Naval EC should not become another version of standard Naval Battles

Game Discussion Realistic Battle
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411

Apart maybe from your first shot/salvo at a new target (and even for this a firing solution should already be present), this isn’t really necessary. It’s entirely viable to instead observe your impacts while continuing to fire, and adjust your aim on the fly. Not to mention that given the potential course and speed alterations of your target, the info you get from waiting for shell impacts may already be outdated anyway by the time you’re resuming fire.

All you end up doing is waste opportunities to score more hits by needlessly limiting your RoF. Restricting your DPS that way may carry no immediate risk against bots or unaware players outside of losing a kill to a team mate and getting fewer kills overall, but in a 1v1 against players you’re putting yourself in danger for no real gain, all to save some ammo.

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412

Fundamentally the firepower / protection / mobility triangle is completely borked for naval.

Why?

A fast BB would take the best part of ten minutes to accelerate to flank speed in real life. And in a 90 degree turn would bleed about a third of it’s energy, then take several minutes to get it back. Hull drag is V cubed. Speed is V squared. The last few knots take a long time to attain.

That isn’t to say they couldn’t turn, famously an Iowa could turn inside a Fletcher. But it would lose a significant percentage of it’s energy in doing so. The DD could make it up again relatively quickly.

Though that doesn’t work in a 20 minute FPS bash em up game. So their mobility has been exaggerated by a large factor, probably 20-40x.

Unfortunately this means they cheat the triangle and become a panacea in any situation. Frankly an Iowa probably accelerates almost as fast as a Fairmile in real life. And hence it does not need torpedo boat destroyers to escort it.

Quite rightly BBs should not lose to CAs or CLs, which should not lose to DDs. However the borked triangle means they don’t need the DDs. Hence there’s no rock, paper, scissors excepting a few Japanese DDs.

Quite how a game mode manages this borking is the question. Spawning an a DD with 6 base camping Iowas competing for how fast they could kill you was not the answer.

I’ve tried EC lots of times previously. I tend to have a fit of enthusiasm for the game about once every two years and log in to see whether it is still borked. So took HMS Rodney out for a match or two and almost uninstalled the game immediately. But then saw that EC had changed.

So I gave it a go. Still didn’t quite understand what I was doing and there’s still no instructions. Seems the map is the briefing, but nothing even tells you how to cap a point. However it was rather compelling.

To be fair to the snail their naval game is improving, whereas wows has become a dog egg. They tried to enforce roles despite being even more borked, but then powercrept the DDs out of the game.

The snail has to powercreep them back in though luckily they have another aspect so horrendously wrong that it provides an opportunity. WT Naval operates on a flat world, there’s no curvature of the earth and no sea state. Never mind and haze or weather. A few rain squalls would make things much more interesting than islands…All ships also have full link16 perfect battle picture.

In reality DDs might spot each other sooner but would be unlikely to be able to positively identify each other beyond 7-8 nm in average sea state and weather. ID is an aspect of the game completely missing. You see to get a firing solution you need to know their speed and bearing. But the contact is, at first, just a bit of smoke on the visual horizon. It’s only when you are close enough to ID the contact that you then know it’s hull length. By measuring the angular hull you then get it’s bearing. And therefore a firing solution.

But the game is billiard table flat and with no troughs in the waves, spay or sea state and no need to spot or ID. Which also increases the BB’s dominance.

The ships are remarkably well modelled, but they were designed to fight in real world conditions.

Doubt it’s difficult to produce a curved map, it’s just modelling a big hill with a very slight gradient fundamentally. Given the borked triangle a slightly exaggerated curvature would probably be good. But they haven’t so the classes and balance will always be borked.

It’s merely a question then of how this borking is managed via game mode.

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413

Strong CAS in naval, no thank you. It would kill the advantage some BBs have being weaker main battery but having better AA, and strong CAS can be quite an issue in ground RB.

Against PT Boats i’m more split, it’s true that preparing a torpedo attack for 15 minutes to fail miserably because AA automatically kills you isn’t exactly great.

Probably wouldn’t work with the current engine because of water surface modelling and basic gravity, but having a curved map would indeed be nice for naval EC

I also agree that DDs speed in game does not represent the advantage it should, and torps are just not that good at long ranges, except maybe for Type93s

Submarines would give them a more important role i guess. Subs would most likely camp a port and spam torps at closer ranges on BBs, while staying near port to reload, so DDs needing to go first to clear the path from SSKs for BBs could be a way to give them a more prominent role

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414

Yip, though DDs should go first for AAA too. CL or DD up threat. American and British doctrine differed, US escorts were ~2000 yards and they reckoned that was too far at Midway. British would be 6000. Similar but different ideas. The US figured the torp bombers would have to launch close to a 20mm farm, we relied on a longer field of fire for 4" from both DD and HVU.

But making the individual AAA too powerful also means no team play / escorts required. And that’s against singletons, rather than squadrons or even wings.

I’m in no way an expert on the match engine though if water is just ponds then surely every 10m (?) being a separate pond would work? Or merely rendering the ship as below the horizon even if the ME says otherwise? Or merely obscuring them at range? Or an immensely bad plot / rangefinder?

They seemed to put a lot of effort into making the sea look very spiffing recently, hopefully some dev work is being put into the more basic spotting mechanics. Which do have crew skills, though ones quite clearly designed for tier 1 coastal and never updated or changed since.

If there were tanks which were at least 20x borked I suspect there’d be outrage and several leaks of classified documents per day for each line by now. Though admittedly only the Brit line is allowed to handle like a 2hp french car in treacle, as WW1 BBs should.

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There was none of it in IRL too.

In game ship acceleration means less than in IRL(besides that all ships affected by this acceleration, not only BB) there no conditions where you need to chase enemy for hours an days or turn on 180 a lot, or maneuver hard(even in EC) on big ships. All maneuvers in game are just shots/torpedo avoiding, and in RB ships are so sluggish that BBs couldn’t even dodge what coming. If you suggesting make it even more sluggish, what it will give to already too slow gameplay? But in Arcade DD is a menace to BB, so threat that they even nerfed torpedoes speed so they slow over distance, besides that a lot of the torpedoes in game doesn’t have proper Torpex analogue explosives as they were IRL and you could not switch torps speed during that match only in hangar, which limits them even more.

Even on round earth BB will spot and engage you faster just cause they have better optics and higher height. So curvitude will actually only limit DD even more. To the point where you will be bonked by the BB or CL/CA not even knowing the see you. Besides that in game DD already don’t render over 10km+, torpedo boats on 4+ if they don’t shoot. And in RB all ships are blind kittens, not even knowing that there is BB in couple kilometers from you.

They are “panacea” not cause of some acceleration. But cause of conditions they were put in(maps, mechanics, game rules and tons of bugs of the naval modes). Of course naval gameplay will always gonna be “arcaded” especially in session multiplayer game.
And acceleration behavior is least of the problem in WT naval, when you have game behaviors like this
Naval shells have diminished fragmentation penetration or that Is something changed or wrong with naval and underwater shells? - #7 by Kweedko where ships in game could not even deal proper damage to each other, what forces BB to engage easy targets just cause they know, that other BB is often not a treat and too long to demolish.

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416

I wouldn’t want to play a glacier with guns. Gaijin wouldn’t sell any glaciers with guns.

Nerfing them isn’t what I’m asking for.

The game design has to somehow work around the whole borkiness of them.

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Ikoma; the glacier with guns.

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There are slower icebergs in WT naval.

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Ikoma is literally one of - if not - the slowest bluewater ships in the game I don’t consider K2 bluewater because she’s an armored sloop.

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Note - I’m not weakening the AAA in any literal sense. I’m insisting you man the guns yourself and use them yourself, and give you the aiming assist to use them effectively yourself when the plane’s close enough to bother doing so. The AAA won’t be an aimbot anymore, but provided you are willing to use it yourself, it will actually be arguably MORE effective, not less.

It’s the same fundamental concept, just on a small boat to deliver the torps or depth charges instead of a plane. Against AI-controlled gunners the result is also the same, too.

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It hasn’t been aimbot since the nerf.

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It very much still is in my experience. Both in AB and RB.

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Player AA is only accurate against straight line targets and only within 4km where they actually open up. Hell, some ships don’t get their AA to open up until sub 2km unless they manual it.

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Not really, as the plane does not need to travel for 15 minutes to set up its ambush, and a bomb is far harder to dodge than a torpedo.

Planes are basically impossible to balance across the board, and in Naval game mode, i’d rather have ships outperform them than the other way around

We saw how it looked like when airborn vehicles dominate in ground RB, and i’ll stand by my “no thank you”

Manual AA also means you can focus one plane at a time, which is both very limiting and quite unrealistic. Gunners on the starboard side wouldn’t stand by and aim at a plane attacking from the port side (out of view because of superstructure) if they already had a threat to deal with

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425

I’d rather have vehicles outperform other platforms in their respective modes, ie ground vehicles outperforming aircraft in ground, ships outperforming aircraft in Naval and aircraft outperforming both in air

That way everyone is happy.

Edit

I think the absolute highest vessels we should ever have in ground battles are PT boats if it must happen.

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426

And with all the bomb nerfs demanded by whiny tank mains, if you don’t fly straight to aim your ordinance, your bomb is mostly likely to just “hit” anyways.

And unlike PT boats, planes have to contend with many more autocannons flying up at them when they approach anything but the earliest reserve DDs. Many of those same ships have noticeable blind spots at low angles a PT could approach from.

Not quite, planes are in fact able to be balanced, but they need an actual purpose in the game mode other than just “oh I see that player in [insert ship] over there, Imma go ruin his day!” or “Grrr that player in his goddamn [insert whatever] killed me, I be ANGR MONKY and will make him pay!”

That is the problem. As soon as you strip away “see that, go blow it up” and “i want revenge,” aircraft currently have no purpose at all. And even in Naval EC which depending on the map sometimes gives them a purpose to bomb things, intercept AI bomber/attacker groups, or sometimes even mop up AI vs AI ground scuffles, but the only objective that should matter for planes helping with - preemptively bombing out the stupid Coastal Artillery - is rendered null and void by a very fast respawn time on those blasted guns.

As for the “but its called Naval,” my answer to that is parallel to people saying “but its called Ground.” Change the mode name as part of the long-overdue CAS overhaul. “Naval” could be called “Task Force AB/RB” because that name implies multiple overlapping unit types. “Ground” could be renamed “Joint Operations AB/RB” in an analogous manner.

Aircraft are currently implemented in an unbalanceable “killstreak powerup” manner, but they themselves are not actually unbalanceable.

And yet I have seen quite plainly that Gaijin is incapable of making AI-controlled anything that isn’t either overkill or useless. Thus this is a limitation of the game engine I am willing to accept. That plane you’re engaging has none of his companions with to swarm your vessel from multiple sides, so why do you need to have guns automatically firing in ten directions, anyways?

427

I’d sooner abolish the split modes entirely, or at least begin working towards that. This game’s true potential is ONE fully integrated theater, which is what probably all of us thought World War Mode was supposed to be. Only for it to thoroughly disappoint us by being mostly existing assets daisy-chained together.

428

There should be a naval mode with multi-vehicle approach as a copy of Battlestations: Pacific.

The battle of Carrier groups 3vs3 and 5vs5. Every player controls a carrier group of 1 carrier or battleship, 3 destroyers, 5 small ships and 1 submarine…

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So how does that address the problem of planes having nothing to do but repeatedly smash their faces into a brick wall of AI-controlled AAA fire? It would possibly resolve the issue of planes costing SP for no reason, but there’s unfortunately still close to nothing to do with them.

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You can spawn your planes for free on your carrier.