Greetings! As a longtime naval player and Japan main, I’ve decided to tabulate all of my perceived issues with Naval that are making it less popular and fun for fewer people, as well as possible fixes.
It is my belief that making the gameplay system better and the mode more engaging overall will assist in boosting player counts, as well as boosting income from Naval for Gaijin due to having more players around.
Disclaimer: I play almost exclusively Japanese ships, primarily bluewater with minimal coastal so most of my examples used to illustrate points will be through the eyes of Japanese ships. Additionally, as I mainly play bluewater all the issues and potential solutions I’ve thought of apply entirely to bluewater ships.
First off: These are things that I’ve seen people complain about, but that I personally will not be addressing in this post
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The grind: Everyone knows the Naval grind is horrendous, perhaps more so than it is for ground or air. That being said, having a terrible grind is part of Gaijin’s game policy, and I am no game dev, so I can’t really suggest any real fixes or solutions.
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Server issues: This is outside of my realm of experience, it’s entirely up to Gaijin to fix this. Maybe if there were more real players they’d be more motivated to improve stability, who knows.
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The damage model: I personally like the damage model a good bit. It gets a decent balance between ships being somewhat durable, but also sometimes exploding if a shell touches off their magazine. It’s a little jank, but it’s the least of my worries in Naval.
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The presence of player-bots: In most battles, each side is usually 50% players and 50% bots outside of events and peak play times. That being said, these bots do give decent rewards and honestly it’s fine if they stay. They help with adding more cannon fodder for stock ships too.
With all that preamble out of the way, these are what I believe are the main issues with Naval right now:
Main Issues
- Compression, especially in bluewater, is quite literally insane. As comparisons between different nations tend to end up embroiled in some sort of argument, I’ll stick strictly with Japanese ships. Currently, the Bluewater Naval goes from 3.3 reserve to 7.0 top tier, consisting of a BR spread of less than 4 BR brackets covering everything from WW1 era destroyers to interwar super dreadnoughts and their World War 2 refits.
Case number 1: The IJN Kongo and Haruna, armed with 4 turrets of twin 14-inch (356mm) cannons are at 7.0, the same BR as the IJN Mutsu, armed also with 4 turrets, but this time with 16-inch (410mm) cannons. Mutsu herself is now at the same BR as the newly added IJN Amagi, this time with five turrets of 2 16-inch (410mm) cannons each. Now, the Kongo-class are at the exact same battle rating as the Amagi, where no matter how you look at it the Amagi is far better than the Kongo in every aspect except for anti-aircraft armament.
Case number 2: The IJN Aoba and Furutaka at 5.7 being the same BR as the IJN Myoko and Haguro. The Aoba and Furutaka have 3 turrets of 2 8-inch (203mm) guns each, while the Myoko and Haguro have 5 turrets of the same 2 8-inch (203mm) guns each. Basic subtraction tells us that the Myoko and Haguro have the distinct advantage in firepower. And yet, they’re at the exact same battle rating. It isn’t even like their AA armaments are particularly different either.
Just looking at these examples, shows that there is far too little space within the current Naval Bluewater BR spread to properly differentiate the BR of ships with different capabilities.
- Planes need rebalancing.
Basically as it states. Currently in Naval, planes are essentially irrelevant. The automatic AA gunners are incredibly effective, capable of nailing planes flying over 3km away without the player ever realizing they existed. I have personally gotten nailed on my way to the battlefield coming out of spawn countless times. While if one gets close enough to actually drop a bomb and hit one can usually kill something, getting close enough to drop and hitting are usually the hard part. Not to mention, torpedo bombing is basically a suicide run as it requires getting low and slow and pretty close to drop. Considering the standard way to counter battleships was with planes, planes feel vastly underpowered, or the AA gunners far too powerful.
- Reworking of maps.
Many people complain about the naval map’s lack of variety or objectives. I agree with the judgment that the 3-point domination mode is ill-suited for Bluewater ships especially, due to requiring between 10 and 30 minutes to even reach the point and being unable to maneuver in tight spaces (god forbid you accidentally skirt the edge of the point).
- Ships of a smaller class being irrelevant the instant ships of a larger class show up. (“Bigger Fish syndrome”)
Unlike in most of ground or air, where vehicles of a lower BR usually have a fighting chance at winning against a vehicle that is a full BR bracket higher with the proper tactics or skills, this is basically impossible in naval. If your early destroyer meets a fleet destroyer, you will explode. If your fleet destroyer meets a cruiser, usually you’re going to explode. If your cruiser meets a battleship, usually, you will explode. Many times without a chance to fight back due to getting completely outmatched in range and firepower.
Solutions
Now then, next is how I think these issues could be addressed. This is the main reason I’m writing this post, and so I’d like proper feedback. While I highly doubt the Gaijin dev team is actually paying attention to the forums, I hope that maybe some of these will provide some kind of inspiration.
- Compression
The primary point of compression comes from the incredibly small BR range for vastly different vehicle capabilities. As stated above, in a mere 3.7 BR brackets the naval tree goes from early destroyers all the way to super dreadnoughts.
The obvious method to fix this is, increasing the BR spread. Personally I’d like it to be extended to at least 8.3 if not higher. However, this brings up the issue of “how will these battleships deal with (more advanced) Cold War-era planes?” For that issue, see the next section.
- Planes and ship-based Anti-Aircraft. This is also somewhat a continuation of the above section as they are tied into each other. The changes I’ve thought of are:
Making it so that the AI gunners don’t engage planes past 1km out without player direction. Basically, the player needs to use the “X+3” keybind (“assign anti-aircraft target”) to order the gunners to fire at an enemy aircraft that is farther than 1km out. The reasoning for this is that it’d allow aircraft to get closer without being sniped out of the sky, and it’d give pure air search radars (not just air search+tracking radars) an actually somewhat important gameplay role. Additionally it’d allow for more realistic screening movements where a ship with good AA (like most American ones) can cover for ships with worse AA (like most pre-mid WW2 ones). This is a plane buff.
You can see the targeting reticle on the plane - that means the AA guns are assigned to fire at it.
Boosting the BRs of planes in Naval Bluewater by 3 across the board. So a 1.3 plane would be 4.3 in Naval. This would result in planes first showing up at ~4.0, with planes like the D3A1 or TBF being low-BR dive bombers. As currently bluewater starts at 3.3, there is no issue with this in my opinion as reserve destroyers don’t need to deal with planes. However, if reserve bluewater was moved to starting at 1.0 like every other reserve rank (requiring a full split from coastal) then the increase could be closer to 2 or so BRs (so a 1.3 plane would be 3.3 in Naval). The reasoning for this is primarily to increase the BR cap available in Naval. So in that sense, it’d fit more under “decompression” but since this change concerns mainly planes I put it here. The reasoning is that currently, the BR cap in Naval is 7.0, presumably because the devs believe that ships from WW1 shouldn’t be fighting jets from the Cold War. While I agree with the sentiment, the result is all ships past a certain power level being stacked at 7.0, resulting in mega compression. Under the +3 plane BR in naval system, it’d allow for ships up to the BR of 10.0 or 11.0, where one could reasonably put the big late-World War 2 battleships like the Iowa-class or Yamato-class who are best equipped to fight off early jets.
While this is definitely a stretch goal, allowing dive-bombers and torpedo-bombers (not frontline, heavy or long-range bombers) to spawn in as flights of 3, consisting of the player plane and 2 AI planes. The technology already exists, as in air RB there are AI planes flying around and bombing things, and in the single-player missions there are AI wingmen that engage enemy planes. The idea is that the 2 AI wingmen would follow the player and drop their bombs or torpedoes at the same time as the player, and attract fire away from the player controlled plane. Historically, anti-shipping bomb runs were rarely done by single planes but rather by squadrons of planes, and ship AA was built with this in mind. I would like to see this better replicated in War Thunder as well, but again, a stretch goal. I would say this is the least important of the 3.
An AI squadron of TBF Avengers in the single mission “Death of the Yamato” - while they don’t exactly follow you, they’re a close enough tech demonstration
- The maps and gameplay. Many people have complained about how the 3-cap setup is getting old and is unsuited for bluewater ships. That being said, the open-water fleet battle maps you can find at higher tiers (also known as “Circle of Death maps”) and the convoy battle maps (like what can be commonly found on South Kvarken) are unsuited for ships smaller than battleships and (especially the latter) can result in long, boring matches with little to show. With this in mind, I’ve thought of a few potential alternate battle objectives that could provide some variety:
Shore bombardment: Primarily for battleship tier, add one of those bombing targets from Air battles to the shore and make it the objective of one team to bombard it and the other team to defend it. Preferably put the target a few km inland so that ships need to get closer to land to shoot at it properly. Also, make it require something like 1000 kg of TNT to die so that it isn’t easy. This should provide a good target for battleship HE users to actually be useful and not splash harmlessly off other battleships, and give cruiser users something they can reasonably hurt. It can also be scaled down to work for BRs that have primarily cruisers. My main concern with this is that it’d result in one team having to split their attention, so it’s really just a baseline. Shore bombardment would be really cool though.
Convoy Escort: Primarily for tiers where destroyers are common, with maybe a few light cruisers. One team needs to destroy the convoy, and the other team needs to fight off the attacking destroyers. Japanese destroyers with their long-range torpedoes would be a menace in sending spreads of torpedoes towards the convoy, but American destroyers would be able to gun down most other types, with other nations somewhere in between those 2 extremes. Perhaps AI plane assaults could be thrown in too, for either side so they need to deal with planes as well. Additionally, the convoy should be conducting evasive maneuvers, so that a few well-aimed torpedo spreads wouldn’t immediately end the game.
Port bombardment: This is similar to “shore bombardment” described above but more geared towards destroyers, cruisers and maybe early battleships. There is a fleet in port that one team needs to destroy, and the other team needs to defend it. The fleet in port would consist of a bunch of cruisers and destroyers and perhaps a few battleships, so it won’t be that easy to kill. If a destroyer gets into the port and can launch torps, it’d do a lot of damage. Air strikes also could do a lot of damage, as ships in port would be stationary.
Fleet interception: This is also mostly for cruisers and destroyers. One team has an AI fleet consisting of a battleship and its escorts, and the other team has to destroy it. A spin on the previously mentioned convoy escort.
Air defense: This would ideally be for all ship types. One team’s goal is to destroy the carriers, the other team needs to defend the carriers from the surface threats and waves of AI aircraft. A carrier invulnerability lock can be applied so that the attacking team needs to whittle down the defense force before being able to directly engage the enemy carrier.
The general thought process for these was "add spice to matches without replacing the main goal of “destroy the enemies faster than you get destroyed” since I’m sure most players would rather shoot at other players over AI targets. Additionally, as some may have noticed, many of these are based on real-life historical events. My hope is for War Thunder to not be scared of adding historical locations as well, but these are close enough. Thoughts and opinions, and alternate modes are appreciated too!
- “Bigger Fish” syndrome: This is when ships of a smaller class immediately get rendered irrelevant when a larger ship shows up. This is mainly an issue in RB, as in EC there are things for smaller ships to do that aren’t just ‘join the line battle and get beamed by shells larger than their turret wells’. My idea for a solution is as follows:
Disclaimer: these changes are suggested with the assumption of BRs already being decompressed similarly to what has been described above.
You start with 200 spawn points. A battleship requires 280-330 spawn points to spawn in. A cruiser will require 50-80 spawn points and cruisers that are more than a full BR bracket below the match BR and destroyers are free. This will force players to start matches using cruisers or destroyers, making it more likely that players who only have cruisers or destroyers will be able to assist the match more.
If you die in a battleship, it will require another 300 spawn points or so to spawn in another battleship (no SP scaling) so you better hope you got enough spawn points, else back to cruisers and destroyers it is.
Additionally, if there are no cruisers within 1 BR bracket of the match BR (example: a match at 7.7 would have zero cruisers within 1 BR bracket as all cruisers are below 6.7) you can first-spawn battleships. There is no such thing as a “bigger fish” because you have the “biggest fish.”
Spawn regions will be different for Destroyers, Cruisers and Battleships. Right now we have different regions for Destroyers, and Cruisers/Battleships are together, but realistically cruisers should not be spawning in the same locations as battleships. I’d say destroyers start ~10km from each other, cruisers ~15 and battleships ~20, with some variation.
The goal of this is that players without the top-tier battleships can still be reasonably expected to do something in the match. That being said,there are issues that can be guessed at, such as “what happens if someone gets a battleship really quick? Just one-sided slaughter?” While such cases may arise, most of the time battleships will start too far away to properly hit a maneuvering destroyer and torpedoes are scary. Any more than that though is beyond my realm of expertise and is up to actual dedicated balancers.
“What about Coastal?”
Coastal is… a mixed bag. Personally, I’m not a fan. That being said, I recognize that there are people who like it. However, due to coastal past 3.3 being essentially dead in the water due to constantly fighting bluewater destroyers, it is in a bit of a sad state. As such, my suggestion:
Completely split coastal off of bluewater.
Just, completely. Different trees entirely, no gameplay overlap. Allow bluewater to start at BR 1.0 like every other reserve, and allow Coastal to fully extend the BR length.
This would allow the dev team to utilize Coastal for modern destroyers and frigates, as I am fully confident those are on their way, with the Braviy and Kondor already existing in game. Modern ships would be a terrible match for the massive bluewater battleships, but in the Coastal tree gameplay can be better tailored for them.
My vision consists of Bluewater being for massive battleships with massive guns, whaling on each other with shells and within visual range. Coastal, on the other hand, would be for those who want to play with missiles and modern ship equipment. This could be fun in its own right if done correctly, but that is not within my wheelhouse. At the very least, modern missile ships and WW1/WW2 battleships should NEVER be fighting each other. (The missile cruisers we already have are unfortunate but I can overlook a SAM cruiser or 2).
Pet peeves and minor issues:
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Reload
- Really, give the American standard battleships 30s reload - they did it historically and they kind of need it in game to be relevant. If the Ise-class can do 30 seconds, the Nevada-class can do 30s as well.
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Visuals
- Please, animate battleship gun barrels having to go back to resting position to reload. Those were a non-zero part of the reload time usage, and it looks cool as hell.
- Naval Night battles. For the love of god they were such a major part of WW2 naval engagements
- Spotlights please? Many ships, especially in the Pacific had massive ship floodlights to illuminate targets at night
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Ammunition
- Brits should get their 6crh AP shells already. They’re already outmatched as-is
- Give the option to get illumination shells. They’d be funny, as well as useful at night
- Japanese Type-3 anti-air incendiary flechette rounds would also be an interesting gimmick. Shotgunning PT boats with it could be fun.
- Having dye packets on shell splashes would be cool too. They were actually used in WW2 and if nothing else they’d be funny to see. Imagine watching multicolored sprays of water erupt around a ship. They could be something like wing smoke is for planes.
If you’ve read this far, congratulations! You read through what honestly became way longer than I originally thought it would. Like I said above, I’d appreciate thoughts and feedback with reasoning.
