So, you can have different vehicle types within a mode, but they need different paths to win.
The example is bombers in air or AA in ground. They can often easily be killed by vehicles at much lower BRs if they’re caught out. What allows the mixing to work is because they’re superior in some specific circumstances.
The trouble with naval is against both major threats (ship-to-ship or air-to-ship) battleships are superior to cruisers which are superior to destroyers. So there’s a linear progression.
Really the only way to justify destroyers floating up in BR is if there’s something they can protect the battleships from. The obvious choice here is ASW. That’s why I think we’ll see that long before we see post-war missile boats or carriers (which are optimized for beyond visual range combat that War Thunder currently isn’t really rigged to do).
Unfortunately submarines and by extent ASW will be simplistic to a point where it won’t justify itself.
Last we saw of subs, irrelevant to their time period, the detection mechanics were too arbitrary, and it was alright as a quick event, but not much more.
Naval doesn’t really work in WT because unlike tank or planes it has no depth.
I will not pretend that Air or Ground have any good gameplay, but they offer options, variety, and paths to improvement that are at best severely limited in naval.
Ideally a SS/ASW couple in naval should not mirror the relationship between AA/CAS in ground, because at no point was it ever balanced between one another, and seeing the latest round of addition to AAs, Gaijin is in no hurry to adress the issue either.
Even putting aside the poor gameplay of naval, you have to account for player behaviour, why shouldn’t they mutually farm each other’s DDs until they all give up and then resume killing each other ?
And while the presence of subs will somewhat threaten BBs due to their theoretically imprevisible nature, it remains to be seen wether they will be able to inflict meaningful damage to justify their use. Also in practice SS will be extremely easy to read since you will have their spawn indicated on your maps, and the average player will take the shortest route to your position.
That’s not even touching how the nature of WT makes torpedoes near useless outside of spamming a wall into spawns.
As far as contemporary ship combat goes, WT will never be ready for that.
The initial assessment of the devs that proper ships wouldn’t work in WT turned out to be absolutely bang on, but sunk cost fallacy, we’re getting the Yamato wether we like it or not.
Yep, I remember them saying that anything bigger than a frigate could never really work right… They’re still basically right.
I merely said ASW was the most likely way they could bring destroyers up into tier with battleships some day. Of the options they have if they want to do that, it’s basically the easiest.
Still hard though. ALL the current random battle maps would need to be deepened and modelled with subsurface relief. All the ASW weapon mechanics would need to be redone, and proper hydrophonic mechanics established. But it’d all be doable with dev effort.
Question is at 1.5% of games played and falling (Data Analysis #3: The arrival of Statshark answers some old questions) whether anyone would think it worth the investment now to try. Napalmratte says they’re out of good options after the June BBaganza and I suspect he’s right.
It boils down to them being too slow and complicated to be palatable by a large audience, thus requiring massive simplifications of their workings and use. To Gaijin’s credit, they made big ship accessible, just like they made planes accessible, but the issue is that contrary to planes, ships are much more limited in their options, thus they end up with a low skill ceiling and very repetitive gameplay.
Picture a ground match where everyone is playing the Maus, it’s a funny thought, but not much more.
To make big ships engaging in a multiplayer game for a profane audience you are forced to go the arcade route and hand out buffs everywhere, even in WT we have these adjustments to mobility and survivability.
Smaller boats have their own set of issue, but you have a lot more creative license to make them good in a less obvious manner.
And if you go the modern ship route, it becomes exponentially worse due to doctrinal differences between the East and West where one side will have to get severely handicapped in their specialty to make it playable. It’s either shipborne AShM hell, or airborne AShM hell. And since the West relies on carrier operations, and that’s it’s own can of worm, the obvious route would be to limit Soviet AShM to those comparable to the Harpoon and go from there.
Also modern ship gameplay would look exactly like the new AA control screen, and while personally I jive with that, I know that it’s not exciting enough to garner a large audience.