How to play Naval so that it isn't a grind

The Academy - Players helping Players
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This isn’t a guide on how to actually play Naval. This is a guide that will help ease the feeling of grinding.

I play every nation in Naval. I keep the first two crews for each nation set aside to do this. One is for coastal and one for deep water (dw). I take the lowest BR vessel(s) that is not spaded and place them there. Don’t forget to put your planes in there as well.

Then I play that crew in one battle. Then I move on to the next. After playing one round of coastal and one of dw, I move on to the next nation.

This has helped me to play Naval w/o the feeling of grinding away at the same thing day after day. I have seven nations to play, so that is fourteen matches a day. Do I play all fourteen every day? Nope. I have kids and an active social life. But when I do play, I meet all kinds of people as I play lower level coastal and even up to 6.7 (Germany).

Of course, I have higher level ships that I hop into on occasion. But the idea of actually getting somewhere helps to ease the feeling of burden when just grinding out a single nation’s naval line.

I hope this helps any of you. And I hope to see you out there on the high seas or along the coast. If you see me, give a hail, even if I’m on the other side. Who knows, I might not target you. o7

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Part of the issue with naval is the ridiculous disparity between ships within the same battle rating.

Example: Omaha class (Trenton, Raleigh, Detroit, Milwaukee/Murmansk) have to see ships that are either practically immune to SAP (Krasny Krym) or just straight up better ships (Emden).

Similarly, the sheer power level difference between 5.3 DDs and 5.3 cruisers is only beaten by the ridiculousness of there being cruisers in a bracket almost completely dominated by battleships (6.7 Americans).

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I agree. This is why I don’t play the same ships in consecutive battles. I flip between coastal and dw.

When playing naval, I have a saying, “Sometimes you’re the bug, sometimes you’re the windshield.”

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Although sometimes, the bug can cause a catastrophic accident (Japan and the type 93s)

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Like those dang 5.3 missile tossers? ;P

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Should I just play Blue Water Fleets? Coastal areas are painful to play in and have low rewards, and maybe if modern coastal ships get added in the future, it will be easier and cheaper?

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Yeah.

Until the missiles hit the brick wall that is the York, Dido or Leander.

The Omahas honestly wouldn’t be so bad if they had something going for them. They’re super early naval treaty designs (although the project existed near the end stages of WW1) having to fight things that outperform anything it can do.

Their guns are slow firing (especially with empty ready racks) and limited mediocre to poor penetration SAP that struggle against even slightly armored targets. Add in the absolutely horrible rangefinders and you get a ship that’s just not fun to play.

The armor is basically non existent outside of deck armor loving to troll SAP, but its large freeboard means people can just as easily sink shells into the thin sides for catastrophic crew damage or even ammunition explosions thanks to the semi-exposed magazine.

Sure, it has a scoutplane and turns fairly well despite the length but I honestly can’t think of a reason anyone would play an Omaha when they have the disgusting gun DDs other than to fill a 5.0 slot.

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You asked if you should just play Deep Water (DW) as you feel that the coastal arena is painfully slow and has low rewards.

I find that the coastal fights are fast paced and brutal while the DW fights are stretched out, almost painfully so at the higher tiers.

Trust me when I say that you can kick butt and make some good cash in coastal.

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I hear and agree with you concerning the Omaha class ships. I play Naval to spade them. “Gotta collect em all!” and all that. Damn this OCD. Luckily my Omaha class ships are all spaded already.

When engaging with them I would face my enemy so that they don’t get those oh so easy side shots. You gotta angle. And with the way the guns are placed, it makes it feasible.

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It is with one big caveat: If you think coastal balance is silly, blue water is on an entirely different level.

Americans have some of the best DDs period for surface and anti-air action although british are pretty similar.

Russian DDs, especially the tashkent, have vicious SAP and can mag det some cruisers with scary consistency.

Imperial Japanese DDs have mediocre to poor guns and mostly limited to HE and mostly horrid AA but make up for it with torpedoes that consistently oneshot battleships. The cruisers have mediocre firerate on kind of arse platforms but the AP tends to make ships disappear with magazine sniping. Otherwise, yay, more Oxygen torpedoes.

Germany has great guns but mid shells for their DDs (HE only) although Z32 has 15cm SAP which can ammo snipe some cruisers. The caveat is poor firerate. The cruisers range from terrible (Elbing. Because it’s the Elbing) to oppressive shell spewing machines (Königsbergs and Leipzigs) and eventually to arguably the best cruiser class in the game (Hippers).

Conversely, american cruisers range from garbage (Omahas) to sub 10km obnoxious ammo spewers (Atlantas, Fargo, Cleveland, etc) but the 6.0 cruisers suffer from mediocre penetration, poor muzzle velocity and garbage turning traverse.

Edit

British cruisers are limited to SAP and range from really mediocre (Abdiel, Enterprise) to borderline overpowered (the literal ‘queens of the 5.3 bracket’, Dido, Leander and York) to somewhere in between (5.7+ cruisers). Add in the fact the 5.3 queens are almost completely empty space with super deep and small magazines on fairly fast platforms with really good anti air potential (especially Dido whose guns have an almost 85 degree gun elevation) in a bracket where they can even stand toe to toe reliably against almost any cruiser they can see and you got a recipe for consistently top of the leaderboard.

Russian cruisers generally have poor armor and great guns with the Pr68s (Chapayevs) having insane muzzle velocity and great firerate.

Italy goes from poorly protected and great gun cruisers to fairly well armored, pretty good guns. Although the magazines are still somewhat exposed.

France is… Somewhere in between Italy and Germany for ships, I don’t see them all that often but they seem pretty solid overall.

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While there’s definitely some glaring huge issues with current Naval, I’d argue it was worse pre Leviathans when 6.0 cruisers had to see Scharnhorst.

The borderline unkillable monster that made every other nation almost impossible to enjoy for roughly 2+ years.

Now that silliness is mostly limited to 7.7+ with Pr23 Soyuz.