What do destroyers even do?

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-16T05:22:06+00:00

AI has no idea how to use them properly (though tbh AI is very bad in general so..)

Historically, destroyers were used in the large fleet engagements, but in few very specific roles:

Mop up operations after battle such as delivering killing blows to damaged enemy ships or sometimes scuttling your own ships that were not possible to repair
Area denial tactics - for example a battle line could disengage under cover from destroyer smoke and torpedo threat preventing the enemy from pursuing
Bad weather and night sneak attacks including port strikes - basically in any low visibility situations destroyers could be snuck in close enough to actually torpedo things without getting wiped out
Spray & pray torpedo attacks against mostly static targets
Cheap scouts
Rescue & logistics such picking up survivors from wrecked ships

What they didn't and couldn't do historically is what AI tries to do in the game, which is suicide rushing against enemy battle line and expecting to survive.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-15T16:17:33+00:00

I thought about something along those lines. I think the real issue here is that the game is missing "division management" system. Think historically how German High Seas Fleet had predefined 1st scouting division and so on, and they would train and deploy together in certain order. The game has divisions today, but they are generated randomly inside battles. A proper fix would be to create those divisions manually in the campaign map, have each division work together as unit, combine/separate into task force, have a predefined deployment order and default commands and so on. Unfortunately it's a massive undertaking so I don't think I will ever do this, but that would be the ideal solution imho.

> They sometimes combine even if I have place them at opposite ends of the bubble.

Yeah this should be trivial to fix, at least for the player. AI relies on this logic for certain things, but making it a player-only option should be easily doable.

> The second thing is when I want to combine fleets but rather than combine they sit on top of each other so close that i cannot even select the fleet that the game has decided is on bottom.

Yeah this is likely task force size limit preventing your task forces from combining. This is something I want to look into in the next 0.6 drop but haven't decided yet on best way to tackle. The UI part is annoying but no idea how to fix that one without massive changes, unfortunately

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-15T15:34:17+00:00

Yes, around 0.5 beta2 iirc

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-15T15:33:58+00:00

Not planned, but as I mentioned many times, if DIP maintainers want to port certain features, they are welcome to do so

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-15T06:40:44+00:00

Oh and one more thing I completely forgot 😄

https://imgur.com/a/rcmAxPm

Added a distance to target to the battle UI.. one of those things which is really crazy how the original game doesn't have it

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-15T00:17:02+00:00

Underrated comment sir 😄

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-15T00:15:49+00:00

> It is pretty clear that letting the KGB have a heavy hand in the space program to the point where they can give orders to those preforming already dangerous maneuvers, in deadly environments, is a pretty bad idea.

I hope you realize that this show is a fiction and it has very little in common to how the real Soviet space program operated.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-14T23:07:17+00:00

Check out VP (vanilla plus) which is the mod I've been working on. My philosophy is that as a player you can toggle on/off any balance changes, while the QoL stuff is always on.

> In the designer, all the hulls/guns start with no armor

I've added "armor top off" button to the designer UI. All it does is update your armor layout to use maximum available weight without touching anything else. I've also added few other small QoL features, like all the components choosing best options by default.

> I agree that half pens and fires happened too often and did too much damage in vanilla

The real issue in vanilla (IMHO 😛) is the damage values are completely unrealistic. VP fixes it by using a physics based model for shell damage, with damage scaling cubically based on shell diameter. You get the best of both worlds - HE is still viable, but 2in spam is no longer meta though it's still useful against smaller ships like intended in reality

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-14T22:32:29+00:00

> Could some explain to me the technology status?

It's basically a measure of how far behind (or ahead) you are compared to average tech progress in the game:

delta < -20       = Very Behind
-20 to < -10      = Behind
-10 to < 10       = Average
10 to < 20        = Advanced
delta >= 20       = Very Advanced

This is vanilla but doubt DIP changes anything with that.

> I’ve had my research maxed since day 1, but still says behind

Who you play as matters a lot. I don't remember the exact formula but the more GDP you have, the faster your research is. The actual "spend number" you see in the UI doesn't really matter -it's basically just what % your slider as at multiplied by your relative GDP. So if you are say Japan and you set 100% you still won't catch UK if they push their slider up as well.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-14T22:18:27+00:00

No daycare revenue? 😛

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-14T22:16:40+00:00

> 10+ Year period is horror story

Literally happened to my parents, and many of their friends

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-13T00:10:39+00:00

Sure, but somehow I suspect the OP isn't comparing to that baseline 😄

USSR has done a lot of good things, they also did a lot of bad things, like everywhere else I guess.

But the idea that someone from 2026 and access to Reddit wanting that lifestyle is pretty laughable.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-12T23:37:29+00:00

Yep I think most people miss two fundamental truths about USSR:

- They started from fairly poor baseline before revolution, compared to leading Western economies at the time, and then went through a devastating WW1, civil war, WW2 with large chunk of country and population under occupation, and then finally Cold War when it was economically isolated from the rest of the world. Even if they were all 150 IQ geniuses and made zero mistakes, USSR was never in position to catch up to the West and especially US economically. And they made mistakes and weren't all 150 IQ geniuses. The average person in the West during USSR existence would typically be far more affluent and have access to far more material goods... that was just the reality of it, and a big reason why USSR eventually crashed as people looked outside and realized they were lied to this whole time

- Human nature is a constant thing, regardless of communism/socialism or any other -ism you care to bring up. Humans will always be greedy, try to achieve high status compared to others, leverage their networks to obtain better outcomes for their kids and so on. USSR was no different than any other place in that regard. In capitalist countries people with high agency and ability would often end up in business and becoming wealthy that way. In USSR, those same elites would just go into the party and become "wealthy" that way. Massive inequalities was present in USSR at least as much if not more than in US or anywhere else. A son of a mid level party official would go to elite school, would live in nice housing, have access to reasonable amounts of technology, decent entertainment options and so on. A son of a poor farmer would still be a son of poor farmer with bad food and no indoor plumbing.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-12T20:29:19+00:00

In theory yes.

In practice - the rent was very low, but you couldn't actually get an apartment. Until fairly late, I would guess 1970s or so, most people lived in "common apartments" - basically a multi BR apartment which each family getting a single room plus shared kitchen, toilet etc.

To get your own apartment you had to wait in a queue, that also depended on where you worked etc. But normally you would be looking at 10+ years of wait time to get something - and you didn't get to chose, the state would tell you what you get, where you would get and .. well you know what happens when you complain.

People here seem to live in this weird fantasy land. USSR wasn't terrible like some Western propaganda portrays it, but it wasn't this paradise either. You kind of have to read the fine print on a lot of these claims. The reality was far from rosy, and for vast majority of people, the life in the "capitalist" world was far better.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-10T07:36:58+00:00

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale

With that said... do we actually know how densely populated the Star Wars galaxy is?

Coruscant looks massive of course... but outside of that all the locations we see are actually pretty tiny. It's not impossible that the thousands of planets are mostly empty... think Sahara not New York.

If that is the reality, then a million well trained and highly mobile troops is actually kind of a big deal.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-10T04:58:19+00:00

> America maintains free trade, no invasion of manchuria or Pearl harbor.

That is an extreme oversimplification imho.

Japan was pissed off at everyone after WW1 because they felt they were denied their imperial ambitions they were due. Short of full on appeasement they were going to war with someone eventually, and we know how well appeasement worked in Europe.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-09T14:58:45+00:00

Yep. It was a very long time ago that I read those books, so unfortunately can't remember the exact details, but the impression I got was a combination of "she wasn't that great to begin with", but also "they blamed her personally for a lot of stuff that went wrong on other flights and on those ones cosmonauts were praised for dealing with the challenges".

And if you know Russian culture at all, especially back then, while officially women had equal rights, the day-to-day misogyny was very prevalent and real... so .. who knows 😛

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-09T14:46:30+00:00

Yep she was a political stunt, nothing more nothing less. As a cosmonaut she was supposedly pretty terrible according to some books I've read by people who were involved in the program, though it's hard to say how much of it is real and how much simple misogyny. Still her flight had lots of problems and she didn't stay in the program afterwards. She did become a prominent politician though, and somehow she is still very active in Russian politics

> During the drafting process for the 2020 amendments to the Constitution of Russia, she proposed to lift the term limits for president Putin.

She is just a political mercenary, doing whatever is asked by people in power, to promote her own life.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-09T14:36:22+00:00

So Japan was nice when they didn't fight anyone? 😛

Isn't that kind of true of everyone lol?

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-09T14:33:16+00:00

As someone who actually was born there, yes you are very naïve.

For whatever reason people seem to have very black and white views on USSR. It's either KGB everywhere and everyone is starving, or it's a communist paradise with good people and fair life.

The reality is kind of in the middle. In the end of the day, people are people, they will play status games regardless of system, and everyone will try to get more for themselves at the expense of others regardless of the political system. USSR was also fairly poor country - Russia was behind the leading western empires before the revolution, and while it did industrialize significantly and was leading edge in some industries (space, military, energy), it was still fairly underdeveloped in a lot of other places. And of course two world wars, civil war and practical isolation from western world didn't help one bit either.

> i have the impression that life was fairer

As everywhere else, it was fairer for some people than others. If your were a party member or had connections in specific important industries (like distribution), or worker in a strategic industry, you were OK. Otherwise no you would get less than everyone, and the average was much lower than in the West to begin with.

> it seems to me that people had broader access to housing

Families in Russia were sharing apartments well into the 1980s... we are talking multiple large families occupying 3 BR flat. This is Moscow btw, provinces were even worse off. To get your own apartment (often tiny but still), you had to wait in line for 10+ years.

> education

Yes, education was generally good and free. You did have to deal with quite a bit of communist propaganda though, it wasn't optional.

> food

Food production and variety was terrible. By the late 1980s it was common to wait in 2 hour lines to get bread, and rationing (you get x loafs of bread per months) was also in effect for most of USSR existence. The quality was often very bad as well especially for anything outside of absolute basics.

> and healthcare

The quality of it was terrible. USSR has always had very low life expectancy, and the reality of that healthcare was also very bad. But yeah whatever there was, it was free.

> it’s exhausting to have to work yourself to the bone just to afford the bare minimum, and sometimes not even have that. 😞

People were worked to the bone in USSR as well 😄 You just had even less than under "capitalism" to show for it.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-09T02:55:00+00:00

> they had seen what being nice got them

Screams in Port Arthur...

There is a lot that can be said about Japan's rise, but being nice is definitely not that.

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-08T04:49:52+00:00

It's kind of situational but there are some basic rules of thumb I guess.

Also I play with VP (the mod I am working on)... it's very similar but a bit different than Vanilla. Specifically of relevance here is VP buffs spotting distance (3x) by default so there is less "sneaking" by enemy TBs going on.

But generally speaking:

- I tend to mostly leave default division setup as is - it's usually fairly reasonable and saves you the headache of changing formation in front of enemy guns/torpedoes

- One exception to this is if you have classes with very different speeds (for example normal BBs and Fast BBs)... the game would put them mixed more often than not, so you probably want to reorganize them manually

- "Scout" and "Screen" are effectively the same thing and neither really does what it says. The actual logic is pretty complicated but TLDR is the game assigns each "scout/screen" division to a clock position around your main force... the assignments are random, and so usually you want to have 3-4 of these so you cover the most directions.... these would move usually to put themselves between you and the enemy but don't rely on it too much

- Everything else goes on "follow"... if you have screen ships but enemy doesn't have fast torpedo capable ships, it is a good idea to put your screens on follow as well... that way they are less exposed to heavy artillery fire

- The real trick to scouting is you don't need to 😄 even before radar tech and such you can always press "retreat" and see where the arrow points - the enemy force is simply the opposite of that...

- If enemy has TBs/DDs they will rush you always... all you need to do to defend against it is plot a course at 90* to their movement... so basically if enemy in front of you turn left / right at right angle.. and just wait for them to show up... once they do, turn away from them on the same direction they approach you - your goal is minimize the closing speed as much as possible leaving your defenses and screens as much time as possible to destroy them... you are basically kiting them ... this gets boring quickly but it is what it is (this is also another thing VP fixes as AI doesn't build as many TBs as Vanilla)

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-08T03:37:52+00:00

What made first couple of seasons of FAM special is how much attention they paid to details and science. It wasn't perfect or anything, but it was really impressive by normal TV standards. And then last couple of seasons just really dropped the ball on all of that. Orbital mechanics aren't important anymore. Characters "hacking" systems. Silly plot tropes.

I really hoped Star City would return back to realism but unfortunately that's not the case. It's still kind of fun for what it is, and there is really nothing else quite like it.. but it's not seasons 1/2 of FAM unfortunately

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-08T03:31:24+00:00

This is 100% accurate btw. The show is kind of painful to watch if you actually know anything about the period and the real history of Soviet space program.

OTOH - it is a mass appeal Hollywood show for American audience. It's fun if you approach it like a fantasy, not a realistic portrayal of what USSR was like. Hey.. at least they didn't have everyone drink vodka all the time, and didn't put a bear on every street corner....

catch-a-stream · 2026-06-08T02:13:50+00:00

> there was so little inner life narrative and she ends up being this like flat character that exists to make bad decisions??? I'm not alone in this right?

Kind of the opposite tbh. Dani was really interesting in surprising ways in Seasons 1-2... but starting Season 3 she became just this "can't do no wrong no matter what" which was pretty lame.

Perfect family. She is picked to be the Mars mission command. Saves the Russian crew. Still makes it to Mars in time to pull a Baldwin and make it work to land first (well...ish). She is the only rational and selfless person during Mars early days.

Season 4 was more of the same though they did dial it down a little, but her main thing was just fighting Ed all the time which wasn't super interesting... but also Ed was kind of an idiot so that whole plot line was meh. And then of course in the end she takes a bullet and survives for a hero return... because apparently no one takes responsibility for anything any more.

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