Nice Review,
...
My main complaint is the problem with the discrepancy of the positions between the strategic and the tactical map, which often leads to have you ships "teleported" back after battle end and results into an endless series of battles.
...
Yes, this is also a gripe of mine. Went already through several of those in my current first 1916 campaign.
Just yesterday I had a great battle with HSF + Scout BCs (16BBs + 8 Pre-Dreads +4BCs) vs GF (19 BBs, no PreDreads), resulting in 10 Brit BBs sunk with just light damage on my ships!
Most BBs ran out of ammo in this and some minor subsequent scraps. So now I am retreating home, but I don't get quite away and get continuously engaged by GF. That is even though there is one brit BB with moderate damage, slowing the BBs down to 13knots in combat, while my slowest ship still does 16knots.So I easily run away till the combat ends, but they always manage to quickly catch me on strategic map...
Maybe I have to wait for the next night to dispose the point AC that usually triggers the engagements.
In this case I even manage to make some slow crawling progress toward home, but navigating around the big static minefield like that is a chore - last time I was already around, when in the next "iteration" it put me back north and running straight into the minefield
In a previous "instantiation" of this problem (in the same campaign) I was step by step warped back to the coast near Hull, even so the initial engagement was many miles away and I kept running away from it...
Disrespect to costal batteries on behalf of the AI is another problem - about half the Entente combat shipping in the Channel must have succumbed to the Ostende and Zeebrugge batteries...
And while I am at it, is there any way to fight subs? I would love to somehow deal with those pesky minelaying subs - lost already at least one BB to their mines. The only way I currently see is counter-mining - mining the same areas and approaches - worked at least against FL Abdiel.
Well, at least it works both ways - ~1/3 of the GF BBs were already damaged before the above mentioned battle by mining Scapa Flow.
And they will be up for some nasty surpirse when their remnants head home, as my HSF sortie was covering three minelaying TFs, mining the surroundings of Scapa.
Bought the game a few weeks ago in a sale, incl. the Dogger Bank expansion. That one I consider worth the price tag, adding 1915 ships, scenarios and campaign - not so sure about the Falkland pack, maybe in a future sale.
I fully agree with the assessment of the Stormpowered client. It took me almost one week from the purchase to actually being able to play the game. Tested the trial a few years back (before Stormpowered), and despite Stormpowered indicating that I own the full license, the game still told me that my trial period has expired. Well, their no refund policy made me quite persistant in harrassing the support to get it running instead of just refunding it. Took about a week, and several (most likely unneccessary) re-downloads/installs (~800MB each) - in the end they made a Stormpowered update that got it running.
"Funnily" enough, similar problems occured to others that just tested the demo before the purchase...