Damage Control incoming changes

Machinery of War Discussion Navy
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The Damage Control Window for Naval

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Without a doubt if you play naval battles, trying to survive after being hit by salvos can be a struggle. You’re constantly trying to activate fire extinguishing systems, pump out water and perform repairs as efficiently as possible. Adding to the fact that the damage model (especially fires and critical magazine fires) has also changed in recent months, reacting quickly is essential to save your ship from being quickly destroyed.

All of the above in mind makes the current damage system quite difficult to manage, as you’re generally distracted from the core gameplay, which is to shoot at targets and take them out. Next to this, it’s not always as balanced as it could be, and as we would like it to be. This is because a player who does everything correctly still might not, for example prioritize the repair system in time because of the need to hold down the hotkey for a few seconds, leading to their ship still being destroyed, which can be frustrating.

So today, we’re announcing the new Damage Control System for Naval, giving players the opportunity to introduce automation elements. Players can plan their priorities in advance, choosing what’s most important at a given moment: be it firefighting, repairs or water pumping and can then quickly switch between them.

Let’s take a quick look at how it will work. While in the hangar, you can access the damage control menu through the modifications window by clicking on the “Damage control” button at the bottom right:

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In this window, you’ll be able to put together a “Damage Control” build from available options and assign each one to one of the three buttons on the action bar, which were previously responsible for firefighting, repairs and water pumping.

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Note: this window and text is heavily work-in-progress and the names, explanations and numbers will likely change.

Each damage control build has a primary process, a secondary process and an additional process.

Any of the three types of damage control options operate at full speed if only one is running. In addition, you no longer need to press buttons to begin the process, as it starts automatically as soon as the ship takes damage. You can switch between three presets, changing the priority process based on the tactical situation you find yourself in.

We’re currently working on the values for each and fine tuning it, and you’ll be able to test it for yourself on the dev server in the near future and leave your feedback there.

So Naval community doesn’t concerned that it will loose manual controls over damage control?

I got my thoughts on this coming changes(in short terms if it work as they saying and as i understand what they wrote there, it will lead to drastic diminishing of survivability of all ships and boats), what do you think?

As for me i think it should not be how they presented it should leave player that manual control over that what kind of damage control measures he want to be used is what certain time, but priorities and modificators are fine. I also concerned that with this this change, ships will live even less than in WOWS despite not having same dynamic and elfism as there.

ps. There is no “naval” or “navy” tags in Navy section of the forum when you creating a tread here, is that even legal? @moderators How could people find naval treads if you can’t tag them properly.

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I think it might be a case of waiting to see how it’s actually implemented rather than going by the description. The way it’s described seems to cater for a lot of different scenarios where the player still has a lot of control over the damage control process… but the description can also be interpreted differently by different readers, or how it ends up being implemented.

Is there a particular scenario (i.e. order of damage events) where you think this change will be detrimental?

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They have officially stated you can opt out of the new system. CBA to go looking for the quote though

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I wish they reworked naval in the process (but one can only dream)

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What kind of “opt out” are we taking here, choice of the patterns, or choice to not auto enabled damage control and use it separately for all kinds as before, cause new damage control icons that they showed us doesn’t seem like that is option, as for me?

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No, pretty sure all they said if you don’t select one of the damage control buttons you’ll get the default multiplier values, meaning you don’t have to set up the presets or use them in game if you can’t be bothered, I think.

The “old damage system” will be gone, as setting one type of damage to auto or cancelling repairs will be impossible.

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Im still waiting for them to add the ability to repair just the important stuff.

I dont want to have all of my aa repaired and crewed just so i can repair my main batteries.

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Yep that what was asked, but looks like we get this instead, what was not a problem in first place at all. Besides other proposals that were accepted, about changes to survivability model of the ships that we have in game including “crew” behavior and damage control.

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Unless there’s been further info, here’s what I asked:

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and the reply:
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That’s all we’ve got to go on, in addition to the original info from CM8

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gotta say, kinda surprised

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Looks like you cannot in fact opt out of the new system.

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Give a feedback there

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Now you can vote how do you like new damage control.

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Not quite sure what they’re trying to do here, but it does seem like they’re trying to shoehorn TTK changes under the guise of a new damage control system.
The idea of priorities and modifiers is neat, and in fact, it technically speeds up damage control when you have multiple processes happening, but it could’ve been integrated into the existing system without ruining how it currently works.

It could’ve been done by applying no penalty to the first damage control process started, showing that on its respective icon, and putting penalties on damage control processes started after. Say you start firefighting and then breach repair. Firefighting gets the priority and has no penalty, breach repair gets whatever penalty they were aiming for. If you start them in the opposite order, then breach repair gets prioritized and firefighting gets the penalty.

It’s kind of baffling that they talked about the ~3 seconds needed to cancel a process being a problem, and then added a 30s cooldown for switching between the damage control modes.

Also, I’m seeing a lot of people talk about how repairing forces crew into the AA guns which will be lost to HE spam. That’s not a thing anymore, it hasn’t been for quite a while (I’m unsure when that was changed). Most large ships (BB/BC, Cruisers, many destroyers) don’t have any crew assigned to their small AA guns, so HE spamming is kinda useless except for taking out secondaries.

But yes, it’s unfortunate that they want to remove even more player agency out of the game. I was hoping we’d get more damage control options, like separating breach repair from water pumping, counterflooding, etc… not less!
There’s the suggestion of repairing individual modules that has been brought up multiple times. I do get what people want from this, because it can be frustrating being forced to repair modules you don’t need, but I think that some ships out there will become genuinely broken and stupidly hard to crew kill if that were to be implemented in the current state of the game. I’d rather save that for when we get better damage models and such.

Speaking of, the damage models are still a mess. Ships survivability in terms of crew is very arbitrary and up to Gaijin’s whims. The system is still confusing to the point that a very large part of the naval playerbase believes that “more crew = better survivability”, which is not the case. Crew count doesn’t matter, distribution does, and distribution is arbitrary and done by Gaijin.
Lots of people also believe that repairing modules pulls crew away from compartments, which is not a thing. I’m not blaming people for thinking that, these are reasonable assumptions, but that’s not how the system works, and it’s never been made clear for the players.
Naval is also the only gamemode where losing crew doesn’t affect functionality. You can be at 10% crew and operate every single system on the ship at as you would at 100% crew, but lose 2% more crew and the nothing works anymore. Of course, ship damage models is a complicated topic, one where we don’t have much to reference, and lots of abstractions have to be made, but it’s still absurd.

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And FCS, visors and torpedo tubes and all other modules that not under armor but have crew.

That a big flaw of current system(or either just bug in it, that was never fixed), cause it doubles the crew when your modules destroyed and repaired but compartments not damaged. Which lead to big crew drops when shell actually reaches the crew compartment.

I have a solution proposed to devs how we can fix it a bit to be more realistic in terms of cause of death for the ships and their survivability.

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I guess so. As far as I can tell, it quite literally spawns “crew members” out of thin air like magic! But also I think there are some ships that can still be alive with all their compartments destroyed, so there’d be nowhere to take crew from.

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To the best of my knowledge from the explanations of other people, this is how I think crew works in naval, however I am not truly sure if it is 100% correct.

I do have my own thoughts on how crew count could be made to matter, and why some people may like it while others do not, but I’d rather put that in another thread and keep this one focused on the new damage control system.