RazgrizRaptor

alright, so I believe everything is ready to go. Strangereal renamer is up to date and ready for everyone to use. same with the flags. ^^ as always, if you find any bugs, please tell me either here on the forums or join my discord and tell me there. =) https://discord.gg/EfAcBV8

Alright, so the flags have been updated. here's what to look for... Aurelia's flag has been added under the Pan-Asia flag options Place Holder flags have been assigned to the Commonwealth ship flags Strangereal text file is updated, nothing new here that I can remember. and lastly, Fog Kestrel... as an optional skin for those of you that love playing with anime ship skin mods and all that. I've provided a skin that'll let Kestrel fit in them. so I present an ARP Enterprise/Kestrel. the skin is located in the ships of Strangereal mod, but they are not positioned properly to enable them by default. to enable them, just drag and drop them into textures. please note, to make the ship glow, you will need to download an additional mod that contains a "Shaders" folder, like Haruna Line's spaceship/Arpeggio mod

this is the test server where the population is far lower than what it'll be on the live versions. I for one am glad they're making it T10s, it gives them more of a purpose. still tho, it might have been a good idea for the test server's sake, they had made the ranked battles vs AI so it'd go faster. lol (I'm not saying AI should be in the live version of Ranked Battle, only here on the TEST SERVER so it finds games.)

So I didn't notice this in the first round of testing, but for some reason, Midway doesn't produce smoke from her stacks. although I'm still not fond of losing planes in the hanger, I am very thankful to you WG for making it 20 planes instead of 40. I do have to wonder why you didn't update that in the round 2 patch notes tho. I still think a better option than removing planes from the hanger is reducing their damage by 35% or more so the damage numbers are more in line (or possibly lower) with the other ship classes. as a CV captain, I'd rather have planes in the hanger allowing me to play the entire game but doing more reasonable damage numbers, than deleting 2-4 ships and then loitering around the map for the last 5 minutes. the only con I see to this is the damage reduction might discourage newer CV captains from wanting to use "limited ammo" for average damage numbers. cause with things as is, when I didn't know what I was doing (for nearly 2 years, I'm sorry I didn't think to look up tutorial videos until this month), with the damage numbers I did about 60~80k damage. but now that I've watched Fem's CV tutorials, that number is 160~260K per game... which is entirely why I think the damage of all air raids (not just American ones) should be reduced. "targets" might whine less when they die to a CV cause it wasn't "full health to dead in 10 seconds" and they get to limp away with 40~50% health left, for CVs, it means more normalized damage numbers and either larger numbers of planes to let us stay in the fight or more plane health... or possibly reduce the damage strafing runs do so a single fighter team doesn't just wipe out every, single, bomber when they do their strike. but yeah, as a CV captain I suggest that you guys lower CV damage, not our hanger space, please. lol^^

yeah, fair enough, tho I figured I should point out that their numbers are incorrect for any of the Midway-class carriers. I'm sure you found out Yamato had more AA guns than what WG gave her, you'd want them too. lol that and I recall WG saying that if someone pointed out they had incorrect stats, they'd fix it. I think their example was a battleship and her deck armor being thinner in game than irl.

that's a good question. just a few nights ago while doing a PVP battle, the game failed to load and I couldn't join the fight until after it was over and it had kicked my ship back to the harbor. I even forced the game to reboot twice trying to rejoin.

alright, so I'm gonna break this down a bit, cause there's a lot I wanna cover. first thing's first, reading only the patch notes and not playing anything on the test server. I'm also an avid CV captain so these aren't being said because I hate fighting carriers, they're being said because as a CV, I think this needs to change for the sake of others. (TLDR version... "no games played = wAT?! WG y u do dis? I'm playing hello kitty island!!" "port and no games = well... I'm not happy, you could have at least tried to put some Neosporin on the knife wound..." "gameplay thoughts = do not reduce plane numbers/increase plane health but reduce their damage by 35% or more.") [reading only, no gameplay.] wow, I am not liking this upcoming patch AT ALL... 1.) Midway's losing 40 planes. there are no adjustments to correct the lost planes. we already have it hard enough finding a game, so you're discouraging people from playing even farther? already our numbers are super tiny as is, I'm willing to wait for a match as is, but with the amount of punishment you've been dishing out it's making me once again think I should stop wasting my time hoping you'll do something to help our numbers, mothball all of my carriers, and just load up on DD torps. they flood the waters with upwards of 30 torps from one ship that reaches out to 20km but you don't nerf them... no, you make their torps even harder to detect. 2.) the already difficult medal "Clear Skies" is being replaced by two nearly impossible medals to earn, requiring you to kill 40 or 55 aircraft, so you expect us to wipe out 55% of a Hakuryu's aircraft single-handedly for 10 flags? already the 30+ Clear Skies is silly because of how the game counting system works for this. I guess it doesn't really matter since those flags will be pointless with the death of carriers in this patch. 3.) we've done nothing to Hakuryu to try and balance her vs the now even weaker Midway... do I need to say anything more? I mean really, I was expecting you to bring the Japanese CV line into line with the American CV line with a one loadout option first. if you did that then make the two carriers both fun to play and let our numbers come up tweak their hanger numbers. but no, you decide to leave her alone to encourage us to all switch over to Haku, destroy ships with her, make the enemy whine about her, then you'll nerf Midway again, Haku will run rampant, and then you'll wallop her with the nerf bat and fully and finally kill of carriers... the reason I got into this game. 4.) to make carriers even less useful, we're making torps harder to spot from the air. why? I mean really, why? as I said before, a Shima can fling 30 torps into the water if she so chooses. so my Midway that can't risk her planes to hit a ship is forced into a more defensive role praying that someone will stray too far from the enemy fleet so I can get a few torp hits in, and then my team complains that I'm not spotting anything because my planes on the front lines to spot for them didn't see the torps Shima fired from the edge of my screen. thanks, wargaming for giving CVs some desperately needed "love" this patch, I really thought you were finally making things fun for us again. you even made Midway a little better by giving us a balanced loadout that's pretty good... I mean really wargaming?! what the f(ERRK!!), it's already hard enough to find a match as an aircraft carrier, so do you really feel you need to make it even harder? who's gonna wanna play a midway? "congrats on making it to tier 10, where your fighter's capped out at tier 9, and you're using the exact same bombers as Lexington! and best of all, you'll run out of planes before the match ends, so this T10 comes with a leisurely cruise nearly towards the end regardless of a win or a loss." if you're really going to do this to Midway, please at least tell me you're willing to give her back the F9F jet fighters she once had. I mean really please wargaming, don't take away those 40 planes? it's hard enough as is, and to get results because of all the AA buffs, some games it's a struggle to even have any survivors with 136 planes. or if you wanna take those planes away, at least give us some actual tier 10 planes like midway once had. if you're gonna proceed with this update to Midway, then how about you just remove her from the game, replace her with Essex as the new T10, and introduce the "Yorktown-class Aircraft Carrier." it just means Enterprise enters service as a non-premium carrier with some small tweaks to her aircraft. then you mostly get rid of the "OP Midways" and the few of us that have them still have them as "freeiums". [after updating and looking at ships in the harbor.] so naturally, the first thing I did after logging in was look at Midway, my heart sinks as there's no explanation on what happened to my hanger and why the same planes as before suddenly "take up more space" so we're down 40 planes. this is rather upsetting because one of my favorite things about midway is that I can be more reckless and push attacks. with the loss of 40 planes (that's a loss of about 29% of her current reserves), I'm predicting I'll be far more timid to engage. in other words, if an AA cruiser OR a single fighter team is in the area, bombers won't advance. so yeah... in a way, it's like a battleship in a game full of DDs, she's not gonna do anything cause those torps will punish her for trying to make a push. the next thing is that they're the exact same planes... why am I down 40 planes? WG, at least change the models of the planes so they're "bigger and take up more space in the hanger." bring back the old F9F jets and AD-1 Skysharks, those planes are bigger so they'd take up more space. if they were "buffed" or not doesn't really feel needed, I guess if the F9Fs were going to be redeployed, I'd just make them quicker but more fragile so you can pick your battles. additionally, I'd like to suggest that strafing runs should lose some of their power to help reduce losses, allowing CVs to enjoy the entire battle and not just 75% of the match duration. as, if this change went through, I'm not sure if I'd want to try and wait it out, I might just stop playing and find a new game. [after doing a few matches.] while doing the short climb back up to midway on the test server, I couldn't help but think about CVs and how they're not really fun for either person. because of the finite number of planes, it's not fun for us to try and strike a ship, the losses make it so we're unable to enjoy the game later on. for the targeted player, it's not very fun brawling for 7 minutes with an enemy warship, hear the "torpedoes off the port side!" warning and notice that your AA was crackling away while bombers raced in from 5km out only to drop 500m from you and there's your death. the first thing I thought is "what if air torps did 25~30% less damage, but all CVs got a few more planes to strike with?" or "what if air torps did 25~30% less damage, but the bombers had more health?" honestly, I'd be okay with either of these since I'd still get to enjoy the more aggressive manner I'm used to, I could do like a BB and just go "eh, good enough" and fire a volley off hap-hazardly since I have unlimited shells. would anyone play Yamato if it had ammo and you only got 10 volleys? probably not. so, in conclusion, I'd like to suggest a few options. 1.) change nothing. easily the worst option because nothing changes. 2.1) reduce air raid damage by 25~35% but CVs have larger reserves of planes to make up for the lost damage... or leave them as is with Haku having 100 and Midway having 136. 2.2) proceed with the reduced Midway payload, but give her more durable planes to compensate for the loss of 40 planes. for the fighters tho, I'd bring back the F9Fs, reduce their health, reduce their ammo, but greatly increase their speed allowing them to catch and engage any other aircraft. the TBS would be replaced by the AD-1 Skyshark with a little more health and nothing else. 2.3) air raid damaged is reduced by 50~60%, but CVs have an unlimited number of planes. (probably the second dumbest option, but I might as well throw it out there.) 3.) reduce the damage of strafing runs. it's horrible how overpowered these are, losing 27~47 planes to a single fighter squadron just because you couldn't react fast enough is very discouraging. no one would play Battleships if one could just hold down the alt fire mode and intercept every. single. shell. fired... so yeah, maybe tone that down too. it's rather aggravating that even when you take evasive action against a strafing run, the bombers still lose 4 of 6 planes to a strike that caught them for a second or two. and on the test server, I had a game where my Lexington shut down every single raid a Shōkaku did... not one plane made it within 8km of my fleet because of strafing runs... that's not fun for the other CV, and all I did was tap hold down alt and clicked. cause yeah... looking at a number that says a single bomb hit can do upwards to 10k damage does make me smile, it is probably part of the problem why people give CVs so much hate. if you took off 35% of that damage while letting midway keep her 130 aircraft then that'd mean a single torp does 6414 damage. (25% is 7,400 and that felt too high, 30% is 6,907) now that number might sound rather weak, but remember, that's just a single torp, in the "worst/best" case scenario, 12 torps are heading for the target with a maximum of 76,963 damage from just those 12 bombers (if all 12 somehow survive and hit the target) a more realistic number would be 7 hit the target for 44,898. and for those of you thinking "oh, that's too much damage, it needs to be reduced by 90%!!" keep in mind that it took the CV over 25% of the game clock to deal that damage. if your rubbish in a BB like me, then in roughly the same time, you've dealt about 30~40K damage by just half-heartedly firing 18" shells at targets every 30-ish seconds for a total of 14+ volleys with the forward guns. so a skilled CV has to try harder to do the same amount of damage as a sucky Yamato just saying "FIRE ALL THE SHELLS!!" lol^^; there's still the dive bombers as well, cause it's rather unfair that I can just auto-target a ship and basically get a free citadel hit doing 25K damage. reducing them by 35% means that I'd deal a painful (not citadel) strike of 16,250. that 25K comes from matches on the currently active 7.3 servers over many, many, many games. Please note, that those numbers do not include burning or flooding damage, but that's something that's far more random that I can't really calculate for. these numbers are solely for Midway and American weaponry. DISCLAIMER!! THE NUMBERS BELOW ARE IF EVERY. SINGLE. WEAPON. HITS. these are not real numbers, on average, through total damage Delt by my Midway (and I'd like to think I'm a little above average, but not up there with Fem and iChase.) I score about 133K damage throughout a 20-minute battle. for 7.3 Midway, the quick numbers, if everything somehow survives and hits the target, are... 12 torps = 118,404. 14 bombs = 151,200 Midway reduced by 35% is... 12 torps = 76,963. 14 bombs = 98,280 for a 7.3 assault Hakuryu, the quick numbers, if everything somehow survives and hits the target, are... 12 torps = 102,804. 15 bombs = 69,000. Hakuryu reduced by 35% is... 12 torps = 66,823. 15 bombs = 44,850

A small update to Aircraft of Strangereal has been released. I recently stumbled across the location of some of the static aircraft that are kept on Langley (and as display items on maps), so now Langley's planes above deck have their pretty skins and so do the ones under the deck. no more "OFS Langley" on top and "USS Langley" on planes below.

So, I'm not sure what compelled me to, but today I decided to look up the real USS Midway to see if it was even possible for them to somehow make a "free premium" version of her like they did for Missouri/Musashi. so first I went to Wikipedia to see when she got her angled flight deck (original idea was "launch and recover at the same time, fewer AA guns are her flaw), but then I discovered something the real midway had WAY more AA guns than what we get in the game. in fact, no Midway-class carrier has that loadout. Midway has too many guns, Coral Sea (CV-43) has too few (only 14 x 5" guns), and the closest is CV-42, USS Franklin D. Roosevelt which has 21 × 4 – 40 mm Bofors /60 caliber guns. our Midway has a jumble of guns that equal the same 21 Bofors, but not all of them are the quads. to make sure Wikipedia didn't have the wrong numbers, I searched the internet for about 30 minutes, finding several sits with war stories and finally two with actual info, one being from the United States Navy. here's what her owners say her stats were... displacement: 45,000 tonslength: 968 feetbeam: 113 feetdraft: 35 feetspeed: 33 knots complement: 4,104 crewarmament: 18 5-inch guns, 84 40mm guns, 68 20mm gunsclass: Midway another site I found even listed the years for USS Midway's armaments over her life. 1945: 18 5-inch (12,7 cm) 54 caliber guns, 84 40mm guns and 28 20mm guns 1950: 14 5-inch (12,7 cm) 54 caliber guns and 40 3-inch (7,6 cm) 50 caliber guns 1957: 10 5-inch (12,7 cm) 54 caliber guns and 22 3-inch (7,6 cm) 50 caliber guns 1961: 10 5-inch (12,7 cm) 54 caliber guns 1963: 4 5-inch (12,7 cm) 54 caliber guns 1970: 3 5-inch (12,7 cm) 54 caliber guns 1985: 2 Mk-25 launchers for Sea Sparrow, 2 Phalanx CIWS Mk-15 so... I if WG sees this, I think they needa tweak the Midway herself (not the planes, I didn't look into those today. lol)... even if they rename her to be CV-42, then it'd still require some tweaking since the AA isn't in line with what either carrier had when they were commissioned. the only unfortunate thing is I can not figure out what configuration those 84 x 40mm guns are in. is that each gun mounted separately? the number of barrels in separate mounts? or 84 batteries with "X" number of 40mms? even if I'm assuming it's the number of total barrels, regardless of configuration, our in-game Midway is missing about 20 of them, cause her total is 62. so where's the other 12 40mms and where's our 28~68 20mms? (I've no idea what happened to 40 of the 20s Wikipedia and the USN say 68, the 3rd site only said she had 28x20mm guns.) included below are links to the three pages I found that had useful information. well, to anyone that reads this, thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope you have a good day. ^^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Midway_(CV-41) http://www.navy.mil/navydata/ships/carriers/histories/cv41-midway/cv41-midway.html https://www.navysite.de/cvn/cv41.htm

So first off, sorry for the week delay on these, the update shouldn't have taken this long but none the less, it's here! to make up for the delay, this one has a little extra thing changing the names of some of the emblems you can earn to be Strangereal nations. for example "United States Navy III" now reads "Osean Maritime Defense Force III" I hope you guys like it, if you find any bugs, please let me know. ^^

So, I'm not entirely sure if I'll have the update ready for this weekend, but I'll see what I can do, the biggest roadblock right now is a new game called Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet, I've been playing that when I should have been updating files. ^^;

Alright, so the newest versions of Strangereal renamer and flags are up. if you find any bugs, let me know please and thank you. ^^ what's new? no new flags yet... I'm considering the idea of re-releasing some of the existing squadron flags for future ranked battles since I'm finding a hard time getting more diverse squadrons, sure I could flood it with Belkan squadrons but that feels cheap. I think next ranked, regardless of what it is will be Galm Team. Italy has been renamed FATO, I've no idea what to make their flag so I might make something up. lol

As far as I can tell, all my mods as is, work with 7.0.2. if you find any issues, let me know and I'll correct them ASAP.

wish granted, I just finished the updates today. lol So after a little testing, the Nation Renamer is up to date and the flags have also been updated as well, there is not atlas file this time since this mod is back to the regular updates. I do plan on resuming the planes eventually, but they're a little farther out. also somewhere down the road, now that there are those patches and emblems to earn, I figure I'll figure out a way to throw in some ace combat stuff for those as well. EDIT: after seeing what the patches actually look like, I think they're above my artistic skill to recreate something like them. I'm not that good with photoshop. ^^; the final thing I wish to mention is that now I'll be posting here and on my discord about the mods. discord, however, will be posting more of little updates alongside the "so-and-so is out." it'll also allow for quicker replies. ( discord link: https://discord.gg/X6RgASj ) I hope things with your family have improved tho.

anyone know how to disable just the FTW camo? or I guess more accurately, what its name is in the camo file.