Hi everyone, I’m one of the few people who enjoys naval combat. I’ve recently been going a lot of Whaleman tasks to carry out, which is to torpedo a DD or cruiser with a Coastal boat.
Having tried countless times to ambush a DD, then getting lit up by its secondaries, it’s got me thinking. Would costal have a better time, if it wasn’t auto detected by blue water boats. So you could get closer to DDs to deliver torps/depth charges without being raped. Sure you can still be spotted visually and fired at manually, just stop the auto acquisition by the AI gunners, give PT/E boats a chance to get close.
This could be balanced with boat side, say anything over a certain weight class can be auto detected, under that size, they are more stealthy. It really feels like something needs to be done to bring small boats back into the game.
6 Likes
I will always advocate for automatic gunners to be disabled and only allow them to fire if a player manually marks a target for attack with those secondaries. I think auto gunners just give clueless players free undeserved rewards and protection from planes and ships regardless if they know they are there.
4 Likes
I think some should be disabled. Some should not. But I do think there needs to be some “buffs” in other areas to compensate
Secondary guns (like 4 inch guns on cruisers) should still fire at aircraft (aiming HE-VT at range is very hard)
Secondary guns though perhaps shouldnt aim at naval targets. Though their accuracy is very poor. So not sure if that matters too much (So maybe just drop their accuracy down a bit more, or only have them fire at things like Frigates and Destroyers and not PT boats)
tertiary guns (MGs, Canons, etc) probably shouldnt auto fire at either aircraft or ships. (though maybe ships if they enter like 500m or something)
The compromise though. Is that along with making sure “crew call-outs” were decent. maybe some UI element in the bottom left that just flashes the rough general direction of a threat. just so that you have some warning when in the middle of a fight
I don’t have too much issues with automatic tageting, but I did make this suggestion to discourage people from just setting their AI targeting to all and just have easy kills though. TL;DR, having your crew set to be able to target surface target automatically means more crew loss
Because in real life all those eyeballs on the ship would not at least report the contact? The way it is in game represents a realistic “local control” and “weapons free” status.
Sorry but IRL, boats attacking DDs and larger was usually suicide for real reasons.
Its doable in game, but it requires using cover and being sneaky.
Whaleman is one of hte easier tasks that I like to get - use 3.3 or lower PT boats and half your games are against reserve and 3.3 DD’s
AI gunners absolutely should not open fire on their own. They should still be automated, but only fire at targets marked manually, with the system we already have.
This is easily one of the biggest design/balance problems in Naval.
True, though its more prevalent in coastal I feel, boats with manually aimed deck guns are horrendously outclassed by auto pew pew boats and for some reason a boat being slapped with a 75mm HE shell takes less damage than a boat being machine gunned…Gaijin logic.
Ships can fire at more than one target at a time. Using that would prevent them from engaging multiple targets.
Finding solutions is far more prodictive than listing problems.
The current system already allows each weapon set to be assigned different targets, so that’s three right there (primary weapons should get their AI back, if auto-target is removed).
If that’s not enough, simply allow multiple targets to be assigned per weapon type, easy.
I get the idea, but that would mean destroyers which already having to deal with awful spawns, will definitely get swarmed at caps now if not shelled to shit from the enemy spawn.
Are the AI gunners even that good? last I played naval with DDs, the gunners only served in telling me that there was something nearby, so I had to change focus and kill that thing with the secondaries manually.
I think naval has to be fully revamped, just the gamemodes however, better maps, better applications
For now, all I can think of is, wait for the DDs or cruisers to get close to the rocks and ambush
It litterally doesn’t. Manual targeting just means you have to be aware and actually mark the target before it is killed by crew control. You can fire the main guns, assign the secondaries (if you don’t control those too) to a different target, and assign the AA guns to another seperate target.
1 Like
Doesn’t seem to work like that. When I switch to secondaries and target something, then I go back to main and switch targets, the secondaries shoot the same target or just do whatever they want.
Actually had another thought on something that would need to change if they totally removed AI fire for secondary and/or Territiary guns. The ability to lock primary guns looking in a certain way or disable all gun tracking your sight regardless of selected weapon. Id not want to be in a BB, firing at something off to my port. Then swap to my secondary guns to deal with a PT boat/Aircraft off my Starboard side and then swap back to my main guns to find they are now facing the wrong way. It would be a nightmare
When you change guns, the main batteries should not track to you POV. You can use freelook or change your 3rd person cam view X and Y independently with keybinds.
You don’t switch to secondaries to do it. You can stay operating main calibers while assigning the manual targets. You can tell which target is assigned to whoch battery by the icons above the ship/plane after assignment.
I though they made this standard after the main battery autofire change.
Dont thin so. Just jumping into a test match to test
Ype has been fixed. so never mind on that (though would still love to be able to lock some guns facing one way)
I think what it is, is that if you look in the opposite direction and then swap guns, they’ll move to where you were looking before swapping. So in the heat of battle I must of been doing that