Hello Captain,
We are with you in the final diary of our current series, coming in at the tail end of an experimental cycle. As usual, the upcoming Big Update will now receive a name in anticipation of a Stable release at the 26th of November.
It was another wonderful experimental cycle, and our joint efforts will have soon culminated in the v1.6. Shock and Awe update. We thought the name was fitting considering this update's focus on big guns and ships with big guns, among other things.
The Experimental branch is meant to last another 6 days, with further updates not being unlikely, so stay tuned and don't be shy to reach us either at the community forums or over at our Discord channel if you have feedback to give or suggestions to make.
Without further delay, let's get into the main topics of this week's diary.
The second previously unplanned weapon to be added in this update, the 107 mm M2 Mortar is a direct upgrade to the fan favourite 60 mm M2 Mortar. Originally, the 75mm Pack Howitzer was meant to take on the role of the upgrade to the mortar, but we ended up deciding to give it a different sight for gameplay variety, and gave it much better ammo efficiency to compensate for the difficulty in using it.
This left the mortar without a direct upgrade, and upon realizing the extent of your demand for it, we decided to add in a new weapon to fill this niche. That weapon is the 107mm M2 Mortar, a weapon that works exactly the same way as its smaller cousin.
The differences are that the larger mortar will deal more damage, have a larger smoke cloud, and have more range, at the cost of requiring 2 Gunners to use instead of 1 while also costing you more in RP.
Mechanically, it's just the mortar we already have but bigger. It is said it is hard to improve on perfection, and some of you have let us know that the mortar is already perfect. So here is a bigger one we hope you'll enjoy.
Speaking of the Pack Howitzer, your feedback during the Experimental branch has shown us that it is a bit too hard to aim with for various reasons, to the point it takes away the joy from using the weapon and makes it feel like it's not worth it. We heard you, and came to the same conclusion after playing with it ourselves, and decided to make some improvements to the aiming.
First, the reticle will change color when you're trying to target outside its rather narrow aiming cone. Currently the targeting reticle doesn't really make it obvious that you can't fire there, resulting in wasted shots. We considered removing the reticle instead of having it change color, but that would make it difficult for you to find your mouse again, so we settled on a dimmer gray color to indicate you're not aiming properly at the time.
Second, we added live tracking of the range you're aiming at, which still has some issues accounting for elevation differences but should be good enough for use at open sea and not cause an error bigger than the inaccuracy of the gun.
Third, you no longer need to zoom in for the rangefinder to work, allowing you to maintain better situational awareness and a wider field of view while operating the gun.
These changes will also apply to the other utility weapons, and this will be the final revision of the Utility Weapon targeting for the foreseeable future. Getting hits should be much easier overall, though you still shouldn't expect to hit very long range shots to hit reliably due to the innate imperfectness of weapon accuracies.
After all, that would be a game imbalancing factor, and even a partial hit rate can be devastating with the Pack Howitzer considering its strength as it can already sink a destroyer in 3-4 hits or even in a single lucky one. Still, we hope all of this is sufficient to make it, and the other utility weapons, more fun to use.
The 8 cm gun in the game was rather infamously a tube attached to a cube attached to another tube, as a holdover from Boat Crew's earlier, humbler days. The last of the venerable graphics-economizing shell-casters have been removed, being replaced with the 3"/50 Dual Purpose Gun model you can find on your own boat, although colored differently for the Japanese side.
Aside from one barely produced example, the Japanese didn't really use Dual Purpose Guns of about 3" size, with the main example being an outdated variant from before the war. Now it would make sense to put those on merchant ships, but we decided to go with the crisp 3" model we already have, which exudes a sense of agility and multi-purpose lethality. For gameplay purposes we took another artistic liberty imagining that the IJN found them at the same place they found the Dual Bofors guns they use on the big subchasers from.
Said gun will make an appearance on certain ships, including a new variant of the Nagara inspired by the later anti-aircraft cruiser conversion of the Isuzu. Instead of a much larger complement of 25mms, she will instead get a few additional triple 25 mms, 7 new 3-inch dual purpose guns, and 2 twin 127mm open topped turrets; the same as you find on the Ryuujou and certain variants of the Mutsuki.
Both the 3-inch and the open topped 127 mm are now capable of anti-aircraft fire, resulting in more downed planes and for you, a more impressive light show of intense bursts of flak.
Of course, being dual purpose, these rapid fire, high velocity cannons are a major threat to you as well, so be careful when approaching this new variant of the Nagara as they are considerably more lethal to you!
Last but not least, we’ve tackled an issue that’s been bugging us for a while: the way ships are currently numbered, leading to campaign results like "Akizuki III" or the infamous "Ryuujou VIII." This problem is especially noticeable with unique ships like the Ryuujou, which had no sister ships in real life. We’re excited to announce that we’ve finally settled on a solution.
To address this, we’re adding a list of semi-fictional names. Where possible, we’ll use names from cancelled ships of the class, or otherwise follow historical IJN naming conventions to create fitting fictional names. We felt this approach was better than borrowing names from entirely different classes, especially for carriers with iconic names like Akagi or Zuikaku.
While we get away with some creative license, we wanted to respect the historically inclined among you by avoiding names that might break immersion completely. We think this is a solid compromise and a definite improvement over seeing something like "Ryuujou XII."
The ship you see in the screenshot above is the Kiyotsuki, a historically cancelled would-be sister to the Akizuki who came to life in Boat Crew.
We have a long list of names to be implemented, so don't expect all of them to reach the game in one update, but they should all be gradually implemented by the time of the stable release. This list was sourced via our community, in particular by one of our players who goes by the Discord handle Matsuo_Basho.
He was also responsible for suggesting the Seaplane Tender Nisshin that was featured earlier in this series, so thanks again for your efforts in improving Boat Crew. We truly appreciate that you share our passion for the game, and this also goes out to all of you who take the time to share thoughtful suggestions and feedback.
That about wraps up what we wanted to share for this week, Captain. Any further changes will be noted in the changelogs and eventually a full list for the entire experimental cycle will be available at the time of the v1.6. Stable launch. You can expect everything we've talked about here to reach you in an experimental update before the end of the week.
That's all for now Captain,
T.T.