People not thinking that a single experience is status-quo, getting unfixable breaches outside of the citadel of a BB causing a BB to sink(the system in general makes little sense), American aircraft not having crazy stiff elevators around 400mph, HESH working as expected, light armor vehicles not being the toughest things to kill in game, as an examples.
As for the Scharnhorst and turtleback armor by in large, one would think the 16.1"+ AP rounds, at least on the updated Nagato’s with the delay fuze set should be able to handle the gap better than majority of AP rounds by other ships. That said there are too many examples of how the game is coded where AP rounds have really no basis in reality when it comes to damage.
That said, also really haven’t played much Naval since patch.
I would dissagree, 15 km is far too easy to hit stuff while at that range you wont be hitting precise parts/modules you can quite consistently hit stuff especially if the guns have better balistics.
And the 15 or even 20 km range wont solve problems with german turtleback BBs being mostly imune and the issue with 15 km range maps is that they become essentialy 5km maps extremly quickly. The maps should allow space to maneuver which I really really doubt that 15 km range maps would be able to do.
I have a bit of experience fighting at around 15-20km. And I don’t completely disagree with you but…
While yes I’ve OKHed a Scharnhorst at 19km with the Renown, it also took multiple salvoes to get the range in and quite a bit of luck given I couldn’t even see the Ship. But more specifically, historically, realistically, Firing shots past 25km is more or less should be a waste of shells given how inaccurate the Cannons are sans maybe the Yamato given how accurate the 18.1" really were. While yes the Scharnhorst/Warspite have a fight over who had the longest confirmed hit at 26,000yards…the Yamato near-missed a Light Carrier at 34,500~yards.
As for the Maps as a whole, they are a mess and I do think the Battleships need some more distance as it’s literally knife-fight ranges where the Scharnhorst’s BS-coded armor shines. But also, Cap points will just be one boui in a speedboat auto-winning the match or more less.
As HK reporter once said, in theoretically even Yamato’s AP won’t penetrate her in War Thunder naval range. Maybe it could be possible in 30 km+, but you know, hitting enemy ‘turtleback’ in such distance is pure luck even in real life where manuever breaking line of battle is forbidden.
The real weakness of Scharnhorst and Bismarks turtleback armor is the tendency to sink without having to penetrate the citadel. In theory, German turtleback should pay for their almost immunity to getting ammo racked by letting in plenty of flooding once the main belt penetrated.
I also personally think that barbette hits and penetration should knockout the turret in its entirety. As well as a chance of starting fires that needs to be dealt with ASAP lest it reaches the magazines. Because right now a barbette hit does nothing more than reduce reload rates or be lethal magazine strikes to ships that store shells there ie, Arizona and other standards.
Being able to defang a Scharnhorst similar to how Rodney did it with Bismark would be a start on giving all these German turtleback ships actual drawbacks rather being the uberarmor as advertised by wehraboos.
Because real life ship combat wasnt intended to occur at 10km or less with ships that are able to repair almoat nay types of damage and emotionless and perfectly obedient crew?
WT is just about the perfect arena for a ship using turtleback and a distributed armor scheme.
Even then, Scharn is more effective because it gets to fight ships its meant to kill (anything smaller than it). Vs other battleships, its not a particularly major threat unless it gets into torpedo range.
You also had many nations trying to avoid another naval arms race like that which preceded WW1. Many navies, like the Royal Navy, were building far more conservative battleships and battlecruisers to comply with naval treaties.
Though vessels that were eventually designed to go toe to toe with vessels like the Scharnhorst like the King George V-Class or Vanguard-Class have yet to be added.
You also have to remember, Germany was going for Quality not Quantity.
Germany had 2x Scharnhorst class and 2x Bismark class that made up their main fire power
6x heavy cruisers and 6 light cruisers
Britain had 15 battleships/battlecruisers, 7 aircraft carriers and 66 cruisers
In a real fight, Scharnhorst would be fighting multiple vessels at once, maybe even air power as well.
Interesting enough Nevada also has a 3" turtleback on top of her all or nothing armor scheme. Its just not modeled like the Fuso and others.
Anyways, i think the battleship BRs needs maps where engagement ranges are around 20km-18km. At that point the armor of BBs that arent turtlebacks start to matter. Of course the map needs to be built in such a way that a single destroyer or PT boat arent the only things thst can capture a point.
however I think WT naval is quickly proving that gameplay needs something more than the team deathmatches like Air RB and ground RB. This is primarily why Endurance Battle are so popular for naval players.
I would say that currently the issue with ranges past 20km is that the FCS up until now didn’t provide good way how to guess the range to fire at. Now that changed with new FCS and I will need to do some tests how helpful it actually is but we will see.
I believe that in actual game we could see quite reliable hit rates well past 25km (or even past 30km) as long as we get good visibility to actually see the target and have enough space on the map not to have our view blocked by island or something similar.
IRL the issues with the several engagements we actually see are problems of visibility and spotting. We see that the fire start at the rages past 25km but the issues are that often that at that range they had problems with actually spotting the ship.
With the battles in Atlantic (Hood X Bismarck, Scharnhorst X Glorious) we see them opening fire at 25-26 km that is case mainly because both Bismarck and Scharnhorst are quite low for a BBs so the horizon is closer for them so they are harder to spot.
As for the issue with cap points I say get rid of them. I am saying it from the start of naval CBT capture points are terrible idea for anything larger than PT boat. We saw several times that convoys or other AI based objectives can work so I say get rid of capture points. Since as long as they stay we can’t move past the knife fighting.
I have pointed out that maps trying to keep PT boats relevant in battleship tiers is a massive problem. But then i get told that battleships are boring and coastal boats are fun so that I should deal with it.
It was frustrating i can tell you. But i agree that higher tier naval needs more dynamic objectives than capture a circle.
Hard disagree on both counts, EC exists for that. Standard modes should remain standard, as in standard video game modes like TDM/Dom/KotH/CTF/etc, and should be PvP, not PvE.
Just to bring things back to practicality here, with a separation of 30km, two ships sailing directly at each other at 20 knots (37 km/h) literally cannot meet before the end of the match.
When I face ingame Scharnhorst, I fight it as any other BB. I always aim for the two front turrets (A+B) and load AP. As soon as a salvo hits there, alot BBs detonate. So does the Scharn. I don’t bother to aim anywhere else. I also don’t bother to use anything else than AP for everything down to cruisers. Works consistantly. AP treatment of the turrets gives you the kill.
Could you give us a screenshot of where your ammo hits (and tell us what ship(s) you are using) to better understand what weakness of the scharnhorst’s armor you are exploiting?
From basic protection analysis, the only way to reliably reach the magazine is with an underwater penetration (broadside) or bypass the turtleback through the armor at the bow if the player is angled.
