Even when I was figure gaming using “Janes Fighting Ships” as resources and various sets of rules in teh 70’s and 80’s - Fletcher Pratt IIRC - naval was never popular - Napoleonic, WW2, Ancient, Modern land were where it was always at.
When I sold my collection of Avalon Hill etc. board games, naval titles were slowest to sell. Fortunately, there were not too many such titles. The ones that went first had massive amounts of planes in them, like “Flat Top”. There are just not that many naval buffs around.
Personally, I’d say WWI naval would be an idea: No planes and a dreadnought is really a dreadnought. I’d probably enjoy that too.
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Never had any of hte naval board games - did play Carriers at War a bit in the 80’s or 90’s - it was quite good for the time :)
But even then it was really an airgame with mobile airfields…
Naval should be PVE.
Player team cooperates to complete a predefined scenario. Attack port, protect naval landing or convoy, search for Bismarck, etc.
As it is now, is a clusterf…
Players hate getting spawn camped and naval is the “get spawn camped from the first second of the match” game mode. For all of WoWS’s faults, at least I can spawn into the game and not get instantly locked on to and attacked the second the match starts.
That is the main reason I dislike the high br naval. I cant play the game because the second I spawn, i see a wall of shells heading right towards me. Not to mention the lack of balance of having to fight ships with armor while only having HE.
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They ruined the naval aiming system, it feels horrible to use, the system is complete trash as well, if I range a target, lose target I didn’t magically forget the range to the target, even more annoying of it switches target when a ship passes in front.
Combat just isn’t fun, coastal could be fun but it’s just thrown in as fodder, the bigger ships are an absolute snorefest to play, only around 3-4 are the ships fast and agile enough to be fun to play but compression ruins those as well and you end up facing things that you tickle.
Not even bad map design, just no map design at all.
Economy is absolutely atrocious, they want to make up for the lack of ships in a tree by just making everything stupidly grindy, do I want to play naval? Do I want to grind 320k RP for a useless coastal vessel at only 4.3? Yeah… no.
That should be like 20k RP, not 320k RP.
To make naval more popular is to allow coastal to actually be played against other coastal ships, reduce the grind by like 80% and create an aiming system that isn’t a chore to use like we used to have.
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I have a bad feeling about the upcoming subs…
They should introduce some old time sailing vessels to Naval. Something to recreate the Battle of Trafalgar, where your trading off broadsides cannon barrel to cannon barrel.
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I want to play through coastal but the rp gain and wait times just turn me off from it. If they increased rp I’d play it more.
Each ship class should have a separate spawn point, BB has the furthest one, heavy cruisers have a spawn point closer to the BB, then light cruisers, destroyers which should spawn close to the center of the map, then frigates which should be even closer, and finally the cutter torpedo boat, which should respawn closest to each ship class, so that the ship can perform its role BB fight from afar, cruisers support, destroyers hide and wait for a target, torpedo boats take over the points and frigates hunt them, because at the moment it’s like this, I take the destroyer and respawn where the BB is, which is ABSURD and shouldn’t happen, of course you have to limit the number of BBs in the game, for example 6 per team, and this can be done using the first-come-first-serve system, like this it is in many simulation games, for example sqaud, post scriptum, where each class is limited and if someone leaves the match or loses a ship of a given class, a free place appears, and there would be a constant rotation of players in different classes of ships, otherwise this mode cannot be fixed, at the moment the chaos that prevails on the ships excludes half of them from any sensible use, not to mention the maps, they should be made in the scheme I described with spawn points, which means the destroyer has a place to hide from BB and cruisers, yes just a frigate and a torpedo boat, they shouldn’t have spawn points without a cover, for example a mountain, another thing is the change of physics, let’s be honest, you can’t dodge on ships, even with a torpedo boat it’s hard to avoid BB, because the ships have too high accuracy, especially BB with WW1, you do one dodge and want to do another but you no longer have speed and you die, smaller ships like destroyers should gain speed faster and hit it less when turning, in my opinion I doubt that anything will change on ships because they do not bring much profit gaijn, like there are mistakes, sorry, I’m writing with Google translator :/.
Who needs a separate spawnpoints in an endless vast ocean when you can just spawn everyone on top of each other?
The problem is just the complete and utter lack of creativity at Gaijin, we’ve been playing the same modes for the last 10 years, all they do is throw everything into a giant pile and that’s it, there is zero depth and zero strategy to these games.
No asymmetrical gameplay, beyond asymmetrical and unbalanced map design, no point to any map beyond capture zones, which are random circles of grass, water or piles of rubble, air has nothing to do but fight each other or screw with ground forces.
Like DO SOMETHING, TRY SOMETHING, you can just create an experimental mode where they test new features and ways to play the game year round but instead they make an april fool’s event once a year to try out mechanics.
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exactly, they could made some historical operations but no… all we get is a decade of team death match
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You need to disable automatic target switching and bind range up and down adjustments. I set mine to my scroll wheel.
It’s easier to just not play naval, I don’t care to be playing some sort of mini-game every time I want to just shoot at stuff and endlessly be micromanaging a garbage ranging system.
The biggest issues to me:
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Spawn locations are cramped, and result in ramming, and getting drug by bots and selfish players.
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Spawns that get you shot right away are bad. While I don’t know that we should eliminate open ocean maps and spawns completely, most ships aren’t capable of sustaining the type of fire encountered at spawn with any hope of battling and influencing the match
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Match making works the worst for Naval. You can simply end up on a team with less BBs and get absolutely destroyed with no hope of putting up any real response.
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Coastal progression is brutal. You’re asked to do a whole lot for ships and boats that just aren’t effective against the bluewater ships they’re asked to face.
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Ships need better roles in terms of map design. Coastal has their own caps, but we really need roles and missions that can be fulfilled by DDs, Cruisers, and BBs. That could be bombardment, anti-submarine, or anti-aircraft roles. Adding PvE elements to the PvP gameplay like in Air, or EC.
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More actions taken against players using bots and scripts. Ideally main gun automation should be restored so that a player can manually control AA and secondary guns to drive off Aircraft or patrol craft.
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I always get the intense feeling that people who say we need to add more ships to naval to make it more fun/popular are the people who play little to no naval.
In my experience naval is ruined by several things, notice how none of them are “lack of battleships”:
- poor map design and spawns
- bad servers
- Bad damage models
- Chinese botters and cheaters
- extreme BR compression
- cap rushing with PT boats/floatplanes, ending the game within minutes
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I completely disagree about floatplanes and patrol boats capturing spawns and ending games “early.” The game has to be more than your ability to shoot. This is a military game, and strategy should come into play. Capturing points wins games, and it forces a superior force to close range to recapture those points, where an inferior force can deploy its weaker DDs and Cruisers, and use torpedoes to pull of David and Goliath.
You won’t use 3 spawns in the average naval match, so taking a patrol boat and float plane in every lineup isn’t a hindrance in 95% of matches.
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and I disagree with your point. It’s immensely frustrating when someone spawns a PT boat at the start of a game and caps all 3 points before your heavy cruisers have a chance to get there. Games have ended within minutes of beginning because of stuff like that.
Problem is, coastal and hydroplane is not equal to everyone. Coastal grinding is way too painful and even not easy for naval main players. And even when it ends, gap between nations were even bigger than those in bluewater, and actually it is almost unable to fill those gap for now.
Hydroplane has same kind of gap. France and Soviet didn’t have tech tree hydroplane and solely have to rely on shipborne hydroplane(and for Soviet, KOR-1 is actually unhistorical except Kirov) Meanwhile Japan has bunch of maneuverable hydroplane both in tech tree and shipborne.
I’ll dont write about those ‘capturing’ harassing main battle because Richardguy already saids about it.
Spawn your own boat and fight them for the cap? You’re losing nothing in doing so. The minutes of difference won’t significantly impact your big ship earnings and getting a win is generally a bigger boost.
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