Current state of Naval Forces is ABYSMAL!

Machinery of War Discussion Navy
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Evenig lovely thunder folks and especially naval enjoyers, those…5 people, who actually enjoy it.

Since we currently got the Winter event going on, i am also grinding the USS Mississippi.

I overall grind mostly the major nations like USA,Germany, and Japan when playing Naval, Japan i play currently the most of them all, and i can say this is literally the worst nation for navy, i have seen.

I guess like most Naval players, one day you wanna sail those big ships like the Yamato, right? but to get there, for japan you truly have to be a masochist!

The destroyers are currently quite useless because we got no subs, and in higher tiers no one is playing destroyers or cruisers.

I currently got all Japan Blue Water ships, and i can tell you all of ther Battleships are trash!

Despite there 356mm guns which some people might choose them as a solid pick, because of the 68Kg explosive tnt equa, the round does 0 DMG what so ever.Plus you are fighting a 39s reload timer, and a bad accuracy.

This isnt the only flaw of the Japanese Battleships.They are also through the bank super slow, have 0 armor, and there ammo racks are wrapped in paper that is soaked in napalm itself same goes for the deck of the ship.If 1 sailer drops a ciggarete on the deck of the ship, you are facing 16 fires accross the ship, have fun engaging enemy ships, while half of the crew is trying to fight the fire.

And that literally is how it ends up for me every battle, with Japans Battleships.I spawn get 1 tap of US HE rounds from a helena or Des moines, and burn down within 10 seconds.
Or i get a 283mm round from a scharnhorst, that has auto guidance mode from space, straight into my ammo rack with 110 percent accuracy and 500 percent critical chance multiplier.

Even if you are lucky, and nothing of the above occurs, what exactly you wanna do against other Battleships with a example “Ijn Ise”? the guns are crazy inaccurate, have a long reload time,and overall do 0 DMG be it the SAP round or the AP round.

If you face ships like a Scharnhorst, the best thing you can do, is just J out and try to respawn on another part of the map, because you just wont have a chance against it.
In all my time i played Japan at Naval Forces, and the USA or german tree, i NEVER managed to ammo rack/one tap a Scharnhorst, because it is 100 percent impossible.
There isnt a single round, SAP or AP that can penetrate the Scharnhorst belt except maybe the USS Arizona AP rounds.

All other rounds, are completly useless against.I even tryed to fight a Scharnhorst with a USS Alaska, still 0 chance because it reloads faster then me, has nearly same pen, but on top Scharnhorst has Armor that cant be penned and ammo racks that dont explode.

Even HE rounds from the USS Newport News 203mm 9 rounds with nearly 10kg of explosives, cant do anything against a Scharnhorst.I shot over 240 rounds of 203mm He rounds at it plus i dont know how manny 127mm rounds with 3kg explosives, the ship didnt catch fire ONCE!!!

At the end i got killed by it, came back with a A-26c-45 dropped 2 2000 pound bombs on it, 1 hit straight on top of the turret and the other one the bridge, guess what? nothing happend to the Scharnhorst.

Gaijin you seriously need to put some love in Naval forces, and get some heads behind it to figure out something fun for this game mode.For example we have soo manny air planes in the game, it could be so much fun to use them, but in all the matches i played in the last 3 weeks in Naval, i have seen 2 people actually using planes.That propably is due to the fact, that they are WAY to expensive to bring them into battle, plus you cant even get close enough to a ship, to do anything against it.

Why is it that only in Naval, we got Ships AA firing on there own without that the player has to do anything? planes cant even get close to most of the ships, before they getting annihilated from 3 kilometers away.A audio voice line would be cool, to signal that a enemy plane is coming your way, or maybe like make it visible at 600-700 meters, so you as a player can manually react to it with your AA guns, instead making it automatic.

In this game mode in all the matches in Naval, i have NEVER EVER seen anyone, who is using Torpedos dropped from planes, because it just isnt rewarding grinding the points to get a plane up, flying 2 minutes only to then annihilated by AA from 3 kilometers away, that is just boring and bad game design.

Or if you still insist that AA is firing auto on planes, make it so that only destroyers shoot AA guns on auto, all other ships are getting a Audio voice line that states a enemy plane is approaching and at a certain distance, the plane or maybe with a high enough Skill/plane detection the plane becomes visible and you have to shoot it down with your AA skills, and not do it the easy way, rely on A.I to do the job for you.

This is like a regular round looks like, when you got Scharnhorst in your round

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Top 2 players in my team of course boath scharnhorst and the enemy top player also a scharnhorst.You wont see anything else on top, you just wont if you got scharnhorst in the match.

We really need some strong changes in 2024 for Naval itself, because i dont wanna see the mode die off, because i am quite a big fan of the idea of Naval and combined forces, like planes.But the execution is just miserable.

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I tend to agree that the Scharnhorst in particular seems very powerful in its tier. I’ve been playing it pretty much exclusively for the past few months, and it’s hard to play the Japanese battleships afterwards. They do feel very weak in comparison.

I do however disagree that torpedoes are useless, especially in Arcade, where in some maps a Japanese destroyer can pretty much make the enemy spawn a zone of death where players are one shot seconds after spawning for the entire match. I imagine that alone might be keeping the nation afloat in winrate, ironically preventing the devs from doing anything about it, if they cared about naval at all.

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Naval is alive in Arcade? wow ok didnt even know! i only play RB in Naval.

No i mean like Torpedos dropped from planes, like the US AM-1 Mauler.
Torpedos fired from destroyers, are of course quite powerfull especially the ones from Japan, wth there 780kg explosives they destroy anything!

Yeah i played today the Scharnhorst for one round, and oh my goodness you can literally just sail straight head on into the enemy spawn and still survive.

Yet with my Japan Battleship i spawn, and before i can even get out of spawn to have a bit of cover, i already lost 30 percent of my crew due to fire.

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Sure feels like that sometimes :-)

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What a bizarre question to ask. Yes, most of the time there are more players in Naval Arcade than Realistic.

Yea, but that’s got nothing to deal with your rant about Japan, but rather Scharnhorst being OP ASF.

Previously we had the same problem with Kornestadt, that could sink an entire enemy fleet before getting seriously damaged, now it’s Scharnhorst (again, as pre-Korne it was also Scharnhorst).

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This is the price to be payed to be at least somewhat realistic.

World of Warships solves these balance and playability problems by really big leaps from reality: they have destroyers, cruisers and battleships go up the tiers parallel to each other, instead of progressing from destroyer to cruiser then to battleship, and they are balanced so that a destroyer at top tier is just as viable as a cruiser or battleship. They solved this by implementing a rock-paper-scissors mechanic, where destroyers beat battleships, battleships beat cruisers, and cruisers beat destroyers, and in a 1 vs 1 it’s completely inevitable that a destroyer always defeats a battleship, given equal skill.

How did they solve this?

  • they decreased the firing ranges. In real life 10 km was basically point blank range for battleships, and 5 km was basically point blank range for secondaries. Instead, in War Thunder 10 km is a reasonably mediocre to long range to start being really effective, and in World of Warships 10 km is about the absolute maximum visibility and firing range.
  • torpedoes are super fast, and due to the decreased firing and visibility ranges, ship travel is also very fast. Torpedoes are plentiful and respawn quickly.
  • destroyers have the superpower to become completely invisible. Even without smoke screens, destroyers become invisible if they are further than about 5-6 km, and battleships have very poor detection. Therefore a destroyer can always kite and kill a lone battleship, especially as torpedoes travel at unrealistically high speeds. Battleship secondaries (unless it’s a rare battleship with especially good secondaries and you invest a lot in skills related to secondaries) are almost completely useless against destroyers.
  • destroyers can turn, brake, reverse, and accelerate very quickly, so it’s easy to pop out from behind an island, fire a salvo, and get back before the enemy can return fire.
  • cruisers have good detection ranges and fast fire rate, therefore they are dedicated to hunt down destroyers. They obviously lose to battleships due to less protection and raw firepower.

Due to this mechanic, in World of Warships all three of these ship categories are found at every rank.

The price they pay for it, is that the game is much more arcade-like.

In real life, fleets engaged each other at ranges where you could not even see the other ship with a naked eye, and even with binoculars it was a small fleck at the horizon.
To solve this in War Thunder while still staying realistic to historical ships (instead of destroyers having magical stealth fields and supersonic torpedoes), battles would need to start further apart (but then they would be more boring for the first 10-20 minutes - maybe more focus on Enduring Confrontations could solve this), or there would be a need for more islands, or maybe time could be sped up a little at high BR?

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How does one play Naval, never really got into it.

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There is another way how to solve this. Realistically there is no way that DD takes BB in 1v1 and even IRL the cases of direct engagement are very fringe scenarios or fleet actions where the DD just dumped torpedo wall towards the enemy fleet.

So maybe we don’t need to force or find a way how DD can fight BBs we just need to make space for them in one battle.

And this can be done without any of the issue like firsts 10-20 min of nothing if we have playable area of around 45x45 km we can have both DD spawns on one side of the map 5-10 km from each other. In the middle we can have both cruiser spawns with 20 or so km between them. And on the other side we can have both BB spawns with around 30 km between each other.

This way we can have DDs, BBs and Cruisers in one battle without needing special unrealistic adjustments or the huge boring maps. We only need to make interesting objectives for all of them.

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The problem with this is that it would separate DD, cruiser, and BB play from each other, so much so as they could be their own separate battles.

Maybe it would be better to find a solution where all ship types could play together.

One big problem is psychological, as in “progression”. People want to play with the “strongest” available vehicle, so if it wasn’t for the super-long grind, almost everyone would play solely BBs, and that would be boring. Players should not feel that a destroyer is merely a stepping stone to get to something better. (this is what World of Warships solved really well, unfortunately at great costs to gameplay realism)

Maybe a solution could be to find jobs for destroyers? Destroyers and cruisers accompanied battleships, to protect them against threats where battleships were vulnerable. Usually submarines (which we don’t have), and aircraft, and torpedo boats. Hey, the term “destroyer” is actually a shortening of “torpedo boat destroyer”, because battleships were vulnerable against torpedo boat ambushes when close to enemy shorelines.

We have WW1 era dreadnoughts with almost no air defenses, so in a game it would be useful if some DD or cruiser players served as escorts against air attacks, too bad that it is unrewarding and boring, so no one does it, except maybe some extremely dedicated squads, and even there, as spawning a DD costs the same as spawning a BB, it’s better to have 2 BBs and risk losing one of them, then a BB and a DD, even if you come under air attack. However, I observed that in Enduring Confrontations, very diverse fleets emerge, and it does happen than 1 or 2 BBs travel with lots of light ships escorting them.

What jobs could we give to DD players in random battles? Maybe have fleets of AI-controlled PT boats attack our BBs, so the DDs have to defend them? Or above a certain BR, PT boats should not cost an entire spawn out of 3, so more players would yolo BBs with PT boats, and there would be a need for DD players to be there and defend the BBs?

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Yes finding objectives for cruisers and DDs is the right way, but I don´t believe that simply that will allow all ship types to coexist in one battle.
I would say that EC really isn´t great example of such combined battles since they emerge only because some players might not have BBs but mostly it happens because players don´t have enough SP for bigger ships and mainly the EC doesn´t have aditional abjectives for DDs or cruisers.

My biggest problem is that from my experience (in EC or even standart battles) the players in bigger ships will always focus the smaller one when they get a chance. So I think that only finding providing new objectives for smaller ships won´t solve the issue, expecting DDs to hunt PTs or subs and try to evade enemy fire from BBs or cruisers is delusional IMO.

That is why I suggested the “separated” idea.

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I myself feel guilty of this when playing lower tier BBs and battlecruisers. If I attack an enemy top-tier BB, I will fire salvo after salvo doing very little damage, and when the enemy BB finally notices me, I’m crippled by just one or two salvos. So I rather hunt cruisers, because I can finish them quicker. But I don’t waste my shots at destroyers, so if there is a balance between numbers, destroyers have a chance. If there are only 1 or 2 Battleships in a game per side, most destroyers don’t have to fear being attacked by them. But cruisers will finish them off, so it’s still not a good place for DDs.

Maybe if the scoring was changed? For example hitting ships your role says you should be targeting should give you more rewards, and hitting ships you shouldn’t focus on, should bring much less rewards?

Currently, with a WW1-type BB, I have to spend almost the entire battle destroying an enemy BB. And I get very little reward, so I’m incentivized to spend my time killing cruisers instead. Maybe increasing my reward if I was pounding a BB, would help a little.

This won’t be a solution on it’s own, but it might alleviate the problem a little.

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True destroyers currrently have not much to do, because there are no subs in the game, they have no one to chase.There guns are so small compared to even the smallest cruisers, that it aint fun engaging them.

If we would have subs, you can bet that i would sit in a destroyer rather then in one of my battleships.
The Subarmine event that we currently had, was so much fun that i even concider it one of the BEST events we had in war thunder.

Subs would pose a serious threat to for battleships, because they also get a nice lead indicator.They are also quite fast with 39Km/h nearly as fast at some battleships.
Sure submerged only like 20 or something.

It also isnt really rewarding bringing a plane, because all ships have Auto AA which is just a free kill always for every player in a ship.
I think that planes must be drastically reduced in cost if you bring them into battle, also a higher reward multiplier depending what ship you destroy.

If you just destroy a small PT boat 1x Destroyer 1,5x Cruiser 2x battleship 3x for silver lions and also EXP.

And as you said AA also needs a fix.I suggested that AA on cruisers and battleships should only be manual.If your crew spots an enemy plane, you get a voice notification and then you have to manualy aim your AA guns on the plane to bring it down, so you actually have to do something and not be a automated bot.Automated AA fire would only be done by destroyers.

This would encourage players to choose more planes and engage with them in naval battles.We have so manny planes that can use torpedos, but yet no one chooses them because the risk is WAY to high and the rewards are bad.

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Only the Gaijin bots have laser accurate AA. Please don’t ask for more planes. Many of the large ships, such as dreadnoughts or any Japanese ship have woeful AA protection. A “free” plane can spawn and destroy a 30,000+ SL ship.

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Be careful with the planes that is what has ruined ground battles. Best to keep planes as is

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is it true that they are going to start all the intro’s for rushtard vehicles with
" once upon a time ?"

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But the plane is not “free”? why should it be free?
And you also have a audio line, that indicates the plane is coming, giving you more then enough time to react.

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In arcade, it’s completely free and costs nothing but spawn points. We don’t need more planes in naval. As a naval main, there is no reason I should constantly be worried about planes. Reaction time means jack if you have no way to shoot it down.

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Where is the supposed problem that needs any solution?

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It’s as if the Battlecruisers have some magical Coding that prevent their ammo from cooking off…

Or something.

As for the Rant, to be honest. The Type 93 is easily a OHK weapon if you bother to set it at 4m, it’ll kill basically everyone, and their dog for good measure. The Guns on IJN dds are bad…and they are bumped up too high in BR due to the Torpedo thing.

As for the Cruisers eh…Honestly the Tone was fine, the Japanese 203mm APC round is good with a good reload, the ships are however fragile.

And to be honest, the IJN 14"s have a faster reload than the USN ones, and seem to deliver more bang for the money. Read: The only Ship I’ve used that I can reliably put down the Kron and Scharnhorsts.

On the other hand, the Settsu is likely the worst Battleship I’ve used yet. The Fuso is good, the Ise-class has protection issues while the Fuso is pretty solid when angled (mcuh like the Kongo from what I’ve seen).

If you want to see some real BS though. That is the USN Douglas that gets to literally not be drawn on your screen while it fires missiles at you, if you play Naval EC you know exactly what I’m talking about.

And seeing as you were complaining about slow Battleships. Go play the USN Wyoming and Friends for a bit.

PS: the lack of Floatplanes at top BR is the biggest thing that bothers me currently outside of the Scharnhorst/Kron nonsense Damage modeling.

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We are several months and a lot of games past the origins of this post now however many of the points made here are still valid to this day. Id like to add that compairing WT Naval to World of Warships and asking why its not that way makes no sense. War Thunder prides itself on being a Semi-Sim with even their most arcade versions being realish. WOW is a kids game plain and simple made for people with short attention spans(no offense intended)

As for ship AA and Being able to cut down planes I stand with the CEO of Gaijin on this topic when he said back in 2015, “Its fine the way it is and if anything, realistically it should be harder”. Relaxing AA would do nothing more than welcome every dogfighter to come into Naval thus turning it into todays ground battles.

I think the addition of Float Plane tenders with solid AA mounted on them would be a massive improvement to the game as they could act like CVs in a sense and you could repair or re-arm a PBY on the water. Also adding Submarines would drastically improve the game regardless of any Battleships mains opposition to this.

Navals AB and RB battles as they are currently with the exceptions like North Port, African Coast and a couple others just dont work well and im talking about the circle of death maps in open waters especially! I think Enduring confrontation is the way to go for Naval in the long run and more so once a player gets to 6.0. Perhaps adding a few more maps and do away with the ascending spawn points madness and just do repair cost with open BR range. No more separation past 6.0 because lets face it there is none now. We bring in anything and everything during the course of a battle.

Side note: It would also be cool if Air Simulator EC and Naval could merge together and be one mode. This could open unlimited possibilities for growth and bring hundreds of people into the Game