Naval mechanics have been inconsistent for a long time in War Thunder, which is bad. Things need to be fixed so that new players can come and enjoy naval mode.
1-The damage after penetration is bad. When you shoot with a large cannon from a battleship, the explosion after penetration is very low even when shooting with 400mm cannons.
2-The mechanics of the waterline are unpleasant. A round with 700mm penetration cannot penetrate 0.1-0.3m below the waterline. Thus making it very hard to explode magazines.
With these things being fixed, naval matches will become more exciting and fair and there will be no more problems with Scharnhorst or any other ship.
Note: These things worked years ago, but they don’t today.
The things you described are either due to bug or past unrealistic handling of DM.
Damage is calculated entirely in real time with great detail and the outcome is determined by where you hit. If you hit somewhere without vital parts/crew etc, there will be minimal damage. Also, don’t forget that the game has modelled internal bulkheads, all of which can stop/reduce fragmentation damage.
In the past, there was a bug where shells/fragments could randomly ignore the ship’s armour and internal bulkheads, giving you a false impression of what the damage should be.
What you have described is simply not true. If you go into the hit analysis after every battle and check the hit replays, you will find a lot of underwater hits - some of which can be very deep under the waterline. The depth to which shells can penetrate water is determined by the shell’s calibre, fuze delay and, most importantly, the angle of fall. Your previous impression of easily hitting ammunition below the waterline left and right was due to unrealistic handling of underwater shell trajectories, which has been progressively corrected over several major updates.
That is all well and fine, and I think most players would agree with you.
But consider this. We are talking about battles with hundreds of rounds in the air at once. There are limits to the calculations you can run at the same time and not have the server TPS increase substantially. We’re also talking about a game where there are only five steel types to represent battleships spanning half a century. Partial penetrations do not exist and secondary spalling is disabled on ships. Heck, shells don’t even inherit acceleration due to gravity in their terminal arc - a law of physics which is vital to the function of battleship shells at long ranges.
Now I will say that most if not all plates on a ship have HP parameters defined in their ship’s .blkx file. So making them degrade is easy. The problem is that like the issues above, I could foresee more load on the servers.
We’re getting off-topic here so I’ll stop after this. The exact crew numbers are purposely obscured because they’re complicated and often irrelevant to the player when in battle. I believe the developers want battles to play out with speed and finality, which is something that naval battles in real life often lacked.
In a normal arcade-style game like War Thunder Mobile, class interplay and time-to-kill reduction can be accomplished by changing stats and abilities for different ship types (ex. giving destroyers super speed and homing torpedoes). Since War Thunder is supposed to be more or less “realistic,” the devs are constrained in this regard. So, they control the speed of the fight to by changing the healthbars behind the scenes and obfuscating them with things like the crew system and hull section HP.
All of these numbers are entirely arbitrary and are changed to fit what the developers consider balanced. Whether or not that meshes with our idea of balance is another story.
on new HE pen thing thats technically not part of this thread considering how little pen the HE on german/japan destroyers get is not incredible but for sure will help those be competitive even if we keep the old sinkability stuff. Also stock grind will be improved. For cruiser and lower calibre you still need to pretty much hit parts with almost 0 armor to pen with HE. Its a good buff for battleships with trash APHE (mostly france) since HE will become quite bit better. Its not a hack that makes random HE spam good suddenly. New HE fuze is bit overblown by the current overtuned shrapnel and damage on dev so hard to tell what will be final result but on its own HE having kinetic pen is good for naval.
Okay, I’m happy to report that gaijin made some changes in today’s patch to the dev server.
Bluewater ships (but not frigates) now require 3 sections to be destroyed.
Shrapnel no longer does damage to hull sections
Kinetic damage to hull sections has been reduced by 75%
Explosive damage to hull sections has been reduced by 90%
Hydroshock damage to hull has also been somewhat reduced.
However counterbalancing this (but only a little) is a further 25% reduction in hull HP.
With some practical testing, it’s going to take a very very long time to sink a ship this was with HE, it’s still doable with AP but is gonna take a lot longer than before.
Yeah its not a ground and game breaking mechanic now, you most often will kill the crew before destroying 3 modules on normal stuff. Im more concerned about ballistics nerfs makes some AP of ships pretty bad (french 305mm APHE really be worse than kavkaz 180mmAPHE at range now), at least HE is not as bad of a option now. Definitely the whole update improves well armoured ships a lot also improves ships that sadly have to rely on HE too.
Status quo around the lack of balancing kinda stays the same. OP coastals could maybeee be killed easier now. Small calibre HE isn’t that great at utilizing new pen mechanic you still need to aim and face paper stuff. All APHE is much weaker at range due to ballistic nerfs so overall its harder for BBs to kill BBs but its equal suffering to everyone i guess. Makes dodging easier for faster cruisers. Armoured cruisers now are suddenly much better i think. I didn’t check how bad 203mm and below APHE got hit by the nerfs yet.
Dispersion for big guns ships has been reduced across the board to more or less current cruiser levels. I expect this will double or triple your hit rate with big guns, perhaps even more for some of the guns getting the biggest accuracy buffs. This correction to more realistic ballistics will be the only thing keeping armor semi relevant at top tier.
yeah also noticed most APHE isn’t that much nerfed. US 14 inch lost like 90-110mm pen at 15km
But most guns are losing around 40-50 mm pen. Scharn and Alaska got hit with like 70, 152s are pretty badly hit especially soviet ones. Kron got barely hit with nerf lmao.
The 14 inch nerf seems realistic in terms of values but god damn they could use better reload now lmao. Made Colorado actually viable now with its round 469mm vs 320mm of arizona at 15km at same br. Truly gaijin moment. Its bit off topic but its pretty laughable not to mention it.
They’ve instead given the 14”/50 a .26 vertical dispersion angle vs the current .39 and new .28 for all other 14” guns per the datamines. While I’d prefer they set it to a 2rpm like in my bug report the effective hit rate from this new dispersion will be massively higher vs live than an extra 6 shells/min would afford. I expect the Tennessee to massively outperform Colorado on live, as she just won’t have the volume of fire or protection to be worth bringing. The overall nerf to shell penetration also works in Tennessee’s favor, as the torpedo bulge provides a large amount of additional ballistic protection vs the other standards.
Okay yeah I’m not sure how it’ll do in actual live matches or in slugfests between BB but as it is now for cruisers and DD for the amount of time you’d need to destroy 3 compartments you could sink them several times over by just aiming and shooting areas with crew.
Still think we should get more complex compartment modeling with above and below compartments but this is much better than before
messed ballistic after June 2024 seems to be corrected, so many of guns got ‘nerfed’ penetration based on historical shell velocity. But some guns were out of this change, and maybe Kavkaz is one of them
