The Dreadnought Improvement Project (DIP) Version 3 for Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts

Credits: Massive thanks to the Baron (author of the Naval Arms Race mod) and Admiral Snackbar (author of the balance mod) for helping me understand how to mod the game and for letting me use some of their hard work in the mod. Thank you to Nathan Kell for making v3 possible! Thank you as well to lead developer Nick Thomadis (aka Dartis) for helping me understand how the game functions. And of course thank you to everyone who has helped test the mod!

Not all UAD mods are here on the nexus, you can find more over on the game’s forum https://forum.game-labs.net/forum/199-unofficial-mods/

Known Issues: Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the mod does not break saves you can experience issues installing the mod mod campaign. It is recommended to install the mod before generating a new campaign and to make sure you do not have any shared designs in the shared design folder that are not designed to be used with the mod.

Mod purpose: To make the game more fun! If you are jumping in from the vanilla game designing ships is very different and strategies that are very good in vanilla are perhaps not so great in DIP. Battles are much more dangerous and the AI has had a few pointers, expect the game to be more challenging but much less annoying. I will try and update the mod to the latest version of the game as soon as I can but they happen a lot and ususually when I'm away from my computer. The mod version number will work like this: X.Y.Z where X denotes major features being added, Y means something in the mod changed, and Z is a compatibility update.

Installation:
1. Install Melon Loader from https://melonloader.co/. This must be done first.
2. Unpack the Great Game zip file and then copy the files and folders inside into your UAD Mods folder, ususally located at
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts\Mods

3. (Optional) Make a copy of the UAD folder and move it to another location. See this video for details https://youtu.be/X0RSOnNpZ9Y

You can check if the mod is installed by checking the version number in the bottom right of the screen.
You can experience weird UI issues if you have any vanilla shared designs or saves, a clean install is recommended!
Uninstallation: Delete all files in the Mods folder

The Great Game
All minor nations are removed in favour of a playable Byzantine Empire, Portugal, Netherlands and Scandinavia.

Changes in all versions:

Shipbuilding
Weights and costs have been adjusted significantly from the vanilla game. You should now find that ships do not have very high pitch, roll, or offsets but including everything you want in terms of protection, firepower, and speed is not possible and you need to make compromises and decisions.
The stats of guns have been reworked completely from the vanilla game. Big guns are far more viable, deck penetration is much lower, and long x.9 inch guns are no longer the go to option, and high explosive penetration is lower.
Armour techs are now radically different and no longer give weight reductions but are significantly stronger. Armour limits are much higher than in vanilla. Armour techs become obsolete faster to help the AI with this change.
Propellants have also been reworked, with shell damage effects removed. Muzzle velocity, range, and penetration are now linked.
Rangefinders are now all the same weight and become obsolete faster. This helps the AI keep up to date with the player.
Torpedoes now do significantly more damage, roughly quadruple the vanilla values.
Changing beam and draught is now less impactful.
Anti-torpedo defences have been improved.
Heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships can no longer equip hydrophones/sonar. You will need light cruisers and/or destroyers to escort your big ships.
Citadel techs are now have a smoother progression, this particularly affects citadel 4 (turtleback) which is now inbetween citadel 3 and citadel 5 in terms of effectiveness.
A few of the campaign techs have been altered such as the starting communications tech and the late game hull survivability tech to prevent large changes to ships effectiveness.
Light cruisers must have at least 0.5 inches of armour on their main belt.
Gas turbines have been improved.
Multi tube torpedo launchers now no longer have their prices squared.
Keep Gun/Torpedo Marks on refit. To upgrade the guns/torpedoes you must press the new upgrade button after entering refit mode.
Barbettes mount freely.
Better conquests. Invasion chances should make a bit more sense.
Replacement armour generation behaviour. Ships now have minimum armour values!
Per-ship type speed min/max params. This should hopefully prevent the AI making tin foil speedboats all the time.
Limit calibre counts and size. Ships should now come with 1 main, 1 secondary and (sometimes) 1 tertiary calibre of gun.
Improvements to port capacity and starting provinces (for instance Canada and Egypt are part of the British Empire on all start dates, and the US starts with Hawaii).
A massive number of improvements to parts thanks to Rocket, including new quad gun models & various tweaks to hulls and components, and completely reworked gun scaling.
Rework of engines to give realistic horsepower figures, brining back the balance from pre 1.6 and fixing the weird funnel capacity issues.
Cruisers now don't like having single guns.
Gun stats have been completely reworked using some NAR data (thank you to the Baron for helping me with this). Guns should now perform reasonably predictably.
Effects of changing gun barrel length have been reduced significantly, you should no longer see long guns having terrible accuracy or short guns being extremely cheap for instance.
When new marks of guns are unlocked has been reworked. Expect to be stuck on mark 1 guns until the 1910's. Mark 3's probably won't show up until the 20's, 30's for mark 4's, & 40's for mark 5's and so on. You should see higher marks of guns unlock sequentially from smallest to largest for the most part.
Belt penetration has been reworked to generally make guns less punchy and to make realistic armour thicknesses viable.
Changes to how weights for light and heavy cruisers are calculated to make them more in line with bigger ships. Overall this means that cruisers should have less spare displacement.
Multiple torpedo tubes are now slightly more displacement efficient making quadruple and quintuple launchers a more attractive choice.
Mine laying, mine sweeping, and depth charge components have been 'removed' (by making them torpedo boat exclusives). This was done primarily to stop the AI wasting displacement on these parts.
Engine costs have been rebalanced, turbo electric is slightly more expensive, diesels are cheaper. Overall ships should no longer reach ludicrous costs unless they are very large and very fast.
Auxiliary engines have been cost rebalanced to make high end options more viable & to stop the AI making obscenely expensive ships.
Propeller upgrades have been rebalanced and are now slightly less effective but cheaper.
Standard bulkheads will now become obsolete, this forces the AI to use at least reinforced 1 bulkheads which helps it not make crippled designs.
Adjusted the appearance of auto loaders, sonar, and radar to be somewhat later (late 1930s to the 1940/50's). Radar 3 and autoloading guns will likely now become unlocked after you have mark 5 guns.
Standard reload will now become obsolete. The AI builder is also more likely to use better reload techs if it can.
Adjusted component weights for shell types to encourage better AI decision making. For AP shells this means the AI is most likely to pick the 'rightmost' AP shell it has access to.
Base detection of torpedoes lowered to 500m to make hitting AI ships more likely.
Heavy Cruisers now have a maximum secondary gun size of 5" rather than 6" to avoid problems when ships were designed with both primary and secondary 6 inch guns.
Other attempted improvements to the auto builder, such as trying to persuade the AI not to put very large guns on small ships.

Battles
The damage from partial penetrations has been reduced, as has damage spread and the chance of fire. With the threshold of ship loss due to fire being raised to 95% ships will no longer be easily sunk with low calibre 'he spam' tactics.
The overpenetration threshold is now much higher, only very large shells going through very thin armour will result in an overpenetration, however overpen damage has been reduced.
Generally you can see ships further away and battle ranges are longer than in vanilla. Close range engagements are likely to be deadly and short.
The AI's ability to spot torpedoes has been greatly reduced torpedo attacks should be viable now.
Initial division layouts should be a bit more sensible.
Bad weather is now less likely and also not as impactful.
Adjustment to shells and HE penetration to make all or nothing ships more viable and the AI more competitive, as well as making shells behave a bit more like their real world counterparts.
Increased ammo detonation damage, secondary ammo detonations are now quite dangerous.
Increased flooding sinking threshold to 75% of flood-able compartments (ships have 10 compartments). This means that ships are slightly more survivable but also sinking via flooding is more predictable and obvious to the player. A ship whose citadel covers at least 3 compartments should not be able to be easily sunk by hits to its extended belt/deck.
Reduced maximum speed of some ship classes to plausible but still very fast values. (BB 36, BC/CA/CL 40, DD 45 knots). This is primarily done to help the AI not build ridiculously fast ships with no armour.
Increased the partial pen threshold to 80% and reduced partial pen damage. Whilst HE is still very useful for destroying the upper-works of a ship a properly armoured battleship can now withstand a considerable amount of punishment.
Rebalance of the fuse and ricochet effects of shells to make shells behave more predictably.

Campaign
Submarines have been removed.
Mines have also been removed (they can still appear very late game).
The governemnt modifiers have been adjusted to be less extreme and for provinces to matter more to the overall health of the economy.
AI personalities have been improved to be a little more realistic, and the scrapping threshold has been increased to 250,000 tons to help the AI maintain a decently sized fleet.
Naval invasions have been made slightly easier to pull off for the invader.
Denial zones have been significantly reduced to prevent task forces blocking each other. You may find that if you drop a fleet ontop of an enemy one it dissapears, this is the AI refusing battle and moving away in the background (no mission is generated). Task force denail zones are still big enough to block narrow straights and canals.
Allies are now more likely to buy a mothballed ship.
Peace agreements should now mostly follow what the player selects, and enemies will nearly always agree to your peace terms. There is still a small chance the goverment declares peace without you.
Blockades and transport losses are much more significant in terms of victory points. Maintaining a blockade long term can cause revolutions or collapse of enemy nations.
Technology research is much more even, tech spread is larger, priorities hurt less, and ahead/behind penalties/bonuses are set at 5 years.
Replacement scrapping behaviour. The AI should now be a bit more sensible about scrapping ships, prioritising old ships & smaller vessels.
Rebalanced unrest modifiers to be lower overall. This makes AI countries quite stable unless they suffer a string of defeats and/or conquer too much territory.
Adjusted map colours of Spain to match the yellow of their flag and China who are now a darker orange.
Submarines have been removed completely from the research screen.
AI personalities changed to encourage AI nations to be more aggressive with bigger fleets.

General
Better shared design support. You should see shared designs much more often, especially on 'Always'.
Version text on screen now shows DIP version number as well.
Serialization & CSV support. The mod files are now loose in UAD/Data/Mods and can be edited.
Support for the new pregenerated design system. [WIP]
Typo fixes for RandParts
The Naval Academy has been completely rebalanced to act as a tutorial rather than a challenge mode.
Adjusted difficulty levels to make the AI more fun and challenging.