

Fixes

  • Armour Suggest and Auto Scaling now switch a plate’s material when the written gauge crosses the face-hardening threshold
  • A mount whose base ring or working chamber overhangs a deck edge, step or lowered quarterdeck is now invalid
  • Early-era torpedo defence depth scales down slightly with technology level
  • A superstructure’s wider section no longer paints over mounts standing beside its narrower section in the profile view
  • Cage masts draw their lattice in the 2D profile instead of an empty hourglass outline
  • An unpainted open-top embrasure mouth no longer shows as a hole cut clean through the ship in the overhead view
  • The 3D viewer opens much faster on big designs: the shader warm-up compiles off-thread instead of stalling the first frame
  • Mast staff and legs no longer show through the hull side below the deck line
  • Standing rigging keeps clear of gun mounts, so wires no longer pass through a gunhouse
  • Fixed mill-limit rounding on edge cases
  • The cage mast’s superstructure-overlap error is removed
  • Mount custom base, embrasure sill and magazine room floor show in feet under the imperial unit toggle

Balance

  • Slight rework of the machinery footprint, and of item sizing and placement
  • Topmasts adjusted: the height cap rises about 15%, and minimum heights or stub masts are required depending on the top fittings

Four navies, three start dates, and a tool for shooting at your own ships: the Discord wants to see what you do with them.

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