Naval mode is finally dead

Game Discussion Arcade Battle
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1752

I can’t say I’d gainsay your approach or this assessment (“we shall buy our way to victory!”), I just think the dispersion values they use are just too tight and unaffected by other real-world limiting factors (basically using the equivalent of range benchtesting figures as the MoA values for real-world performance of a firearm, irrespective of what your gunsights actually allowed you to do, which everyone would see as silly if we were talking rifles) to call anything about NAB “realistic” after you turned all those true aiming aspects over to the AI as well.

If they’d replaced the gunnery aim-off enjoyment (as unrealistic as that was*) that they had previously with the current more passive aiming/firing but added more compensatory aspects of complexity to the survivability (fire control systems, advantages to surface radar, weather, visibility, sea state) where skill and ship knowledge could still convey advantages to a player, I think it would be a more satisfactory game loop. But of course, they tried to simplify that as well with the recent damage control changes, and reversed THAT to keep both systems in a new, messy repair system melange, because at this point they’re really just grasping at straws. Their last two store premiums sold terribly, their player numbers are back to where they were a year ago, the bots are back (but at least being fought off fairly aggressively so far). As it is, it’s just not a very satisfactory naval game in any respect anymore.

*I do get the point of the “I’m a ship captain, I have people to do that” argument against manual aiming in a battleship game. My counterpoint would be, well then why do you think you should press the mouse button WHEN to fire then, either? Battleship captains aren’t standing on the bridge shouting “fire” like Captain Kirk, either. If we’re being consistent to “things captains wouldn’t do,” the game should at most just be assigning target priorities and letting the guns go off whenever they like. But I think everyone would agree that would be even more disliked by players. So to me “captain agency” is just not a very useful lens on trying to figure out what Gaijin thinks they’re trying to do with this mode. But honestly I don’t think they know anymore themselves either. The real naval warfare grognards have games like War on the Sea which actually delivers what the naval diehards always said they wanted in capital ship action. The “I just like to do ballistic physics in my head” nerds have NRB (and yeah, there’s not many of that type of nerd who are also naval geeks, but there never were). So… yeah. I think most naval play now (both modes, but NAB even more so) is getting PoH and BP challenges done fast and making SL to subsidize your play in other modes. Once you take the other stuff away and don’t replace it with other mechanics as they’ve done, that’s what it has left as a purpose.

5 Likes
1753

What is naval

1754

Same here. I initially tried to get the challenge done during normal sessions with Soviet DDs at BR 5.3,
which netted only 1 torp kill after several battles. After switching to AB (ewww) using Shimakaze and Yuudachi at 7.0 it took only two battles (open circle map- 3 kills, Franz Josef Land- 8 kills) to complete it.

1 Like
1755

Yap initially I had a terible idea to play 5, It’s just no fun any more.
You immediately getting under fire at spawn, A/A are everywere etc

Anything from 6,3 and up is just 3-4 games.

1756

a severely neglected gamemode

2 Likes
1757

Gotta be honest the mode is Semi Dead for me cause at top Tier now its like oh you want to have fun? sorry Soyuz spamming monkeys that perma hammer down on their movement keys like its some whack a mole game with their keyboard. There really should be a movement lockout of like 5-10 Seconds once uve gone into reverse or forward

2 Likes
1758

This mode is extremely boring, just like the land warfare mode that has only occupied three strongholds for so many years. Its map design and game mechanics are nothing but low energy and lack of ambition, and I can’t think of any other adjectives.
Except for some players who really like giant ship cannons, the value of this mode only lies in obtaining more Silver Lions for other players. As for why it is a naval battle, we have to ask why Gaijin’s land and air combat profits are so low.
But is that all? Will gaijin allow you to smoothly obtain the Silver Lion? Of course it is negative, even if you spend real money to support them. For gaijin, the priority of this mode is to prioritize survival over minimizing the profits for players.
I have been focusing on naval battles since the update in April this year. After the update in April, killing AI was very efficient. But two weeks after the update, gaijin added an avoidance mechanism to AI. Subsequently, in the updates from July to September, players who frequently play naval battles will surely feel that AI is becoming increasingly difficult to kill. Whether it’s the evasive maneuver of predicting the landing point of the shell, rapid drainage, the one second extinguishing of the ammunition depot, or the shell walking and hit effects under the Elo mechanism, all make it increasingly difficult for the game to benefit. Usually, the number of kills per game is between 4 and 8. If the ground cleaning command is activated, usually only 4 can be killed during the command period. If you dare to exceed the profit limit set by Gaijin, which is about 600000 silver lions per hour, then your matching opponent, hit probability, and effect will definitely give you a clear answer about the effect.
So how do we play games now? Usually, after starting the game, I only need to attack 3-5 rounds to know if this game belongs to me and if I can earn sufficient profits. What motivation do I have to play a game that already has a known outcome, knowing that its profits do not meet my requirements, and its game mechanics are extremely boring?
This mode should have been doomed long ago, or in other words, only when it is in a state of imminent demise, will this mode not die. As long as there is any chance of survival, gaijin will let him die.
So, naval battle players, what should you do?Do you still want to continue purchasing super battleships for $80 each?

4 Likes
1760

never had issues with ai ships
absolutely whacked balancing is more of an issue

no such thing in naval (or any other mode for that matter)

1761

The only mentioned AI behaviour change I can confirm is the their tendency to change course as soon as you target them, in order to face you bow-first to provide a smaller, more difficult to hit profile.
This doesn’t happen all the time, but often enough to be noticeable.

3 Likes
1762

Well, it sounds like naval damage rewards are getting a substantial rework in the upcoming update. It sounds positive to me at first read-through, what does everybody else think?

1 Like
1763

Looks like it means more rewards (SL/RP) in general, that’s always good.

It’s a little sad they’re giving up on detailed damage modelling and making it all about crew% as hitpoints now, but shrug.

3 Likes
1764

Looks good! Doubt it’ll solve the wrong kill credit with barbette fires though, as those don’t deal much crew damage

Edit: it also doesn’t really explain how kill credit works on target sinking by means other than crew loss, like flooding

1 Like
1765

How does this reduce damage modeling? It just makes the rewards more dependant on crew damage

1 Like
1766

So before, a boat had 1200 earnable points from damage and a destroyer (to pick two examples) had 2000. Score, in addition to the kill/assist reward, was damage points done/10. Because you’d one-shot the boat (and it only had one compartment often), you’d see the 120 score points in a pop normally. Destroyers had a few compartments, so while you could still get the 200 in a pop with a one-shot, the score reward from damage could fraction in different ways depending on how the compartments were blacked, effects of repair, etc.

As I read this, the score is now going to be tied directly to crew loss%. It’s unclear, but it’s likely a boat will still be 120 total cumulative damage score reward, destroyer 200, etc. But if your hit does 10% crew damage, however you do it, you’ll get 20 score points on that destroyer.

So in this case the compartments are really just storage boxes for those crew points (which should probably reward centermass and citadel pens more as you’re more likely to kill crew that way). Note this is separate from the OTHER compartment system used for the “hull integrity” mechanic, which don’t map to the internal crew compartment subdivision scheme (which players can’t see except when those compartments turn red in the damage model).

My beef would just be that’s kinda throwing in the towel on making a game where ships actually fight like ships. Crew drain was not how ships were taken out of action in the 20th century. Looking at War on the Sea lately and its detailed compartmental damage model reminds me how far we’ve gone from anything that resembles actual naval combat. It’s just hitpoints now, really, not significantly different from how WoWS does it. It’s another “rules simplification” in a year of rules simplifications. It’ll make the grind easier, but won’t do much if anything to attract new players to the mode.

1 Like
1767

Won’t the different modules still have an impact on performance and the armor on crew protection?

1768

I think the kill credit/rewards/and severe damage mechanism will all be great. Oh also that “heavy damage” award. I do like me some awards that give more SL’s 🤑

However, I will still NOT be playing naval until/unless they give me the option to use the old Naval Arcade aiming. I did play a couple matches to work on the torpedo challenge for the BP and I went back to ground after only a couple matches. It is sooooooo boring and NOT enjoyable watching 50% of my shells miss targets that I SHOULD be saturating.

So, too little, maybe too late. I again call on the naval community to keep rejecting the stupidification of Naval, or if they insist on making it stupid, do NOT remove our ability to use the current/previous control systems as an option in the menu.

6 Likes
1769

I agree that there are still questions when it comes to who gets the credit for kills via flooding or barbette fire ammo detonation. And those need answering for the battleship fights.

But crewdamage is practically the sole way cruisers and below are really damaged/destroyed. So I don’t see the major problem yet. As for the scoreboard “damage”, this was always directly tied to crew damage. With a max of 2200 being gained from any one particular target before it’s sunk.

I will admit, how it’ll effect score is beyond me.

Bit yeah, my only question lies with flooding and fire kills, as those won’t benefit from these new “mechanics”. As to my knowledge kills from these are still given to whoever hit them last.

Edit: the mechanics behind how ships are sunk aren’t changing one bit. Only how they’re rewarded.

1 Like
1770

In some cases that actually makes them easier to kill despite the reduced target profile. Frontal magazine detonations through raking fire of the bows is is more likely than the same magazine detonation on a broadside target. For most ships, barring Soyuz; the armor of the bow is also thinner than at the broadside.

1 Like
1771

So it’s been a while since I looked at the damage model in the files, but last I looked, the compartments were like:

Bridge
Engine Room
Turret 1
Turret 2… etc.
Crew Compartment 1
Crew Compartment 2… etc.

The “compartments” that did things affected function, and had to be crewed for that function to work. The non-functional compartments held crew which could be used to refill functional compartments on damage. They also comprised part of the damage point model, so if you had (say) 8 functional compartments and 2 crew compartments on a destroyer, they’d each have a certain number of the destroyer’s 2000 “points of damage” to give away.

So before if you blacked a non-functional crew compartment you’d a) kill all the crew if there were any there and b) do the score-reward damage to the ship that that destroying that compartment gave you. Unless you had a one-shot situation, you could often get less or more than a destroyer’s 200 score points because of compartment repair, or compartments not being affected at all by progressive crew damage.

Now you’ll still have those non-functional crew compartments, but now they’re purely holding boxes. The functional ones will still affect ship function as before. Crew loss will affect all your progressive damage score, so, killing a non-functional crew compartment with no one in it will do nothing, really. And while in the past, ship repair could effectively “regenerate score” for the other side to take away again, now your score due to damage will be capped. But I suspect on balance they’re right and this will still increase rewards, because there were lots of situations you’d die from crew loss or other mechanics before you’d even reached 100% compartment damage.

No, it was tied to the compartments that had the crew in them before. NOW it will be directly tied to crew damage. As today’s writeup says, “Previously, damage — and therefore rewards — was calculated based on how much damage was caused to sections of the ship that contained crew, and not explicitly tied to crew itself.”

EDIT: So to take one example, if I look at an old Nurnberg blk file (because I’m not going to download a new one, so any values could be out of date), at the time it had 32 compartments, including 9 with no attached function (look for compartment_01_dm, etc.), the rest being bridge, turrets, ammo, etc. Each compartment had a crew value (“crew”) and a separate damage value (“hp”) in order to be blacked in the files. The majority are 62 crew and 3000 hp to destroy when the ship is at 100% but there is variation, with one compartment having 62 crew and 5500 hp, and another one having 113 crew and 3000 hp. Because of these little discrepancies, blacking a specific compartment could lead to variances between “ship damage” and “crew damage.” (and of course the ship damage hp was potentially regenerative and crew damage was not). That’s what’s now being corrected, apparently.

2 Likes
1772

To be fair, I also always thought that damage was linked to crew loss on the enemy ship, so their explanation comes as a surprise. But maybe it actually makes sense, since usually the first damage to a section kills a lot of crew members and also deals significant damage to that section. In that sense, they are somewhat tied together. Perhaps that’s why I always thought it was crew loss that caused the damage.

As a few people mentioned above, this still raises questions: what happens if crew members die from fire? What happens if the ship dies from flooding or explodes? Will the remaining damage be credited to the player who caused these events?

I don’t play Naval anymore, but I really hope they implement this new damage calculation properly. Like every Naval player, I’ve seen some very strange things with damage calculations in the past. This is the best chance players have to finally get these issues fixed.

3 Likes