The Dreadnought Improvement Project (DIP) Version 1 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 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!

Known Issues: Some enemy ships may occasionally be invisible due to graphics loading issues, but they remain targetable and can be attacked.

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.

Changes in this mod:

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.

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.

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.

A word on version numbers and releases

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.
You can check if the mod is installed and what version of the game it was made for by checking 'news' from the main menu.