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.
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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)
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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.
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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)
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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.
