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.
Well, yes, that’s the idea really.
But more generally, I’m not saying all gunner automation should be removed, only auto-targeting. We already have a system in place for assigning targets to gunners, and that should be what causes them to open fire.
Requiring players to aim AA guns or aim main guns would be a bit much, I agree, but players should have to at least notice a plane / PT boat and manually tell the gunners to open fire, after which they fire on it autonomously as they do now.
The same system for tanks (AA MGs) could actually help with CAS complaints, and for aircraft (gunners) could allow gunners to actually be buffed to be useful again (instead of opening fire at rock-throwing range) without being overbearing like ship gunners are.
(Oh, cool! What mindless rambling did you catch?)
I suppose that’s fair. I can agree that the learning curve is pretty lopsided at the moment and that higher tiers have a significantly lower skill ceiling (I never really liked the initial FCS just giving out where to shoot but it’s just a part of Naval now I guess), and some of the ideas you propose certainly have merit (although not missiles, missiles makes things even easier and I really don’t want to face anti-ship missiles in my WW2 powder keg…). But I’d still keep some automation in otherwise they are just some extra weight that does nothing but rack up crew losses when a shell sweeps through the superstructure.
Ah, okay, I can certainly get behind the need for players to manually direct the guns to shoot at a specific target for sure. I thought you meant having the need to manually aim the AA/secondaries to have your AA cover, my bad.
It was the one where you solo capped C with a 3.3.DD while I cleaned out their boat spawn with a 2.3. GG.
I must not have explained it well initially. That is the exact thing that I wish would happen. That change alone would bring much more dynamic gameplay to bluewaters, costals, and aircraft. Just assigning targets instead of them autoselecting and autofiring at targets. That is why I mentioned situational awareness, it isn’t required right now, you ship will auto defend you from everything that is smaller than it. I have sat and watched my 3in AA batteries fire at 7km+ at targets I had to actually look for (smaller boats) after they started firing. No boat or plane can compete with that. If players had to manually assign that aircraft/boat as a target then ambush tactics would become viable again since most players sit in their main gun view so much they ram other ships because they are oblivious.
Gotcha! Apologies for my stubbornness, I misunderstood from the get-go haha.
No problem at all, misunderstandings happen.
I already have plenty to juggle when most of my team spawns at the far side of the map where there is just 1 cap point and I spawn either alone or with just one more guy near the 2 caps. Meanwhile (as if by magic) most of the enemy team spawns near the 2 caps where I am. It’s really fun being shot at from 3 directions, managing my critical buoyancy, so I cannot even maneuver and then being finished off by a plane that suddenly appears out of nowhere (he wasn’t on the minimap).
Controlling the main guns and auxiliary ones is a good middle ground or compromise, if you will. Aux. guns do not fire automatically at the enemy, unless you disable the control in setting for them. This means aux. guns will not fire, even at the planes, unless you fire manually. I think this is a good solution and we don’t want to change something that works ok. We already had too many changes (variables) and the whole Naval became very unstable and it will take a while to dial it back in.
Especially in boats at lower BR you still have to manually prioritize your targets, as the matches are more hectic and there are often many planes in the air, so you still have your micromanagement.
It isn’t the secondary guns that are the problem because most players control them both. If they aren’t player controlled though they are even worse than the AA batteries with automatic firing. HEVT mixed with much longer range will take down planes even more quickly than the automatic AA gunners.
Assigning targets isn’t really a difficult or time consuming thing to do, just lock a target hit the keybind and your good to go. It wouldn’t take much more effort for Captains to prioerly utilize the system if the automatic gunners were completely removed.
I enjoy the ability to control main and secondary guns simultaneously, but I just wish there was a sperate keybind to fire them. I have had many times I wanted to fire secondaries without chancing the main guns firing.
Just switch to the secondary guns, if you want to just fire them. It’s just another keybind, as you said.
Yea, I could. Last time i seriously played naval was when I was stuck on my Xbox with a controller and I haven’t gotten used to using keyboard and mouse for everything yet.
That’s the problem, the game is not just played on PC, but on consoles as well. Many new players don’t even bother connecting a keyboard and too much manual control from the start may turn a player off from the game or they play without knowing and using half of the stuff and find the game too hard. That’s not good for a “free to play.” There always has to be some compromise that encompasses all the players. What’s good for one person may not be good for another.
Yes, you can make the game harder in RB, but look at SB in tanks and planes. Not many players there. RB and Arcade Naval is already full of AI units. Making the game harder to learn could result in less players than more. Gaijin should concentrate more on good maps and more balanced play with a redesigned matchmaker with more stable servers, then we can build on the game more. We need stability first before redesigning how the ship is controlled. I am forced to turn on automatic repairs for my ships, especially destroyers, as I don’t want to constantly check the bottom corner to see that my ship is taking on water. Haven’t played battleships in a while, but I would preferably disable back auto repairs for them.
In ideal world it would be great to have settings (auto repair, etc.) for each ship, but we all know how this goes with ammo for planes and how many times over the years selected ammo types got reset to default. It still happens from time to time. Adding specific features is just another thing for gaijin to screw up in the next (unrelated) update. That’s the result of the outdated spaghetti code, unfortunately.
It isn’t redesigning anything. The manual targeting system is already present and works quite well.
Fair point, but automatic gunners drive away players that enjoy the other huge side of naval warfare, aircraft. Surface ship combat, especially in WW2, was not the thing to have happen. Noone talks about Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa and his night action against the US landing fleet at Guadalcanal, most people are interested in the aircraft carriers and their massive actions at Midway and the Battle of the Philippine Sea. I’m sure you’ve seen people begging for aircract carriers and the gameplay they wpuld bring. Right now all of those naval aircraft, the drive bombers, the torpedo bombers, and naval fighters (with ordnance) are rendered absolutely useless because of the automatic gunners. Comparing naval from before the main battery autogunner removal and now there are less aircraft than ever being played. I can confidently say that if you remove autogunners and make players manually target planes (and throw in a slight accuracy nerf), then those players that are fans of naval aircraft gameplay will return because aircraft wouldn’t be useless. It is almost impossible to make a torpedo run on a ship above 4.3 battle rating, even while utilizing the cover supplied on the maps. I have tried and tried with all types of aircraft and nothing can escape the destroyers let alone the cruisers with good AA capabilities. Even level bombers with the highest airpsawn in naval can’t get into bomb range without being killed by NO EFFORT. Let alone floatplane gameplay, which is needed if you want to win games at 6.0+ because the caps are basically unreachable from the heavy fleet spawns. Let arcade keep their NO EFFORT autogunners, and make realistic a mode that can actually be enjoyed by naval enthusiasts.
The thing is a plane never attacked a bigger ship alone. Multiple anti-air on ships wasn’t just because of the poor aim, but because multiple planes attacked the same ship at the same time. You are not going to have that in WT, as it is.
My problem is not the automatic anti-air on player ships, but long range anti-air on AI ships. I’ve been shot down by AI from 5+ km before and couple of days ago I got damaged from AI shooting… from 7 km. The pittance that you get from killing AI does not equal the suck you have to put up with when facing AI ships in a plane. The worst is when you are closer to one of the spawn points of the enemy and an AI can spawn and start shooting at you with laser precision before you can say “oh, crap.”
If you want to make it easier on planes in Naval, stop increasing the sniping range of the AI. The thing is, this would end Encounter maps in a jiffy, as players would get some points and just spawn in attackers/bombers to finish the match off, instead of in ships. There is this specific balance that is hard to get. I like a little bit of planes, but not too many and I hate that they can just climb and be immune from higher elevation while reloading in the air over and over (arcade). There are still matches that end with killed parked AI, but most end with nice battles that last 25 minutes (and I like that, as that’s good for my fat RP booster).
The problem is that there are still many suicide bombers, be it in AB or RB. My ship exploded to one yesterday and another (with 19% buoyancy) got finished off by rockets while some dumb player rammed me because he was shooting in gunner view. Many people in RB don’t want to bother returning to the base to rearm, so they just suicide while bombing. Making it easier on them just defeats the purpose of the anti-air.
How about the ship rockets that snipe you out of the sky from 6+ km? Did that make it easier on the planes? It’s especially fun when you spawn near one of these ships. You got some extra “realism”, but was it worth it?
As I said before, you are the captain of your crew. A good captain delegates tasks to the crew. A bad captain tries to micromanage everything (and fails). That means you don’t trust your crew and your crew will not trust you, as a result. Do you want realism? This is realism.
Don’t forget, this also has to apply to Enduring Confrontation. It’s hard to make something that fits all the game modes at the same time. If AI is different in different game modes, that makes it more unrealistic.
I am in full support of turning off AI gunners irrevocably in the “Realistic” and “Simulator” modes. Both in aircraft as well as ships.
How exactly bot ships would be handled, though, I have no idea.
Also, the moronically high SP costs making planes not worth the effort even if AI gunners were nonexistent.