After thinking about the current naval mechanics, I think most of these systems could be improved without making the game significantly more complicated.
The general idea would be:
Let the player make the important decisions, while the crew and ship systems handle the execution.
Standing orders
Instead of manually controlling individual crew members, give the crew simple priorities:
Normal / Combat / Air Attack / Damage Control
or allow players to prioritize:
Main battery → Engines → Steering → Damage control → Secondary → AA
The crew handles the actual work.
This would also solve one of the problems with the current damage control system: sometimes you simply don’t want a minor repair to pull crew away from something more important during combat.
Damage should degrade systems instead of simply switching them off
A damaged turret doesn’t necessarily have to become useless.
It could lose traverse speed, elevation range, reload efficiency or fire-control assistance.
The same principle could apply to propulsion, steering and FCS.
For example:
FCS damaged → manual corrections
Rangefinder damaged → estimate range manually
Steering damaged → reduced steering / differential propulsion
Turret damaged → restricted traverse/elevation
The ship remains usable, but you have to operate it differently.
Flooding and buoyancy
I wouldn’t replace the current flooding system either.
I’d simply make flooding progressively affect the ship:
flooding → list / increased draft → reduced performance → loss of stability → sinking
A heavily damaged ship shouldn’t necessarily sink immediately. It should become progressively harder to operate.
Damage control could then have priorities such as:
Contain flooding / Protect stability / Keep propulsion running
So the player decides what the crew should save first.
The common idea behind all of this is pretty simple:
Don’t make the player operate the ship like a machine. Make them command it.
The crew should handle the boring parts.
The player should decide what systems to prioritize and how to fight with whatever is still working.
That would make naval feel much more like commanding a warship without turning game into a simulator.
I forgot to mention another expansion of in-game mechanics I’ve had im mind lately.
To be honest, I was thinking of some changes in na naval battles, with the core idea of making them more decision oriented and at the same time simple enough to not overwhelm the player.
Basically fire control in realistic battles would be more like arcade, but with one little extra step:
Press and hold a key — the rangefinder view appears.
While holding the key, use the mouse wheel to adjust the sights and find the range.
Release the key — the readings are automatically passed to the FCS, the guns turn and elevate accordingly, and you can fire. (Of course, with the existing follow-the-pointer system, the guns would turn as you move the sights, so they would simply adjust their train and elevation according to the FCS solution)
The problem you mentioned would just mean that you would need to use mouse wheel to correct your guns elevation after observing falls of the shells, initial range in this scenario would be the last observed from rangefinder.
With undamaged rangefinder they would adjust elevation after every reading
So you could just play naval Arcade where something like FCS already implemented.
Already in game you just didn’t noticing it due to sluggishness of NRB, again play NAB and you will notice.
They already didn’t sink immediately they flood and reduce in speed turning and have a tilt. And there was an accepted suggestion about flooding rebalance if you interested (link)
Crewmembers from engine room don’t replace gunman IRL, cause they have different training. We already have system that replaces crew in repaired modules out of nowhere(not from crew compartments, if you don’t know)and affects different ships in different ways - strong ship become stronger cause of it, weak ones become weaker cause their modules not well protected so more often to being damaged which lead to constant crew loss, if crew were replaced from crewboxes as it should there will be more balancing gameplay, but devs not in the way to fix it(there was already an accepted suggestion about it link).
ps. just use manual damage control to focus on what needed in current moment.