Naval Forces re-work [Merging Coastal/Bluewater again | Separating Modern Vessels from the WW2 onces | Addressing the balance between Planes and Ships]

Suggestions MM/Eco/Prog
1
Do you agree with this suggestion?
  • Yes.
  • No.

0 voters

Do you mind having to research some small PT boats again before getting to destroyers?
  • Yes.
  • No.
  • I don’t care.

0 voters

Do you think modern/missile ships should be separated from the WW2 era ships?
  • Yes.
  • No.
  • I don’t care.

0 voters

Hello ladies and gentlemen, today I bring you a big re-work suggestion for naval forces!

After having played War Thunder Naval since it’s Beta testing, I’ve always had opinions about the gamemode and how to improve it. But now it’s time to turn those ideas into action and make this sugestion!

This idea is a complicated and detailed suggestion, so I’m setting it up in steps to make sure I explain everything nice and slowely. So let’s dive in!

Step 0, the current in game situation

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What we have in game right now are two separate techtrees: The Bluewater fleet and Coastal fleet.

Although these two trees are separate, they still join the same matchmaker.

This setup for the naval techtrees is not so bad at first, but when you start to think about the future of naval we run into some problems.

Let’s start with the Coastal fleet:
The highest BR ship here are the German frigates Köln F220 and Lübeck F224 at a BR of 4.7. These are modern frigates that have access to the post war 40mm Bofors with time fuse shells. And on top of that this ship is filled with radar and other modern equipment. Yet it sits at 4.7, where it can come across aircraft like the Spitfire and P-47.

If we look at the future of naval, where we will eventually get more guided missile ships too, then these would be somewhere around 5.7 in BR going from the in game logic. These would be deadly missile frigates fighting things like AM-1’s and Griffon Spitfires.

This ofcourse is very unbalanced and weird to have in the game. So something here has to be changed.

Next let’s talk about the Bluewater fleet:
Here you start with destroyers with a BR of 3.3 or 3.7. This is already a problem since all other reserve vehicles in game make you start at 1.0. Why is this a problem? Take the recent battle pass event, you needed to play at a BR of 2.7 or higher to earn points for the event. So anyone who just downloaded the game could hop in a destroyer and earn points, where people who don’t play naval first have to get to a BR of 2.7.

Everything else looks okay here for now, and with more and more bigger ships getting added, this also won’t change much and so it’s not a big problem.

But there is one very specific type of vehicles that make problems here. That is modern destroyers or modern cruisers. Aside from the HMS Tiger, we don’t have any proper modern light cruisers yet, but there are plenty out there that have things like guided missiles. Their armour and conventional weaponry make them just like any other cruiser, but if they have guided weapons then suddenly they sit at a BR that is way too low for them. But put them up in BR to let’s say 6.0, they constantly face battleships which is also far from optimal. And just like the problem with the coastal fleet, these modern destroyers or cruisers will be fighting WW2 aircraft.

Step 1, merging the techtrees back into one

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The first step of my proposal is to merge the bluewater and coastal fleet back into one techtree.

But there is one important thing here!
All modern vessels will be left out! This combined naval tree is strictly for vessels around WW2, or before.

We will cover what happens with the modern vessels in Step 2.

Now that the tree is back into one techtree, we will still keep the vertical setup (We won’t go back to the old horizontal setup). The current coastal fleet will just be put back together into Rank I and II of this new combined techtree, and the Bluewater fleet continues from Rank III and onwards.

I’ve also added some different BR ranges. Naval forces right now is very compressed and unbalanced in some cases, so here I showcase a more un-compressed BR range for the naval vessels.

This combined techtree again puts all vessels of around WW2, or before WW2, into one techtree. And the top of the line vehicles in this techtree are ofcourse battleships!

Step 2, the “Modern fleet”

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Here is where we introduce something completely new.

We’ve got a smaller naval techtree which branches of from the regular naval tree, just like Helicopters do from the ground and air techtree.
The way you unlock this “Modern fleet” is by unlocking either Rank III naval, or Rank V aviation.

This new naval techtree specifically includes only modern vessels. Vessels with radar, modern guns, missiles, you name it.

And most importantly, this “Modern fleet” has it’s own matchmaker!

They cannot join any battles people have with the regular naval techtree!

Another thing worth noting is the BR range I’ve setup here. We can see that the first vessels you get start at a BR of 6.0. So now your modern vessels will sit at a BR which is much more realistic. Guided missiles can be added in full to all these modern ships. They no longer fight WW2 stuff, so for balance sake it’s become much easier to implement.

Something that you can see in the illustration above is that I pointed out the Italian cruiser Garibaldi (1961 refit). This is a WW2 light cruiser which got most of it’s older weaponry replaced with more modern weapons, and anti air missiles. These very interesting modern cruisers will now have their very own spot in this “Modern fleet”. If they were to be put into the current Bluewater fleet, then it’s very messy since they really lack in primary weaponry to fight other cruisers. But they have powerfull 76mm Oto Melara secondaires which will destroy any small ship that dares comes near. So either the BR for it would be to low and it’s stupidly overpowered, or it’s to high and it’s straight up useless.

So again, having them in their own “Modern fleet” techtree makes much more sense.

Also, light cruisers like the Belfast, Tiger, Chapayev and Sverdlov are also modern light cruisers. So technically these could go into the “Modern fleet” too!

Fun little thing, technically even the USS Iowa in it’s 1984 refit could be added into this techtree. It is modern after all, but it would be one of, if not the only, battleship in the “Modern fleet”.

Step 3, discussing aircraft in these naval battles

Spoiler

Another big thought that came to my mind are aircraft.

The higher we go in BR, the more modern we get with aircraft of course. So battleships will eventually go to BR’s of around 9.0, which will introduce many modern weapon systems, while the battleships are stuck in WW2.

So here is what I propose:

For the “WW2 fleet”: Aircraft of BR 1.0 up to 8.0 can join the battles. Even if you are playing a BR 9.0 battleship, you can only take planes up to 8.0 into battle with you.

This makes sure that WW2 battleships won’t have to fight things like cold war supersonic jets.

For the “Modern fleet”: Aircraft from Rank V and higher can join the battles. The “Modern fleet” starts at a BR of 6.0, so when playing these first ships you won’t encounter many aircraft (Maybe a He 162 here and there). But as you go up in BR with the ships, so do the aircraft. And eventually we’ll come to the point where you can take out your F-4E Phantom II, together with your BR 10.7 modern frigate.

But there is another issue I have with aircraft. At the higher levels of Naval you as an aircraft have to face stronger and stronger anti aircraft weaponry. And one aircraft vs an entire battleship with WW2 era anti-aircraft weapons just doesn’t work.

For this I propose a simple idea. When playing at, let’s say, the BR 4.7 area when you spawn in a plane, you now also spawn with a second AI controlled plane that will follow you in a tight formation (This AI plane will ofcourse be the same plane as you, carrying the same loadout).

When you drop your weapons, the AI drops theirs. When you manoeuvre around they follow. When you do a loop they do too. Heck even if you activate your aerobatic smoke they do too!

And the higher in BR you go the more AI’s will spawn with you in your formation. So at the battleship level it will no longer be you against an entire battleship. No it will be you with four more AI controlled aircraft.
This higher number of aircraft flying towards a single ship will also start to stress the AI gunners. If you get lucky as the pilot the gunners might target your AI buddies first and you get more time to get in close and drop your payload!

Imagine this when you are flying the AM-1 and carrying 3 x 2,216 lb torpedoes. Now the battleship will have to deal with 15 torpedoes if you and your AI buddies all make it through to him!
Same goes for dive bombers. You can now get so many more bombs of at a single battleship, this will start to even the odds!

One final exception to this idea would be strategic bombers. I’m not looking forward to seeing a formation of five Pe-8’s flying overhead. So strategic bombers still only spawn as just the one single plane.

Step 4, future additions to these techtrees

Spoiler

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One final thing I want to touch on are submarines.

We’ve so far had events which tested modern submarines. I’ve always found this interesting, but never saw this working ingame because modern submarines vs battleships……well the battleships will almost always lose to them.

Now modern submarines have their place in the “Modern fleet”, whereas WW2 submarines have their place in the “WW2 fleet” where they have a much more balanced fight against WW2 destroyers and WW2 sub chasers.

Step 5, the final end result

Spoiler

So, let’s say all this is added in game, what have we got?

  • We now have a proper separation between WW2 and modern vessels. Things like the PG-02 or Freccia P-493 no longer ruin games where they fight against WW2 Higgins boats. Instead modern vessels fight other modern vessels, even jet aircraft.

  • For the battleship players, they now have a fair game where it’s strictly battleship vs battleship. You won’t have to worry about getting ammo wreaked by a modern frigate’s anti surface missile.

One thing people might point out is that they only want to play big ships. So now they have to start with small boats again.
Well all I will say to this is that when I started playing this game, I wanted to play with jet aircraft, but I still had to start with biplanes.

Plus it’s only two ranks which include small boats, you can grind through it in only a day or two. So I really don’t see this as a problem whatsoever.

Here are some ingame examples of what the current techtrees would look like:

USA:

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Germany:

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Russia:

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Britain:

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Japan:

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Italy:

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And that is it!

I seriously came up with all of this when I couldn’t fall asleep last night, and I spend two hours laying awake thinking of every possible solution, and I do strongly believe that this is by far the best idea for it!

Please let me know all of your opinions on this in the poll above and the comments!

Take care everyone, see you on the high seas!

11 Likes
2

In my opinion, your view on battle ratings is incredibly flawed and imposes the same logic Gaijin currently uses that isn’t helping the game at all. Battle ratings should not be determined by ship type. This naval game mode is missing a very important aspect of naval combat that should give ALL types of ships a place in all battle ratings. Screening. Because of the lack of aircraft, destroyers and light cruisers do not have the opportunity to fulfill their proper role, which creates this ship type separation in battle rating. If aircraft played as big of a role in game as they would in a realistic naval battle, this would drop defenseless ships like dreadnoughts much lower in battle rating. This would naturally develop the tech tree similar to that of other games, where ships become more historically oriented with each other. I agree with your proposal for aircraft as I have suggested the same thing for many years, but I think more than one wingman is required. I think this feature should also be introduced along with the ability to spawn in aircraft at the start of the match, or introducing AI squadrons of aircraft that make attack runs on players. The introduction of this wingman mechanic would in theory allow aircraft carriers to be added, which in my opinion is very much needed in order to properly balance these tech trees. The presence of aircraft carriers would naturally balance early battleships and cruisers to lower BRs, syncing the tech much better with historical time periods and giving a much more prominent role to smaller screening ships, as they have the ability to avoid air attacks while also getting points by destroying aircraft. I think other features that could naturally balance tech trees to align with aircraft better and historical time periods is fire control systems, by implementing aiming assists for more modern WWII vessels with advance fire control directors and radar, and nerfing the assists given to early battleships and cruisers that lacked these abilities. More mechanics could be added to ships like DDs similar to scouting vehicles in ground battles, especially those of which that have early radars and can relay location and range of targets to other ships.

Basically, my view of how a proper naval tech tree should look includes ships of all class types in nearly all battle ratings. This would group all ship types together by their technical capabilities. For example, if US tier one or two looked something like this. Clemson class, USS Trenton, and then, for example, something like a USS Mississippi-class BB. All of these ships lack AA armament for the most part, which would allow early bi-planes and monoplanes to have a chance at destroying them with torpedoes (especially with their new wingman mechanic), giving the smaller ships an advantage due to their ability to evade the air attacks. I don’t know, one thing we can all agree on is there are a LOT of pieces to the puzzle that need to be added TOGETHER to fix this mode, no few solutions can completely solve the problem. We need tech tree and BR rework, aircraft wingmen, a new spawn system and new spawn locations that don’t group players up into one big fleet, and new vehicle mechanics all together to have a chance at making things work.

8 Likes
3

Overall I agree, however Gaijin still needs to finish his job properly and add the French coastal TT, and since we still have no news, I’m not very optimistic.

1 Like
4

If battleships find themselves facing DDs or cruisers in lower BRs, part of the community will cry. People who forgot that in naval battles admirals don’t say “we’ll only send battleships because if we send destroyers or cruisers we’ll be at a disadvantage, and that doesn’t seem balanced to us blabla etc…” the fact is no. They sent all ship types because that’s precisely the point of having multiple ship types. Each type of ship forms a synbiosis and is intended to fight other types of ships, that of the DDs was to fight against Aircraft Carriers and Battleships or Submarines (or against Destroyers but it was rarer, it was rather the French doctrine with their “Contre -Torpillieurs”), the cruisers were rather versatile, etc… I had already asked the questions on another subject, mixing the type of boat towards smaller BRs (good except swing all that) but many people were afraid of it. So it’s true, there is the problem of knowing which cards would not be suitable for this mix of types so that it can be done (bigger card, no spawn kill possible, implementation of adapted mechanics etc… ). But rejecting this idea purely and simply is not the solution either, it is on the contrary the technique of the ostrich. This mix works great in a higher BR, so in a lower BR it will work too, just find the right ship at the right BR.

1 Like
5

I agree with all your points. Yes the community would be upset, but only if that were to happen in the current state of the game, not if the additional features I suggested were added as well to help bridge the balance between ship types. Overall, I think aircraft are the main solution to the problem, plus or minus some of the other changes I suggested.

6

Some other ideas/changes could include adverse weather conditions and night battles, allowing smaller ships to close the distance with larger ones, and removal of that targeting feature that brackets the enemy, allowing cheap shots over terrain and obstacles.

2 Likes
7

It’s cool that naval players from different communities think in the same direction. I would like to present a vision at the fleet research trees, compiled by ru-segment players. We have our own discord server, where we would be glad to see more English-speaking players for joint discussion and work.

4 Likes
8

The problem that I see with the implementation of combined unit battles in Naval at its current state is that for the screening effect you have proposed to work as effectively as the real-life analogues, it would require extensive teamwork and cooperation that you simply will not experience in a War Thunder match. When we do witness teamwork, more often than not, it is driven by the player’s self-interest that happens to benefit the team. Why do we cap the point? It isn’t to deny enemy movements on that side of the map, we cap points because it stops/reverses the ticket bleed. Ground battle spawns SPAA not because they want to defend allies from CAS but because getting plane kills can be fun (or your SPAA happens to double as tank destroyers). In Naval, being a destroyer in the presence of a battleship just means that you will be next to die as some 305mm AP round soars across the map to utterly decimate your flanks (you can kind of experience this to an extent if you play a 6.0 Naval Arcade battle, where the bots often spawn in as destroyers and die within minutes). And even if there are carriers around to add the potent threat of aircraft, there is no difference for a destroyer player whether their AA suite shot down the planes in the protection of their battleship comrades or just protecting themselves in the middle of nowhere; meaning there’s no reason to stay in formation and possibly be an easy target.
Now, to compare this to World of Warships which implements a gameloop that includes all kinds of classes per match, it has the benefit of being much more arcadey in nature with the whole visibility mechanic that hide destroyers from view until it’s like a handful of kilometres out (more so with gimmicks like crew skill and camo and whatever else). That is to say, features that has no place in WT.
So ultimately we have to adopt the Gaijin’s interpretation where BR brackets are divided into ship classes; with the current problem being severe compression. And if there is ever a day where we can have cross-class Naval gameplay, it would probably be in the form of each class given their own objective to contribute to the match’s victory conditions.

1 Like
9

As I’ve addressed extensively in my thread to discuss ways to improve Naval (shameless self-promotion, eheh), I honestly and truthfully don’t see how they can add submarines and get around its paradoxical strengths and trade-offs.
To put it simply, submarines are vulnerable against destroyers and sub-chasers which place them in a low BR for optimal balancing. But as WT is a game that allows you to bring a low BR vehicle in your high BR line up, this means you can bring that sub up to the battles among cruisers+ which often lack anti-submarine defense. This means the higher BR you go, the easier it is for you to use the sub; which culminates against you sneaking up upon and firing upon the virtually defenseless battleships.

All that being said, I know that WT Mobile got submarines there so I am genuinely curious on how they implemented the vehicle there.

10

I agree, submarines should be limited to a certain BR range, and also not be allow to be taken into higher BR games. I wanted to throw the idea of submarines out there, but ofcourse they require much more thought and work to be ready to be implemented ingame. And I’ll leave that for another suggestion.

1 Like
11

I like some of your suggestions, but please do not buff aircraft, or nerf naval AA in naval modes.

One of the reasons I still play naval modes is because I can play relatively unmolested by CAS.

If CAS were made easier in this mode I do seriously think this would be to the detriment of naval.

12

I’m not a fan of Aircraft in ground or naval battles either. But in Naval RB aircraft really aren’t good without that Arcade mid air reload. So for realistic I think a slight buff for Aircraft wouldn’t be so bad.
Right now in Naval RB I feel like I never see any aircraft simply because aircraft stand no chance.

13

Everything is fine, but Gaijn won’t care about it, and won’t separate WW2 ships from modern ones, I’m sure of it, I’m waiting for such absurdities as Yamato will have, for example, Br 9.0 or higher, and will fight against MiG21 or F4, and its AA will be of no use able to do it, and such an F4 will drop bombs from several kilometers away, because of course Gaijn will not want to make new weapons for planes, in the mode with ships, because it is too big of a requirement, I really want to believe that they will change these models, they will separate the WW2 ships from modern and so on, but having played Tue almost from the beginning and seeing what this company is doing, the chances are zero, but always + for you for trying.

14

The problem is that ships from 1943 have proximity missiles with radar, so flying to the ship is suicide, it would be nice if flying over the water surface reduced AA accuracy by 60%, because flying to the ship with a torpedo is a feat that almost never happens. pretends, but it must not be the case that BB is killed by a single plane, because it is not true, and in the irl there were always a lot of these planes and often they did not manage to sink the ship anyway

15

Right now in Naval RB I feel like I never see any aircraft simply because aircraft stand no chance.

above 5.0, yes. Below that, it’s the opposite. There are a lot of reserve ships that have no AA whatsoever like the Litchfield or Mutsuki.

I really don’t want all modes to turn into Air RB+

16

so, i can see your logic here, and while it is good, this would ruin a couple things
first, people who enjoy coastal (like me) will just be shafted, because if you remember, rank 3+ is what you use for events. now people who enjoy playing coastal cannot grind out events and if they still do, they are forced to play cruisers and other large ships, this was the whole reason why coastal and bluewater were split in the first place. i know you want to combine it because you feel its better this way, but a majority of people will have the whole point of playing ruined for them.

second, as i previously said, there are people who enjoy coastal, and one of the main things about coastal
is you can have swifter games then battleships, maybe instead of combining coastal and bluewater, you just have the whole shared RP thing like with GRB and heli’s, but make it 2 way. then you can just split it into 2 matchmakers 1 for faster coastal matchs and 1 for longer bluewater matchs, but allow people to still keep coastal ships in their linups.

third, there was a suggestion that was created on the old forum that was talking about making BR’s depend on gamemode, and it was rather popular and even passed to devs (gamemode as in an aircraft like the buccaneer could be 8.7 in GRB while it could be 7.7 in ARB) this could make it vastly more balanced then simply trying to work with what gaijin is currently giving us.

fourth, you did not talk about the possibility of carriers, something that could actually be added in the near future, there are actual full scale damage models ingame as of writing this, but not on any AI carrier.

fifth, you could have also talked about adding more and better rewards for helping out, to encourage teamwork, like perhaps coastal ships helping give bluewater ships a faster repair, or perhaps a new mechanic of coastal ships giving new crew members to bluewater ships

18

I say yes to all, and could the Fairmile H LCS (L)(2) be a special instead of research, seems so slow and under powered only useful in Fiji map etc and be nice if Gun boat, torp boat would fall under same types to research.

19

id much rather have coastal more split from blue water. have coastal with more brs and only coastal maps.

then blue water would drop down to 1.0 br at the lowest instead of 3.0, allowing for more room as more advanced battleships get introduced without them having to face higher and higher br jets.

you could of course bring coastal and blue water together in one lineup, but it would be going in blue water matches, not coastal.

imo, its all upsides and no downsides vs this way or current and with little work needed to switch over.

20

Maybe the coastal be laid out as it is (with modern ships moved over to the Modern Ships matchmaker), and Bluewater placed below it? This would still allow late coastal games to go towards event/task grind. Yes, this would push the BR of Bluewater ships exceedingly high, but that’s why there’s the additional proposal to limit the BR of aircraft that can be going in with “normal” and “modern” Naval matches (as you mentioned below this as well).

Carriers as a specialty unit certainly makes this hard to consider, something I kinda see along with submarines. The way I see it (summerized here and suggestion proper here and here), it would operate kind of like drones in GRB, something you need spawnpoints to spawn in, with submarines for mid coastal/low bluewater, and carriers for mid-bluetwater and above. it will need to be balanced as needed.

21

This! And something id personally add, why not have very early naval ships (torpedo boat destroyers, protected cruisers etc) at rank 1 and 2 together woth the torpedo boats?