i turned down the voice warnings because they were just garbage clutter … from the time they came out a few said they were wonderful but those were the serial suckups … the realistic said they were an unwanted distraction and worth less than nothing just a distraction to clutter up the warnings you do want … it was and always has been a 3 vodka bottle idea … yet still it is there … even on a fairly modern frigate there are 7 full time lookouts and 10 part ( most of the ) time lookouts … in a disciplined western naval ship there is plenty of reaction time to all threats that can be picked up visually
routine orders and responses to orders are restricted to the coms channels dedicated to the sectors concerned they do not spam the ship with them
An audible cue make sense in RB, the indicator above the torpedoes doesn’t make sense to me. I’m all for these things in Arcade, but not so much in Realistic. Similar to the audio cues when your crew spots an enemy ship and will call it out, but not mark it like Arcade. It brings the skill ceiling up a bit but would be a positive for gameplay and allow ships to be a bit more successful with torpedoes. I like the audio cues because that is what you would get as a Captain, not a visual blip above a torpedo that was spotted. Again this is only for Realistic, keep the visual cues for Arcade all day.
Auto gunners is one of the worst features Naval has right now. You don’t see rooftop MGs on tanks firing at random targets whenever they feel like it, even when the player is unaware. Yes, a naval crew is much larger and more complicated than a tank crew and could act somewhat independently when ordered to, but the auto gunners need to go. Then planes and costal vessels can have some use against bluewater ships since they won’t get automatically deleted by unaware players with no input at all.
I agree with you on the quick messages. Most of them are quite useless and need some updating for every mode.
I think they should change the ai gunners to a 2 tier system. The first tier is regular auto targeting and it is not good. The second tier is activated when the player selects a target for the ai gunners. It will be much better at aiming but only lasts for a set amount of time. Then the ai will revert back to the first tier until the player selects another/same target.
I would say that would be a pretty good idea, but the volume of fire that ships can put out can negate that inaccuracy most of the time. I see the issue as the same as when they disabled main battery autofire, it is just a feature that degrades the quality of gameplay for everything other than bluewater ships. Making manual targeting the standard for engaging when not controlling a weapon seems like the only way to bring costal and aircraft back into usefulness. I say this because approaching any bluewater ship is basically impossible, especially closing in on it, and the player probably has no clue or you can see the main batteries are trained away from you.
That’s the thing. AB and RB are barely discernable from each other.
RB should have no markers. You should not get the close up camera with damage inflicted either. There should not be the notch to tell you where to fire. There should not be AI aimbot gunners, you should aim everything yourself. No yellow/red warnings about nearby land. And most of all, if you can’t see the ship (because it is hidden behind an island) you should not be able to lock on it. All this belongs to arcade, not RB.
It’s the same with AAB and ARB. They are literally turning ARB into AAB with every update.
If you must dispense with the individual markers for torpedoes (which I personally have nothing against especially if you spent skill points on its detection range) then yeah, enhanced audio cues could be rather desirable, although given how Gaijin does things currently, it’d either be something that’d be flooding the audio channel if it detects a spread, or if it generalizes the direction to just “torpedoes, port side” it wouldn’t be accurate enough to be helpful.
As for auto gunners, I also don’t mind them since they let me focus on the thing I play naval for (namely, hit ship good), I did stole throw out a suggestion there to give planes and coastal ambushes a chance: tie AI firing modes to their respective crew placement. You don’t want to lose crew by sending them to their death on external AA mounts when you are engaging a surface target? Put your AI firing mode to shoot no target, and they would be safe in your hull, but at the cost of you being vulnerable to what your AA suite would protect you against.
Sure, it’s not perfect, but hopefully, that’d give an opening wanted without making it seem like you need to be personally involved with every operation of naval warfare to be effective. (This is, more or less, similar to the argument of “why don’t you just spawn SPAA?” in GRB. Swatting at planes just isn’t what most people who play Naval signed up for)
Wasn’t there supposed to be an option in the settings somewhere that lets you toggle between the current earful and the older voice lines? I seem to remember that supposedly being a thing back when the new voice lines were rolling out, but I can’t seem to find it either…
When they introduced voice lines I played using them for a couple and games and quickly turned them off. It’s like Gaijin have never been in a ship, crews don’t shout unless there’s a reason too as it rather defeats the purpose of verbal alarms. Ironically the best alarm is an unplanned silence which means crash stop vents and usually a fire, enough to snap you out of a deep sleep.
As fir visual warning messages - love/hate them. Fire, torpedo, shallow water, aircraft etc are very useful in theory but poorly implemented (pointing specifically at you Mr depth warning!). I would like them placed at the top of the screen, either top left above the radar, or between compass and ticket count. They would catch your eye but not fkahs in your face obscuring the very island you’re being told to avoid.
And on a related note - Can we have a choice between true and relative bearing for such things? (unless it’s an option I’ve overlooked?). Radar and other movement related bearings are usually 0-359deg, whilst relative bearing warnings and markers are pt/stb 0-180 (or red/green if you want to confuse outsiders). Be nice to set each according to the task… And please no negatives unless it’s a weapon mount rotation/elevation, I’ll let them slide.
Rant complete…again…for now…until I think of more annoying naval issues (so many!).
Wait, so there is an option to turn it off! What is the setting called? I looked under everything in audio settings I think.
I don’t recall if it’s on/off or a volume slider, I’m not at home to check.
Whichever it was a blessing to silence the HANDS TO PANIC STATIONS which I found annoying in volume, overused in content, and particularly unrealistic for anything more modern vessels.
Yeah, I particularly hate how it’s on the same audio channel as team callouts so while the crew are going on and on and on about passing commands down the chain of command, any team communication is secondary and by the time you heard it, it probably isn’t relevant anymore.
would really love it if i could spawn into the start of a match and not get smacked by larger ships in the first 15 seconds of a match.
cant forget the annoy jerking that a ship when it loses its bridge
As this is a combined arms game, expecting to only play other ships, tanks, or aircraft is somewhat unrealistic. Especially since aircraft played such a pivotal role in naval warfare, especially in with the ships in game. It hampers the mode to have costal vessels capable of destroying larger ships be destroyed with no player input and the same goes for planes. Part of the allure of Naval is to be able to use the torpedo bombers and dive bombers for what they were designed for. Look at the US and Japanese trees at the amount of naval dive/torpedo bombers. It is an amazing thing to be able to do a torpedo run on a ship with these amazing aircraft, but it is impossible because you can’t even get into attack range, not because of player skill but because AA fire is automated. What is the point of playing torpedo boats and torpedo bombers when you can’t close the distance on an unaware target? ALL unaware targets WILL KILL YOU if you approach. Keep all this auto gunner and visual indicator stuff in Arcade, it makes sense there. But in realistic it makes sense to take those things away for audio cues and manual targeting selection because that is what a Captain would actually deal with.
This is a combined arms game in the sense that you can play different varieties of vehicles if you want, although this doesn’t always mean that it translates into it being an effective choice.
I do agree that pulling off a successful torpedo run is a thrill and that’s why I always have a torpedo bomber of some sort in my lineup, and yes it being struck down by a hailstorm of bullets isn’t fun, however, I can understand it from the quality of life perspective that people who play Naval don’t particularly want to address non-naval targets got the choice. And if you do want to be involved as a captain, you can always manually assign the AA/secondaries to target a specific target at the cost of them largely turning a blind eye to everything else. Maybe that’s more accurate than just general “shoot anything that flies” but as you have brought up elsewhere, that isn’t really a solution due to the sheer volume of fire some ships are capable of dishing out.
This just all leads to the main problem for people who choose to engage in dive/torpedo bombing in relation to reality: it’s just you, against an anti-air suite meant to fend off the whole aerial formation. Autogunners by themselves (at least to me) aren’t a problem as much as you are one plane facing off countless barrels pointing in your general direction. Not only does this make you literally singled out, but when you are facing a ship of such notoriety anyway, what is a single bomb/torpedo going to do? So in the end, I think the issue is that planes and boasts just aren’t in meta except for occasional moments to meme.
So explain to me why it makes sense that you can take an approach to a ship where you are not seen in a plane, and the INSTANT you show yourself ALL of the AA guns immediately fire at you. Not just a couple on that side of the ship you are closest too, but ALL of them almost instantly. Such reaction time on the ship for all of the batteries to spot, identify, deduce range and heading, and begin firing with absolute accuracy. That is the problem, not the amount of batteries firing or the type. It doesn’t matter what range or altitude you are the guns are much to accurate. The whole reason ships need that much AA defense is because humans aren’t perfectly accurate with hand trained guns leading with their eyes. In Warthunder, if you approach a ship the AI is an almost perfect shot. If I had to dodge AA fire from a light cruiser, say the USS Helena, not every gun would be firing in the EXACT SAME ARC as the other guns perfectly. You would have some closer, some further away, some nowhere near you. Even if a player used the AA in combination with the ship’s radar the fire wouldn’t be as accurate as the AI gunner are. They are automatic with almost infallible accuracy, better than a player can muster WITH RADAR GUIDANCE, and much, much better than a player trying to eyeball it. Planes and boats aren’t in the meta because the meta is perfect ai gunners killing other boats/planes that the player has no clue about with no input from the player. Seems completely reasonable that you’d earn kills for literally existing. No wonder naval was full of bots when autofire was still around for main armaments, rewards for nothing.
Perhaps you can make a case on nerfing the accuracy of AA/secondaries as Gaijin have done every now and then for the AI-controlled AAs in Air RB, which I would still find a lot more preferable over the complete removal of the auto-gunner feature. Sure, you get free kills with no input, but the alternative is to have Naval become a game of micromanagement that may detract from the gameplay. The point these visual and automated features ultimately is to give you accessible information so you can take the appropriate action without diving into the nitty gritty of it. If you are facing a battleship that outclasses your armor, it is in your interest to maneuver erratically to avoid direct hits, track your guns to hopefully disable their gun or bridge for some breathing room, maybe launch torpedoes to preempt their maneuvers, all the while balance out the damage controls. If a plane chose that moment to dive on you and you have to further divide your attention to man the AA cannons, that’s more workload to take into account.
Yeah, having the main guns on autofire was a stupid early decision on Gaijin’s part since main guns should be the primary gameplay mechanism that shouldn’t be automated, but everything else being accessible isn’t a bad thing in my opinion.
That’s the primary element of Naval gameplay though, it’s basically the whole idea. Just as defeating an opponent is less about specifically having better aim or positioning, and more about psychologically overwhelming them with too many things to manage.
Aim, lead (and all the factors that go into lead), steering the ship, firing and reloads, objectives to reach, possibly also switching between your scout plane (especially to cap), ammo types, and then on top of this you want to make them also have to watch for torpedoes, or see torpedoes and have to dodge, deal with broken guns/engines/bridge/etc and do repairs, but also manage that with fixing leaks, and also putting out fires, but ideally not doing all three at once and instead one after the other… and so on.
Winning a fight in Naval is usually about giving your opponent too many things to juggle, while managing to keep juggling your own, and that’s a big part of why I love it.
I think there are a clear distinct difference to be had between desirable complexity for you to balance out for gameplay, and the need to be involved with every major aspect of combat. Yes, perfectly emulating irl Captain’s job of giving commands to fire at something or merely plotting a course wouldn’t be fun (although some seem to like WoWs style autopilot, but that’s a story for another time) so giving the controls of the guns and the rudder to the player is something to be involved in. Determining the ammo type and damage control management (heck, I’ll even take a mechanic to specify on repair priority) is also something desirable and adds nuance to how you’d dish out or mitigate damage, so I’m onboard as well.
However, when you have to be personally involved with aspects like anti-air (or secondaries up until the update that lets you bind them to your main aim) it just unnecessarily divide your attention to that extent. If each kind of attacks are mutually exclusive, then yeah, you might get away with manually scanning the skies for planes that are coming in your general direction and fending them off, but if the pilot knows what they are doing, they will be attacking you while you are taking damage because that’s the best chance that the AA guns are knocked out to some degree. So having a ship, with its hundreds of crew onboard, can help delegate the task so you can focus on what matters at that moment. I’d be fine if they nerfed the AA accuracy if that’s the issue, but the removal of it just seems too involved for me. As for torpedo spotting, I guess I can reduce it to crew audio cues if you must.
I’m mostly with Uranium on the naval gameplay loop being okay right now (saw you in a game on North Port last night btw).
My issue would be that the skill level doesn’t continue to rise with BR. You can say something similar about jets and tanks at high tier too, and some do, but even though some things get easier, new mechanics keep getting added (from helis to missiles) so in those modes high tier still requires learning new things.
Right now above 5.0 or so in RB, things just get easier as you go higher. In a destroyer you have to worry about everything a battlewagon does, plus more smaller boats, plus more torps, plus more planes, plus navigation… All those other mechanics play less and less of a role and there’s nothing to replace them. Damage control doesn’t get any harder, shooting gets slower, you are generally less likely to run into islands at high speed, and so on.
Greater automation does make some sense because you’re commanding a bigger crew and they are doing their own things, but in the current set of mechanics there’s nothing replacing it to do the information overload Uranium is talking about. Basically high tier naval needs more mechanics, but if anything they’ve been taking them away (firing primary and secondary with one button as one example). I think there’s an argument to be made they’ve lowered the skill floor on high tier naval too far.
What could fix that? Couple things, including the missing things that would make long distance bluewater shooting more challenging to learn, mostly. Surface radar. Roll mechanics. Wind mechanics. More missiles. Shoals. Squalls. Submarines as a kill streak reward maybe. And yes, bigger maps for high tier. Those are some of the many ideas I’ve heard here that I thought had value.