USS Nevada has major issues

[Balance_Enjoyer 72]

The USS Nevada, the way it is currently implemented in game suffers major issues. I've played a variety of battleships from different nations and all of them have small inaccuracies or issues, but the Nevada suffers from a deadly combination of real world shortcomings and terrible game mechanics.

 

 

 

1) The crew module layout it atrocious. When the crew space in the screenshot below gets hit, you're down to 60-65% crew most of the time - from a single enemy salvo. This means you can repair your ship roughly once every match before you're out of crew. Theres is another equally large crew space just behind the one in the picture, also completely unarmoured. You may aswell write off the crew in these modules, they wont exist for long. So right off the bat, you're starting out with a hand tied behind your back.

 

• Why does a single gigantic crew space contain 20-30% Crew?
• Why wasnt this divided up into smaller parts? 
• Why isnt more crew within the, admittedly, limited armour parts?

 

Guess what, if you design a game mode around crew loss, and thats where you put the crew, youre going to be at a major disadvantage against any ship with a distributed armour scheme, no matter how big your guns are. (see picture 2)

 

 

2) The bridge is Constantly on fire because it has zero armour. Yes, this is most likely historical as the conning tower was removed during the WW2 refit and the bridge was placed in the unarmoured superstructure. Heres where the god awful repair mechanics in naval come in:

• Because the bridge is constantly on fire, all other damage control actions take longer - all while your ship floods or your crew dies to fire. And theres nothing you can do about it. Sometimes you dont have the choice to wait for the bridge to finish repairing, especially when you catch fire every 5 seconds.
• Why does the bridge auto-repair, slowing all other actions down and making me die faster?
• Why cant the player determine what to repair?
• When repairing modules, why are the most useless modules or the modules with most crew repaired first? If I need to repair a broken ammunition elevator, why does it repair my crew draining secondaries and my rangefinders first?
• Is this done on purpose to make ships die faster?

 

In summary:

The combination of all of these things makes the Nevada an unfortunate ship to play at the moment. The reload is aweful and ahistorically slow, you're on fire 24/7 even when all your superstructure modules are destroyed already, you can kiss 1/3rd of your crew goodbye instantly because theyre in terrible crew modules and you cant steer half the time because your bridge is somewhere in nirvana. The only upside is the good hull armour, it can take a hit or two. Ironically, the ship that was degraded to a training ship by World War 2, the Wyoming, is more survivable and effective than the Nevada in every way....

 

Because, for whatever odd reason, gaijin decided that crew count is the determining health factor for Naval, ships with all-or-nothing armour schemes are going to run into major difficulties.....

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disclaimer: Just because Im talking about the Nevada specifically here, doesnt mean there arent other ships with issues that should be addressed.

Edited March 21 by Balance_Enjoyer

[kkang2828 1,426]

9 hours ago, Balance_Enjoyer said:

The USS Nevada, the way it is currently implemented in game suffers major issues. I've played a variety of battleships from different nations and all of them have small inaccuracies or issues, but the Nevada suffers from a deadly combination of real world shortcomings and terrible game mechanics.

 

 

 

1) The crew module layout it atrocious. When the crew space in the screenshot below gets hit, you're down to 60-65% crew most of the time - from a single enemy salvo. This means you can repair your ship roughly once every match before you're out of crew. Theres is another equally large crew space just behind the one in the picture, also completely unarmoured. You may aswell write off the crew in these modules, they wont exist for long. So right off the bat, you're starting out with a hand tied behind your back.

 

• Why does a single gigantic crew space contain 20-30% Crew?
• Why wasnt this divided up into smaller parts? 
• Why isnt more crew within the, admittedly, limited armour parts?

 

Guess what, if you design a game mode around crew loss, and thats where you put the crew, youre going to be at a major disadvantage against any ship with a distributed armour scheme, no matter how big your guns are. (see picture 2)

 

 

2) The bridge is Constantly on fire because it has zero armour. Yes, this is most likely historical as the conning tower was removed during the WW2 refit and the bridge was placed in the unarmoured superstructure. Heres where the god awful repair mechanics in naval come in:

• Because the bridge is constantly on fire, all other damage control actions take longer - all while your ship floods or your crew dies to fire. And theres nothing you can do about it. Sometimes you dont have the choice to wait for the bridge to finish repairing, especially when you catch fire every 5 seconds.
• Why does the bridge auto-repair, slowing all other actions down and making me die faster?
• Why cant the player determine what to repair?
• When repairing modules, why are the most useless modules or the modules with most crew repaired first? If I need to repair a broken ammunition elevator, why does it repair my crew draining secondaries and my rangefinders first?
• Is this done on purpose to make ships die faster?

 

In summary:

The combination of all of these things makes the Nevada an unfortunate ship to play at the moment. The reload is aweful and ahistorically slow, you're on fire 24/7 even when all your superstructure modules are destroyed already, you can kiss 1/3rd of your crew goodbye instantly because theyre in terrible crew modules and you cant steer half the time because your bridge is somewhere in nirvana. The only upside is the good hull armour, it can take a hit or two. Ironically, the ship that was degraded to a training ship by World War 2, the Wyoming, is more survivable and effective than the Nevada in every way....

 

Because, for whatever odd reason, gaijin decided that crew count is the determining health factor for Naval, ships with all-or-nothing armour schemes are going to run into major difficulties.....

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disclaimer: Just because Im talking about the Nevada specifically here, doesnt mean there arent other ships with issues that should be addressed.

 

These are really an issue for ALL ships right now, except maybe the Kronstadt. It's most certainly intentional, so ships will die faster. Just two of the many sadly broken things about the DM currently. Maybe one day they'll fix it, or not...

Edited March 22 by kkang2828

[굴러온 306]

2 hours ago, kkang2828 said:

 

These are really an issue for ALL ships right now, except maybe the Kronstadt. It's most certainly intentional, so ships will die faster. Just two of the many sadly broken things about the DM currently. Maybe one day they'll fix it, or not...

 

Kronshtadt also has crew compartment outside armored part. There are no exception.

 

And for crew... not all crews were in the armored part when battle is on. For example, lots of crews were with XO in the unarmored part of superstructure on the USS South Dakota during the battle with IJN Kirishima. So it is not historical with crew compartment in WT, it is also not historical if all crew compartments were in armored part. Maybe Gaijin could make crew compartment as characteristic of each nation as usually European countries have more spaces in citadel against USN or IJN battleships.

[lizardmech 769]

1 hour ago, glown2307 said:

 

Kronshtadt also has crew compartment outside armored part. There are no exception.

 

And for crew... not all crews were in the armored part when battle is on. For example, lots of crews were with XO in the unarmored part of superstructure on the USS South Dakota during the battle with IJN Kirishima. So it is not historical with crew compartment in WT, it is also not historical if all crew compartments were in armored part. Maybe Gaijin could make crew compartment as characteristic of each nation as usually European countries have more spaces in citadel against USN or IJN battleships.

The cruisers previously had reasonably distributed crew modules split between unarmored and armored spaces. They relocated them all outside armor in the patch the introduced BBs and every ship since has followed the layout. It's part of the reason bot HE spam became so common.

[Balance_Enjoyer 72]

14 hours ago, Math3matica said:

 

 

Hit and run.

 

 

Hit and run in a 20kt standard battleship  Theres is no such thing as hit and run in Warthunder.

 

Where did you have the information about the crew percentages from? Its interesting because it supports my point exactly. According to your information 75% of all crew (and 100% of reserve crew) is in unarmoured compartments. You may aswell pretend that this crew doesnt exist.

 

6 hours ago, kkang2828 said:

 

These are really an issue for ALL ships right now, except maybe the Kronstadt. It's most certainly intentional, so ships will die faster. Just two of the many sadly broken things about the DM currently. Maybe one day they'll fix it, or not...

 

Yes, and I did aknowledge that too. My main point was that this universal issue seems to affect the Nevada disproportionaly much, given its all-or-nothing armour scheme. 

 

3 hours ago, glown2307 said:

 

Kronshtadt also has crew compartment outside armored part. There are no exception.

 

And for crew... not all crews were in the armored part when battle is on. For example, lots of crews were with XO in the unarmored part of superstructure on the USS South Dakota during the battle with IJN Kirishima. So it is not historical with crew compartment in WT, it is also not historical if all crew compartments were in armored part. Maybe Gaijin could make crew compartment as characteristic of each nation as usually European countries have more spaces in citadel against USN or IJN battleships.

 

In my opinion anything thats based off of general design trends for a specific nation during a specific time should be avoided, in order to maintain a degree of uniformity among ingame nations. Things should only be done this way if there are concrete numbers to base these changes on. Keep in mind your suggestion is already implemented in the game to some extent. Even now, Gaijin can only work within the constraints of the real world vessel. If the Nevada had 90% of crew berthing outside of the armour on the real ship, then they cant magically decide to move the crew spaces to the engine rooms. What they CAN and SHOULD do is divide the compartments up into smaller ones according to the original blueprints and fix shrapnell damage so that it no longer ignores all armour after detonation.

 

Gaijin has to fix the crew system, while adhering to a vessels design constraints. And that is exactly where the major dilemma comes into play. 

 

As I see it there are 4 options moving forward:

 

1) Stop making crew the determining factor of whether a vessel is destroyed. Ive never been a fan of the crew system. The idea behind it is excellent, but its badly implemented, crew damage is unrealistically high and it only really makes sense for small vessels. 

 

2) Reduce the amount of damage that crew take, across the board. Divide crew compartments into smaller sections instead of gigantic halls....

 

3) Fix the aweful repair system so that you can make flooding and fires a viable candidate for being the most important threats to a vessel. Ofcourse this can only be done once the player is given more control over what and how he wants to repair his ship.

 

4) Stop making ships magically sink within a nanosecond once their crew is depleted. I really liked the idea initially because before that ships basically never sank properly, but its become absolutely absurd. Abandon that idea and never think about it again.

 

 

 

 

I made a detailed post on the crew system and how to improve it years ago, but ofcourse it was ignored.

 

 

Edited March 22 by Balance_Enjoyer

[Balance_Enjoyer 72]

2 hours ago, Math3matica said:

Well, it is better to make a separate post and choose a better title to explore the crew compartment system beyond Nevada if you wish.

 

I made those diagram for in-depth analysis of a ship's strength and weakness, not for a pro or con of an argument, My word is that Nevada is probably the most OP battleship at 6.7 and its a deadly threat to most 7.0 battleships. Nevada is the meta ship for those true naval enthusiasts, its hardcore, high learning curve, hard to master but also with extremely high skill ceiling. And of course, it has no issue in term of crew allocation. I've grinded this ship from stock and I got 90 frags but only 2 deaths. 

 

To be honest many of your statements are very wrong but I don't want to waste time on these arguments. Save your time, play more games, and get better understanding to the thing if you really care about.

 

My suggestion is, if you want to promote a change to crew system, go play Paris Commune and use that as your basepoint instead. 

 

What I brought up are valid points. If you disagree with what I said I'd love to know about where and what. Perhaps you didnt fully understand the points im making? Calling the Nevada a good ship ... maybe. Calling it OP, absolutely absurd.

 

"Nevada is the meta ship for those true naval enthusiasts, its hardcore, high learning curve, hard to master but also with extremely high skill ceiling"

What are you even talking about? This has nothing to with skill, or plAyInG sOmE mORe GamEs. Stop kidding yourself mate. 

 

"To be honest many of your statements are very wrong but I don't want to waste time on these arguments. Save your time, play more games, and get better understanding to the thing if you really care about."

You dont want to waste time on arguments, yet you bother replying. Not much of what you said so far contributed positively to the conversation.

 

 

Its really disheartening that in every f'ing discussion on this forum, no matter how good someones ideas or arguments are, there is always one guy spewing some meta garbage about sKIlL ISsue, You DonT KNow HoW tO PLaY XyZ... blababla

 

You are right about one thing. A seperate post about the crew system would be a good idea.

Edited March 23 by Balance_Enjoyer

[Balance_Enjoyer 72]

Would love to hear some more replies from people who played the Nevada and/or are interested in contributing to the discussion. Whats your experience? How will a gamemode revolving around crew loss affect ships with unprotected crew compartments that are too unmaneuverable to evade incoming fire? 

 

 

 

 

 

PS: To people who are more active on the forum than me, does this mathematica guy always write this much random nonsense? Would love to know. Cheers

 

Edited March 23 by Balance_Enjoyer

[HK Reporter 1,210]

No need of starting a flame war again...

 

Floatplane launching issue - acknowledged, under process of solution 

 

Bridge replacement imposes penalty on fire control timer - acknowledged 

 

Crew allocation - Nevada actually has one of the best crew allocation across all ships as @Math3matica had mentioned in his comments. She's among the very few ships with crew compartments located inside the citadel.

[Balance_Enjoyer 72]

59 minutes ago, HK_Reporter said:

No need of starting a flame war again...

 

Floatplane launching issue - acknowledged, under process of solution 

 

Bridge replacement imposes penalty on fire control timer - acknowledged 

 

Crew allocation - Nevada actually has one of the best crew allocation across all ships as @Math3matica had mentioned in his comments. She's among the very few ships with crew compartments located inside the citadel.

 

"No need of starting a flame war again..." I agree. Sick and tired of posts getting derailed by dumb "advice" and meaningless comments about playtime and "skill".

 

 

About the crew allocation. Could you explain how Nevadas crew is located inside the citadel? Neither my own screenshot nor that other guys crew diagram shows crew within the citadel (apart from the engine rooms etc). 

 

 

PS: I dont check the forum too often, but its good to see you've become a techmod, considering you're one of the only naval players in this position. Hope this gives the naval playerbase better representation.

 

Edited March 23 by Balance_Enjoyer

[HK Reporter 1,210]

2 minutes ago, Balance_Enjoyer said:

About the crew allocation. Could you explain how Nevadas crew is located inside the citadel? Neither my own screenshot nor that other guys crew diagram shows crew within the citadel (apart from the engine rooms etc).

Math's screenshot clearly indicates the three crew compartments each with 11% of crew assigned are located inside the citadel. You can check it by yourself using the protection analysis.

[Balance_Enjoyer 72]

43 minutes ago, HK_Reporter said:

Math's screenshot clearly indicates the three crew compartments each with 11% of crew assigned are located inside the citadel. You can check it by yourself using the protection analysis.

 

According to the armour viewer the top of the citadel starts at the bottom of the barbettes. If you look at my 2nd screenshot from the OP, it looks like the 11% berthing spaces are above this area in maths screenshot. How did he get the numbers for the crew allocation by the way? He didnt explain that properly.

 

PS: Was just in a match 1 minute ago. First hit I recieved = down to 66% crew. And that was from a cruiser.....

 

 

 

Edited March 23 by Balance_Enjoyer

[kkang2828 1,426]

On 22/03/2023 at 23:52, Balance_Enjoyer said:

My main point was that this universal issue seems to affect the Nevada disproportionaly much, given its all-or-nothing armour scheme. 

 

Many ships already have the "all or nothing" armor schemes in the game right now, and there's only going to be more as newer ships get added. 

 

On 22/03/2023 at 23:52, Balance_Enjoyer said:

I made a detailed post on the crew system and how to improve it years ago, but ofcourse it was ignored.

 

Best to make a proper suggestion post for it. If that gets ignored as well, get someone to translate it into Russian for you and post it over on the RU forums where stuff tends to get recognized more.

 

17 hours ago, Balance_Enjoyer said:

PS: To people who are more active on the forum than me, does this mathematica guy always write this much random nonsense? Would love to know. Cheers

 

Actually he's a great guy who's done some insightful datamining for naval here on the forums. But I agree his statshaming statements are not appropriate here.

 

12 hours ago, Balance_Enjoyer said:

How did he get the numbers for the crew allocation by the way? He didnt explain that properly.

 

Datamining.

Edited March 24 by kkang2828

[lizardmech 769]

Another problem is crew modules HP do not reflect crew sizes. The nevada has a very large crew 2230, but it has 3 unprotected crew modules with 14% of the crew each. This allows a light cruiser spamming HE to kill 42% / 900 crew effortlessly with only a few hits. If the ship had a very small crew number of 600 or so those crew modules would contain a tiny % of the crew, and turrets + engines and subsystems would hold a higher % of crew. The minimum crew required to man the ship is silly as well, it's just a straight % of total crew rather than the amount of guys needed to man all the subsystems. Min crew numbers could be done much better, AA turrets don't have crew losses modeled currently but you could just have it so they're disabled when crew levels fall to near the min needed to crew modeled subsystems. It would make more sense if damage control just became slower as you approached min crew rather than the ship inexplicably sinking at 10%. 

[Balance_Enjoyer 72]

Exactly this. If the crew system and damage control mechanics were fixed, this would be a non-issue. 

As I said earlier, I realise gaijin cant magically create crew compartments inside the citadel where there are non, but that wouldnt even be necessary if the above points were ever addressed.

 

@lizardmech

Either make damage control slower, as you said, or let the player prioritize actions. If you run out of crew, allow the player to pull off crew from secondary guns to help fire control and so forth, you get the point. Its slightly unrealistic that guncrews suddenly become damage control experts, but still a trillion times more plausible than the "not enough crew" magic we have right now.

 

Pretty sure Im not the first one to suggest that either. Remember similiar mechanics being suggested multiple times in the past.

 

 

Edited March 26 by Balance_Enjoyer

[SkySo1dier 85]

Great post. I hope the community rallies around the issues raised there, because proper gameplay of these large armored beasts is impossible without addressing the shortcomings raised in the original post.

[kkang2828 1,426]

On 26/03/2023 at 01:13, lizardmech said:

Another problem is crew modules HP do not reflect crew sizes. The nevada has a very large crew 2230, but it has 3 unprotected crew modules with 14% of the crew each. This allows a light cruiser spamming HE to kill 42% / 900 crew effortlessly with only a few hits. If the ship had a very small crew number of 600 or so those crew modules would contain a tiny % of the crew, and turrets + engines and subsystems would hold a higher % of crew. The minimum crew required to man the ship is silly as well, it's just a straight % of total crew rather than the amount of guys needed to man all the subsystems. Min crew numbers could be done much better, AA turrets don't have crew losses modeled currently but you could just have it so they're disabled when crew levels fall to near the min needed to crew modeled subsystems. It would make more sense if damage control just became slower as you approached min crew rather than the ship inexplicably sinking at 10%. 

 

On 27/03/2023 at 01:22, Balance_Enjoyer said:

Exactly this. If the crew system and damage control mechanics were fixed, this would be a non-issue. 

As I said earlier, I realise gaijin cant magically create crew compartments inside the citadel where there are non, but that wouldnt even be necessary if the above points were ever addressed.

 

@lizardmech

Either make damage control slower, as you said, or let the player prioritize actions. If you run out of crew, allow the player to pull off crew from secondary guns to help fire control and so forth, you get the point. Its slightly unrealistic that guncrews suddenly become damage control experts, but still a trillion times more plausible than the "not enough crew" magic we have right now.

 

Pretty sure Im not the first one to suggest that either. Remember similiar mechanics being suggested multiple times in the past.

 

 

 

On 27/03/2023 at 17:46, SkySo1dier said:

Great post. I hope the community rallies around the issues raised there, because proper gameplay of these large armored beasts is impossible without addressing the shortcomings raised in the original post.

 

Check this out: https://forum.warthunder.ru/index.php?/topic/330488-flot-dm-izmenenie-raspolozheniya-ekipazha-u-kreiserov-i-linkorov/

[Balance_Enjoyer 72]

Pretty interesting suggestion. Its good to see people come up with solutions.

 

I think a middle ground between the current crew distribution and his suggestion would be great. He also sees the issue with the gigantic crew boxes and suggests dividing them up into at least four smaller ones. I'd say, divide them up exactly as they where historically. If there are 4 large mess halls, make it so. If there were 20 berthing spaces, do that. Just dont do it randomly.

 

So all in all I'd make 2 changes:

1) Crew rooms according to real blueprints

2) Dont put all crew behind armour, that could backfire and make ships way too OP. 

 

And for the love of god, finally make it so that armour and metal plating slow down shrapnell velocity (Correct me if Im wrong, but thats not the case yet is it?).

Edited March 30 by Balance_Enjoyer

[kkang2828 1,426]

On 31/03/2023 at 07:42, Balance_Enjoyer said:

I'd say, divide them up exactly as they where historically. If there are 4 large mess halls, make it so. If there were 20 berthing spaces, do that. Just dont do it randomly.

 

That would require a level of historical research that Gaijin is simply incapable of, so it will never happen.

 

On 31/03/2023 at 07:42, Balance_Enjoyer said:

And for the love of god, finally make it so that armour and metal plating slow down shrapnell velocity (Correct me if Im wrong, but thats not the case yet is it?).

 

IIRC that's currently an engine limitation/optimization measure.

[Lolman345 580]

On 03/04/2023 at 08:45, kkang2828 said:

IIRC that's currently an engine limitation/optimization measure.

Not exactly Cough cough T series ammo carousel slowing or stopping all shrapnel even though its just 5mm of structural steel because it has "create secondary shatters" set to no. 

 

If the same was applied to the thin internals of ships there would be a vastly different result on both AP penetration and HE effects, but as it stands it seems like gaijin would rather generalize that internal plating and divisions that are not explicitly listed as internal armor on all naval vessels are incapable of stopping or at least mitigating spall. 

 

 

Edited April 4 by Lolman345

[kkang2828 1,426]

13 hours ago, Lolman345 said:

Not exactly Cough cough T series ammo carousel slowing or stopping all shrapnel even though its just 5mm of structural steel because it has "create secondary shatters" set to no. 

 

If the same was applied to the thin internals of ships there would be a vastly different result on both AP penetration and HE effects, but as it stands it seems like gaijin would rather generalize that internal plating and divisions that are not explicitly listed as internal armor on all naval vessels are incapable of stopping or at least mitigating spall. 

 

 

 

Naval and ground have diffrent DMs of course.

[ShineShooter 5]

Standard practice on USN ships would not allow for many crew in common areas. During "Battle Stations" all crew including the night watch/off shift report to their workspace. Berthings, galleys, storage, and common areas would be empty. There may be muster reports available from the Nevada class which would show exact crew locations and distributions.

Your note of 'cross training' between jobs is fully valid. Every USN sailor trains to extinguish fires, and most are qualified to preform advanced damage control due to it being something their bosses are told to xxxxx at them about.