Improving Naval!

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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To continue the discussion on improving naval, here are some other suggestions raised in the old forum that could use some more love; this time focusing on the Crew and how it relates to the current gamemode:

  • [Naval] Replace Crew Hitpoints with Sinking as the Primary Means to Kill a Ship - Gameplay - War Thunder - Official Forum
    A revision of the ship’s defeat condition from running out of crew at some point and your ship just suddenly realizing their desire to become a coral reef habitat to actually your ship struggling to keep the flooding at bay as your crew no longer can keep up with the damage control while manning their stations. Now I know the idea of “Not Enough Crew Members to Repair” is something of a legacy of how Ground Battles does things, as mission kill (loss of vehicle because an essential component is broken but all crew is alive) isn’t a thing, but the way it’s currently implemented just makes the game end up feeling like a health bar in disguise, something anti-thesis to WT’s whole gameplay loop. Not to mention the UI readout in regard to crew loss in the damage indicator is something I’ve never been able to figure out. There’s an indication of how much crew is left out of the total on the top left then on the bottom left there’s a percentage of crew? Aside from being seemingly redundant, the two value doesn’t seem to even match each other’s value; with, say, 268/273 which is 98% but the Percentage value instead provides 84%? I know there is something about crew skills among all these calculations but to say it’s not intuitive is an understatement.

  • Allow naval ships to "uncrew" secondaries and AA guns to mitigate HE spam, boost repair speed - Gameplay - War Thunder - Official Forum (my reposted suggestion of the same idea)
    Now I wish this idea was implemented to reverse the intention of the OP. I’ve already mentioned my issues with the current nerf to HE ad nauseam in this thread alone, so I will avoid restating it here. But that being said I think this is a solution that could be easily implemented to offer the best of both worlds. Combined with the existing “target surface target/air target/both” feature (with a little cooldown so you have to plan ahead), those commands now dictate which parts of your ship are manned. This idea might also be effective at weakening the (current) bots as they tend to set their secondaries/AA to fire on all targets; meaning those positions are manned at all times and therefore will suffer greater crew casualties from surface combat. The alternative will just make them vulnerable to CAS or sneaky patrol boats.

As we are speaking of Crew and their implementation, I guess now is a good time to talk about the Crew Skills in Naval that have caught my eye:

  • Enemy Torpedo Spotting Distance crew skill needs an overhaul. Currently, it’s broken (again), but even if it works as intended, it would be utterly useless beyond a certain stage. While I can understand its application when it was made at the very start of Naval game mode with speedboats and the like, the max distance of 10 metres is absolutely useless for larger ships. Instead, I believe the detection range should be based on the size of your ship, say each “bar” represents a percentage of your vessel’s length, with a filled-out skill allowing you to see the full length of your ship outwards or something.
    TorpSpot

    • On a related note, mine spotting doesn’t work at all. You will hear the sound warning you of a mine in your proximity but it is not highlighted even if I’m virtually next to it. I doubt this is the intended effect for Naval RB (if it is, let me know).

Other Suggestions To Consider (for now, I’m sure we’d find more over time):

Less Pressing Issues:

  • Some map requires their Level Of Details to be redone to avoid such a dramatic pop-in on island features. The most dramatic of this case is probably the African Gulf map where the entire top of the island just derenders. While it doesn’t affect gameplay aside from you sometimes being able to see enemies that you shouldn’t be able to, it does make the game feel less polished than it could be.
    LoD1
    LoD2.PNG
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After quite sometimes and also after the “big” updates before. the good things is they add “bot” on the reporting players. but still bots still arround and ruined gameplay. at some point you can exploit it to your adventage but most of the time it just ruined it.
Gaijin got a lot things to fix Naval Gameplay, especially the bots for me

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It would be really cool if naval got night battles again, it doesn’t seem as big of a deal for naval and also there are battles like Cape Esperance that happened in real life. This might need something like Sea Search radar to be modeled on some ships, or not (it isn’t really that hard to just look) and also the tracers in naval at night just look cool.

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Naval night battles would be great, yes. Gameplay wise they wouldn’t really make much of a difference, but they would make random battles a lot more fun and varied.
In terms of gameplay, even if you can’t see the ships you can still see the muzzle flashes, locking on is a thing, the rangefinder gives you lead estimates, and so on. Hell, it might even give smaller ships a better chance at sneaking up to larger ships (night torpedo attacks woooo)

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The way I see it, different gameplay night battles brings could be something like make locking on target quite hard - kind of like how locking on merchant ships in the Encounter gamemode or perhaps only locking on a target if you are actually pointing at them (as opposed to just hitting X and it locks on somewhere) and add time to rangefinding and ballistic calculations. To get around this your ship needs a surface search radar, or (as an IJN main, I push for this) searchlights. Searchlights would also allow you to “blind” the ship you are targeting, preventing them from targeting you (unless they have radar) at the cost of being a very visible and selectable target for the enemy team.

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Talking of targeting and signalling… Think I’ve mentioned what a nonsense the whole ‘shooting someone behind an island with perfect information because someone else has spotted them’ thing is.

There also doesn’t appear to be any realisation from the Gaijin devs that visibility was limited in naval combat. Sure Capital ships could throw rocks at each other from quite a range but destroyers engaging at 16,000 yards? Haven’t worked it out but doubt they’d even be able to see a target due to the visual horizon. Maybe just some smoke on the horizon. The larger the ship, the taller the observation platform, or unfinished Jenga game pagoda in the Japanese cases, the longer the visual horizon was.

Some titchy little MTB probably wouldn’t be able to see much further than the range of their pom poms. A DD or Capital though would be able to see them.

We have rangefinders though they don’t appear to really do anything. Had a game the other day where some chap in a moffat kept hitting mine. I still seemed to get the range data, though if the fire controller went then I’d lose the firing solution. So what’s the point? Course this was at about 14,000 yards so I doubt we ‘should’ even have been able to see each other, maybe just about… Certainly not the fall of shot. But if everyone on your upper decks and bridge is dead then how are you seeing further than single digit thousands of yards?

Doubt it will come as any surprise to the player base that the devs are literally flat earthers. :)

There’s no end of other things which could affect visibility. rain, storms, haze, fog banks, squalls. Even something as obvious as sea state. Try hitting something at 14,000 yards with an unstabilised gun in a big swell. Or for that matter the direction and periodicity of the waves. Can think of lots of DDs who badly damaged themselves trying to flank into head seas. If the ship is 100m long and the waves are 100m apart then that’s a pretty big problem. If the same is beam on then you’ll be rocking and rolling all over the shop, but also probably out of sight intermittently.

I mean, if it’s meant to all be arcade only with a few stats copied from wikipedia then fine. If on the other hand it is meant to somewhat simulate things then maybe get in a dinghy some time, read a few books about it etc.

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I do believe that I’ve read somewhere of some sort of detection mechanic already in the game based on how high your mast is or something like that. The rest seems tied to the radio mechanic in the Crew Skills as raised in the last time this discussion came up; although I can’t tell you for sure since I never really touch that skill since I thought it was Arcade Mode specific.

According to the X-ray view’s tooltip thing, the rangefinder’s destruction leads to the loss of lead point calculation, not actually finding the range of your target (so the same as losing your fire controller). Not terribly intuitive, to be honest, I thought that the destruction of the rangefinder would at least slow down your ability to get range (unless it is all destroyed then you get no ranging calculations) but guess not.
tooltip

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Lack of modeling of visual horizon is indeed problem but it needs to be said that modeling it properly would be very hard and halfassed solution like ships poping into existence is really bad.

And for current map sizes it would only be a factor for boats even frigates are tall enough to confratbly see whole map for current map selection. Even DDs have the rangefinder at height of around 10+ metres above the water, meaning that the horizon is 11,3 km evay and in case of ships they can easily see ships almoast 20km evay.

Well actually at this range the USS Moffet which has the rangefinder more the 14m above the water is perfectly capable to observe the waterline at distance of 13 km (which is more then the 14000 yards) and ship of this size is perfectly capable to observe enemy ships at distance of 20km or so.

Yes the rain, storms, haze, fog banks, squalls missing is indeed sad. But sea stat can be noticable at longer ranges and smaller ships like DDs or even some cruisers if the ships is oriented badly towards the waves.
It is somewhat of a engine limitation that the waves are entirely homogonus across whole map meaning that they need to be smaller to allow PT boats to do anythings and honestly even if this wasn´t the case the community would likely oppose this like they did with the waves before.

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Of the lines I’ve played all the rangefinders and fire control seem to be pretty much the same. Update every 10 seconds, all seem to give very accurate ranges. If there are differences then I haven’t really noticed them.

Seems they’ve artificially buffed lighter calibres to be easily over the horizon capable ( the ballistics for 4" to 5" seem to be outrageously enhanced which they claim is an engine limitation but really isn’t) rather than the legitimate potential flavour of the fire control systems.

So they want their Russian and American ships to be oh so superior but have done it in a really daft and nonsensical way which defies the laws of physics. German fire control was outstanding for instance - until it took a hit or two at which point it went to pot rather quickly.

So correctly judging the range to a ship would require it’s identification first ( hull length which gives bearing), the longer the range finders and the further apart individual range finders are the better, assuming they are working. Crew skills are quite legitimate here though what they currently do seems a bit arcane and naff. What on earth does ‘absolute identification’ at a whole 49 yards mean or do? Surface target detection at 1500 yards?

Might seem nitpicky but consider how subs are going to work. Doubt they’ve even considered or likely knew about visual horizons though a periscope 1 yard above the surface should only see a few thousand yards and certainly wouldn’t have the full moving map and link16 information relayed by other units.

Until you have subs you don’t have the rock paper scissors of sub > BB > DD > sub. And without visual horizons / information the subs are going to be a nightmare for balance which will inevitably result in Gaijin doing really stupid things.

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Do you want to do the bug report for this or should I do it?

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As mentioned in the first post, I still honestly think subs have no place in the game. Even if we do implement the previously discussed ideas about having the map divided into task zones for each class of warship, defending the cruisers and up against submarines means being around them; which in turn makes them an easy target for the enemy big ships. That being said, even if your periscope can see into infinity and beyond, I doubt it will make the existing problem you have with ships being targeted behind islands any worse than it currently is.

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Yeah, I just lost the connection in Naval. Had something like 30+ small boosters running from that recent Ice Cream Las Vegas casino fiasco, as they were expiring (the dumbest idea ever, as you PURCHASE these booster with SLs). The game probably awarded wins to both sides and all I got was a bill for some SLs for ammo reload. Total sham. The matches were mostly hard uptiers with major losing steamrolls. It’s just so unbalanced, I hardly ever have fun in this game anymore. On paper you earn more, but now (as if by gaijin’s magic) I get more uptiers, so I earn less from getting kills and have more repair costs.

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Would there be even matches without scripted bots? It has gotten completely out of hand and my favourite game-mode loses quaility rapidly. For all the superbly modelled vessels we have available this is terribly sad. There seems to be a law that rather sooner than later everything nice in online-games gets spoiled by *holes.

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@Spinflight @kkang2828 So I bugreported the balistic issue. Community Bug Reporting System

From testing it seem like there is more likely an issue with the drag and whole balistic calculation since the shells follow way lower arcs.
So if it issue with all shells (more or less) it is also contributor to armor and ammorack issues.

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Actually remove bots and not just say youre gonna remove bots.

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@Spinflight @kkang2828 well the issue seems to be bigger then I though:

Due to game engine limits, it is impossible to make terminal velocities, time of flight and angle of fall all accurate at the same time. Currently ballistics parameters are adjusted on the basis of making terminal velocities closely match real life performance as much as possible, since penetration is dependant on such factor. Developers CAN correct the time of flight and angle of fall to match real life records but then the terminal velocities will become too low, leading to underperforming penetration performance.

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In that case everything from the performance of aircraft machine guns and cannons to the high velocity tanks guns and naval rifles is utter garbage. No wonder they are incapable of understanding HESH.

British 6" seems to be about right. So does British 15". So there is at least one dev who knows what he’s doing.

Penetration is based upon angle as well as velocity. Even moderate flare on a broadside would see the angle getting over 30 degrees ( should be 18 degrees aof at 10k, 12 degree flare is hardly unusual) and therefore reducing the penetration. Plus the armour would be angled and therefore effectively thicker. These factors will be far more than the variance in terminal velocity, which was lowish anyway ( 1000 fps/ 306m/s).

So penetration will be massively over performing currently. Which is no great surprise.

What values are they using for terminal velocity? And muzzle velocity? Indeed what parameters does the game engine use to calculate the ballistics as muzzle energy is out by 100% or more here.

edit: Using Pejsa reference I get a ballistic coefficient of 2.84 for the historical projectile. Plug that, the 2700fps muzzle velocity etc into an external ballistics calculator and it looks about right.

Just for my own amusement ( don’t judge me, somebody gotta geek ) I wondered what a 5" projectile made out of depleted Uranium would do.

Frankly it doesn’t look all that different to what we see in game. Now I know WT used to sell premium ammo. Has someone forgotten to turn something off? Buy a Moffat and get free depleted uranium ammo with it?

Or put another way the 16 inch 50 calibre guns on an Iowa would be able to hit 10,000 yards in about 13 seconds. Only a few seconds quicker than the 5" mounts can do it in game.

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Just tested British 8" and again it’s about right. Differs slightly from the range table figures that I can find but they list a different muzzle velocity.

So there seems to be a very strong theme where British calibres seem to be on the mark. Whoever devved them knew what they were doing. It’s an excellent bit of work. It fits reality. The light cruisers especially are wonderful all round.

The US line on the other hand, well I’m all for diversity hires of course and it’s probably better that they’re working on a computer game rather than air traffic control software. Bless.

Anyone find range table data for the Japanese calibres? They had some serious hardware but very much doubt the in game performance matches reality. The 5" seems to be even slightly crazier than it’s gump counterpart. Given it’s MV and weight the 8" however seems to be good, though I can’t find decent data.

Is there one dev who does DD’s and another who did the proper ships? If so I rather suspect it would worth asking for a second opinion…

Anyone want to bet that the BCs for things like the British 2 and 6 pounders are wrong too? Or the low velocity German cannon?

Find whoever did the British Cruisers and have them cast an eye over the ballistics of other modes of the game too and I rather suspect some of the abhorrently bad vehicles in game might suddenly make sense.

Which, whisper it, might end up generating some enthusiasm.

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Hi,
seems like a good place to share my initial experience with Naval in WT!:)

So I started to play RB coastal a few weeks ago and eventually climbed to 1.7 as Japan.
Before that, I played only RB Ground battles and I also have a fair amount of hours in WoWS, so thanks to all that I didn’t go in completely blind.

Why did I chose RB coastal as first experience? I was looking forward to similar experience as Ground RB in terms of less hand holding and more authentic experience. Also I wanted to try something little different than bluewater fleet I knew from WoWS and I was looking for faster paced gameplay. It seemed more natural to start there simply because naval BR 1.0 starts there, so I felt like game telling me I should go there first.

As a new player, I would summarize my first experience, as… not cohesive I would say.

  1. First weird thing - Torpedoes
    I jump into first battle and first thing I see are two big ass torpedoes on top of my boat, so I expected those to be my main armament, but this quickly proved to be wrong assumption, as everything to shoot at was too small and too fast to have any chance to hit with torpedoes. I also had only two, so after two complete misses I am out of ammo. (later on, I got depth charges, this time I expected I will have to get creative as no submarines are around to use them on, so I had to use depth charges for annoying ships getting very close to me with depth charges exploding before they reached any real depth)

  2. Second weird thing - Aiming
    Without torpedoes, I am left with machine gunner standing on top of my boat, so I started shooting… and I immediately realized that everything is way farther than it seems as my machine gun shots looked way more like mortar fire than I expected.
    With that I started to get familiar with star of the show in Naval - aim point! aka that green thing which tells me where my fire is going to end up.
    Now this thing felt very weird, sometimes it looked like impact point, sometimes like a circular aim crosshair, sometimes it disappeared completely. It was floating around like a wild ball on chain when I tried to adjust my aim and didn’t seem to follow my aim that much, especially in sniper view.
    Later I found out that waves made it even worse and automatic switching to different targets didn’t help either.
    So, closer fights seemed to be more suitable for this setup, but at close range and when I found out I adjust “my ball on chain/my aim” by trying to look under or above my target, the fights seemed be best done by looking so far down I barely saw my target at the top edge of screen just to not shoot above him, when he was close to me. With big waves on top of it, it felt extra weird.

  3. Third weird thing - Damage mechanics of a boat and its crew
    Now that I started to get a hang of how to hit stuff, I also started to wonder where to aim.
    From Ground battles I naturally expected the damage model to function similar, so the first obvious “weakspot” to hit seemed those rambos on top of boats shooting their machine guns at me and my teammates
    Well, turns out that first, its damn hard to hit so small spot, with you both moving at high speed and in big waves too and second, that guy is a real rambo being invincible and stuff! What I found out shortly after is that despite some human figures to be modeled in the ship model, they are there mostly for illustration and they are not worth to shoot at, unlike in Ground battles… Instead it is replaced by crew number that gets down, when the ship is hit. With a crew number on most boats being under 10 it felt… you guessed it, weird.
    Ok so, where do you shoot a boat to destroy it? There were times where I shooted at ship for tens of seconds and despite the big parts of the ship getting black it was still alive! Also my ship getting black in bottom left corner and despite all that I still had some crew and was able to function no problem… So how was it possible that boats seemed fine during battle despite appearing to be nearly completely destroyed in Hit camera?
    I couldn’t wrap my head around that, wiki offered some vague info on that and playing tutorial once again didn’t help either, so this time I felt weirded out and frustrated on top of that.
    So I went here and visited WT forums for the first time!:) And thank fully, combination of some nice french guy writing guides in Academy section here, his fast replies to my confused questions, more visits to test sail map and more battles, I finally fully understood that with boats, you don’t shoot at invincible people in the ship, nor its vital modules, which take forever to destroy with a machine gun, but instead you color different parts of ship with your machine gun in darker and darker colors until you paint the whole ship black to mark it as destroyed! What a poetic damage model:) (and weird, of course)

  4. Fourth weird thing - Capping objective points
    As seasoned Ground battles player, having capture points across the map felt like nothing new. So in my first battles I simply chose a spawn point and headed to closest capture point. Later on, I found out that on some maps, capture points in open sea are very far away and if I won’t go to cap them, my “turns out to be bot” teammates with nice names won’t try to do it instead. So here started my long and romantic rides to open sea, all alone, just me, capture point in the distance and rapidly shortening objective bars on top of my screen:) So sweet but, kinda boring when I had nobody to shoot at and if I chose to stay and fight instead, no number of destroyed opponents helped me to win the battle, unless some romantic soul decided to cap those points instead of me.
    Later on, I unlocked my first ship with a cannon! Soukou-tei ships were first which boasted steel hull, cannon in front and lower top speed, which seemed almost like a true warship! Well, regarding capture points, they were too far away for this metal beast to dominate nearby seas. So weirdly enough, some battles were lost before I was able to reach the closest capture point, with my slow and steady tempo, and without even slowing down once, just because the deadly romantic nature of my opponents in fast boats, which cant resist long trips to distant capture points drowning in a heart aching sunset.

I also briefly tried 1.7 BR battles, where much bigger ships started to appear, so I was excited to put torpedoes to a good use finally, but whenever I tried to jump a bigger ship, which seemed to be a major threat to my teammates, I was quickly sunk by its autocannons, no matter how distracted the opponents seemed to be. Later on I realized AI took care of secondary armament, so he didn’t have to pay attention to me at all, let alone, try to shoot me, in order to sink me swiftly. That felt kinda unfair.

First comparison is obviously with WoWS, where the experience feels more like a tight package. Sure enough it has to do with WoWS being much simpler and hand holding than WT in terms of mechanics and what is required from the player instead of being automated or enhanced for better player comfort.

In this regard, I knew what I was getting myself into thanks to ground RB, so I expected some messing around with controls in settings will be required, but both default controls and what is available on controls menu left a lot to be desired, so despite finding as much info about controls as possible and trying different settings, the aiming still felt weird with small fast ships on a big waves.

In the hindsight, the aim system feel much more suited to big warships, where aiming is done while moving at slow speeds and undisturbed by the waves that much. Same for damage system, where ships have hundreds of crew members, so modeling every one becomes impractical and big cannons are more likely to damage modules as well, without having to “paint” enemy ships compartments.

I hope for different objective system on naval maps, as this capture point system doesn’t seem to work as well as in ground battles and again feel weird to having to capture some strategically unimportant empty spot in the sea.

The aiming felt like the most fun system at these Ranks, despite it being not suitable for small boats and torpedoes not having much use.

The damage system feel very non intuitive at these Ranks, where ships appear to be heavily damaged at first glance on hit screen, but they are not sinking neither falling appart.

Also, I would very much appreciate calm waters at low ranks, just to keep waves out of equation to help learning process of aiming for small ships and not making it more confusing by it instead.

EDIT: I would also like to see targeting system of secondary armament to be more interactive, so instead of just selecting which types of targets it should aim at, I would like having to at least manually select individual targets for it to shoot, which would be more fun for targeting ship and also feel less unfair to targeted ship. WoWS has at least option to boost damage of one side of ship.

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First, thanks for the contribution to the feedback in regards to coastal! I played a lot if it during the recent summer event but since I was there practically at the very start, I didn’t quite have the same teething issues as you went through so I can’t speak as a newcomer’s experience, so this is valuable!

In regards to this, technically, this option exists, if you select a target and you hit X+1/2/3 it should assign the target to primary, secondary, and AA guns respectively. In reality, it doesn’t seem to work for me at all.

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