Greetings, Captain!
We're with you in another Developer's Diary, which will be of the short and sweet variety in the buildup to the big update, covering incremental additions of what we have mostly already talked about in the previous two diaries. It is told, rather ironically, that it is better to show than to tell, so let's get right down to it!
To begin with, Boat Crew now has torpedo nets! Little more than heavy wiring held up by a line of buoys, the torpedo net is nevertheless effective at thwarting torpedo attacks on docked ships. A common sight in moderate base defenses and pretty much abundant in better fortified bases, torpedo attacks on docked targets will no longer be as easy as it is currently.
Mind you that newly conquered (or lost, from your perspective) won't have time to deploy torpedo nets, so you will still have the advantage while conducting port strikes during a counterattack. The enemy, of course, will be expecting a counterattack and thus be Alert, meaning the effective threat level for the engagement will be increased, but that doesn't mean that it is impossible to sneak in and launch torpedoes without being noticed so don't write port strikes out just yet!
Next up, we have these renders of the Ki-84 Hayate. Admittedly an anachronism, given it didn't enter service until 1943 in actual history, we're nevertheless excited to introduce the Ki-84 as a high performance enemy aircraft. Mostly operating in its own groups, the Ki-84 is the second Imperial Japanese Army aircraft to enter the game, which is not a nuance that's lost on us.
Indeed, there will be a marked distinction between the ways you may encounter Army Air Service aviation and Naval aviation in the future, but that's the topic for a future diary. For now, enjoy this crisp model made by Shigure, and soon you will also be shooting them out of the sky!
The Nagara has been implemented in earnest, and she even has a functioning floatplane catapult! Although not likely to affect the outcome of an engagement with the Nagara one way or the other, we felt it adds quite a bit of charm to this new ship, making her more distinct from what we already had.
The new fire control direction we alluded to in the previous diary has also been implemented to the game. Now, instead of each gun firing at will, guns will fire in pre-determined patterns in salvos, with the outcome being something more resembling of actual naval gunfire.
Sequential firing is also one of the available "patterns", though only the Nagara can somewhat sustain fire with the Fubuki and Akizuki having higher fire rates and longer rest times. We wanted sustained fire to be something to set Nagara apart, and it will generally be more in the realm of heavier ships in the future.
The system allows for a lot of customization in the shapes of the firing patterns, which we hope to use to coordinate the batteries of shore installations and perhaps larger ships at some point as well.
We hope these changes will make ship gunfire both visually more interesting and also more predictable to make it easier to learn avoiding incoming fire.
That's all we have to share for now.
Until next time,
Captain,
T.T.