Hey all, Avian here. This thought has been dripping off the side of my brain for a while now, I’m not really the type of guy to spread out full video essays-worth of balancing ideas for a game in one go but now would be probably be a good time to discuss it.
I’ve rather quickly realized that the general balancing for it is WEIRD when you inspect it for a minute or 2 in-game. The problem? You’ll probably take around 5 years (minutes) to even get into a match so you can have your jaw drop from the barrage of incoming shells, perhaps winning the match by the skin of your teeth and snatching victory from those level 100’s. So you check the various trees for Naval, let’s say Japan (the one I’ve been grinding as of now)
Destroyers…then Light Cruisers…ok…then, heavier Cruis- hey no wait a second- is that a Fletcher-Class Destroyer from the 1960’s in the SAME BR as the Hatsuharu?? A ship that was ordered in 1931??? That’s a 30 year difference!
While we’re lucky that Naval is the only gamemode to have such a noticeable mix’n’match of ships from various eras (as of now, they are drastic but…somewhat manageable) this brings into the question: Is it realistic…and, is it balanced!?
Well, it is, technically balanced, but for how long? when they start adding newer, more advanced ships will these ships have to be stuffed into 4.7 and such because “their destroyers”? Now is the time to improve and fix upon it before we start getting copypaste ships and such, so with all that rambling aside…let’s go onto it.
oh and uh, yeah it ain’t too realistic, mimimi muh realism mimimi
Alright, Ships are lazily placed in BR’s (and therefore Era’s) they shouldn’t be in and without any good reason, how do we solve this?
This is a very easily solution.
STEP ONE!: FIX THESE BR’S!..But not by adding new ones! ;)
nono we’re not adding more BR’s for Naval! Calm down
Naval’s problems are currently deep in the roots, the system. One of these issues is the unorthodox progression system it has made up on its own. You’ll start with small ships such as Destroyers, you’ll grind them out and then go to Cruisers, and then you’ll get to Battleships (ditto for Coastal, tiny toy boats to more impresive Sub-Chasers to Frigates).
…Do you grind fighters, for medium aircraft like CAS, to tactical bombers, to strategic bombers? Nope, we don’t! So why is it like this for Naval? Why do we need this railroaded tree? This is what I mean by root problems, it’s a very fundamental thing that the trees in this game are seperated by what kind of vehicles your looking to grind, Naval however forces you on a set path.
So, the simple fix is just, making the Naval tree normal. Instead of this “bigger is better” mentality, simply split battleships away from Destroyers, and of course Cruisers too, have them be seperate lines- and then don’t forget Coastal! Of course we have to split Gunboats from Frigates and other such smaller tugs too.
A very basic example for seperate ship lines, keeping Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships and other such things would make the grind much smoother too, being able to choose what you’d wanna play today…y’know, for fun. (and of course, “le realism” which I’ll probably repeat at nauseum.)
And uh, that’s kind of it really. Assuming I grow a pair and get confident on suggesting stuff, I’ve got other, more wacky ideas but I don’t wanna induce any fainting in the audience, so that’s gonna be it for now, thanks for reading.
p.s: one of those less wacky ideas would just be fleshing out this seperate line idea, feel free to dicuss how balancing things such as battleships or cruisers in earlier tiers for this idea here, i do feel as if dreadnoughts could be a little quirky if they were able to be unlocked pretty early and played in earlier tiers, i have a bit of a solution but that’d be on well, wackier side, but yeah yadayada i’m done here